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INTRUDER

Time they are a'changing for the fine folks who work at Walnut Lake Market, a large supermarket located in what appears to be the dreariest city in all of Michigan. Danny, co-owner of the supermarket, realizes the financial situation isn't good so he and his partner Bill have decided to sell the store to the city, something Bill isn't happy about even if he realizes he has no choice. Bill feels bad for his crew of young workers, all of whom will be out on their asses come the first of the month. On the night before the big markdown sale is to begin, the entire crew is gathered to re-sticker items. The last customer of the night is a thuggish looking guy named Craig. He's come to the supermarket for two reasons. The first is to get a pack of smokes. The second is to see Jennifer, one of the register jockies. They were dating up until Craig accidentally killed a guy in a brawl. Now out on parole, he wants Jennifer to talk to him, to work things out. She is not interested.

Things get hairy when Craig hits her and assaults one of her co-workers. Craig manages to fight off the entire store staff and escapes into the dark aisles and corridors of the store. Danny and Bill send everyone off to find him. They finally manage to catch him, smack him around a little and throw him out. Jennifer calls the police. The fuzz finally shows up but don't do much except tell them to call back if Craig shows up again. Everybody gets back down to it, cutting produce, stocking shelves, cleaning and re-stickering. This night has been a monumental bummer but it's about to get worse. Someone else is in the store with them, brutally knocking them off one by one.

By 1989, the slasher film, that most exploitative flavor of mainstream exploitation cinema, had cannibalized itself to death. With only scraps of remaining flesh to chew on, the slasher film began its prolonged and painful death throes soon after Mr. Englund slipped on Mr. Krueger's glove and shifted the realm of the slasher from sitcom reality to rubber reality. In hindsight, it's remarkable the slasher film had lasted as long as it did. In the space of ten years, hundreds of films had been made, each a copy of the last in a perpetual cycle of rehash, retread and retardation. Only the most deluded horror fan would think these films, in the long run, amounted to much of anything other than pop culture trivia and countless wasted hours. While I count myself a slasher fan, I am not so blind to the realities of what I spent my childhood watching. I most certainly don't think all films that stalked and slashed their way through the video rental stores of the 80s were bad films; far from it. But for the most part, they were just the same thing every time and the quality, just like you would expect from a copy of a copy, began to degrade so quickly that by the time Bill Leslie and Terry Lofton loaded up their nail gun in 1985, every idea that could be done had been done ten times over.

But every once and awhile a slasher film would come out that rose above the trash and sludge. Although none of these films were original (how could they be?), they contained a certain element that was missing from garbage like 555, CANNIBAL CAMPOUT and all those other direct to video offerings that had become the bearers of the slasher film torch. Scott Spiegel's 1989 film INTRUDER is one of those films that had that particular element. What is that element, you ask?

Fun.

What was missing was fun.

Slasher films exist in a kind of logical vacuum. Especially true of the "Summer camp" variety of slasher, these films all required an extensively well-planned and well-executed killing spree (usually pulled off by some batshit crazy lunatic who would have problems tying their shoelaces let alone planning a massive slaughter) pulled off under the noses of a dozen or more teenagers so stupid and so preoccupied with sex, drugs and general idiocy that they never bother to notice their friends going missing or various other tell-tale signs that something is seriously amiss. In order to sustain the threat, the killer was always somewhat impervious to the kinds of damage they meted out; otherwise he (or sometimes she) would be just as easily killed by a lucky swing of a machete as anyone else. Before we got down to the business of the big chase, the killer meticulously (and sometimes creatively) placed all the bodies of his (or her) victims in a kind of pre-planned path so that the final girl seemingly had no choice but to stumble across each and every one of them before reaching the arena of the final showdown (slasher villains would make excellent haunted house designers for undiscerning amusement park owners). Once the fight began, the killer was (usually) quickly struck down by the final girl. After the final blow had been delivered, all the killer had to do was lie real still (no easy feat when you're mortally wounded and bleeding profusely) until no one was looking. Then they would sneak away to wait for the sequel.

That's the kind of head-scratching logic we've come to expect from slasher films and, hey, I can live with it as long as the movie is entertaining and contains a few good gotcha moments. Unfortunately, the former quality was incredibly hard to come by for most of the slasher films lifespan. What Spiegel and Co. managed to do with INTRUDER was make the slasher film fun again. It has the same kind of brain dead plot as hundreds of other slasher films. It really does nothing but change Camp Crystal Lake into a grocery store, inject a whole bunch of humor and set the film on autopilot. But it works and it works because Spiegel understands that there is no way for this material to be taken seriously so he allows the humor of the film to grow from the narrative instead of trying to force the laughs in (particularly amusing is the notion that while the all these counselors at unpopulated Summer camps are too preoccupied with necking to notice a killer knocking them off one by one, the kids in this film, all working class regulars, are too busy working, restocking shelves and cleaning the register units, to notice). Spiegel comes from the Sam Raimi school of filmmaking (he had a hand in virtually every early Raimi effort) and it shows in everything from his use of bizarre camera angles (shooting a phone call from within a rotary phone or using shopping carts, baskets, mirrors and store shelving to frame the actors) to his editing. Spiegel, though not a very good director, bends over backwards to out-weird himself with every single shot, giving INTRUDER one of the most schizophrenic looks in slasher film history. He also deserves an award for "best use of a Sting photograph in a motion picture".

The Raimi influence doesn't just stop at the wacky bits of direction either. The cast is filled with familiar faces. Sam and Ted Raimi make appearances as does Bruce Campbell in the last minute and a half of the film. But the real star of the show (and arguably the star of the show in EVIL DEAD 2) is Dan Hicks. While he never quite gets his "Bobby Joe!!!" moment here, his performance easily makes INTRUDER one of the more memorable slasher films. This really is one of those films where the performances make up for the sketchy characterizations in the script. While no character is given anything close to a fully formed personality, the performances all have a kind of easy going quality to them that creates likability and even an air of believability. In another moment of narrative reversal, Spiegel and his co-writer/producer Lawrence Bender make Jennifer, the final girl of the film, the least interesting character in the entire piece. While most final girls are somewhat proactive before the final chase, Spiegel and Bender stick her up front at the register for 70 percent of the running time.

Having watched the film again recently, I was surprised at how violent this film actually is. While all the violence comes in quick, ragged bits, what is on-screen is undeniably graphic stuff. There is a strange pre-occupation with damage done to heads in this film. One character gets cleaved in the head and another has a meat hook shoved through his jaw. Someone gets impaled through the eye and another gets his head crushed in a trash compactor. Later on in the film, someone gets beaten unconscious with a severed head. The films piece de resistance is the slow sawing in half of a head using a meat saw. All in all, this is a pretty bloody flick and the craftsmanship of KNB Effects Group shows through the entire film. Some of the violent set-pieces directly reference other films (is there any other way to take the aforementioned meat hook scene than as an homage to THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE or the meat saw scene as a wink to Fulci and his CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD?) but most of the passing nods are in the build-up. We get little "wink wink, nudge nudges" to ALICE SWEET ALICE, ALONE IN THE DARK, FRIDAY THE 13TH and HALLOWEEN. This is a movie aware of its genre and it manages all of these little, clever bits without doing what so many other filmmakers do which is turn them into proper set-up/punch line jokes. They don't call attention to themselves. They're just there to be enjoyed if you're "in the know". I also wouldn't be surprised if Tarantino didn't get his little eye squashing gag in KILL BILL, VOL. 2 from this film.

Really, the most unfortunate thing about INTRUDER is that it came out in 1989. Dumped on VHS with little fanfare, INTRUDER didn't have a chance to make any impact in the sub-genre. This was the year that saw Jason take Manhattan and Freddy turning into an infant. Michael Myers was trying to get his revenge, Leatherface and Co. were carving their way through sitcom dementia and horror was generally shifting into the more supernatural realm of things like PUPPET MASTER, CAMERON'S CLOSET, THE DEAD PIT and PET SEMETARY. Aside from the three big franchises, the only real slasher films of note were NEW YEARS EVIL and SHOCKER, and neither of those films were anything to write home about. INTRUDER just got lumped in with the worst of them. Had this film been released in 1984 or 1985, it would have probably been a much bigger hit. It certainly has everything a slasher film fan could want with one big addition. Remember what that is, Dear Reader?

Fun.