#Blogtober 3 - Trailer of the Week - Intruder

I was a bit hesitant about having this one, as the trailer is a bit spoilery, but it's been on my mind recently, so I want to have a chat about it.  What I'm going to do is have a 100% spoiler free first paragraph, recommending the film, and a deeper discussion, trying my best not to give the game away, after the page break.  So to start, if you want a fun retro slasher this Halloween season, I definitely recommend tracking down 1989's Intruder, it's available on pretty good blu rays from Synapse Films in the States and 88 Films in the UK.  It's got good acting, fun camerawork, pretty damn spectacular gore effects, and you get to see the future director of Spider-Man being murdered.  Plus it deviates from slasher cliches in some notable ways, including avoiding the sleazy, somewhat misogynistic areas that this sub-genre can fall into a little too often, and delivers a real gut punch of an ending.  Now that shock ending isn't given away in the trailer, but the identity of the mystery killer is (even though it's really not too hard to figure out in the film), so if you want to go in really fresh, just go find a copy and check it out!  (Heheh, check it out, it's set in a supermarket, it's fu- nevermind.).  Some more details and hints at spoilers after the video and page break.

Intruder is a film by Scott Spiegel, a long time veteran of the horror industry, who was also a close collaborator with Sam Raimi and co; in fact, he co-wrote Evil Dead II.  Now you can tell that Raimi had a hand in this, both in terms of some inventive camera work at various moments, which give a neat "fly on the wall" eye view to what's going on, but because the man himself is in front of the camera for once!  Yep, the man who'd later give us A Simple Plan and Oz The Great & Powerful is one of the victims here (and ooh is his death scene a doozy!).  Oh, and for Hercules & Xena fans on here, Joxer the Mighty himself Ted Raimi is also a victim, and Bruce Campbell shows up at the very end.  (No, he and Sam don't share screentime, so Sam has no opportunity to bonk Bruce on the head with anything!).  There's quite a bit of talent on this, so purely as a curiosity piece it would be worth a look.

There's plenty more to this than namechecking figures in the world of cult film & TV though; as a slasher, it's a pretty damn solid one.  Now it's far from the absolute top tier of Halloween or the best of the Nightmare on Elm Street series say, but if I did a top twenty slashers list, this would probably be in there somewhere.  The setting is a good one, as there's something about seeing a place you tend to always experience filled with people, like a supermarket, being empty instead that's always unnerving.  The characters are nothing spectacular, but they're less obnoxious than the standard "jock, nerdy guy, slutty girl..." checklist you tend to get.  It's fairly obvious from the word go who the final girl is, but that's not a deal breaker, everyone else seems like a fairly average person who really didn't deserve this night of slaughter.  Even the true villain once revealed (there's a very obvious red herring through most of the film) gets a good bit of fleshing out.  Scott Spiegel said in an interview that the scariest part of the original Friday the 13th for him was Betsy Palmer's performance, an absolutely correct call there.  It's clear then that he decided to not make that film's mistake of just have the killer turn up at the end, they were a constant presence throughout, and the reveal of their true nature is all the more unsettling.

It's in one area though that this one excels; the gore and death scenes.  Seriously, this is perhaps one of the bloodiest slashers of the whole era, courtesy of KNB Effects, and it's a great showcase for what they were capable of.  There's a good amount of escalation with them too, it builds up  as it goes on, with the last two before the main Final Girl chase being true jaw droppers, unlike anything else you might have seen elsewhere.  It's worth mentioning that when this was released, the Friday the 13th movies were being severely cut by Paramount before the MPAA even looked at them, and the Nightmare on Elm Street films had gotten very cartoony, so something this extreme really was unusual at the time.  If the film had been released a lot earlier (fully uncut; Paramount managed to get their scissors into this for a VHS release too), way before the slasher fatigue had set in, this probably would be a much better appreciated film than it currently is.

It's that ending though that's the main reason I've been thinking about this recently.  I got talking to someone about the Friday the 13th films (which BTW are still caught in a tangled web of a lawsuit!), and they mentioned something about the ending of at least the first three films they were confused by.  It's something I and quite a few others have noticed, something about the last few scenes at the climax.  Intruder's last little sting in the tale is kind of a reaction to that; instead of a "not really dead killer leaping out for a jumpscare" or anything like that, the film insteads has a moment where reality ensues to screw over the characters.  Trying really hard to not reveal what it is, but if you follow my advice and give this a try, you'll know it when you see it, it's a neat cherry on top of this horror sundae.  So yeah, far from a perfect film (the characters are OK, but the acting can be... variable), or one that will change your life, but if you just want a fun gory, scary time, and see a slasher done just very well, go pick up Intruder!