5 Forgotten Slasher Movies That Still Hold Up Today
by Jeremy Smith · /FilmAdd SlashFilm on Google:
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The slasher subgenre existed long before anyone thought to apply the term. Tales of characters getting picked off one by one by a mysterious killer were perfected by the prolific Agatha Christie in her novel "And Then There Were None," which has been cited as a significant influence on "Friday the 13th." It's a simple formula in theory: line up a bunch of potential victims, and knock 'em all down, preferably in an inventive fashion, until a motive and the killer emerges.
In the 1960s, "Psycho," "Peeping Tom," the splatter oeuvre of Herschell Gordon Lewis and giallo classics like "Blood and Black Lace" stoked an appetite for a horror subgenre where grisly kills were every bit as important as an ironclad plot. This led to a full-blown slasher flick craze in 1978 with the release of John Carpenter's masterpiece "Halloween." As filmmakers and studios watched the low-budget sensation become one of the most profitable films ever made, knockoffs and movies that aped the old Christie formula were rushed into production. Most were awful, but some placed an original spin on the stalk-and-slash premise. You know the standouts (e.g. "A Nightmare on Elm Street," "The Slumber Party Massacre" and "Sleepaway Camp"), but if you're looking for hidden gems, well, that can be a brutal game of trial and error because slashers got such a heavy workout during this era.
As someone who spent a good chunk of his childhood scouring the horror section of his local, well-stocked video store, I believe I can be of help here. Given the unfavorable crap-to-quality ratio, finding a slasher of actual merit or one that was just plain bizarre was cause for celebration. Here are five that are deeply etched in my memory.
The Swinging Barmaids (1973)
Director Gus Trikonis is probably best known as Goldie Hawn's first husband, but before becoming a prolific television helmer, he made some pretty wild exploitation films in the 1970s. The wildest of them all by far is "The Swinging Barmaids," which I discovered during a grindhouse festival hosted by Quentin Tarantino. It was on a double bill with a similarly titled raunchy comedy, so I figured Trikonis' film would be more of the same. And that's how I got blindsided when I got an unrepentantly sleazy slasher about a murderous voyeur (Bruce Watson) who knows kung fu and hates being called "Sonny."
Written by Charles B. Griffith (1960's "The Little Shop of Horrors"), the movie is largely set at a low-rent Los Angeles nightclub called the Swing-a-Ling. The atmosphere is putrid (you can smell the urine and stale cigarettes through the screen), and the entertainment is lousy, but the barmaids provide enough scantily clad eye candy to keep the patrons well-oiled. One night, Watson follows a waitress home and fatally assaults her. It's a realistic, messily staged murder that punishes one's affinity for memorable slasher kills.
Tough guy William Smith (Clint Eastwood's punchy opponent in "Any Which Way You Can") plays the detective assigned to the case, while the Swing-a-Ling's owner unwittingly hires the killer as a dishwasher/bouncer. Watson develops a crush on nice-girl Laura Hippe, at which point the film becomes an effective squirm fest until the slow burn breaks into a bloody conflagration during the stretch run. If you ever wondered what a Brian De Palma thriller would look like if he had zero sense of style or shame, "The Swinging Barmaids" is the film for you. I guarantee you've never seen anything quite like it.
Night School
In the mood for a stylish slasher where the victims are decapitated by a motorcycle helmet-clad killer wielding a kukri? Of course you are. This Boston-set gem failed to catch on with moviegoers in 1981, and was, of course, panned by critics, but it's a skillfully shot, sturdily plotted film from "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" director Ken Hughes and screenwriter Ruth Avergon. For a movie with this much headrolling, "Night School" is surprisingly less gory than many slashers of the era.
Hughes and Avergon hook you with a tale about a string of killings at Wendell College, which seem connected to womanizing anthropology professor Vincent Millet (Drew Snyder). Millet, as is his skeezy penchant, is currently involved with one of his students, Eleanor Adjai (Rachel Ward, in her feature debut), so we're inclined to think the worst of him. In other words, there may be a twist or two incoming.
"Night School" has acquired an enthusiastic cult following over the years, and just received a 4K Ultra HD release from Vinegar Syndrome. It's a slasher I recommend to horror fans who don't go in for the rough stuff. It's no classic, and it does have its lulls, but it's genuinely scary at times and features uncommonly good acting. If you're looking for a badass costume for Halloween this year, the "Night School" killer would certainly rattle people (bonus points if you can track down a kukri).
Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker
I might be stretching the definition of a "slasher film" here, but this exhilaratingly inventive horror classic checks enough boxes that I feel duty bound to include it — because you will have wasted your time on this planet if you shuffle off without having seen "Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker." Directed by William Asher, a television veteran whose film output largely consisted of Frankie Avalon-Annette Funicello beach romps, this Oedipal free-for-all stars Jimmy McNichol as a high school kid who was orphaned at infancy when his parents were killed in a grisly car accident (that was 100% lifted by the makers of "Final Destination 2").
He's been raised by his possessive aunt (a blisteringly brilliant Susan Tyrrell), who has no plans of letting the love of her life leave the roost for a college basketball scholarship. She will kill to keep him in her grasp, and it doesn't help that the cop (Bo Svenson) charged with looking into her crimes is a raging homophobe who thinks McNichol is caught up in a gay love triangle with his high school hoops coach (Steve Eastin) and a television repairman (Caskey Swaim).
Many slashers double as coming-of-age narratives, but "Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker," released in 1981, is rare in that it presents a gay character as a positive influence in a young man's life. It's also notable for, as critic Marc Edward Heuck noted, making McNichol the final girl who's protected by a helpful girlfriend (Julia Duffy). Asher's film is laden with surprises, and deserves a full-scale critical reappraisal. It's the kind of culturally significant film that belongs in the National Film Registry.
The Mutilator
A word of warning here: Buddy Cooper and John S. Douglass' "The Mutilator" holds up in that it's lost none of its savage stupidity. I mean this as a compliment. Like most "Friday the 13th" sequels, "The Mutilator" isn't interested in mystery. Its dramatic engine is one of who will die next, and will it go more poorly for them than the last victim. If the film has a fatal flaw (that has nothing to do with its amateur-hour acting or technical ineptitude), it's that the filmmakers peak with a kill so shockingly gruesome that you know they'll never top it. Because few slashers to this day have come close to matching it.
There's a story here, and it involves a college kid (Matt Miller) being summoned to his father's (Jack Chatham) beachfront hangout in North Carolina to close it up for the winter. Dad's still sore about the boy's accidental killing of his wife via the botched cleaning of a hunting rifle, so bloody revenge is on the menu. This is bad news for his son, who's inexplicably brought his buddies up to the run-down house for a weekend of boozing and screwing. The sleaze level is high, and the kills deliver the gory goods. If you enjoy fishing, you'll get a kick out of the father's murderous methods, which all involve angling tools (including pyramid sinkers). It's a Bill Dance-coded slasher.
Jack's Back
One year before he blessed cinema with the skull-cracking majesty of "Road House," director Rowdy Herrington concocted a sinister slasher about a Jack the Ripper copycat terrorizing Los Angeles. Herrington was a weird flash-in-the-pan. He segued from the electrician side of film production to make a quartet of solid studio productions, and "Jack's Back" was the film that put him on the map. He wrote the slippery script that asks a stellar James Spader to pull double duty as a doctor who stumbles upon a prime suspect, only to get murdered before he can reveal the killer's identity. Then the doctor's identical twin shows up, and it's game on.
This is a murder mystery on a certain level, but Jack the Ripper is the ultimate slasher. Herrington brings an impressive degree of scholarship to this well-trod lore, and imbues it all with a dazzling studio style that makes me wonder why he didn't become one of our great commercial filmmakers. It's far from flawless (Herrington was a better director than a screenwriter), but this is a bracing, professionally crafted slasher.