"That's a nice-a donut."

Tuesday, May 02, 2006


Unhinged (1982)

The 1970s were a golden age for the horror genre. Amidst a wave of excitement and clamor for horror and slasher movies, a multitude of cheap knock-offs and unoriginal duds were produced in the latter part of the decade and into the early 1980s. Very few of them even approached the level of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, or Dawn of the Dead, among other classics. One of these pale imitations was director Don Gronquist's Unhinged. It is a movie that was notoriously banned in the United Kingdom for many years.

There isn't a whole lot to the plot of the movie. Three young college-aged women (Laurel Munson, Sara Ansley, Barbara Lusch) are heading out on a weekend-getaway road trip. In a heavy thunderstorm they get in an accident and wake up later in a big old house. A kind, passing motorist had found them and took them to safety. It is a strange house though; there is no phone, and two women live there: an old lady in a wheelchair and her spinster daughter. (The stranglehold that the old lady has on her daughter makes the relationship between Agnes and Principal Skinner on The Simpsons seem perfectly normal.) After a day of recuperating and waiting for the storm to pass, one of the women heads off to make the two-mile walk into the nearby town to call their parents. And that begins a tense, nerve-racking time in the big old house for the other young women.

It is curious, and rather shocking today that the movie was banned in some places, given that the movie is actually rather tame by current standards. There is some brief nudity and a couple spots of bloody violence, but nothing outrageous until the closing minutes. What is outrageous though is the acting, which ranges from borderline acceptable to absolutely horrible. The variation is sometimes by the same actors, and sometimes within the same scene. Though certainly part of that blame can go to the uneven script, of which the dialogue is a very weak link. But it's hard to get past the overall poor actors, with their very poor characterizations.

To its credit, Gronquist and the filmmakers have lofty expectations. In a brief television interview that is included as a DVD extra, the director makes explicit reference to its renowned predecessors The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween. And there are a very few, brief moments when the movie good. The music is a key element in the movie; in fact, just about all of the suspense up until the final act comes courtesy of the well-timed music cues and ongoing beats. These brief suspense scenes are definitely the high points of the film, but are over with sooner than you can blink. Then we are back to the dullness. To its discredit, Unhinged doesn't belong in the same breath as those movies. It arrived in the tail end of the first real wave of horror movies (with the second wave currently underway), among similar movies that are generally throwaway, teen exploitation trash, with very little in the way of artistic promise (think: Friday the 13th). And it even ends up below most of that junk. Without the relatively good (though highly unoriginal) twist at the very end, this would be near the bottom of the barrel.

The Verdict: D.

Archives

March 2005   April 2005   May 2005   June 2005   July 2005   August 2005   September 2005   October 2005   November 2005   December 2005   January 2006   February 2006   March 2006   April 2006   May 2006   June 2006   July 2006   August 2006   September 2006  

     


 
 

Need to contact us? E-mail a Box Office Prophet.
Thursday, March 28, 2024
© 2024 Box Office Prophets, a division of One Of Us, Inc.