Sweet 16

As much as I like Bo Hopkins (I nicknamed him "The Natural"), and his easy, laid back acting style (seriously, this is the kind of guy you can pull up a chair next to and have a few drinks and shoot the shit, he's that cool), the obscure, relatively unknown slasher, Sweet Sixteen, seems to follow suit and the film is just a bit too lackadaisical for its own good. That said, the cast for a movie that continues, despite a dvd release, to hold its spot in the lower echelon of the 80s slasher--not a film that will garner a lot of attention for any duration--is bound to attract those always interested in character actors like Patric Macnee or Susan Strasberg. Friday the 13th fans will immediately recognize Dana Kimmel, knowing her from the third film (particularly for her histrionics), in the cast, as the inquisitive daughter of Bo's sheriff in a Texas town located near an Indian burial ground. The film goes out of its way to establish the strained (to put it mildly) relations between Native Americans and the Texas redskin racists who populate the town (including the venomous Don Stroud, mostly spitting vitriol any time he even catches the glimpse of a Native American in his midst). This is done so that a young fiery Indian buck named Johnny Longfellow (played by Don Shanks, who I didn't realize, until researching his career a bit, was Michael Myers in the fifth film of the series) is considered a suspect due to his rather heated exchange with the first victim, a redneck prick with a screw-you attitude that needed to be brought down a little from his perch. But when a decent jock kid, awaiting to see new girl in town, a bad girl looking for a little danger, Melissa, in this town with her archeologist father (Macnee) and mother (Strasberg, who tells Hopkins she was born and bred in the town) for a short stay as he studies the Indian burial ground (with help from Johnny), is killed, Johnny doesn't seem to be as viable a suspect.

There's a LOT of plot in this movie. There's so much plot and story that the audience for which this is intended is likely to cash their checks by the half way point and attention-wise flee the premises. There are some stabbings, but I have to admit that director Jim Sotos' sexualizing lead actress, Aleisa Shirley (in the film, she is fifteen, her sweet sixteen the event where the psychopath's identity will emerge, but not without a few more slayings before it's over with) had me feeling really more than a bit uncomfortable...I mean, are we really supposed to be aroused at the naked body of a fifteen year old? The slasher genre has always sexualized "teenage" chicks, but normally of a certain age where the viewer who might be aroused wouldn't feel creepy (mainly because there's common knowledge that she's actually 22, passing as a teenager) or guilty. This film actually has a girl that looks teenaged, so the effect of her nude body is muted by discomfort. The violence is really of minor consequence to those who made the film: it actually isn't important to those behind Sweet Sixteen, preferring to explore the investigation and tension among the characters.

Who is killing people and why? The slasher genre often places quite a bit of emphasis on those two questions. All the rest of it accompanies those questions. The sex and violence, and at times some rock'n'roll, are the allure that ultimately sends pheromones that attract the audience to what is produced. This movie places almost all its emphasis on the questions, although the lead girl all of the violence tends to gravitates towards is more than a little naughty and starving for attention. But Bo has plenty of screen time to prove Johnny didn't kill the two white boys, keep the town from increasing a body count of corpses, pursue a possible lead that might tie the current string of murders to incidents from the past (possibly uncovering the identity of the killer and how past incidents tie to whoever it is wielding a knife), hold his kids in check just trying to protect them (but as the end comes, no matter how hard he tries, danger is always close to them), and investigate if Johnny stole his people's knives during the archeological dig, Macnee's accusations maybe holding water (this does, however, provoke conversation about the right to excavate and disturb the graves and artifacts of the dead).

The film is unconcerned with pace, the pulse of the movie  damn near flat lines, and there's an ease in the performances, and a steadiness in getting to the point and purpose of the killings, that I can clearly understand why it took some doing resurrecting Sweet Sixteen from its grave. Like giallo thrillers prior to the genre, slasher movies often feature a heavy psychological reasoning behind why a character commits his/her crimes, and the twist often resulting in a bad way for somebody else is reinforced in this movie as well. Sweet Sixteen will probably remain of interest to those who get a taste of the more popular, mainstream  slashers and start seeking out the lesser known films, the ones that take some digging to find.

I am glad there are inspired distributors and horror fans out there trying to release these kinds of films, stuff like Sweet Sixteen and Blood Song, not shining examples of a genre that isn't favorably held in a positive light by critics or certain types of audiences who find the product reprehensible trash not worthy of any sort of advertising or marketing. There is a rabid collection of slasher junkies out there, though, that eat these films up.


 The cast is really impressive for Sweet Sixteen overall, although instances like the casting of Stroud and Michael Pataki (as an important member of the town's municipality) and Sharon Farrell (as Bo's enthusiastic love interest, who works in a library) all seem like little favors to the director, their parts small but pieces that do populate the grand thesis of the overall result of the story. I have a hard time critiquing harshly a film dedicated to storytelling, but there can be instances where there's an imbalance present, too much story, not enough action. I think the slasher genre is about beats and pace, and this film has  trouble moving it along.