Intruder (1989)

 Let's get down to the brass tacks: this is strictly a body count movie. It is a KNB (Kurtzman, Nicotero, and Berger) showcase, with a hell of a lot of severed body part props and fake blood filled prop heads being crushed, sawed, hooked, sliced, and stabbed. You get a little bit of setup with the surviving characters at the end representing an abusive, obsessive stalker and his supermarket checkout girlfriend he smacks in the nose after she rejects his pleas to take him back (after serving time in prison). If anything, that sort of plot development is unexpected. No one would expect parolee Craig (David Byrnes), after his physical, destructive behavior towards the beginning, lasting all the way to the end, much less get past the first thirty minutes. I think it is rather surprising that Renée Estevez gets taken out right at the beginning...she does fit the bill as the perfect lasting survivor in terms of typical slasher tropes. The knife sticking in her chest lending help to Jennifer (Elizabeth Cox) at the end when co-owner of the supermarket, Bill Roberts (Dan Hicks) is pulling her feet towards him is quite the irony considering the Slasher Handbook might have dictated Estevez be pulling the knife from Byrnes. But by 1989, any alterations in the slasher genre would have been welcome considering how stale horror as a whole seemed as the decade came to a close.

What isn't there in plot (much less the wacky motivations of the maniac, who seems to have gone mad due to losing the grocery store as his co-owner/partner is selling to the state for a payoff, killing off the employees for some reason that never makes a lick of sense) director Spiegel and KNB make up for in all the camera angles and alternate shots from every vantage point and, especially, grisly violence. This slasher film is notable for the camera shot from inside the shopping cart, but there are shots from the floor looking straight up to characters, from a bird's eye view, through spaces between shelf items, among other alternate points of view.

But the film's once excluded gore due to the MPAA (Fuck you, MPAA) being returned to where it rightfully belongs remains the strongest asset. A screaming victim held in a box crusher as his face is demolished is gruesome in and of itself...you'd think that wouldn't be topped. But KNB really go for it with the victim's face being pressed into a meat slicer, the blade scraping across the teeth, stopped momentarily, before moving all the way through the head. For extra potent punch, Jennifer finds his split-in-two head waiting on her as she rolls down a conveyor. 

One of these days I'll finally get to that Texas Chainsaw Massacre review, but I was thinking about the meat hook death so notorious in that film when watching Sam Raimi hung by his chin in Intruder. And it doesn't end with Sam hoisted up and dropped face first on the hook. KNB go one step further by having Sam hang on the hook, pushed around by Jennifer as she attempts to use his dead body as weight against a meat locker door while she slams it repeatedly on Bill's hand (well, his hand before she knew it was Bill). By 1989, KNB just went that extra little bit with the meat hook, even as Tobe Hooper planted the disturbing, unsettling seed. The difference is in tone. Where TCM was totally unnerving, Intruder goes for the absurd. Of course, Sam's brother, Ted -- who loves his watermelon, as the produce manager, rocking to some music with his headphones on his ears -- gets a cameo as an eventual victim. The butcher knife, obviously, stabs and stabs into plenty of chests and backs. Bill even gets a knife right in the chest, but that doesn't keep him down long...it takes plenty of hatchet wacks to finally stop him.

There is a really great telephone booth scene where Jennifer is trapped inside it as Bill pushes it over on the sidewalk. The ending, with two cops (one of them Bruce Campbell in a brief cameo) believing Jennifer and Craig are the ones responsible for the murders as a wounded and dying Bill blames them with a bloody smile, left a bad taste in my mouth. Probably the intention, but without a serious motivation for killing all these people, Bill's actions were always just puzzling to me. I guess for plenty of viewers just the idea that Bill goes crazy when he can't stop the loss of his grocery store is enough. I think I needed a bit more than just that. It took a bit away from my overall enjoyment of the film. Still as a body count slasher, Intruder is one of the best ever produced. Special effects since then, though, have improved. KNB were even part of that evolution. Intruder was a big part of that evolution. At the very least, slasher fans can see it and appreciate where KNB were in 1989, knowing that this was just a beginning. 3.5/5

I don't want to forget to mention Bill with his grocery store partner's severed head in one hand and sandwich in the other while Jennifer is horrified by his happy-go-lucky psychopathy. Even more absurd is the moment where Bill pummels Craig with that severed head. Speaking of the partner, Bill made sure to put that letter spike to use on the one who he felt betrayed him.

Just a personal connection to the film, if you will:

My second job, besides working for a week as a cleanup kid for a preacher who operated a vehicle paint job business, was working at a grocery store, Piggly Wiggly. I worked there from June of 1994 until September of 1995. I think why Intruder is such fun to me is because of that one calendar year of working in the grocery store, understanding perfectly all the stocking shelves and sacking groceries, the customers and quirky personalities of my fellow employees. The office in the back is almost designed exactly as my own boss' was. When Bill's hand pulls back the little door to the window, the office slightly perched to look down at the registers, I can recall Mr. Vernon's own office. He had a gruffness to him, a way where he could be a bit of a grouch, but he liked me. I worked hard for him. I remember when he came up to me, dismayed at why I was so ready to quit and move on. While he was always a bit of a grump, I never felt disrespected. When the employees in Intruder are told of the grocery store closing, their disappointment amused me. They seemed quite aghast by the news. I guess I would have felt differently. But I was 17 and hadn't quite experienced life yet. Still, when that one customer in Intruder interrupts the two young women during their conversations about boys because he was ready to grab his groceries and skedaddle, it sure reminded me of plenty of elder folks with plenty of snarky comments.

My user comments from June 23rd, 2008:

A psychopath, possibly cashier Jennifer's(Elizabeth Cox) recently released boyfriend who wants to rekindle their broken relationship, is murdering the employees of a grocery store on the verge of being sold.

Outrageous gore film runs the gamut of bloody ways to kill these poor folks who have no idea that some madman is behind them. The numerous methods of this slayer include a person's face being destroyed by a box crushing machine, a face being split apart by a meat slicer, a person being hung on a meat hook through the throat, the trusty butcher knife stabbing into chests & into the back of one man's head, not to mention the unfortunate fellow forced eye first into a desk letter spike with blood trickling on a fallen lamp bulb painting the ceiling red. A meat cleaver is used effectively to halt a killer's attack on Jennifer, trapped in a fallen telephone booth, turned over by the psycho. And, to top it all off, the killer uses the decapitated head of a victim to throttle a man unconscious! I think the grim conclusion, where innocents may be considered the ones responsible for the killer's carnage, puts a damper on the film's overall tongue-in-cheek tone(..of course, some may see this as tongue-in-cheek). And, I'm not quite sure the identity of the psycho and his reasons for butchering the grocery employees, holds up well. One might say that when the killer explains his bloodlust to Jennifer, why he continued to kill long after punishing his desired target, the slasher flick falls right in line with how over-the-top the movie is.

Horror buffs should enjoy watching director Sam Raimi as a meat man and his brother Ted as a nerdy produce manager(..with a penchant for watermelon). Elizabeth Cox is cute and adequate in the role of "final girl" trying to escape the clutches of the serial killer, trying to find an exit from the store. Bruce Campbell is wasted in a small, unimportant cameo as an aggressive policeman at the end. Dan Hicks lets it all hang out as Bill, the grocery boss who resists the idea of selling the store he built from scratch, who seems to be a soft-spoken, kindly employer to his hired help. David Byrnes looks thuggish as the red herring ex-con boyfriend, who bullies those who attempt to pry him from Jennifer. Some slasher fans might feel frustrated with the film because it takes a while before the violence ensues, with director Scott Spiegel trying to bring a style, through every kind of camera angle imaginable, using reflections of faces(bouncing from a lifted butcher knife, from mirrors or swinging glass doors), shooting from the inside of shopping carts, through empty spots(..between merchandise items) on store shelves, from high above explaining the vastness of the killing grounds available to the psychopath..if there was a way to shoot characters unusually with off-kilter camera angles, Spiegel does so. Obviously, Spiegel knows that the material he has isn't much, but by bringing an unorthodox style to this slasher flick, he keeps you entertained before the murder spree begins. An 80's sleeper and perfect Midnight viewing.