Butcher Baker Nightmare Maker

 There is so much meat on the bone in this film, and it is so much more than some "cheap and tawdry slasher film". Susan Tyrrell is brilliant as the aunt with a lust/passion for her teenage "son"/nephew, Billy (McNichol), so obsessed with keeping him at home despite a clear talent in basketball and potential scholarship to the University in Denver, she'll commit to whatever it takes to hold her grasp onto him...including poisoned milk, deliberately done to make sure he fails during a big basketball game. And the girlfriend Julie (Julia Duffy; imagine my surprise when flighty Stephanie from Newhart was having teenage sex with McNichol much to the disgust of Tyrrell!) is especially a nuisance to Tyrrell's plans, since McNichol is obviously in love with her.

What I found particularly fascinating was the casting of Bo Svenson as the horrible lead detective with such homophobic tunnel vision he can't see any other resolution but his angle of a gay Billy killing the gay repairman in some homosexual love tryst gone terribly wrong, which involves the gay basketball coach. Even if the repairman and coach were in love, Billy's involvement was minor...he was just the player for the coach and a dear friend. That's it. But to Svenson's Joe Carlson, who is not above holding a gun on some guy he brought in to interrogate, he can't seem to even entertain what a fellow detective offers as an alternative theory...Tyrrell's Aunt Cheryl is nuts, with a missing boyfriend named Charles that ultimately reveals quite a lot more that involved Billy.

The corpse in a secret room, a head in a jar, a homophobic cop who will cause more harm than good, a gay basketball coach that comes to the rescue, and Billy really confronting the whole ugly truth about his "aunt", even after she chops up her hair, hits Julia in the head with a meat tenderizer, and sinks into psychopathy never to return.

God, the 80s, right? You just never know what you might turn up from this decade. 1980 - 1983 had some real doozies. This and "The Pit" from the same year. Every kind of oddball, of all ages, could emerge, making our skin crawl. This film has two...Tyrrell and Svenson. The violence does get quite startling. This film took a different route with the cop...he's far from anything remotely heroic. And Tyrrell's motivations had a logic, even if her behavior was anything but sane. The opening car crash (and log through the face) because of no breaks just throttles us. The knife attack with Tyrrell unhinged and Svenson toxic and despicable personality fully bloomed until he must also be stopped are shocking and hard to forget.

Joe Bob Briggs is a goldmine of information. I knew nothing of McNichol, especially his heart throb Tiger Beat status of the time. And the Stephen King mention regarding this film to him as a Drive-In gem. I just love Darcy's evolution as an onscreen talent alongside Joe Bob, too. She really is coming into her own and advancing his act.