Census Bloodbath: Guess Who's Coming To Dinner

Year:
1985
Director:
John McCauley
Cast:
Molly Cheek, Christopher Holder, Tony Crupi
Run Time:
1 hour 26 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Plot: In the prologue of Deadly Intruder, we see mental institution inmate Robert Harvey (shown only in silhouette) escaping after killing guards Wayne (porn star and criminal scammer Ben Dover) and Jim (Kurt Bryant, a stunt performer and stunt coordinator who has been a part of basically every marathon I've ever done, having played one of the costumed Ghostface killers in Scream 2 and worked on titles including Fatal Games, Maniac Cop, Wishmaster, Candyman: Day of the Dead, Jack Frost 2: Revenge of the Mutant Killer Snowman, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, 2009’s Friday the 13th, 2010’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Curse of La Llorona, and, for some reason, The Jane Austen Book Club). I use the phrase "we see" rhetorically, because this scene is so dark you can only see murky shapes shifting like blobs in a sludge-colored lava lamp.

Midvale's Captain Pritchett (Stuart Whitman of Vultures, making this an accidental Census Bloodbath double feature) assigns his deputies Carlos (Santos Morales) and Danny (Daniel Greene, who had the good fortune to later play Elvira’s love interest in Elvira, Mistress of the Dark) to keep abreast of the situation. But first, Danny needs to go to a dinner party thrown by his friend Jessie (Molly Cheek, and if she looks to you like the type of person who'd react well to seeing Jason Biggs engaging in sexual congress with baked goods, you'd be wrong, as proven by her role as Jim's Mom in American Pie).

Jessie has just had an unsettling encounter with a strange, axe-wielding drifter (Tony Crupi, who also provided the screenplay for this very movie), but she won't let that put her off from serving a roast to her friends. The invite list: Danny; Danny's shrill and irritating girlfriend Cathy (Marcy Hansen); clothing shop owner and amateur chef John (Danny Bonaduce, firmly out of the "child actor" phase of his career); John's amiable wife Amy (Laura Melton); and John's new employee Bob (Christopher Holder), a Canadian journalist who's taking part-time jobs for a story, and who John is trying to set up with Jessie.

Naturally, people in the orbit of the dinner party keep turning up dead. Otherwise, we wouldn't be here.

Analysis: I had a pretty good time watching Deadly Intruder, but I'm honestly not even sure why. It's an absolute mess of a motion picture. But it doesn't have much of an attention span, at least. It's about four movies welded together, so whenever the movie gets boring (and boy, does it get boring), you don't have to wait more than 10 minutes until it becomes something else.

Nevertheless, I'm hard-pressed to find much here that is an absolute good. I do like the movie's score, which is a cool, layered synthy track that is the rare 1980s slasher score to ape John Carpenter without ripping off Halloween. It feels a lot more like one of his action scores, and that adds an exciting new texture to the proceedings. Unfortunately, composer John McCauley (who also aped Carpenter in that he pulled double duty by directing Deadly Intruder too) clearly only made the one three-minute main theme, so it's repeated ad nauseam and constantly crops up in scenes that don't really match its vibe.

And I suppose the acting isn't bad. Except Marcy Hansen's, but she is thankfully only in a couple scenes before her character kicks the bucket. While there are a number of cast members who only ever appeared in this one movie (a hallmark of the shitty 1980s slasher movie), the majority of the actors had long, if not particularly noteworthy careers, and their decent performances here prove why they had what it takes to become reliable fourth bananas. 

Oh, and Molly Cheek is a great screamer, which is good news because Jessie is one of the least active final girls we've had in a long time. She not only waits to be rescued by a knight in shining armor, she is so incompetent that she needs to be rescued by three at once (the final sequence is charmingly overstuffed, involving two different men fist-fighting the killer simultaneously and a cop racing to the scene).

The final alloyed good element is that Deadly Intruder does have some fun with its kills. There isn't a lick of blood in this slasher movie, but the murders often involve semi-elaborate setups, which give them a smack of creativity that helps liven them up. And sometimes they're shockingly brutal, absolutely out of nowhere. One of the killer's first murders is so propulsively violent that it reminded me of Don't Answer the Phone. Which isn't something I particularly want to be reminded of, but at least it's trying something.

[SPOILER ALERT FOR THE REST OF THIS REVIEW]

The movie also has a fun little Psycho moment, because I was absolutely under the impression that we were going to be following Danny the whole time, and he's one of the first to die. 

But beyond that, it's mostly a slog. First and foremost, this movie has a Big Twist that you can see coming from a mile away: The drifter isn't the killer. "Bob" is actually Robert Harvey. If you're shocked by this, congratulations on watching your first-ever movie! Even if they hadn't just shortened the killer's name, the clues are loud and obvious. So it's frustrating that they wait until the final 10 minutes to tell you what's actually going on, making you wait and wait and wait for the movie to finally happen.

Plus, the drifter isn't a very flavorful red herring. We're forced to watch him wander around outside for minutes on end, not doing much of anything and not going anywhere in particular. The movie is at its most boring whenever he's onscreen, which is saying something, because the dinner party that forms the crux of the plot is composed of some of the most brutally uninteresting small talk ever committed to celluloid.

That said, even the bad parts of Deadly Intruder are at least a little weird. This includes the bizarre sequence where the drifter ties up Jessie and traps her in her own home. This is also pretty boring, because she has no survival skills and mostly just sits there and screams. But I can't say I've ever seen anything like the moment where he takes a tied-up Jessie out for a picnic and angrily calls dibs on the Coke. Or the post-killer-reveal moment where he simply unties Jessie and apologizes for kidnapping her, explaining that he just needed someone to talk to. 

Deadly Intruder isn't a hoot and a half. It's more like half a hoot. But I'll definitely take that over an insipid slog like When Dreams Come True.

Killer: Bob (Christopher Holder)

Final Girl: Jessie (Molly Cheek), through no fault of her own

Best Kill: Cathy's death is both a relief (she's really annoying) and a pretty cool sequence. The movie has already cut to a few insert shots of the car's engine fan whirring when the hood is popped on the side of the road, and Danny has just been killed, rudely refusing to fall on that spinning blade. Cathy, however, has her face forced into it by virtue of the car hood being shut on her head. A good time!

Sign of the Times: When Danny and Cathy are late for dinner because of car trouble, they can't just call Jessie and let her know.

Scariest Moment: Bob starts to freak out about the possibility of Jessie lying to him and dating someone behind his back. John and Amy calmly try to talk him down, not realizing how much danger they're in.

Weirdest Moment: Amy leaves the room to "go mash the potatoes," and like two seconds later, Jessie announces that dinner is ready. Girl, no it isn't!

Champion Dialogue: “Cooking without garlic is like making love without foreplay."

Body Count: 10

1. Wayne is beaten to death with a board.
2. Jim is conked on the head with a board and falls down the stairs.
3. Woman is drowned in a kitchen sink.
4. Mechanic is crushed under a car.
5. Danny is axed in the back.
6. Cathy has a car trunk closed on her, pushing her face into the engine fan.
7. Lineman is stabbed in the face with a screwdriver.
8. John has his head slammed through a TV.
9. Amy is lift-strangled.
10. Motorist is beaten to death with a poker.

TL;DR: Deadly Intruder is mildly entertaining but also mostly bad.

Rating: 5/10