Director: Lew Landers
Writer: Richard Bernstein
From: Cult Cinema
Residents of a small town are harried by a masked killer obsessed with testing the limits of terror.
Well, at least the movie wants us to think it’s about someone testing the limits of terror. In the end, it’s not nearly that interesting.
The movie starts with a cold open as Joey is laying in an open grave with wet cement being poured on him by a man in a suit and ski mask. Crazy Bill watches from the edge of the graveyard. When Joey asks the man who he is, the man replies that Joey already knows. Then Joey screams “Ken!” and we cut to credits.
After credits, we see an old couple driving at night.
Oh God, there’s going to be a lot of driving footage, isn’t there? This is going to be a movie I’m 100% sure was riffed by Mystery Science Theater 3000 even though it never was.
Yup. Hero’s a useless white guy, plot doesn’t make any sense, and we pad out the film with lots of driving. And it’s only eighty minutes long.
Anyway, a car tries to run the couple off the road then they stop at a restaurant where, for no particular reason, they tell the owner, Wesley Blake, about what happened to them. Then we pan over to another table where Marge and David are sitting. Marge works as a hostess and David is one of the guys she’s seeing, though she’s not going steady. Turns out Joey is her brother and he’s been institutionalized after his encounter in the graveyard.
Ken arrives (wait, the Ken?) and we come to learn that he’s Marge’s other partner. He and Joey are classmates at the college and Ken is studying psychology, specifically terror. He argues that, after the Holocaust and Hiroshima, the primary weapon of governments is terror and that humanity, collectively, has to endure the threat of that terror on a daily basis. That’s… not a bad idea to explore in a movie, honestly. It’s just that this movie isn’t really interested in it.
Anyway, Marge wants to talk to Crazy Bill about Joey again so David drives her out to Ghost Town, the abandoned part of town near the cemetery (really an old Western set that looks like it’s about to be torn down). They find Bill murdered and then Ken arrives as we see the masked man hide in a building. So Ken’s not the killer. Dial the suspense and expectations down appropriately. Marge and David drive back to town to get the cops while Ken stays behind in case the killer’s still there.
?
stays behind in case the killer’s still there.Yup, I read that right. What follows is a pretty dull cat-and-mouse where the killer keeps trying to almost kill Ken, and then runs away. Meanwhile, David asks Marge about the mysterious deaths of everyone in her family (!!) and posits that someone may be trying to eliminate everyone close to her. There’s no reason to actually think this, but since it’s the truth, it has to be mentioned somewhere in the movie. They call the cops and Marge learns that Joey has escaped the institution. Now she’s worried that he’s the killer and trying to get revenge on someone for something.
Back at Ghost Town, Ken is finally captured and held onto this time. The masked figure buries him alive as Marge and David arrive to hear his screams. They eventually find him, but he’s died of terror. Then the figure knocks out David and kidnaps Marge. He carries her to a nearby cave and takes off his mask revealing…
Wesley Blake, the owner of the restaurant?
Cops arrive, revive David, and tell him the entire story about Joey coming to his senses and telling them everything. The way the sheriff tells David leaves Blake’s identity as the killer a secret until the very end, except we’ve already seen that reveal so it’s no surprise. The cops give David a gun and they all go to the cave. Blake is trying to force himself on Marge, telling her he’s been in love with her since she turned 16 (creeper), and then the cops come in and shoot him. David hugs Marge. THE END.
Sidenote: at the end, David doesn’t shoot the villain. He does, literally, nothing in the movie apart from serve as a voice of exposition. Our “hero.”
What starts as something simple and laughably cheesy stagnates pretty quickly. The movie seems invested in not letting you wonder what the ending could be. I mean, Joey shouts “Ken!” at the start to make us think Ken is the villain. Then, when Ken arrives at the restaurant, he tells a story of being run off the road similar to the couple that came in earlier. It feels like the movie is trying to paint him as someone putting people in states of heightened fear and then constructing alibis to escape accusation. Then we clearly see that he’s not the masked man and then spend God knows how long watching him not get killed.
Elements of the movie are interesting in the sense that they carry a low-budget charm. The cinematography is done well enough that you can almost miss how cheap the sets are. Seriously, this is what Plan 9 From Outer Space would look like if Ed Wood knew how to use a light kit. Plus you have teens played by elderly adults, which never fails to delight. In the end, though, the movie loses all its steam about 30 minutes in and never picks up again.
While it’s highly riffable, watching becomes more than a bit of a slog and you can kind of guess who the villain is just from being familiar with these kinds of movies. In that sense, the movie feels like a precursor to Scooby-Doo, but without the wit or invention. If you want something to make fun of with friends, Terrified works well enough, but be ready to fast-forward through parts. If you’re watching alone, give it a pass.
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