The directorial debut of the guy responsible for the OK horror spoofs
‘House’ and ‘The Monster Squad’ is predictably another genre spoof, mixing
50s sci-fi spoof with zombie movie spoof.
Campus dork Jason Lively (remember him as the decidedly older looking
Rusty in ‘European Vacation’?) and his handicapped buddy Steve Marshall
attempt to get into top fraternity to impress cute Jill Whitlow. They must
steal a corpse from the campus medical facility. Unfortunately they
unleash leech-like aliens that spread like wildfire, turning mindless frat
boys and sorority sisters into…er…even more mindless frat boys and
sorority sisters. Tom Atkins is the seriously unstable, hard-boiled cop
who thinks there may be a link between the current events and an axe
murder from the past that has haunted him for years.
Whilst Tom Atkins is very amusing, and it’s nice to see us
physically-challenged folk represented in a film in a non-discriminatory,
non-disease-of-the-week way, this horror spoof just didn’t, excuse the
pun, ‘Thrill Me’.
The film spends a reasonable amount of time trying to build character, but there are two problems with that.
1) The characters are still stereotyped and underdeveloped, outside of
Atkins. Lively’s our leading man and yet, other than his unpopularity and
his lust for Whitlow, we know nothing about him. And as for Whitlow, a
cross between ‘Doogie Howser’ actress Lisa Dean Ryan and ‘Roswell’ actress
Shiri Appleby, she’s so low-key here as to virtually cease to exist, much
like her actual character.
2) Character development takes time, and that’s far too much time here,
it’s so slow that by the time that the (admittedly cool and relatively
gory) finale arrives, we don’t give a damn.
Overall, this film suffers the same fate that most of these horror spoofs from the 80s faced; There’s so many of them, a lot of them funnier and
scarier than this rather tepid effort. It’s nice to see the characters
having names of famous directors (even the University is named after Roger
Corman), and the finale is good fun, but It doesn’t quite go for the
jugular in either horror or comedy departments.
OVERALL SUMMARY
Making one appreciate ‘Scream’ just a little more, this horror spoof gets
points for incorporating famous director’s names, a Dick Miller cameo
(always a plus) and a screening of ‘Plan 9 From Outer Space’. Other than
that, it’s decent, but fairly run-of-the-mill.
