Saturday, November 04, 2006

[1980] HE KNOWS YOU'RE ALONE: Best known as Tom Hanks' first film, though the seeds of greatness were not evident here. It's a competent but fairly generic slasher film--there's this killer who killed a bride years ago and now he's back killing brides and whole bridal parties too. And a detective who couldn't stop him the first time, and a goofy friend who the film sort of suggests may or not be the killer even though they already showed us who the killer was five minutes in. The film tries to be intelligent by being self-referential; it opens in a slasher movie-within-the-movie (which was actually a fairly well done scene), Tom Hanks' character makes a speech about why we love horror pictures and why we love to be scared, there's a ride through a haunted house where the protagonist (Caitlin O'Heaney) can't tell the fiction from the actual killer stalking her. But it's not stylish enough to overcome its predictability (predictability in the sense of its pretty clear which characters are going to die.) Definitely not the great lost slasher classic of the 80s.

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