Deadly Intruder, The (1985)

March 14, 2001

by Nathan Shumate

Directed by John McCauley
Written by Tony Crupi
Starring
- Chris Holder
- Molly Cheek
- Tony Crupi
- Danny Bonaduce
- Danny Greene

Because I needed another review for this week’s update, and I haven’t seen anything else appropriate, this movie gets reviewed. There is no pressing need in me to tell you about it, or to relive it in doing so; it was lackluster by even the most generous, nay, beatific standards. The only thing it excited was my apathy. (Can you actually “excite” one’s apathy? If it’s excited, it’s not apathy, is it? See the great lengths my brain has to go to, to keep itself occupied?)

The first thing you’ll notice is the Halloween-ripoff theme music. Not at all remarkable in a slasher flick of this era, but what is notable is that the composer is also the director, John McCauley. See, apparently when he saw Halloween he thought that the fact that the director composed the score made the score good. It’s not; what made the score good is the fact that the score was good. This score is not good. It is composed, in its entirety, of the Halloween-ripoff theme, a repetitive “action-scary” theme that sounds like the discarded outtakes from a period Alan Parsons Project recording session, and one of those damned single-chord string whines that denotes extreme ominousness. Of course, in this movie, everything is ominous — a person’s shoes, a muffler shop, the little clock on my VCR that tell me exactly how slowly time is passing…

In the dead of night, someone escapes from the state mental institution (a complex with all of the security precaution of a pre-1990s grade school). I say someone, because we are emphatically not shown who it is. That’s going to be one of the movie’s major riffs; who is the killer? Nice try, guys; I still don’t care. Although he’s a dangerous psycho, he is pursued only by two unarmed interns with flashlights, who don’t exactly have the quick reflexes you’d expect if you were alone in the woods, seeking out an escaped headcase. Darwinism takes its toll, and we have our first body count.

In the morning, the faceless psycho takes out a lone woman in her kitchen. And here’s where another one of those distasteful things happens that I’ve never been able to explain. Here’s the thing: I like breasts. All-American hetero male that I am, I have no problem with breasts. I also have no problem with mayhem; drama thrives on conflict, and physical conflict is as good a variety as any other. But you gotta be careful when you combine the two, and the last thing I want to see in the first ten minutes of a movie is a woman being drowned in her own kitchen sink, while her bathrobe flaps open to expose her rack. That’s not sexy; the only people it appeals to are those who should have been cellmates to our anonymous killer. Yecch.

We next meet the cops, and apparently we’ve fast-forwarded a month, at least according to their expository dialogue. Seems that psycho-boy “Harvey” killed his wife and child, and is still somewhere in the county. We also spend an awful lot of time getting to know Officer Danny (Danny Greene) and Officer Carlos (Santos Morales) — which is odd because one of them is going to have very little screen time, and the other one’s going to be slaughtered next time we see him.

Okay, finally, into something resembling a storyline. A homeless drifter (Tony Crupi, also the scriptwriter) comes into town and, on a whim, follows a car up a road marked “Not a Thru Street.” I gotta say, Crupi must just be entranced by his own stoic visage, because he sure wrote a lot of scenes in which he just stands and looks at stuff. And we get to sit and watch him look at stuff. Imagine the lead from The Cars That Ate Paris, made up to look like Stallone in the first fifteen minutes of Rambo: First Blood, and you’ll have a good mental picture. The car in question is driven by Jessie (Molly Cheek), who lives by herself in a country house in an isolated valley, and the drifter just kinda drifts around her place for a while (like, until sundown), watching the windows and stuff. Finally he knocks on her door, gives her a story about being laid off and having no money, and asking for food in exchange for some chores. He makes him a sandwich just to get rid of him, but he insists on working for it — chopping wood with a big shiny double-bladed axe.

Do you get it yet? Do you? See, it’s supposed to look like the drifter is the psycho! I mean, he’s following people, he talks strange, he’s holding an axe! Gosh, what could be more obvious?

The drifter disappears (but not too far away) when Jessie’s dinner guests arrive — John (Danny Bonaduce, appearing in that great blank spot in his career between H.O.T.S. (1979) and America’s Deadliest Home Video (1993)) and Amy (Laura Melton). And just to broaden your vicarious viewing experience, we’ve probably seen close to ten minutes of footage of John and Amy previous to this, doing whole lots of nothing. If you’ve ever wanted to see two minutes of Danny Bonaduce icing a cake, you’re this movie’s target audience. On the other hand, Bonaduce does his own stunt of being thrown through a solid-looking table later in the movie. (Note: Jessie was all freaked out about the homeless guy hanging around. But when John and Amy arrive, they just walk in and say, “Hello?” That’s right, Jessie didn’t bother to lock the door. I’m waiting for more Darwinism in action.)

We cut from them to a poor auto mechanic who is killed by the faceless killer. No discernable reason — the baddie just wanted to drop the power jack. (What part of a car sticks down so far that, even on fully inflated tires, it will crush a man to death when lowered on him?)

Jessie then greets her late-arriving date for the evening, Bob (Chris Holder), who works for John. Conspicuously missing are Officer Danny and his girl, who are experiencing car trouble — and who soon start experiencing cessation-of-life troubles.

By the end of the evening, it’s really easy to tell who’s the murderer (yes, other killings continue, including that of a lineman); just watch for who’s out of the room when these things happen. Apparently, directorial intent would have us still believe that the drifter is the murderer, but since we were able to discount that so easily at the outset, it becomes nursery-school work to figure out whose offing people for no reason whatsoever. And folks, here’s the scary part: We’ve already gotten all of the clues, and it’s only half an hour into the flick.

So how do we fill the middle? First, by some gratuitous nudity of “Jessie” in the bathtub, thanks to Body Doubles’R'Us. Not since the intentional spoof in Naked Gun 2½ has the double’s work been so obvious: neck-up shot of Jessie, neck-down shot of body, neck-up shot of Jessie, neck-down shot of body… What makes it even more depressing is that, from all evidences, the body of the real Jessie was more appealing than the body double’s. Aargh.

But that can’t last the entire forty minutes that the middle of the movie requires (though it starts to seem like it’s going to); no, instead we have the drifter attack and abduct Jessie — well, not really abduct her, since he keeps her there at home, but he sequesters her. No sexual assault, nothing really, he just ties her up and then deals with about a billion escape attempts throughout the ensuing night and day, until the following night. As is usual in these movies, Jessie’s got all the survival instinct of a lemming; she fails to grab convenient weapons, thinks that cheeseball chain locks will keep out an enraged attacker (twice), and generally manages to squander any audience goodwill left over from that initial benefit of the doubt we accord the “heroine.” On the other hand, the drifter ain’t no rocket scientist himself; he waits to sleep until she’s awake (and able to attempt escape), leaves her alone in her bedroom to change clothes, etc. In fact, if it weren’t for the fact that Jessie has an Inconvenient Starter Motor in her car, he’d have lost her by 8 AM.

Oh, did I mention that no one has noticed that a lineman, a local girl, and an off-duty policeman (who was supposed to show up for work at 6 AM) are all corpses lying on the side of the road? Seriously. You’d think small towns just misplace their citizens on a regular basis.

Without telling you who the killer is, I will tell you this much: Said killer’s final revelation makes pointless all the previous carnage. This isn’t your standard Jason-style killing machine who needs no reason to kill repeatedly; our perp is shown as being a paranoid delusional, with no reason to leave this trail of random bodies; also, said murderer somehow manages to be witty, calm, relaxed and urbane until set off — at which point we’re suddenly inundated with more facial tics and twitches than at a Clint Eastwood Impersonator convention.

I’d like to think that the ending is simply an ominous “Evil is still abroad” attempt at spookiness rather than a setup for an intended sequel, simply because I’d like to believe that those involved in the production of this lackluster feature had themselves realized by the end that it was undeserving of another installment. Incredible, isn’t it, that I still hold out for some kind of admirable side to human nature?