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Unhinged
Good plot twist, not much more
1982
Director: Don Gronquist
Starring: Laurel Munson, J.E. Penner
Can’t hurt.
THE SETUP:
Girls forced to stay in a strange house after their car breaks down… you know the deal.
DISCUSSION:
This is a DVD I bought from a used video store, because the cover promised a story so shocking that it was banned somewhere or other or something. The sales clerk was horrified and gave me a look of disgust as I made my purchase… so that’s a good sign.
The movie… ah yes, the movie. This is a movie that is not really that great, but has a last-minute twist that makes it all worthwhile. I’m going to describe the twist here, but I’ll give you plenty of warning before I divulge.
The story is your basic three girls go on a vacation, or to a concert, or whatever [I forget] and their car breaks down [or does it?] and they have to wander through the unfamiliar and slightly sinister woods until they come upon a house, and then they have to stay there until their car is fixed. I don’t know… do you think there’s something spooky going in the house?
Yes, there is. The typical range of wandering around outside/wandering around the house in the dark/just general wandering around scenes follow, interspersed with strange dinner scenes with the strange family. There is a main woman, a sort of uptight spinster woman, and her mother, a batty elderly woman confined to a wheelchair. The uptight spinster is nice, and always nagged on by her mother. The mother seems convinced that the spinster is sneaking out to bang all sorts of guys whenever she’s not looking, and is always calling from the other room: “Do you have a man in there?”
The first two girls are murdered in fairly tame and bloodless fashion somewhere during the course of the movie—it won’t raise many pulses. The movie goes on a bit too long, and then the conclusion.
Here are the SPOILERS!
The last girl goes upstairs to the secret attic these houses all seem to have and starts to get creeped out. Then the spinster comes in, and we realize that the spinster is the killer. The spinster chops the girl to bits—none of it is shown, just the spinster chopping and chopping, and chopping and chopping and chopping, but it goes on so long it is really kind of incredible. During the course of all this it slowly begins to dawn on you—the spinster is, and has been since the beginning—A MAN! They really do such a good job that I was clueless until this was revealed [though I can be a little naïve anyway], and it was quite a shock.
THEN, you get a whole new creepy frisson as the mother calls up to her “daughter” from downstairs, and says once more: “Have you got a MAN in there?”
SPOILERS END.
So there you are. It’s a bit of a paradox, because on the one hand there’s nothing that would get you interested in watching this if you didn’t know the twist, and yet once you know the twist, you’ve already had the main point of interest this film has to offer.
If you end up with the DVD, skip the commentary track in which five out-of-work “comics” make snarky and insipid commentary in an attempt to generate a sort of MST3K excitement. Either get some real friends to make fun of this movie with or just watch it in the company of your own brain. Or don’t watch it at all. It’s really more of a curiosity than anything.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
Probably not, though I was glad I did. Now I want to sell my copy and no one will buy it.
