Intruder

The opening credits to Intruder feature what is almost certainly the longest, stillest shot of a full moon in cinematic history. Like the film itself, the effect is cheap, cheesy, and strangely charming.

Intruder is widely regarded as the last great slasher film of the 1980s. The set and setting are pretty perfect for a horror film set in G.H.W. Bush's America. It opens with doomed shoppers milling mostly aimlessly around a doomed supermarket in some small doomed town, staffed by a number of listless, equally doomed, employees. Like all great slasher films, on a meta-level, we get to see doomed actors giving doomed performances in an ill-fated, last ditch effort to stave off having to finally suck it up and get real jobs.

Just before closing time at the Supermarket of the Damned, the psychotic ex-boyfriend of one of the cashiers shows up and starts hassling her. He becomes violent, there is a mild scuffle (roughly on par with the epic Spader v Cryer battle in Pretty in Pink except everyone involved is wearing a cheap shirt), then he disappears into the deep, dark recesses of the store. The employees (how a supermarket the size of a Piggly Wiggly can employ roughly 74 people is perhaps the film's biggest mystery) spend the next several minutes tracking him down and kicking him out.

As it turns out, the supermarket apparently can't successfully employ so many shiftless slackers, because shortly after the night crew manages to kick out the psycho ex-boyfriend, the owners hold a meeting in which they announce that the store will be closing its doors soon and everybody is going to be out of a job. Worse still, the crew is expected to dig their own graves or, in this case, spend the rest of the night marking down every item in the store to half price for a totally awesome "Going out of Business" sale.

It's sort of hard to tell the characters apart, or even be sure how many there are. Even though grunge hadn't hit the mainstream yet, bad hygiene and dirty hair were definitely de rigeur at Walnut Lake Market. There's one kid who looks and talks a little like a trailer park James Spader and who I think is supposed to be stoned all the time. There are only two girls, so they're pretty easy to tell apart since one is wearing khakis and one is wearing black jeans. Actually, the girl who doesn't have the psycho ex is Renee Estevez of Sleepaway Camp II fame, but she's changed her hair so it's hard to tell. The psycho ex is the only one in a leather jacket and there is an old dude (the minority owner) who tries creepily hard to be friends with his teenage employees. Sam Raimi has a supporting role. Bruce Campbell makes an appearance, but he wisely chooses to arrive in the film near the end and get out as quickly as he can. But most of the other male supermarket kids are pretty much interchangeable. It doesn't matter, since you can be fairly certain they're all going to die gruesomely.

The film plays out literally exactly the way you would expect. Okay bodycount. Respectably creative kills. Some fairly amusing grossouts. The OMG surprise twist at the end that you could see coming roughly 17 minutes into the film.

I liked it, but I knew that I would. Just say to yourself "I'm about to watch a slasher film set in the late 80s." If a little voice inside your head says "Hooray," you will like this film. If you hear no such little voice, you will not like this film.

My complaints:

There were an insufficient number of hideous, geometric pattern shirts and zero (0) rope belt sightings. There were also no Ray Bans (granted the whole film was took place in the middle of the night, but still, since when was fluorescent lighting not an excuse to put on a pair of Wayfarers?), no Swatches, and nobody was wearing any Roos.

There was not a single cheesy upright arcade game anywhere in the supermarket. How can you make a film in a supermarket in the late 80s and not include an arcade game and also, while you're at it, a gumball machine?

No Muzak versions of Phil Collins or Kate Bush playing endlessly on the store's sound system.

Also, nobody was wearing a denim jacket with little band and/or slogan pins on it.

So what it comes down to is, Intruder effectively executes the formulae of the era, but fails to capture any of the zeitgeist.

The working title Night Crew--The Final Checkout would also have been much cooler.