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The joke is taken up by Ritchie in The Couch Trip: "Maybe you gotta be a little crazy to be a shrink." Jack Sholder shoots the works right off the bat, a dash of surrealism (raw fish and indoor rain at Mom's Diner) to give the unmoored mind in a New Jersey asylum. (The effulgent music-video aesthetic returns briefly for a punk concert, where The Sic Fucks perform "Chop Up Your Mother.") Donald Pleasence in academic tweed points up the Halloween connection, the doctor this time puffs on herbs while watching over a ward of bloodthirsty cuckoos, not patients but "voyagers." The former POW (Jack Palance), the arsonist-religionist (Martin Landau) and the big-blob molester (Erland van Lidth), only electricity keeps them in. Cue blackout, the fugitives blend right in with looters at the shopping mall. "There are no crazy people. We are all just... on vacation." Grisly therapeutics, a chance to see veteran character actors run amok, brutish fun all around. The maniacs snap orderlies, trample mailmen and skewer teens, though their main target remains the new psychiatrist (Dwight Schultz) whose home is besieged in a grotty retelling of Straw Dogs. (Lee Taylor-Allan as the visiting sister has her own phobia to conquer, "the thing under the bed" returns.) Cleavers, baseball bats and crossbows figure in the climax, the rock club accommodates the last berserk laugh. "We all kill when we must. And we all die when it's time." The murderer's hockey mask is concurrent with its Friday the 13th appearance. With Deborah Hedwall, Phillip Clark, Carol Levy, Keith Reddin, Elizabeth Ward, Brent Jennings, Frederick Coffin, and Lin Shaye.
--- Fernando F. Croce |