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The preamble rhymes the pieces of a salacious jigsaw with those of a mutilated scolding mother, and adduces a whiff of The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz—the boy is interrupted in his pastime, then continues calmly, covered with blood. Four decades later, the wanton slashing resumes in a Spanish mannerist's version of a New England university, where students keep turning up with missing body parts. Who's the cape-and-fedora campus ripper? The dean (Edmund Purdom as Thrift-Shop James Mason)? The spindly college "stud" (Ian Sera)? The effete anatomy professor (Jack Taylor)? The lumbering groundskeeper (Paul "Bluto" Smith)? At the scene of the crime, the detective (Christopher George) points to the power tool next to a pile of torsos and limbs: "Now, could that have been done with a chainsaw? Like that one over there?" The scariest thing is the Eighties Casio score, though the dubbing of the white-sweater coed ("The most beautiful thing in the world is smoking pot and fucking on a waterbed at the same time") is art of some sort. The out-of-nowhere kung-fu tumbler, a victim wetting her pants (in close-up) as the maniac's blade buzzes by her side, Lynda Day George bellowing every possible inflection of the word "bastard": The Juan Piquer Simón touch. The unveiling of the culprit's Freudian gore-masterpiece is an appropriately degraded adjustment of The House That Screamed, the proper finish for a work where scumminess somehow achieves purity. With Frank Braña, Gérard Tichy, Hilda Fuchs, Isabel Luque, Leticia Marfil, and May Heatherly.
--- Fernando F. Croce |