Sadly Over-hyped

Just perfect...

A Disappointing Continuation

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

The only way out for Arch Hall Jr.'s psychopathic character is a violent demise, and once the suspense builds for this troublesome exploitation film, the desire to see his character gunned down and die slowly and painfully increases. His character, as that of his quiet but equally psychopathic girlfriend Marilyn Manning, are both massively sadistic, enjoying the emotional torment that they put on the three teachers stranded just outside of L.A. Sort of a combination of Cagney at his most psychopathic and Mickey Rooney in "Boy's Town", Hall is increasingly sadistic and ugly, photographed deliberately to look that that in close-ups. I find him perhaps too real as he gets more and more demented and desperate yet it's difficult to take your eyes off of him. Some of the twists with his character are gripping to watch in many ways, and at one point, when Alden gets the upper hand on him briefly, I found myself cheering as to what he did next that I did not see coming. The performances to me are perhaps too intense, giving this already disturbing subject matter much more of an uncomfortable emotional involvement. Richard Alden and Helen Hovey did good with their roles as two of the victims. Sometimes a film can have too much tension to the point where you just become angry that civilized society has allowed itself to turn out such garbage as the characters that Hall and Manning play. I can see why this has a cult following as it is mesmerizing for sure but overall, it left me feeling angry and frustrated-not at the movie itself, but at the situation and atmosphere in general.

Just caught this one on TCM, after reading some of the reviews here. I give it credit for being refreshingly grim and uncompromising for its time. It's well shot and directed, and the ending is almost poetic. That said, I must comment that the rave reviews here kind of ignore the elephant in the room, which is that Arch Hall jr. is quite possibly the worst thespian who ever thesp'd. Oh my is he bad. Picture an unfortunate hybrid of Michael J. Pollard and Clint Howard, minus Pollard's acting chops. The rest of the cast is competent, not outstanding but good enough.Anyway, now I've finally seen an Arch Hall jr. film. A couple years ago I saw Rules of the Game, my first Jean Renoir film. It's about 80 gazillion times better than this, if you're wondering.

Imbecilic melodrama, a would-be thriller, involves three people (a virginal young woman along with an older family man and a muscle number with no spine, both in skinny ties) terrorized by a mad-dog killer and his hayseed girlfriend at an isolated auto-body yard in southern California. Any claims that the gun-wielding psychotic here was based upon real-life killer Charles Starkweather are empty boasts; the low-budget film is witless, unpleasantly hammy, and presented without irony or skill. In the lead, Arch Hall Jr. does his best (so to speak) to squint and to snarl, but he isn't too frightening. The bravura snake-pit finale is commendable, as is Vilmos Zsigmond's black-and-white cinematography, but this is merely delinquent-teen nonsense, prolonged to an excruciating length. * from ****

My first thought on this movie was "This was like a Bad Criminal Minds Episode without the main Regulars preformed by a Group of Underfunded High School kids in the Theater department." My Second thought was how did MST3K ever miss this movie? This had all the makings of a classic MST3K.But then my over all thoughts on the film, But actually the movie wasn't that bad and it kept my interest right up to the end. Reading the trivia section on this movie lifted this up quite a bit in my final over all review. Spend some time with this movie if you catch it. I'll stick with the Criminal Minds comment but then it goes to prove how important the regulars are on the show.