jellopuke It's an okay slasher movie in the vein of Black Christmas. Standard set up, someone's killing girls in a remote location with an attempt at a few more atmospheric moments. The girls are very thinly defined and the twist at the end is par for the course. You could do worse, but this isn't super memorable.

Sam Panico After the box office success of Prom Night, producer Peter R. Simpson wanted to create an "adult" slasher. After three troubled years, he had this film, which didn't do all that well with audiences or critics. That said - after years of cable viewing and even more years where the film wasn't available on DVD, it's become something of a cult classic. Samantha Sherwood (Samantha Eggar, Welcome to Blood City, The Brood, All the Kind Strangers) commits herself to an asylum so that she can prepare for the role of her lifetime: Audra. Yet once inside, she learns that her director and lover Johnathan Stryker (John Vernon, Killer Klowns from Outer Space, Animal House) has actually left her there to rot.That's because a whole new group of young girls are about to audition for the role. Like Amanda, who has a dream that she sees a large doll in the road. When she goes to get it, she's run over. And when she wakes up, a killer in an old hag mask stabs her and steals the doll. The five remaining girls show up to audition for Stryker at his mansion: Patti (Lynne Griffin, Strange Brew and Black Christmas, two of the most Canadian movies ever), a stand-up comedian. Brooke (Linda Thorson, Tara King from TV's The Avengers), an actress. Laurian, a ballet dancer. Tara, a musician. And Christie (Lesleh Donaldson, Canada's top screen queen, thanks to roles in Happy Birthday to Me, Deadly Eyes and Funeral Home), an ice skater. And then Samantha shows up!The first night everyone is in the house, Tara and Matt, the caretaker, hook up in a jacuzzi. So does Christie and Stryker, but she pays in the price in the film's best scene when she gets her throat cut while ice skating. Her head ends up in a toilet bowl, which is pretty shocking even for a slasher, and Brooke freaks out upon finding it. So of course, Stryker hooks up with her.All Laurian wants to do is dance, so she gets stabbed. And while Brooke is banging Stryker, they're both shot and killed, falling down through a window. Tara runs from the mansion and finds Matthews body in the jacuzzi. Even though she escapes the killer three times, the fourth time is never the charm because things don't work in fours. She is dragged into a ventilation shaft and killed.Samantha and Patti celebrate with a toast, as Samantha tells her about killing Stryker and Brook. Patti is shocked and reveals that she is the killer, then murders Samantha. We cut to her in a mental asylum where she acts out the film for the other inmates.Lynne Griffin recalls filming an alternate ending where Patti would read a monologue to all of her victims while on stage. It was rejected, yet another issue in a production so tenuous that director Richard Ciupka has his name listed as Jonathan Stryker in the credits. Yes, the same person who is in this movie as the director.To be fair: this movie is a mess. It barely came together and while there are moments of suspense and one great kill, it's amazing that it came together to be a barely coherent movie at all.

Leofwine_draca CURTAINS is a grim and dark Canadian slasher movie from 1983. The plot, about a number of young actresses auditioning for a film director at a bleak and remote mansion, is nothing special, and the constant storytelling really does nothing for the movie apart from slowing the pace down and making it pretty boring to watch. The too-dark cinematography means that all of the crucial death scenes are hard to see and might as well take place in pitch blackness. No, the only thing interesting about this movie is the presence of Hollywood notables like John Vernon and Samantha Eggar, with Linda Thorson and a youthful Michael Wincott alongside them; the rest is merely sleep-inducing.

lonchaney20 I feel like the slasher genre has yet to get its due. A lot of the backlash no doubt started with moral watchdogs and high-minded critics, who felt that the genre both glorified violence while preaching a highly conservative (and even misogynistic) agenda. It certainly didn't help when Scream came along and created a list of largely inaccurate slasher rules that are quoted to this day. Even a cursory glance at the most mainstream of slashers (Halloween and Friday the 13th) will reveal numerous cracks in the popular theories surrounding the genre (the most prominent being that the final girl is rewarded for her virginity/purity), but these sweeping generalizations are even more difficult to justify when looking at something like Curtains.When I first bought a used VHS copy of Curtains from my local video store, a certain meta-fictional detail on the box baffled me. I must first explain the plot to show you why. Curtains is all about six actresses auditioning for the coveted titular role in Audra, the newest project of director Jonathan Stryker (John Vernon). After having the original lead, Samantha Sherwood (Samantha Eggar), committed to an asylum - the method actress initially agrees to this for research, only to discover that Stryker has no intention of bailing her out - he invites the six actresses to his country home for what he tells him will be a unique and life-changing audition process. Meanwhile someone wearing an old hag mask (apparently a prop from Audra) is killing them all off one by one. The strangest detail in all this is that the film itself is credited to Jonathan Stryker, the director played by John Vernon. As I later learned, it was an extremely troubled production requiring massive rewrites and reshoots (most of them under the producer's direction), and the actual director chose to have his name taken off of the film.As troubled as the production apparently was, it mostly doesn't show on screen. Compromised or not (producer Peter Simpson says Ciupka wanted to make an art film, whereas Simpson actually wanted to make his money back), this is one of the most ambitious, mature, and surprisingly nuanced slasher films, with excellent performances across the board (barring a stilted psychiatrist in the opening scenes). What really gives this film a staying power that its contemporaries lack is the decision from Simpson and Ciupka to appeal to an adult audience. This means we have a completely adult cast of characters, and we deal with mature themes: megalomania (Stryker was inspired by Klaus Kinski), sexual manipulation, emotional abuse, and the exploitation of women in the film industry. Stryker claims that his audition process will give these actresses invaluable insight into themselves and acting, but what's really revealed is the ugly sexual politics and backstabbing so prevalent Hollywood. Unlike many films of this type, Curtains dwells on the impact that this emotional and physical violence has on its characters. Perhaps the saddest of these moments occurs after Stryker manipulates a naive young actress into sleeping with him. After he wordlessly puts on his clothes and leaves the room, she rolls over and starts to cry, the camera lingering on her wounded expression.Sadly the film doesn't end quite as strongly as it begins. The climax is where Simpson gains complete control of the narrative. He actually proves to be a skillful director, and the long cat and mouse sequence (set in an improbably labyrinthine prop shed, filled with all kinds of creepy knickknacks), is a definite highlight of the film. Its quasi-Surrealist imagery (an exit door leading to a bricked up wall, a room of hanging mannequins, a room of Twin Peaks-esque curtains) and baroque lighting would fit comfortably into an Italian horror film, and it gives the film a much needed shot of suspense. Unfortunately the ending, in which our killer and their motivation is revealed, isn't entirely convincing, and somehow this whole section seems to lose sight of the themes and conflicts built up so beautifully by Ciupka in the earlier parts of the narrative. The murder scenes throughout are quite striking (especially a ballsy one committed in broad daylight, generally considered a horror no-no), but the most impactful and disturbing scenes are those involving Stryker's mind games. While the killer's motivation is tied up in the audition process, somehow it doesn't resolve the film's themes in a satisfactory manner. The last scene ends things on an appropriately melancholy note, however, helped immeasurably by a Satie-inspired theme from composer Paul Zaza. Overall an impressively mature take on a much reviled genre, whose art-house aspirations elevate it beyond mere shocks for shock's sake. Try to see it in Synapse's brilliant restoration, which reveals how much love and care was really put into the film's visual style.