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The late eighties were a bleak time for horror movies. The ascendency of the teen horror comedy was at its zenith and first-time director Anthony Hickox recognized the zeitgeist and ran with it, immediately revealing himself as a hack of the first magnitude. This particular attrocity so closely follows the formula of the teen horror comedies of the Eighties that it might very well be the end product of its evolution.

The plot is simple enough. Evil entrepenuer David Warner has created displays in waxwork of the eighteen evilest men ever to walk the Earth--but his displays are incomplete. They need victims. When all of them have victims, darkness will issue forth to conquer the world. To this end, he invites some local teens to a private showing at midnight. There are borrowings from all over here and the film itself is dedicated to a number of figures in the genre (Romero, Argento, Carpenter, etc.--the usual suspects), but the whole thing owes more to Porky's than any of the sources cited.

Having said all of this, there is something very, very interesting buried here. It's not something laudable or something which redeems the movie but it is an indicator of the nature of things here. To wit: One of the displays in search of a victim is a scene of the Marquis de Sade to which repressed good girl Deborah Foreman finds herself attracted. When she is inevitably drawn into the world of the display, she surrenders herself to it entirely (she even begs to stay when teen hero Zach Galligan comes to save her). In all of the other tableaux, the victims remain themselves and fight to escape their fate, but not in this one. What the hell is going on here?

There is a clue to be found in the actor who plays the English prince who, as the Marquis' sidekick utters the order to flog the victim to death--it is none other than the director himself. If this were not designed to titilate and were this not embedded inside a wholly silly movie, this might be something to work with, something upon which to elaborate a fruitful exploration of the attraction of horror or even of the kind of dark eroticism it suggests, but in casting himself in this sequence, Hickox reveals this as not just a mundane one-from-column-A horror comedy, but as a fetish. This is the imaginings of a sadist. As such, all of the criticism of the horror genre as a social disease come home to roost. Pity it had to happen in something so goddamn dumb.