Intruder: Director’s Cut

Big Sky

Beyond Home Entertainment

R4 DVD

Some seven years after the success of Evil Dead and a couple after Evil Dead II, Bruce Campbell and Sam Raimi got together on a gory Eighties slasher. Co-written and directed by the original co-writer of Evil Dead, Scott Spiegel it certainly brings some flair to the Eighties slasher genre. Including names which would later go onto bigger things, Intruder was for a long-time the video nasty everyone wanted to see. It is now available in an impressive Director’s Cut from Big Sky (Australia) and certainly matches gore with a suspense filled storyline.

The film opens with lots of moody cinematography and brooding music. As a local supermarket is closing, an ex-boyfriend of one of the checkout chicks re-appears and causes a major ruckus. He is just out of jail for accidently killing a bouncer at a club and certainly lives up to his badboy image by getting into a free-for-all brawl with the staff after assaulting his ex-girlfriend. He flees into the night but they all expect him to return and this is not helped by his obsessive phone calling. It is reported to the police who are noteworthy in their incompetence.

This is just the beginning of a bad night for the staff. They are informed that the supermarket will be closing at the end of the month and they are all going to be laid off. They are invited to spend the night discount pricing the stock to make some extra dollars. As they go about their jobs, flirting, drinking beer and trying to make the best of a bad situation something doesn’t seem quite right.

As the night wears on they are picked off one-by-one, being a supermarket there are lots of exciting and interesting ways to die from death by a hydraulic box squasher, to a band saw, from a hammer and a big knife to an office paper holder strategically rammed into the eye socket. The gore is high, realistic and loads of fun; it is what you would expect from an Eighties video nasty.

At first we are convinced it is the evil ex-boyfriend, but that seems too simple doesn’t it. Sure he may be obsessive and a bit quick with his fists but does this make him a mad killer who slaughters with glee and abandon, probably not. The revelation of the killer is not especially unexpected, though it is a nice twist.

Intruder has excellent special effects and the killings still look realistic even though it was made twenty years, the acting is credible and there are some excellent set pieces. The cinematography is inventive and takes what is essentially a dull supermarket and makes it threatening and nerve wracking, there is a good use of shadow and reflection and some excellent scenes using the basement, butchery and packing room.

I like Intruder; I think it offers something a little unusual when it comes to a fairly overdone genre, the Slasher. It is inventive, has excellent characters and lots of gore.

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This review will appear in Volume 3 No.1 of the digital and print edition of Synergy Magazine.

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