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Unhinged |
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Three teenage girls are on their way to a concert
when they crash with their car. They wake up in
a big mansion where a woman and her crippled
mother lives, far away from any civilization.
It soon becomes more and more obvious to the
girls that not everything is as it should be,
but will they be able to get out of the house
and back to civilization?
After having watched the underrated slasher flick
"Humongous", I decided to give another infamous
80s slasher a go. Now, I don't know if I'm setting
my slasher standards to low but I actually ended
up liking this one as well. Unhinged is not your
typical slasher flick, in fact, even though the
body count is as much as four, it doesn't get
very slasher-esque until the last ten minutes or
so. The rest of the time I was intrigued by the
odd things going on in the house, especially the
strange bond between the mother and daughter
living there.
When the DVD of this hit the stores it was heavily
promoted by the fact that it had once been banned
in the UK. Well, first of all, pretty much every
horror flick released in the late 70s -early 80s
got banned in the UK and put on the infamous
video nasty list which I'm sure that you all have
heard of. Second of all, this movie really wasn't
very gory so even though the statement on the DVD
cover is true, it really felt like they were
aiming at the wrong audience. This is so much
more than just a teenage slasher movie, this
actually had an interesting story to it.
Obviously inspired by Black Christmas, director
Don Gronquist treats us with some very nice
angles. Sure, there were moments were you could
tell that he was a rookie director but for most
of the time the directing was handled superbly.
It's strange that he hasn't directed any more
horror movies after this one actually as he
clearly knew what he was doing.
As you've probably read in most reviews of this
movie, the best thing about Unhinged is the
surprise twist ending. I'm usually great at
predicting how horror movies - especially slashers,
end, but this time I was just blown away. So
just like I told you to do with Humongous, give
this a chance rather than believing all the
poor reviews, don't expect a bloodbath though.
We get an axe in the head, some knife stabbings,
a couple of body parts and some blood splatter.
The main score is naturally a synth score but for
once I really dug the hell out of it. This synth
score was surprisingly well done and very original
for the time being. The piano music also set a
pretty nice atmosphere.
While Unhinged is more of a psycho drama thriller
than a pure gory slasher flick, I still think
that this was a very entertaining movie. Sure,
it does have its soft spots but it's far from
as bad as most critics make it out to be. Give
it a shot unless you're looking for gory mayhem.
Review By: AnthroFred
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