Every week, we spotlight a kill that we just can’t get enough of. This is Kill of the Week.
As much as we all love ’80s slasher films, the truth is that many of them suffer from trying a bit too hard to be like the sub-genre’s most successful exports. In the wake of Friday the 13th, released in 1980, countless slasher flicks set up stalk-n-slash scenarios in locations similar to Camp Crystal Lake, lazily attempting to cash-in on the runaway success of Sean Cunningham’s seminal bloodbath.
But not all of the decade’s slashers were created equal.
By the late ’80s, the slasher sub-genre as a whole was undeniably on its last legs, the golden age a distant memory and its unexpected ’90s reinvention (thanks to Wes Craven’s Scream) still many years off. But the decade was closed out with one of its arguable best when the key creative forces behind 1987’s Evil Dead 2 came together to create some gruesome slasher magic.
Directed by Evil Dead 2 scribe Scott Spiegel and starring both Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell (in a short cameo), Intruder told a familiar slasher story but separated itself from the pack by setting the stalk-n-slash action inside of the most unlikely of locations: a grocery store. Taking place over the course of one night, the film trapped a handful of young characters inside the after-business-hours store, where they were brutally dispatched one-by-one in the over the top, highly inventive ways that made us all fall in love with ’80s slashers in the first place.
In what is easily the standout death scene, one of those characters (I don’t remember his name, and I’m not sure it matters) is first attacked with a cleaver and then, making the cleaver-caused flesh wound look like mere child’s play, has his face literally thrust into the razor sharp blade of a meat slicer. The blade goes directly through the middle of the unlucky dude’s face as he screams bloody murder, slicing his entire head clean in half and sending chunks of viscera all over the place.
The scene, executed by the (at the time) newly-formed KNB EFX, is downright painful to watch, as the whole act is excruciatingly drawn out and shown in great detail. The horror movies of today tend to suggest brutality rather than show it, but the complete opposite was of course true back in the 1980s. Slasher films, more than anything, were a highlight of the incredible practical effects that made horror so much fun in the ’80s, and Intruder (particularly the meat slicer kill) is one of the best examples of that grotesque magic.
Enjoy this week’s Kill of the Week!
