| Cover Art |
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| Credits |
Director: Scott Spiegel
Starring: : Elizabeth
Cox, Renée Estevez, Dan Hicks, Sam Raimi,
Ted Raimi, Bruce Campbell, Lawrence Bender
Screenplay: Scott Spiegel,
Lawrence Bender
Tagline: If this one
does not scare you, you're already dead!
Country: USA |
Years before he made it big producing films for
Quentin Tarantino, Lawrence Bender was involved
with Intruder. Also heavily involved
was Scott Spiegel, a man who's been riding
Sam Raimi's coattails for decades now.
Intruder is set at a small supermarket
where Renée Estevez (Sleepaway
Camp 2 and Emilio's sister) works
alongside those wacky Raimis, Sam and Ted. A young
female checker, not Estevez as claimed on the
DVD slick, has her ex-con ex-boyfriend come into
the store as it's closing. He chucks a major
wobbly, and fights everyone in the store in a
poorly choreographed brawl, and then disappears
somewhere in supermarket. It takes the crew a
while to find him, because, despite being a small
store, the building has lots of square meters.
Anyway, once they find the ex, they kick him out
of the store. One of the guys informs the ex he
better 'hope the cops get you before I do,'
which is a really dumb thing to say because at
that moment he DID have him. After all that excitement,
the owners announce they're selling the
store. As the crew are marking down prices overnight
for the big clearance sale, someone starts killing
them. I can think of nothing worse than dying
at work, but then I work for a bunch of Catholics.
The film does showcase some style, but ultimately
the style just highlights how badly done Intruder is in other areas, particularly the script. Even
the style gets a bit lazy, with far too many upward
angle shots from bins, floors, trolleys, and most
anything shorter than the people, really. It's
also too bad Bender hadn't hooked up with
Tarantino yet, as maybe he could've doctored
the script enough to make the oft misfired jokes
funny.
Like the jokes, the performances are of a mixed
quality, but Bender, Spiegel, Bruce Campbell,
and Greg Nicotero all put in cameos. Don't
be fooled by Campbell getting top billing on this
release (or the still on the back that is obviously
from a different movie), Campbell has less screen
time here than Tarantino in Reservoir
Dogs. The best thing about the casting
is getting to see the Raimis on screen together
and particularly getting to watch Sam get thrown
around and sing a familiar song.
Of course, the big selling point for this DVD
is the opportunity to see Intruder uncut. In the 80s, the gore was X-rated (US) and
unseen, but now it's just stills on the
back. Don't look at the stills on the back,
by the way, as they contain spoilers. Anyway,
Tarantino has proclaimed the film is completely
different with the gore. But as we all know, Tarantino
often has his head up his arse. While the KNB
FX work DOES help the film, it does not fix all
the other problems. It takes nearly 40 minutes
to get to the first reinstated gore sequence,
and the movie still has lots of nothing much happening,
a slew of murders, then nothing much happening
till the end. The pacing is still terrible, and
the kills still needed to be spread out within
the film. The FX also are sometimes poorly presented.
The much discussed slicer sequence is poorly edited,
and that spoils the effect almost completely. |
