A Thriller's Shadow: No Place To Hide (1981)

No Place To Hide (1981)
Ratings:***
Starring: Mariette Hartley, Kathleen Beller and Keir Dullea.

Amy is a 20 year-old art student who was just driving home from work one night when she got an eerie encounter with a strange man in a balaclava and shades, spotting him through the rearview mirror sitting in the passenger seat creepily saying "Soon." As she screeches to a stop and flags someone to help her with the intruder, she find no one in the car.

This, much to her horror, wouldn't be the last she'll see the man, as she continues to spot him stalking her, haunting her days with his ominous warning. Her psychiatrist, Dr. Cliff Letterman, however, points out that this could all just be her subconscious playing tricks, a manifestation of the guilt she's experiencing over the recent death of her father. Believing them, Amy decides to visit the place where it all started - A lonely cabin in the woods near a lake - for closure, not knowing the man in black may drop by in the flesh...

It occurred to me just now: How can you move around at night, wearing shades...?

No Place To Hide (1981) plays nicely as a TV thriller wherein it is divided into two acts. The first concentrates on Amy being stalked and chased by the black hooded boogeyman, playing around the idea that she might just be tormented by a product of her trauma. By the time she reaches her cabin and something unfortunate happens, the film takes a complete turn and focuses on a few guilty figures as they seemingly start getting stalked themselves.

Soon, Amy. Soon...

At times, the film borrows slasher elements for its scares and thrills, most prominently its stalking sequences which have Amy getting prowled around isolated classroom halls and forest-bound cabins by a masked villain, echoing similarities from many creeper scenes found in campus bodycounters and backwoods massacre titles. Other than that, the film stands closer to an American-style giallo of sorts, less focused on keeping a high murder count and, instead, tapping into the idea of paranoia and guilt, toying with these elements to keep the film's mysteries fresh with its twists and sharp in its intrigue.

While not the best slasher-adjacent thriller I've seen, No Place To Hide (1981) is still a modest chiller in a year full of chainsaw mutilations and masked psychos in love with their machetes. A paranoia fright flick never looked so good on TV.

Bodycount:
1 male shot
Total: 1