Deadly Manor (United States/Spain, 1990)
Rating: **
Starring: Clark Tufts, Greg Rhodes
There's a lot of things in life that test my patience: Noon traffic. Dumb, impatient customers at work. Slasher movies that take an hour before any action gets going. Like, really get going...
Enroute to a lake for the weekend, six teenagers on a rowdy ride through the backwoods county find themselves lost after, much to their frustrated discourse, they've been reading the map wrong. A hitchhiker they pick up along the way confirms that they are indeed off track as he knows the lake they're looking for, however mother nature and lady luck have different plans for them as before they can drive to the right direction, a heavy rainstorm suddenly sets in.
Luckily for them, there happens to be a remote manor nearby that appears to abandoned, but borderline-supernatural spookiness are abound as one of the kids senses something evil living in the there and the mansion's décor (including coffins in the basement, human body parts in pickle jars, and a photo album filled with pictures of naked corpses) doesn't help say otherwise. (All it needs is Uncle Fester Addams and viola~!) Still, most of the group opted to camp in the mansion for the night, with the only one gal opposing to the idea of sleeping next to pickled scalps hiking back to the road, just for her to get caught by someone swiftly ending her with an offscreen throat cut.
Eventually (and I use this word questionably), the group is hunted down by an assailant donning leather gloves who is a real stinge when it comes to creativity as most of their kills are offscreen throat slits and knife stabbings. A real disappointing payoff after all that padding this movie did to get this far...
Released in the early 90s when the slasher golden age were thought to be done and out, Deadly Manor (1990) looks to be aiming to better itself from being just another backwoods bodycounter by scaling up is sleazy and gothic imagery as much as it could, evident from the use of creaky old candle-lit murder mansion and random sex scenes that may or may not have happened. The film, however, succeeds instead on hobbling down as an oddity of unprecedented cheesiness and cliched horror movie dumbness as characters spit out ridiculously hammy lines and do every textbook example of what not to do in a horror film unless you are really asking to be knifed down by a porcelain mask-wearing nutbag.
Now, I have no problem loving a bad slasher, particularly the cheesy kinds like Slaughter High (1986) and Jason X (2001), but what these movies have that Deadly Manor (1990) lacks is momentum, making us sit through an hour worth of characters just being dumb and cheekily written for the sake of building dreary tension that doesn't work quite well. Granted they throw in a red herring about the hitchhiker having a shady past for effort's sake, but most of us can tell that this is an old throwaway that gets resolved rather unceremoniously. Thankfully, the last act rally up decently with the villain giving out deranged monologues for both exposition and tongue-n-cheek reasons, as well as cashing in a last minute bloody kill. And, what the hell, why not have the final girl join in the fun and have her try talking some psycho-babble sense into the knife-happy slasher, too? That always work out, right? (Sarcasm)While Deadly Manor (1990) sought to be an atmospheric and dark psycho-thriller, its undeniable that its overall badness dropped it more than a notch down to shlocky slasher shenanigans. Then again, it has a solid motive behind the killer's insanity and resulting massacre, albeit a challenge to sit and wait for. I guess that makes the film watchable on a level so its not a total lost. Probably a fair viewing for those with the patience of a god.
Bodycount:
1 male and 1 female seen slaughtered
1 female had her throat cut offscreen
1 male knifed to death
1 female had her throat slashed with a knife
1 male found with his throat slashed
1 male knifed to death
1 male had his throat slashed with a knife
1 male shot dead
Total: 9
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