Rating: ***
Starring: Wings Hauser, Lynne Adams, Pierre Lenoir
Canada in the 80s pretty much gave us a good deal of golden age slasher cult classics like My Bloody Valentine (1981), Happy Birthday To Me (1981) and Prom Night (1980), but the country also brought upon a platter of weird ventures within the sub-genre such as the Dungeons and Dragons is Satanic-inspired Skullduggery (1983), the "Wendigo psychosis" leaning Ghostkeeper (1983) and this oddly surreal melodramatic bodycounter, The Carpenter (1988).
The movie starts with the chillingly calm mental and emotional breakdown of housewife Alice Jarrett (Lynne Adams), who soon sees herself being taken away to a mental facility after her husband Martin (Pierre Lenoir) finds her cutting up one of his suits one day. Upon her release, Martin believes that a change of scenery is in order so he bought them a house at a countryside that's currently being worked on by a cheap and rowdy construction crew. That night, though, after the workers gone home, Alice is awakened by a lone carpenter (Wings Hauser) still busying himself down in the basement and the two have an unusually cordial conversation about his work, ending with Alice pretty much just leaving the guy to do whatever he needs to fix up the place.
Things go pretty hairy when Martin leaves for work one day, leaving Alice all on her lonesome when one of the crewmen got more than a tad tipsy drunk that evening and breaks into the house to assault her. Fortunately for our housewife in distress, her friendly neighborhood carpenter is there to protect her. Unfortunately for our would-be rapist, said protection involves getting both of his arms sliced off with a circular saw. (Not that he minds, apparently. He looked more bewilderedly inconvenienced about losing those limbs than, I dunno, in complete, horrifying pain!)
Alice would soon learn that the house once belonged to a man named Edward Byrd who fell into massive debt in his obsession of making his home perfect, only to be executed after killing several of the repo men sent after him. Edward now haunts the house, still trying to finish it, and Alice is shockingly okay with this! So much so that when Ed starts murdering away more and more of the crewmen who he sees doing wrong to both the house and its new lovely owner, Alice has no qualms of him massacring these people and, in one scene, appears to be more upset at that fact that he's awfully messy with the slayings!
Needless to say, Alice is swooned by Ed's pleasantly hunky demeanor and good work ethics, overlooking the whole homicidal lunacy that goes with the package, and the ghostly carpenter himself returns her infatuation, promising more bloodshed to whoever comes between them.
Directed by David Wellington (who would later do a lot of TV work like Vikings and Orphan Black) and written by Doug Taylor (of Splice (2009) and A Christmas Horror Story (2015)), The Carpenter (1988) is a strange piece of 80s Canuxploitation bodycounter that builds itself more around the ghostly theatrics between Lynne Adam's mentally troubled spouse and Wing Hauser's unhinged gentleman of a paranormal handyman, only to juxtapose to the nasty killings here and there in an unusual dream-like direction. The result is often goofy as the supernatural psychodrama doesn't really have the solid footing to be as captivating as the unhealthy growing romance between the living and the undead implies here. Instead, it all comes out more hammy for how it is scripted, acted and edited, all sided with touches of eccentricities like the overuse of dissolves to transition from scene to scene or Alice's overly offbeat reactions, implying a form of crazed whimsy from her point of view. It's serviceable so long as you find the unintentional hilarity of the film's nutty arthouse aesthetic and as a slasher, The Carpenter (1988) ain't too bad.
The kills themselves aren't that loud and splashy (strange coming from a film that have power tools for murder weapons, honestly) and the pacing really do takes its time getting around to them, but I have to commend at just how odd the interactions are during and after each murder between Alice and Ed, as if the act of killing is just something the two can do and witness while talking about how good the weather is! It also helps that Wings Hauser is practically tailor-made for his role as the titular carpenter, doing the ole' wisecracking villain trope popularized by one Elm Street's Fred Krueger, only with a good dose of Southern politeness and neighborly sweetness that made a lot of his scenes an intriguing watch. His delivery is spot-on to the craziness of the villain, maniacally dispatching one poor soul a minute, being shy about it in the next. The movie did falter a little in its last act as all the oddities made about Alice being so nonchalant with all of the bloodshed gets discarded way too easily for a by-the-book horror finale, making the fantastical, rather upbeat turn of events feel kinda undeserved for how much it just came out of left field.
Still, the majority of the product has some hokey charm to it, making The Carpenter (1988) a decent enough title for lovers of quirky horror and obscure slashers to try out. It's a sublime blend of several moods and ideas, mostly succeeding in its own curious yet entertaining way.
Bodycount:
1 male had his arms cut off with a circular saw, killed
1 male gets a belt sander to the face
1 male powerdrilled to the throat
1 female shot to death with a nail gun
1 male pinned to the floor with screwdrivers to the hands, head crushed with a vise
Total: 5
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