In Destroyer, Anthony Perkins, the star of Hitchcock's Psycho, plays the director of cheesy 'Women In Prison' movie Death House Dolls and utters the line 'Everybody back in an hour. We'll do the shower scene.' That's as clever as the film gets, the rest of the movie being an extremely dumb tongue-in-cheek slasher that offers very little for horror fans to get excited about (except, perhaps, for the aforementioned shower scene, in which several buck naked fitties get sopping wet before having a cat-fight).
Beating the similarly themed House III: The Horror Show and Wes Craven's Shocker by a year, Destroyer features a vicious, musclebound rapist and murderer called Ivan Moser (played by ex-NFL linesman Lyle Alzado), who receives the electric chair for his crimes, but who returns from the dead to terrorise the cast and crew of the aforementioned W.I.P. movie (which is being shot in the now abandoned jail where Moser was zapped). For this kind of uninspired trash to work, the killer's quips need to be reasonably amusing (which they aren't: Alzado is no Englund) and the kills both inventive and excessively splattery (which they aren't: the dull deaths either occur off screen or the film cuts away from the gory stuff too soon).
Worse still, actress Deborah Foreman, as 'final girl' Susan, puts in a performance almost as irritating as that in her atrocious 1986 'comedy' My Chauffeur. Foreman has proven that she can play cute and sexy in Waxwork (1988) and Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat (1989), and appealing in April Fool's Day, but when she plays overly kooky, as she does here, even her impressive dimples can't win me over. With her horrible hair-do, tomboyish outfits, and supposedly witty banter, Susan is presumably intended to be endearing, but I found her quite the opposite, and would have been quite happy for Moser to have run a few thousand volts through her while he could.
3.5 out of 10, rounded up to 4 for IMDb.
Beating the similarly themed House III: The Horror Show and Wes Craven's Shocker by a year, Destroyer features a vicious, musclebound rapist and murderer called Ivan Moser (played by ex-NFL linesman Lyle Alzado), who receives the electric chair for his crimes, but who returns from the dead to terrorise the cast and crew of the aforementioned W.I.P. movie (which is being shot in the now abandoned jail where Moser was zapped). For this kind of uninspired trash to work, the killer's quips need to be reasonably amusing (which they aren't: Alzado is no Englund) and the kills both inventive and excessively splattery (which they aren't: the dull deaths either occur off screen or the film cuts away from the gory stuff too soon).
Worse still, actress Deborah Foreman, as 'final girl' Susan, puts in a performance almost as irritating as that in her atrocious 1986 'comedy' My Chauffeur. Foreman has proven that she can play cute and sexy in Waxwork (1988) and Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat (1989), and appealing in April Fool's Day, but when she plays overly kooky, as she does here, even her impressive dimples can't win me over. With her horrible hair-do, tomboyish outfits, and supposedly witty banter, Susan is presumably intended to be endearing, but I found her quite the opposite, and would have been quite happy for Moser to have run a few thousand volts through her while he could.
3.5 out of 10, rounded up to 4 for IMDb.