When Amazon first started recommending this for me to watch I was sure I’d seen it before – a cult classic – it is described – about some kid seeing something awful in some mirror and I really thought I knew it but in the end I guess I didn’t and now I’ve seen a movie about a possessed mirror that possesses other shiny things up to and including knives and ice picks and pitchforks and your dad’s golden tooth reflecting off the sun down by the creek. Maybe not that last part but anything else you can think that could be reflecty is there including your mom’s new belly button ring and most of it kills you somehow like in all seriousness a window in one case or that tricky old murderous medicine cabinet door. Let me think. Knife, scissors, window, door, ice pick (or maybe knife), pitchfork and somehow the grandma was dead but I don’t remember how. Maybe she was scared to death. I think that was all the kills but I might have missed one. I know I almost died from trying to figure out what was going through the writers’ heads when they were putting this together. Hmmm.

This movie starts off as maybe a 97% copy of Halloween with the quaint house and a child committing a murder EVEN complete with a dingity dingity ding ding synth score before everything shifts to somewhere “rural” where everyone lives in a house that looks exactly like The Amityville Horror house except with bricks. I guess the big difference here is that our presumed villain or antagonist or whatever is a guy who lets his main squeeze pull a stocking over his head and face and he never takes it off which I thought was kind of weird and maybe fetishy or something so ok to each their own and it’s not my business I guess but what really bothered me is I thought when I saw it that her nylon was that sort of sexy black type some ladies wear or wore and when it’s on his head it’s brown and not sexy whatsoever and his face is all smushed and I don’t know if it’s continuity that’s bothering me or I’m just not in the know with the nylon on your face gang but this character isn’t working for me but that’s ok because soon the kid he rope tied to the bed is set free and kill’s him dead while he’s trying to bang the kid’s mom. I guess what we take from this the most is that the poor kid’s sister witness the stabbing through a mirror reflection which sets up the whole haunted mirror business even though later it pertains to anything shiny somehow but AWAY WE GO! dingity dingity ding ding dingity dingity ding ding dingity dingity ding ding thruummmm

20 years later and the murdering boy is a grown teen who doesn’t talk and the girl is a wife and mom and they all live in a farm eating soup and feeding wallowing hogs and (I think) l drying tobacco leaves but everything’s going ok until they get a letter in the mail from their mom – the one that let them get tied up while she was getting uh um I mean er um I say uh the hibbity bibbity – that mom who’s gettin’ ready to die and wants to see them one last time I guess for a nice hug or two or something. Naturally, these two go batshit and the boy paints over all of the mirrors with thick black paint like tar and the girl mom lady starts speaking in some sort of demon voice so she goes to a hypnotist who tells her husband to take her to back to her childhood home and see what it’s like now and she’ll be cured of her monsters. Oh and by the way they continually and prominently show a well outside the house so – open question to you – who do you guess is gonna end up in that thing?

Back at the ol’ murder house, the offspring of the current homeowners just let them in under the pretense of buying the place. “We want to buy this place.” “Ok come in and meet my younger sister and brother, we’re alone here.” “Thanks we want to look around, specifically in the master bedroom.” “Ok.” Upstairs and surprisingly, the exact mirror from which she saw the murder in two decades before is still hanging there on the wall like it owns the place and guess who she sees in it? dingity dingity ding ding dingity dingity ding ding dingity dingity ding ding the guy with the stocking on his face! AAACKKKHGG! Shit! So she picks up a chair and breaks that fucking mirror into a million pieces!! Back to the dust you came from!! And, naturally, the spirit of the nylon scrunch face killer escapes to extract revenge on everyone through shiny things.

I know this may all seem fantastic in that old timey way that fantastic meant unbelievable or crazy and not fantastic like the feeling of your face skin smushed into the breathable stitching of a leg stocking but we’ve really been building the characters so far up to this big, literally, explosive middle of the film. The kids, the husband, the doctor, the grown girl’s kid and the well.

If nothing else, how about one of the sisters who we quickly meet in the old childhood murder house? She’s sitting in a chair doing her toenails and wearing a Dallas Cowboys tee shirt. I can absolutely see this in her character (I can’t believe I found a picture of her):

“When I grow up I want to meet a boy that lives in a house with a water spigot in the backyard because me and mummy and daddy will go to the beach and I’ll be too pale to be in the sun and they’ll slather me with blocking solution and at the beach the boy will be shy and bring me a popcorn and I’ll undo my blanket so he can see the sun treatment on my legs and he’ll give us a ride back into town because our Buick sedan will be out of gas but my house will be behind another house and have no water mechanics so he can take me home to his house while his mother produces dinner because I’ll be too poor to eat richly and while the dinner is roasting this boy will splash me with the water from the spigot and squirt liquid soaping chemicals about me and I will clean myself and we will giggle and laugh and produce what will be good memories and as I am toweling off my skin and Chopin is weaving through the air his mother will ring a triangle and call us for supper and we will eat the most heavenly and juice filled boiled hams and potatoes I’ll have ever tasted!” Fair enough I guess, kudos to the actress for capturing that in her methods for this movie, especially considering she only has about three minutes of screen time before she’s killed with her “barber scissors” as she called them.

And that’s how it goes. Random deaths by the spirit of smush face guy somehow heavy breathing near the camera. The husband (somehow) rebuilding the destroyed possessed mirror and hanging it up in the kitchen for everyone to die from. A random girl wantin’ some eggs and some sex getting almost choked to death out in the barn. The strange bar b que out by the edge of the lake or river that’s covered in litter and old tires and the girl is grilling ONE hot dog. Very strange and it all builds up to dingity dingity ding ding dingity dingity ding ding SOMEONE GOING INTO THE WELL AND EXPLODING. Yes!

I suppose it wasn’t bad really but I doubt this will be anyone’s favorite horror movie from their childhood but I guess it was ok for a watch on a rainy day.

For much much better takes on this movie check them out —-> HERE <—- or —> HERE <—-

FILED UNDER: PITCHFORKS AND EGGS AND DALLAS COWBOYS AND SHORT SHORTS AND SHE REALLY DIED WHEN THAT MEDICINE CABINET DOOR HIT HER AND BLOCKING LOTION AND CHOPIN

P.S. HAHAHA Years ago I did a series on the Slumber Party Massacre movies and I called it “I Came Here To Boogie: (movie title)” and I found this picture when I was looking through my images for things for this particular movie today. I made this a long time ago way before Steve Loggins – hahaha