The Mutilator (1984)

The Mutilator (1984) is a late-to-the-party slasher that garnered more fans from its oversized VHS artwork than it probably ever did from those who watched the finished product. And who could blame them. Put together by a cast and crew of mostly amateurs, the photography was so dark, the theme song (based on the original title Fall Break) so horrifically misguided, and the killer so unthreatening that the film could barely compete with TV horror fare.

But the years have been kind to director Buddy Cooper's wannabe production. And Arrow Video's high-definition restoration has been even kinder. The overall ineptitude is still there, but now The Mutilator feels like a charming "lets-put-on-show" slasher fan film, full of innocently horny victims waiting for their turn in the make-up chair.

After a stagey prologue in which 8-year-old Ed Jr. accidently kills his mom with a shotgun, we flash forward to the college years where he has seemingly put the incident behind him. But Big Ed, his father, definitely has not. With nothing better to do over fall break, Ed Jr. and his friends agree to drive down to the family beach house and help shut it down for the season. But instead of the cheap beer and unprotected sex they were expecting, Ed Jr. and his friends are gruesomely dispatched one by one by an array of convenient weaponry.

The Mutilator, like most other Halloween-come-latelys, is made up of pre-fab characters: the ineffective male hero, the comic relief, the final girl and the mute murderer punishing them for their sins. Only the setting and the number of expendable characters change from film to film. And it's that fill-in-the-blank format that makes slashers so satisfying. This time around, there's really no effort to hide the identity of Big Ed, who sleeps inside the nooks and crannies of the beach house like some hibernating X-Files monster, emerging only to kill with whatever is handy, including a outboard motor and (in the movie's most infamous scene) a nasty-looking gaffers hook.

The effects by Mark Shostrom, who moved on to some of the best practical gore films of the '80s like the Nightmare on Elm Street series and Evil Dead II, up the ante as the film moves along. But ironically, the gaff sequence pushes the envelope too far, turning a rather amiable slasher into something more mean-spirited than its creators probably intended. Aside from that, The Mutilator is an easy-to-love underdog that will have you humming its oddball theme song for longer than you'll care to admit.

Arrow's Blu-ray / DVD combo is absolutely stacked with special features in addition to a miraculous hi-def transfer of the unrated cut that played only of the East Coast. The crowning jewel of the set is the full-length documentary Fall Breakers: The Story of The Mutilator that follows Cooper's dream of turning $86,000 into a feature film (his second choice was buying a vineyard). It's a great companion piece and increases one's enjoyment of the film immeasurably. As do a pair of audio commentary tracks that go along with several other featurettes focused on the effects, that unforgettable soundtrack, screen tests and more behind-the-scenes stuff. Alternate opening titles (this version bears the Fall Break moniker), trailers, TV and radio spots and the original screenplay wrap up another special edition that is without a doubt the final word on this homegrown horror flick.