Review #586: 'Unhinged' (1982)

So we find ourselves here again, confronted with yet another sub-standard effort in the early '80's flood of slasher films. Unhinged sees three young women leaving the city in a car on a trip to a music festival. Their car is in an accident and they find themselves trapped in the home of an eccentric mother-daughter household, with inevitable dark secrets. Perhaps writer/director Don Gronquist was attempting to reverse much of the arguments in the media against these genre films with a gender twist. Famously, Siskel and Ebert held a vociferous discussion of slasher films and their attempt to subvert the feminist movement by stabbing and eviscerating women on film, and the films were targeted as misogynist. In the mansion house/prison of Unhinged female characters the head of the house, a wheelchair bound matriarch, Marion Penrose (J. E. Penner), has an inate hatred of men, and accuses her daughter of having men in the house, and prostituting herself.

Although if this were the case, the victims (no matter whom their attacker is) are female. The film uses many of the tropes from slasher films from Psycho (1960) to Friday the 13th (1980), and the girls trapped in the house are spied on through peep holes, whilst the deep, sexualised breathing of an unknown male are heard through the walls. It's a strange and almost farcical use of heavy breathing when considered against the backdrop of previous slasher films; particularly when this kind of audio effect was parodied in the dreadful slasher spoof from 1981, Student Bodies. Of course the girls are killed off in a bloody fashion, and the deep-seated psychological damage of the feminine family unit of the household is exposed, bringing with it the fastidious climax which reverses gender specifics - but not, however, creating any kind of revelatory, or even interesting, conclusion.

As would be expected from a low-rent, straight-to-video horror film, the acting is awful, although the campy histrionics of the old woman, are quite irresistible, and often humorous, but her space in the films narrative is underused. Whilst her performance is funny at times, the overall film is simply tiresome. The film doesn't entirely feel like a slasher film either, and at times feels and looks like an early 1970's sorority horror drama - but does not penetrate any kind of character study. No doubt that if this film did not find infamy with its early inclusion onto the UK's video nasty list, then this film would have been lost in time, forgotten, and rightfully hidden in the film history bargain basement - where shit films go to die. Even compared to other little remembered films of the same genre (Deadly Games (1982) or Blood Song (1982) for example), the pacing of Unhinged leaves you with a drab feeling. The dialogue is both written and delivered like the cast were under duress, and the languid, stilted camera glibly moves through the mansion set. I did find myself drifting away from the screen whilst viewing this, and found that whatever else was happening around me (admittedly there was nothing) was more interesting than Unhinged.


Directed by: Don Gronquist
Starring: Laurel Munson, Janet Penner, Sara Ansley
Country: USA

Rating: *

Marc Ivamy