REVIEW: Hide and Go Shriek (1988)

When a late eighties slasher film begins with a creepy man putting on women's make-up products in a dingy bathroom, someone should immediately raise the terror alert scale to the 'Hide All Virgins' level.

Like all good teenage girls, Bonnie, Kim, Judy and Melissa are planning a secretive weekend away from their parents, where they can run off with a group of cute boys and do whatever it is that horny teens do in 1988 slasher flicks -- which, as far as the current state of anthropology is concerned, is mainly having sex. There's also some Chinese fire drills at stop lights, ass-grabbing, and the like -- you know, hijinx! There's also gratuitous discussion of buzzcuts by the guys, one of which played "Crater-Face" Coburn on the episode of "Saved by the Bell" where Zack and Screech invent pimple cream. The star power in the movie is astonishing.

So off they go to that scary staple location of teen horror films, the closed furniture warehouse. I guess they were headed to the abandoned campsite in the cemetery by the haunted lake but got distracted by rock-bottom prices on wholesale cabinetry. Despite being ready for a night of light beer and heavy boobs, they fail to realize that the strange new dock loader ex-con with snake tattoos also happens to secretly live on the premises. Oh, wait -- time to play hide and go seek! Or hide and go sex, as it were. This must have been the first ADHD generation, judging by their inability to focus on the task of hiding without accidentally getting distracted by nekkidness.

Come to think of it, this is actually a fairly realistic portrayal of hide and go seek, according to my experiences playing the game. Half the people playing go have sex, two of them get bored and forget to seek, one just disappears, and the remaining person is adamantly not having sex and so must ruin sex for everyone else by playing the game with the tenacity of a half-starved bloodhound. It really brings back the memories.

And...add on some bloody murder scenes, and you have the essential experience of Hide and Go Shriek, which is about as standard as crappy slasher films come, with the one notable exception of the ending -- and it's a sizable and completely awesome departure. Since this hasn't cursed the world with a DVD version, odds of checking it out are slim, so I'm just going to give up a whole lot of spoilers now. If you hate spoilers or are allergic to people giving away endings to movies that you will never see, turn away now.

The ending to Hide and Go Shriek is one of my favorite endings ever, because it's so "shocking" and "unexpected" that I laughed about it for hours, and rewound and watching it about thirty times. There's a twist in the plot that comes fairly early on that I haven't mentioned for spoiler reasons: the snake tattoo guy is not the killer. He just happens to illegally live on the premises and is made to seem all scary as a red herring. He's a shitty red herring, though, since he has elaborate snake tattoos all over his hands, and somewhere around the very first murder we see that the killer has no snake tattoos on his hands. Good job handling the mystery, guys.

Anyway, Mr. Snake Tattoo doesn't even realize that there's trouble in the store until close to the end, at which point he comes out and tries to help the kids. And the kids beat him up a lot. Maybe they stab him. It's hard to tell, 'cause this isn't the best-lit slasher flick in the world. Regardless of the brightness, the killer is awkwardly revealed to be...Mr. Snake Tattoo's gay lover from prison, who (for some reason) believes that the kids in the store are coming between him and his love, despite the fact that Snake Tattoo has no idea they're even in the store for most of the murders.

So they fight, and Snake Tattoo is mortally wounded, and the killer slips on a puddle of blood and falls down an elevator shaft. This part was funny, but it simply doesn't compare to Snake Tattoo's deathbed (or death-gurney, as it were) explanation dialogue. I wish I had had the foresight to transcribe the genius of it, and the ability to accurately convey the awkward pauses and bad acting in words, but, alas, no.

And the sucker lasts, too. His explanation about how he was just trying to walk the straight and narrow and put the gay part of his criminal history behind him goes on and on, with ocean-wide expanses of silence wherein the burly actor tries to remember his lines. And then...the final silence that befalls even the most straight (and narrow) ex-cons. It's too bad that he didn't live long enough to see that his ex-boyfriend wasn't really dead -- he kills the ambulance driver and puts on his uniform, and then STARES AT THE CAMERA AND LAUGHS MANIACALLY until the credits roll. It's a defining moment in crap cinema history.

Also, speaking of putting on the EMT's uniform, an interesting thing about the movie: the killer dresses up in his victim's clothes after he's done killing them, regardless of whether they're male or female. Wait! I guess that's -- maybe that was some kind of foreshadowing that he's a crazy gay transvestite serial killer. Perhaps....just perhaps this movie is actually more sophisticated than I give it credit for. Maybe it's really trying to make some kind of a statement about...

Nah, just a slasher flick.