Night of Fear (1973)
6/10
Perhaps some originality amongst the tedium and benign scares
1 April 2016
Warning: Spoilers
This is a fairly tedious little would-be shocker, filled with creative camera angles that only really serve to obscure what is going on on- screen, and surprises you can see coming a mile away. It generates no tension, but does feature creative set design.

It features a girl terrorized by a crazed, limping hermit who she encounters after running off the road. His Texas Chainsaw Massacre- style abode is filled with the usual things you find in serial killer's houses in the movies, like disembodied doll heads, animal skulls and newspaper clippings about crimes on the walls that I guess we are supposed to assume the owner perpetrated. The thing is that this guy doesn't exactly live in the backwoods. The girl found him after running off a main road, so why haven't the police?

I feel like giving credit for an ending I wasn't expecting, though if that's due to creativity on the filmmaker's part, or improbability on the part of the plot, I'm not entirely sure. Wouldn't being gnawed on by rats wake a person up after a dizzy spell? And wouldn't it take a lot more to kill a person?

This did get there before Texas Chainsaw, and I wonder if Tobe Hooper saw it. He certainly improved on the formula.
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