Curtains

(1983)**

Samantha Sherwood will do anything for a movie role. When she learns that famed director John Stryker is shooting a movie about a psychiatric patient named “Audra”, she agrees to pretend that she’s a patient in order to spend some time on a psychiatric unit. Once Stryker has her committed he quickly abandons her because he’s tired of dealing with Samantha's high maintenance behavior. With Samantha out of the picture (literally), Stryker invites six beauties to his winter estate to spend the weekend auditioning them for the “Audra” role (and to screw a few of them along the way). The six actresses crab and chitchat with one another as they vie for the coveted acting gig. Meanwhile Samantha learns of Stryker’s deception and immediately escapes from the psych unit to confront him. Soon the six actresses begin dying from an unknown assailant wearing a creepy-ass mask. Which actress would kill for the role of a lifetime?


Help, Faye Dunaway is trying to kill me!

This was a cut above the usual 1980s slashers, with a more involved plot and a few good deaths. Still, there’s an awful lot of silly things going on in this film. My favorite moment occurred when one of the actresses fell out of a second story window into the first story window directly below (?). The narrative is overly convoluted and the pacing is off, especially during the bizarre climax involving several of the characters in separate chase sequences that nonetheless appear to be occuring concurrently. Overall however Curtains delivers with few good chase sequences/scares, characters I didn’t hate, and a decent film score.