Mountaintop Motel Massacre (1983)

(In French, On Cable TV, October 2020) Sometimes, I wonder if everyone and their dogs were filming slasher movies in the early 1980s—there are so many of them, with such slight variations, that viewers at the time must have been sick of them in short order—no wonder the genre deservedly went into severe eclipse after a few years. Mountaintop Motel Massacre is not fondly remembered as an exemplar of the genre and even a casual look will quickly reveal why: Uninspired direction blandly executed a script filled with slight variations on slasher clichés. The killer is a crazy middle-aged woman (that’s not even a secret), the setting is a dilapidated rural motel and the weapon is a sickle. That’s all you really need to know—the rest is just kills, kills, kills, as boring as they are devoid of meaning, theme or narrative meaning. So dull, so incredibly dull.