Out of the Dark (1988)

(In French, On Cable TV, June 2021) Considering my loathing of slasher horror films, I probably would have been better off not watching Out of the Dark. While generously billed as a horror comedy, it remains one of those detestable films with a masked killer preying on young women. Much of the movie is structured around violent deaths and the fantasy of phone-sex operators going through the motions of their jobs. There’s more nudity than the norm for that kind of film and some of the actresses look nice, but little of it is interesting when the next bloody murder is just around the corner. In the hands of director Michael Schroeder, the script’s idea of comedy seems to lie in dull post-mortem one-liners, which feels more psychopathic than actually funny. The outcome of the film was foregone from the start — it’s a mean, nasty, wholly useless slasher and given that it came well after the slasher cycle of the early 1980s, you can’t even excuse it for being part of a bigger commercial scheme. Just avoid.