Curtains (1983)

(On Cable TV, July 2021) By 1983, the first wave of slasher horror movies was already on the decline — overexposed and repetitive, the genre was clearly going through all sorts of permutations in a feeble attempt to freshen an already stale and limited genre. So, it’s not that much of a surprise to find something like Curtains coming out at that time — an attempt to set a slasher in the world of acting, and blend in some ironic comedy based on the theatrical world. The plot, so to speak, has six actresses competing for a role at a director’s mansion and, obviously, being killed one by one. Conceptually, Curtains is slightly more ambitious than an average slasher — it’s aimed at slightly older audiences, thematically tries to make parallels between the auditioning process and the accumulating deaths, and even tweaks the usual lone-killer formula. But it’s still a slasher, and the film’s higher ambitions tripped on a famously troubled production that led to the film being shot months apart in two halves (referred to as “Acts” in the closing credits) by two directors: Richard Ciupka and then producer Peter R. Simpson. Still, even if all of this weirdness behind and in front of the camera may be more intriguing than the average slasher, it still fails to deliver a better result — Curtains is still about women being graphically killed in a nonsensical plot, and there’s a hard limit to how enjoyable variations on the same tripe can be.