Arriving in a small Floridian community, a series of disappearances have the locals convinced a charismatic stranger might be the serial killer responsible for the reign of terror in the community when his handiwork is discovered at a local sorority house that he has targeted.
This was a highly enjoyable and entertaining genre effort. One of the better features is an immensely strong and engaging setup that plays rather nicely with the idea of the killer lurking in plain sight but no one being obvious to his actions. The laid-back attitude of the times due to its period setting helps this quite a bit with the unassuming nature of the central killer being able to make his way amongst the suburban landscape of the sorority house who he seems to target comes off quite well in the first half with it clear he's involved with them from the beginning. Skulking around their house, eavesdropping on mundane conversations, and getting interrupted in seemingly obvious if inconspicuous abductions that are played off with a natural sense of just being around an unfamiliar community that doesn't know him, creating a perfectly serviceable setup. This manages to be incredibly worthwhile at playing up the second half where his psychotic tendencies spill over into a massive killing spree against the various students at the sorority house. This whole section of the film comes off impressively due to the filmmaking style employed throughout the sequence where the use of the non-breaking camera shots of the killer moving through the area knocking off the sorority members in quite graphic and brutal fashion, and with the films' unflinching nature due to the way this section of the film is shot it's all incredibly up front and confrontational in a grand manner. The main issue here is the somewhat flat ending that comes about naturally due to its origins so it's not truly to be held against the film but does leave an unsatisfying feeling afterward due to how it all comes off. Again, this is to be expected given the subject matter and origins, but on the whole, there's a lot to like here.
Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Language and Graphic Violence.
