Appointment with Fear

A thoroughly disagreeable entry into the slasher genre, this film began life as "Deadly Presence". After the producers saw how gawd-awful the film really was, they fired Thomas and shot some more footage. Gowan's detective character and a bunch of others were added in a sort of parallel story and the whole thing renamed "Appointment With Fear." Aside from a couple of performances, this cinematic disaster's only redeeming value is its score. Written by ace composer Andrea Saparoff, the music is the only thing lending a little eeriness to what is otherwise an hour and a half of scare-free tedium.

Recommended audience: Weevils, chunks of granite, D-cell batteries and very very minor Egyptian deities only.

Don't get too excited... this isn't an obscure movie by director John Carpenter, but rather a supernatural slasher from producer Moustapha Akkad, who fails to repeat the success he had with Michael Myers. This movie is such a mess that original director Ramsey Thomas was fired, with Akkad re-shooting and re-editing the film, slapping the resultant cinematic turd with the shameful pseudonym Alan Smithee. When a horror film gets the Alan Smithee treatment, you know it must be bad.

The film opens with a man staking out a house; he leaves his car to place a tracking device on a station-wagon. A woman emerges from a house carrying a baby; she drives off in the station-wagon, the man following in his car. They are followed by another man in a van.

Next we are introduced to Carol (Michele Little), who is using a parabolic microphone to record her ditzy friend Heather (Kerry Remsen), who is across the street, putting on an interpretive dance/mime performance for some old age pensioners (senior citizens love interpretive dance - who knew?). While this is going on, the woman with the baby pulls up at a nearby house; she gets out of the car, and hides her baby in a bush; soon after, the man in the van arrives. He wants to know where the baby is, and when the woman won't tell him, he sticks her in the side with a big knife and skedaddles.

Having finished her dance routine, Heather goes to see what is wrong with the woman, who has slumped on some steps. Barely alive, she tells Heather, 'Don't let him harm my baby', and hands the nipper over. Now, at this point, any rational person would call the police and give the baby to the authorities, but Heather is ditzy, remember? She keeps the kid, taking it to a party where she, Carol, and some other friends are celebrating their graduation. This makes the girls targets for the man in the van, who is actually the physical manifestation of the spirit of Attis (Garrick Dowhen), a patient in an asylum who has mastered the art of astral projection; he is the father of the baby and believes that he must kill it in order to remain being the God of Nature. Are you still with me?

Now this might not seem all that strange to those who actively seek out bizarre horror films, but there's more weirdness - so much more - guaranteed to have you scratching your head in bewilderment. There's Norman the philosophical bum (Danny Dayton), who sleeps in the back of Carol's pick-up truck; Bobby (Michael Wyle), Carol's love interest, who rides around on his motorcycle with a female mannequin in his sidecar, and who likes to play hide and seek before sex; and Cowboy (Vincent Barbour), boyfriend of Carol's pal Samantha (Pamela Bach-Hasselhoff), who, in the film's most oddball moment, appears outside the house where the girls are partying and joins a dance troupe in gyrating to some bad '80s music.

When Attis shows up for the finalé, the dancers vanish as mysteriously as they appeared, but Carol isn't helpless: she has her handy microphone to help locate the villain, and an even handier AK-47 which she uses to shoot the place up. She eventually destroys Attis by impaling him with a very pointy may-pole, the killer disappearing in a cloud of leaves. During all of this, the man with the tracking device, who we learn earlier on to be police sergeant Kowalski (Douglas Rowe), turns up to take the baby into care - but why are the child's eyes glowing green?

All of this nonsense is told in such a disjointed, eccentric manner, with wooden performances and lousy dialogue, that the film might possibly be the worst horror ever; either that or it's a surreal work of misunderstood genius. I'm torn between giving it 1/10 for being totally crap, or 6/10 for being a one-of-a-kind oddity. The only fair thing for me to do average these scores out to 3.5/10, although I am forced to round this down to 3 for only delivering brief side boob from the well-endowed Deborah Voorhees, who happily went nude for Friday the 13th: A New Beginning.

Don't make the same mistake I did, please… If some person, whether it's a good buddy or a complete stranger, ever tells you not to watch this film, then take the advice and DON'T WATCH THIS FILM! "Appointment with Fear" easily ranks in the top 3 most retarded movies ever made and there's more than one reason why it ended up being directed under the pseudonym of "Alan Smithee". The basic premise is imbecile to begin with, not one dialogue in the entire stupid script makes any sense, and – despite being labeled as horror – it's completely gore-free and without tension. Worst of all are the insufferable characters, which give you the impression that this whole film-project had to be one giant lame and very unfunny joke. Allow me to introduce some of them: The 'hero' is a cop who wears suits that already went out of fashion in the 1930's and he has the strange habit of setting his own car on fire by accident. The female lead is a teenager who allows bums to live in the back of her pick-up truck and, as some kind of hobby, she monitors random people's conversations with a giant (and not very discrete) microphone. Her best friend likes to paint her face blue for no reason and she also give mime-shows to her senile grandparents. The heroine's boyfriend, to finish with, is a long-haired loser who keeps a modeling dummy in the sidecar of his motorcycle… Why? Because it's cool, of course! The "plot" revolves on a crazy killer who's in a coma but at the same time he walks around killing people whilst looking for his baby-boy son. He's supposed to be an Egyptian Demigod, even though he looks like an ordinary idiot. The whole thing is slow and every newly introduced sub plot goes nowhere real fast. The music is horrible; crappy 80's dancing is shamelessly used as padding and even the brief nudity-flashes are boring. Oh, and did I mention it's entirely gore-free? What a total piece of crap!

This movie is indeed an incoherent mess, but it's so weird in its very concept that I can't believe it is merely an exercise in incompetence (despite the bad reviews and the "Alan Smithee" directorial credit). But neither is it one of those annoying, would-be "cult" films that tries very self-consciously to be "weird". It is UNIQUELY weird, which is the mark of a TRUE cult film, even if it obviously doesn't have any kind of a cult following.

It starts with a strange detective following an escaped mental patient who is driving a white van (shades of producer Mustapha Akkad's most famous movie). The mental patient stops to bloodlessly stab his ex-wife to death while she's sitting on someone's porch with their infant son. The dying women gives the infant to a ditsy teenager, who has just been performing a mime routine at the birthday party of a cranky old man next door. The ditsy teen gets a ride home with her very cute friend (Michelle Little), who doesn't seem to notice she is now carrying an infant. The friend is pretty weird herself--she constantly eavesdrops on people with a directional microphone and she has a pet hobo named "Norman" sleeping in the back of her flat-bed pickup truck (a "Crazy Ralph" type given to strange, philosophical soliloquies). Rounding out the cast is the cute girl's would-be boyfriend, who rides around on a motorcycle with a female mannequin in the sidecar, and a couple--a guy named "Cowboy" and a blonde girl--who are frequently playing cards and having sex, sometimes doing both at the same time. Eventually this kinda turns into a slasher movie as the killer comes after his newborn son, but a very bizarre one featuring astral projection and the Egyptian god of nature. . .

The most recognizable actor here might be the busty Debbisue Vorhees who played "Jason's" most gratuitously naked murder victim in "Friday the 13th Part V". She has a similarly perfunctory role in this as a casual friend of lead, who, while waiting for her friend to come home, strips down to her panties for a quick dip in the pool for no apparent reason, and is subsequently murdered. (It's not a much of a part, but I doubt anyone will complain). It's also nice to see Brioni Ferrell, who was memorable in Roger Corman's "Student Nurses", but never did much after that. She plays the mother of the ditsy girl, and is usually clad in a skimpy bikini for reasons that have nothing really to do with the plot. There are more boobs than blood in this one (but not really enough of either), and the action comes to a dead halt several times for a synchronized New Wave dance routine or some other weirdness. It probably won't appeal much to hardcore slasher fans, but I actually kinda liked it for some reason. . .

Um, yeah. It's puerile… not wonder why the fetchingly detailed video artwork is eye-catching as it draws you in (and how many times have we've been fooled by that?) to only to find when you watch it. Boy what a mistake! Hey a friend gave this one to me (with a smile on his face), but in all honesty I don't know what to make of 'Appointment with Fear'? If this was supposed to be a supernatural slasher, it wasn't much of one. So randomly bizarre and tacky, but even more so deadly dull. It does seem to have a lot going on with something always happening, but the terribly thought-out material (it's a wonky script) is a complete shambles with numerously pointless developments (what was the deal with bum they virtually kept as a pet?) and unrelated padding that throws out ideas with nothing to entirely back it up. All of this build-up and all we get is one abysmally meandering set-up after another with no real groundwork. Tacked on is a lame climax, with an even lamer freeze ending. Ugh!

The concept which has a criminal lying in hospital in a coma, but managing to leave his body in a spiritual sense and go after his baby (no not teleporting, but in his mysteriously white van in psychical form) to murder it for the reason of staying the king (something of a Egyptian Demigod) for another year. He takes care of his wife, but the baby finds itself in the care of some hopeless teenagers that spend the night at forlorn house in the desert. Soon they find themselves caught in the terror in trying to protect the baby, as a lone, worn-out police detective is the only one who they can turn to.

I guess you call it plain dumb, or simply an interesting idea poorly realized, which has got to count for something. Director Alan Smithee (yeah I wouldn't blame them not wanting their real name tagged to this project) shoddily puts this low-end feature together with blotchy imagery and distracting techniques. The unhinged music score is overkill, editing around certain sequences is jerky and it seems to lose concentration with the camera closing in on redundant images… e.g. dolls? However it demonstrates a fluid glide in some looping camera shots when centering on the action at the remote villa. Then you even begin to question that! Atmosphere is non-existent with inept staging of the deaths (as most of them occur off-screen) and what we do see is impulsively ramshackle. They're bloodless and tensionless… oh no that's not good and our good old villain looks quite plain (while trying hard to evoke a serious face of pure evil!) and what he does is no better… driving about or just loitering around. As for the performances they're mainly annoyingly drab and oddball, however I didn't mind Michele Little as the main heroine, even though her constantly recording sounds with her microphone got numbing. The cast is made up by some faces that appeared in other horror/teen features like Debi Sue Voorhees, Kerry Remsen and Michael Wyle. James Avery shows up in minor part too.

"Appointment with Fear" is a drawn-out and hackneyed appointment that's well worth missing.