After watching director Alan Birkinshaw's The House of Usher (1989), I wrote that it was probably the worst film to be inspired by Edgar Allen Poe's novel The Fall of the House of Usher (I hadn't yet seen Jess Franco's Revenge in the House of Usher). Birkinshaw's other Poe movie, The Masque of the Red Death, is also a load of garbage. At least he's consistent.
In this totally oddball late-'80s offering, Michelle McBride plays Rebecca Stephens, a reporter for Snoop magazine who crashes a lavish Bavarian costume ball being hosted by eccentric millionaire Ludwig (Herbert Lom). Dressed as Cupid (meaning that she isn't wearing much), and armed with a secret camera in her bow, Rebecca snaps the other guests, but the party doesn't go quite as planned when people start turning up dead, murdered by a mysterious figure in a red mask and hooded robe.
What could have been a fun, trashy, gory slasher is totally undermined by Birkinshaw's dreadful direction, which results in irritatingly quirky performances and bizarre scenes that simply reek of the 1980s, but not in a good way. Battling for the title of worst actor are Frank Stallone as Duke, Brenda Vaccaro as Elaina, and Christine Lunde as Colette: one wonders what Birkinshaw was putting in the water to elicit such strangeness. Runner-up has to be the singer in the godawful pop-rock band who blast out tunes during the mayhem: his acting is even worse than his singing.
The film's best moments (ie. The only parts that are bearable) are the murders: one victim is cut up with an open-razor, a woman is threaded into a loom with needles piercing her flesh, and another finds herself trapped under the razor-edged pendulum of a clock, the blade coming closer and closer to her neck with each passing second. They're imaginative and reasonably well staged, but even though they provide a little respite from the horribly dated craziness, it's not enough to make me recommend this mess other than to dedicated connoisseurs of straight-to-video trash.
