Review of Unhinged (1982) by Dougal S — 11 Jan 2012

In my quest to watch all of the original video nasties (I'm about half way through people) this one had sat on my to watch pile for a long time mainly due to the bad press it gets. However, like fellow unloved nasty "Don't Look in the Basement" this was much more enjoyable a film than most reviews would have you believe and was in fact quite effectively creepy.

As usual for this sort of film the acting is wooden in places and the plot stretches credibility in places where it should never be stretched but despite that, and the obvious low budget, the whole thing manages to be much bigger than the sum of it's parts. It doesn't quite reach the heights that some of the more fanciful claims on the box make for it but it works none-the-less.

The film revolves around a group of girls travelling to an out of state rock concert (as seems to be a staple of these sort of flicks) who get caught in a storm whilst driving through the mountains and end up crashing off the road. They awake to find they were pulled from the car by a local odd-job man who has taken them to the nearest house - a creepy old secluded mansion inhabited only by an ageing former socialite now confined to a wheelchair, and her middle aged spinster daughter. With one of the three girls still recovering from her injuries the other two discover that the storms have them cut off from the nearest village and they are stuck with their odd hosts. They soon discover there is something very wrong in this house and decide to attempt to reach civilization but end up running into the sharp end of some garden implements.

It's a neat twist on the usual 'big city folk lost in the wilds of middle America' that is so often a staple of films of this era. Instead of deranged mountain men the threat here comes in a luxurious mansion inhabited by a duo that owe not a little to 'Whatever Happened to Baby Jane' as the abusive and delusional mother abuses her carer and both of them are dancing way past the edges of sanity. Yes there are major plot holes that you could drive a bus through - the group are trapped in the house by storms but it's always sunny outside, they're cut off from the village due to the roads being out and yet the odd job man comes and goes at will plus the third protagonist is left in her room recovering from injuries for days without anyone mentioning or even going to see her. That said what it does have in it's favour are some tense murder scenes and a pretty clever twist in the final fifteen minutes that unless you'd had prior warning can only come as a pretty major shock.

So ignore the bad press, don't expect too much and just take it for what it is - a cheap exploitational bit of American gothic with some gore and a pretty neat final sting in it's tail.