Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker

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LT Cinema World". Albany Democrat-Herald. Albany, Oregon. November 25, 1981. p.11 – via Newspapers.com. Parents Walk In at the Worst Time: Cheryl walks in on Billy and Julie doing the deed. This causes Cheryl to resent Julie even more, and later results in her attempted murder of the young girl. Intensity jumps a few notches by treating The Crazies like 28 Days Later or other “Rage Virus” films. Eisner produces an infinitely scarier version of The Crazies on a purely visual level. Ogden Marsh’s “crazy” residents almost look zombified as they skewer, roast, and commit heinous acts of violence against their neighbors, fitting the 2000s need one-up what’s shown during weekday news segments. Eisner is going for the full-on horror experience, from righteous jump scares in sudsy car washes to gnarly killing blows in mechanic bays, if only to emphasize what Romero established years prior. He’s able to retain the anger in Romero’s themes while adding post-millennium angst and pulse-pounding tension, staying true to the original’s conspiratorial themes with a deeper bite.

Aside from the classy direction, the script is also incredibly interesting in thematics; it's essentially a modern twist on Oedipus Rex, and the execution is fantastic. It's also extremely unusual (and pioneering) for its incorporation of a sympathetic, non-archetypical gay character maligned by circumstances and social bigotry. For 1982, it's definitely far from the standard— daring, in fact— and this alone makes the film a curious and unusual piece of eighties celluloid. That, and, who can't love Susan Tyrrell going on a stark-raving-mad murder spree? a b Conner, J. A. (January 14, 1983). "Battle for worst film of '83 has begun". Santa Cruz Sentinel. Santa Cruz, California. p.7.Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker (later re-released as Night Warning) is a 1981 American exploitation horror film directed by William Asher, and starring Susan Tyrrell, Jimmy McNichol, Julia Duffy, and Bo Svenson. Framed as a contemporary Oedipus tale, the plot focuses on a teenager who, raised by his neurotic aunt, finds himself at the center of a murder investigation after she stabs a man to death in their house. The boy's sexually repressed aunt secretly harbors incestuous feelings for him, while a detective investigating the crime irrationally believes the murder to be a result of a homosexual love triangle. Susan Tyrrell stars as Cheryl, who raised her nephew (Jimmy McNichol) since his infancy after his parents were killed in an auto accident. Now a high school senior and basketball star, Billy is a candidate for a college scholarship; he has also become romantically involved with his pretty classmate Julia (Julia Duffy). The film screened on The Movie Channel in the fall of 1983, [29] and was released on VHS through HBO Home Video under the Night Warning title [13] in 1985. [30] In the United Kingdom, the film was deemed a " video nasty" by the British Board of Film Classification and refused a video certificate in 1987 under the title The Evil Protege. [5]

Given a regional release in Oregon in November 1981 through Comworld Pictures, the film expanded to other U.S. cities in early 1982, and was nominated for a Saturn Award for the Best Horror Movie of 1982 by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films. It was reissued theatrically in 1983 under the title Night Warning, under which it was subsequently released on home video. The film has attracted critical discussion for its early positive portrayal of a gay male character. Vehicular Sabotage: Cheryl tampered with the breaks of her sister and brother-in-law's car, resulting in their deaths. Enter a narrow-minded police detective, Detective Carlson (Bo Svenson), who suspects Billy to be gay, and all the drama of the murder gets whittled down to a police procedural against homosexuality. There are other investigators on the case and they disagree with Carlson’s dogmatic suspicions concerning Billy and the victim, but nothing truly gets in his way until it is way too late. And the showdown between a stubborn cop and psychotic woman is one for the record books.

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Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker Blu-ray". Blu-ray.com. Archived from the original on February 13, 2019 . Retrieved February 13, 2019. Fourteen years later and young Billy (Jimmy McNichol) is now a seventeen-year-old high school senior and a VIP on the school's basketball team. He's dating Julie Linden (Julia Duffy) and appears happy at home with his aunt Cheryl, who has raised him all these many years. Cheryl, however, has issues. She asks Billy to send over Phil Brody (Caskey Swaim), the local TV repairman, to look at their set and, once she's alone with him, tries quite aggressively to coerce him into having sex with her. When it doesn't go the way she wants it to, she stabs him to death… just as Billy comes home from school. She tells him he tried to rape her and just as Billy pulls the knife out of Phil's corpse, friends Margie (Marcia Lewis) and Frank (Cooper Neal), swing by for a visit. The cops are called and Detective Joe Carlson (Bo Svenson) knows right away that something is wrong with the story. Movie times". Vancouver Sun. Vancouver, British Columbia. March 26, 1982. p.L36 – via Newspapers.com. Rabid Cop: Detective Carlson, the officer sent to investigate Cheryl's murders, brazenly ignores the Fifth Amendment right to remain silent and is extremely homophobic. At the end of the film, he's driven to murder. Also counts as Police Are Useless.