Whodunnit
Director: Bill Naud
Writer: Bill Naud
Starring: Rick Dean, Gary Phillips, and Marie Alise
Currently OUT OF PRINT On Video
Body Count: 10
Review: Back in the glory days of the slasher genre (aka the 1980s), a little independent company named Vestron pictures used to put out some of the coolest movies you'd never heard of. It was Vestron that distributed such awesome horror flicks as The Monster Squad and Anthony Hickox's Waxwork. In 1986, Vestron picked up the rights to this interesting slasher flick that was actually made in 1982, and released it on video. And while it's certainly not the best of the best, it's not half bad.
A bunch of young performers (some actors, some musicians, etc.) boat out to Creep Island in order to partake in a casting call for a film director, hoping to get a part in his upcoming movie. While there, a killer begins to pick the hopefuls off one at a time (with each death preceded by the playing of some funky 80s pop song on a walkman that the killer for some reason always carrys), prompting, of course, the suspicion that one of them is attempting elimate the competition. That heated competition is part of what drives this flick, with each of these odd characters going after the same roles (or are they? the film is very inadequate as far as letting us know just how many roles there are, how many people have already tried out--specifics like that).
The good things about Whodunnit? are its fairly gory and creative death sequences (acid burnings, decapitations--stuff that's of course been done before, but still a nice change from the usual butcher knife slasher) and its double-twist ending.
However, problems with the film arise due to its utter lack of consistency (granted, this is a low-budget flick, and I'm willing to forgive something like that) and the inability of the viewer to keep track of who each character is and why he or she does what they do. It's sort of like they put these characters into the movie, with the full intention of giving them some depth, and then all that depth got left out when they realized that they needed to keep the movie under 90 minutes. In addition, some characters appear and disappear, leaving the audience wondering if they were killed or just not shown the rest of the movie.
Nevertheless, despite its many flaws, Whodunnit?, while not being a truly great murder-mystery, does manage to throw a little creativity into the mix, and just might give you a night's worth of slasher fun.
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