In short: Terror on Tour (1980)

Unlike the lying title suggests, shock rock outfit The Clowns isn’t exactly on tour – they seem to have a longer residence someplace. I’m pretty sure pretending to have one venue is difficult enough for this stinker, so a tour bus is really out of the question.

Someone using one of the band’s patented “Kiss with a big afro” outfits murders random women around the place the band is playing at, from time to time going off into victim killer exchanges like “Can I do something for you?” – “Die!”.

Who, oh who might the killer be? One of the band members? The roadie who likes to put on their make-up because he’s too shy to speak with girls otherwise? The other roadie with the drug problem? The mild-mannered manager? The judgmental cop? Wake me up when they know!

For truly, what strikes me most about Don Edmonds’s Terror on Tour is how sleep-inducing it is. I do have quite a bit of patience for films trying to get by despite the difficulties that come with working under the curse of the combination of a tiny budget, a wonky script and little of import happening, but this thing had me yawning early on, and I never felt myself getting any less sleepy. The best you get here is one line or two like the one I quoted earlier about every twenty minutes to keep you awake, otherwise it’s boring, one slash and they’re dead, murders, boring, badly lit sex scenes – actually, that’s unfair, all scenes are boring and badly lit here though you gotta look with horror at a film where even the nudity is this boring –, acting that’s bad in the least interesting and slowest manner, static direction that has a distinct vibe of early sound film surrounding it, and, well, that’s really it. The music’s pretty bad, too, but for a rock band based slasher, even it keeps to the undistinguished and boring style the rest of the films very slowly wallows in.

Did I mention this is really boring and slow?