In short: Sweet Sixteen (1983)

Freshly arrived in a small town in Arizona with her archaeologist father (Patrick Macnee) and a mother (Susan Strasberg) who is actually from the area, Melissa (Aleisa Shirley) has the hearts – and certain other organs – of the local boys all atwitter with her rather provocative behaviour (at least for a fifteen year old as played by an actress who most assuredly isn’t that age anymore), and her strange city ways. Alas, someone is killing off her beaus with a nasty knife, though the otherwise highly conscientious and pretty smart Sheriff Dan Burke (Bo Hopkins) doesn’t really seem to read the murder spree running through his town quite this way.

Dan, sometimes “assisted” (cough) by his murder mystery mad daughter Marci (Dana Kimmell) and his son Hank (Steve Antin), does have quite a mystery to solve. His job isn’t made any easier by the racist element of the town wanting to blame everything on “the Indians” – something that pisses him off righteously – nor by Melissa’s tendency to lie to gain attention.

Marketed and often treated as a slasher online, Jim Sotos’s Sweet Sixteen is in actuality a small town murder mystery with a couple of elements of exploitation cinema added for saleability. In practice, this means the murders are a bit bloodier than in your traditional mystery, and there’s some gratuitous nudity. Otherwise, this is very much a film about a small town sheriff having to find out whodunnit.

It’s not a terribly complicated or convoluted mystery either, but rather the sort of film whose killer is obvious once you’ve copped to the general tone of the whole affair. Which turns out not to have been much of a detriment to my enjoyment of the film, for what it lacks in slasher virtues and a head-scratching mystery, it mostly makes up for in likeability of characters and cast, for most of the time getting by on charm quite well.

Sotos must have understood where the strengths of this project were quite well, for Sweet Sixteen spends nearly as much time in the kitchen of the Burke household as on the case, showing off the charming and often wryly funny interactions of a very nice family, Hopkins as well as Kimmel and Antin actually coming off as a proper family without much of a sense of hysterical melodrama, the kind of people you enjoy spending screen time with even when a given scene doesn’t do much to develop the plot. This tone runs through all of the film’s human interaction, a genuine warmth and sense of humour that is pretty much the opposite of how actual slasher movies do their thing.


Even though this tone dominates most character interactions even outside the Burke family, the film doesn’t pretend small town life to be completely idyllic. It suggests there’s a sense of family in this small town population, but sometimes being part of a family means hitting your racist shithead relation's head against a wall for a bit, or you find yourself becoming the victim of a knife attack. And isn’t that a lovely thought for any film to leave us on?

In short: Friday the 13th Part III (1982)

Okay, it’s plot time: Everyone’s third favourite slasher Jason Voorhees (this time around played by Richard Brooker whose performance makes the big guy look rather cuddly and a bit lazy, to be honest) acquires his trademark hockey mask. Oh right, and kills off the friends of Final Girl Chris (Dana Kimmell) in increasingly silly ways that try and fail to set up impressive 3D effects, instead ending up with mostly very silly ones.

I know, I know, this one is supposed to be one of the lesser enjoyable outings in a slasher franchise not generally known for its class but either its the wine, my taste has deteriorated quite horribly, or this one’s actually a pretty enjoyable movie. For some reason, I prefer to go with the last explanation. And really, if you ignore the humungous number of continuity errors, writing that includes desperate signs of laziness or stupidity like giving Chris a backstory with an earlier encounter with Jason and then using this for exactly nothing whatsoever, or the random mini biker gang that’s only in there to provide a few more bodies to slaughter, and so on and so forth, the film’s a goofy and bloody bit of shoddy fun that might not have two brain cells to rub together but that’s basic fun if you like basic slashers.

Turns out I sometimes do. Therefore I found myself in the surprising position of discovering things to enjoy about Friday the 13th Part III beyond the gore and the all-around dumbness of the affair. For example, while the characterisation is genre-traditionally one-note (if that), the characters are at least not as vile and hateful as your usual slasher victims, so while I didn’t exactly cry when they got cut in half, stabbed, maimed, eye-mutilated, etc., I did find myself enjoying even the scenes not concerned with them being killed off, the 80s teen comedy idiocy of their movie lives, and all the chances of following through with anything it brings up about them the film utterly wastes.

Plus, there’s a ridiculous disco version of the classic (cough) Friday theme in the opening credits, the crazy warning hobo of the day brandishes an eyeball and speaks faux-Elizabethan (can’t imagine why nobody listens to him), a guy is bisected while walking on his hands (it’s as inexplicable as it sounds), and there are so many set ups for gory kills that just don’t make any sense at all, not just rubbing up against the laws of physics but also against the characters possessing eyes. It’s all, as you Americans say, pretty awesome.

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