cult film freak: SUSAN TYRRELL STALKING 'BUTCHER, BAKER, NIGHTMARE MAKER'

Written by James M. Tate / 12/21/2024 / No comments / bill paxton , bo svenson , cult , drama , eighties , exploitation , horror , jimmy mcnichol , julia duffy , susan tyrrell , thriller

SUSAN TYRRELL STALKING 'BUTCHER, BAKER, NIGHTMARE MAKER'

12/21/2024 | No comment

Title: BUTCHER, BAKER, NIGHTMARE MAKER Year: 1981 Rating: ***1/2

Somewhat misleadingly billed as a straight-out horror, and with an exploitation title to get people into the theater, BUTCHER, BAKER, NIGHTMARE MAKER (having nothing to do with the story) has one important element that makes it more suspenseful thriller than body-count chiller...

And that's Susan Tyrrell, who, looking as if Golden Age starlet Gloria Grahame suffered an eternal hangover, could play hag-characters so realistically grotesque, she devours the scenery just by showing up... even though, in this case, she's not technically the main character, provided here by athletically-innocent high-schooler Jimmy McNichol, who was mostly famous for having a far more famous sister...

Susan Tyrrell and Jimmy McNichol in BUTCHER, BAKER, NIGHTMARE MAKER

Although he does a pretty decent job by constantly reacting to all of Tyrrell's deliberate overacting... fitting the role of an aunt (so it seems) completely infatuated with a nephew left after a prologue where his parents (so it seems) are killed in a car without brakes...

From that moment, even before the opening credits, you know they were deliberately murdered, and Tyrrell's the only logical choice for killer since BUTCHER is surely no mystery, but, released in the early-1980's during the slasher-flick craze, resembles one of those severely low-budgeted early-70's melodramas depicting very troubled humans, mostly taking place down south...

Bo Svenson in BUTCHER, BAKER, NIGHTMARE MAKER

Yet here we're in the lower-class suburbs, like any TV-movie, and other than a few scenes in a high school basketball gym featuring Bill Paxton as a goading teammate, most of the terrorizing aspects of Tyrrell's incestual-aunt-from-hell occur during the 11th hour, and would have worked better (for the desired horror genre and the creepy villain herself) if placed more sporadically throughout...

But overall, what's mostly known for the VHS re-release title NIGHT WARNING still has a worthy stalked-upon hero in McNichol, a pretty ingenue girlfriend in Julia Duffy, and best yet a kind of co-antagonist in gigantic cult-actor Bo Svenson as an extremely homophobic (before there was such a term) detective that could have had his very own body-count exploitation.