O boy, was this really bad.

I saw this on videotape.

In scenes that had soundtrack music, it was hard to hear the dialog. When people were on the telephone, it was hard to hear the person on the other end. It appeared that at least two different kinds of film or video stock were used, because the colors and focus sometimes shifted drastically between edits. And there were a lot of out of focus shots that didn't seem intentional.

One indicator of the budget (one of many) was when a news report comes on TV. There is just a "news flash" title card badly superimposed with a video effect onto a TV screen, and a voice-over by a newscaster. They couldn't shoot footage of a newscaster, and then actually show it on the TV?

The movie starts off with a killer wearing surgical scrubs and mask, wielding a scalpel. Supposedly he's a paranoid schizophrenic who escapes from the hospital to avoid having a lobotomy performed on him.

Students are let out of school for a break, and three young women decide to have a slumber party. Three guys decide to crash the party, and a geek named Science decides to crash it too. The slumber party is pretty boring, and the guys just keep showing up randomly wearing masks, taking the masks off, and then disappearing. The mother and father (the surgeon who was to do the lobotomy) of one of the girls keep showing up too. The killer knocks slices people's throats without anyone really noticing. The apparent lead of the movie more or less sleepwalks through the movie. Perhaps that was bad acting, or maybe it was intentional, since much of the movie is a nightmare, and some of it a nightmare within a nightmare.

The ending is really horrible too.

The best thing about the movie is the cheesy United Home Video VHS box art, which was revived for the DVD release (a double feature with Terror at Tenkiller). I honestly can't tell if it is a photo, or a painting, or a combination of both. The women pictured on the cover are not in the movie, and the clothing they're wearing is way more revealing than anything the women in the movie wore. The throat slicing on the cover is scarier than the ones in the movie - where people tend to affect a goofy pop-eyed look. For that matter, that's what the killer has most of the time: head cocked, and eyes bugging out, mugging for the camera. Frequently the scalpel was held up close to the camera in focus, while the killer's mask-covered face was in close-up but out of focus in the background.