Famous and mysterious recluse Raymar, who's some kind of lethal telekinetic psychic vampire, abruptly dies under bizarre circumstances. Nice girl high school student Julie Wells (a warm and sympathetic performance by the lovely Meg Tilly) wants desperately to be accepted by the snobby clique the Sisters (played to sublimely bitchy perfection by Leslie Speights, Robin Evans and the ever-cuddly Elizabeth Daily), so she agrees to spend a night in a creepy mausoleum where Raymar's body has been interred as part of an initiation rite. Naturally, Raymar still has his extraordinary powers, so it's going to be a very long and harrowing night of pure nerve-wracking terror for poor Julie.
Director/co-screenwriter Tom McLoughlin (who later gave us the enjoyably tongue-in-cheek "Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives") eschews graphic gore in favor of creating a brooding and eerie atmosphere, but fails to pull this particular feat off because the first hour is way too slow, talky and uneventful to be remotely scary or suspenseful. However, I nonetheless still found this flawed fright flick to be oddly appealing and entertaining. The big poofy hairdos, a goofy music montage sequence, badly timed false scares (including the ubiquitous hand on the shoulder gag!), a scene at a glittery video game arcade, kids gleefully smoking pot, and the hilariously dumb teen slang ("nerdle brain"!?) give this picture a certain endearingly quaint 80's period charm. Hal Trussell's handsome, polished cinematography (I especially dug the smoothly gliding Steadicam tracking shots), Bob Summers' spooky, yet funky hum'n'shiver synthesizer score, and Tom Burman's splendidly ghoulish make-up f/x are all up to snuff. The ever-stolid Adam West of TV's "Batman" fame merely takes up space in a nothing secondary part. The mausoleum makes for an impressively vast and unsettling main location. The grand finale with a bunch of ghastly rotting corpses popping out of their coffins and floating about qualifies as a marvelously macabre shock set piece. Sure, this baby definitely ain't some unjustly unsung gem, but it still delivers plenty of pleasingly silly and diverting cheesy fun all the same.