Unhinged starts with the opening credits over a black background. Once the director credit disappears the screen stays black for what seems like an eternity! Then we hear an alarm clock which belongs to a pretty young girl Terry (Laurel Munson) who, when she eventually appears on screen, gets up out of bed and takes a shower, the filmmakers obviously wanted to get some nudity in there nice and quickly! Soon after that she is picked up by two of her friends, Nancy (Sara Ansley) and Gloria (Barbara Lusch). While driving during a thunder storm and hard rain they crash their car in the middle of nowhere. A local odd job man, Norman Barnes (John Morrison), finds them and takes them to a large mansion, he works there for the owners who happen to be an old man hating lady Mrs. Penrose (Virginia Settle) and her supposed daughter Marion Penrose (J.E. Penrose). One of the girls is hurt, so they decide to accept the Penroses hospitality and stay. However, this being a horror film, strange things start to happen. The Penroses act weird, they find teeth on the floor, see people at the window looking in on them and just generally get a very bad vibe about the place. Before to long people start being murdered. Co-written and directed by Don Gronquist, I rather quite like this film. If you examine it piece by piece then it should be awful, very flat direction and photography, poorish acting, very slow pace at times, not enough murders, and a very strange twist ending. Yet I like it for these reasons, the murders are few but quite cool and contain a bit of gore, including a scythe through someones stomach, an axe buried in someones head plus a work shed full of fresh body parts and jars of eyeballs. One thing that I really like about Unhinged is that it has a good atmosphere and to some extent the slow pace really helps this, plus I really love that ending, it surprised me which is difficult these days. Oh, and the film is quite dark, I watched the recent British DVD and while it had a good picture everything considered, it was just a little bit too dark especially the climax in the outhouse, hell I want to see all those bits of cut up bodies not a near black screen! I cant imagine how bad this would look on VHS so get the DVD. Give it a chance, its an unusual little film you may just like if you have patience and put the effort in.
Review of Unhinged
