Rish Outfield's reviews
A batty old woman is released from the local asylum, and is running an out-of-the-way motel. She goes nuts, killing her granddaughter/niece, then turns on the guests. And that's about it.
I know the Threat fits into Psychopath, but I'm going to list it as Crazy Old Woman for novelty's sake. The crone really is just a wide-eyed old lady, and not a very scary one at that. But she does use some creepy crawlies to help add scares: She uses a deadly snake, which sort of worked. Rats are used to terrorize one room's tenants. As I've endlessly stated, rats don't scare me, but cockroaches do. So she uses them as well--but still, the rats and the bugs (and ultimately, the snake) are only a bother, not a way of killing anyone. I kept wondering, what the hell is she doing this for? Perhaps we weren't meant to know, but it made little sense to me.
Okay, on the good side, it was nicely lit. The acting wasn't at all bad. It was difficult to predict who would die, in what order, and who would live. It had a genuine back-woods feel to it. I can't watch out-of-the-way motel flicks without thinking of Hitchcock's most famous film, and Mountaintop Motel Massacre WAS lightly Psychoish, but not enough to warrant a Skull. The way the killer gets around is that there's a passage under all the motel rooms and a trapdoor in the floor of every one. That's not a bad idea, and I wonder if it was invented for the film or if the location just turned out that way.
The film was quite cheap--the sickle she used looked fake, the snake was sometimes rubber and sometimes innocuous but they added a rattling sound anyway, and anytime anything did happen there were phony-looking, bad effects. I didn't really care about any of it--the people or the situation. The main good guy tells two aspiring Country Music singers he's with Columbia Records to get them both in bed--but that doesn't really go anywhere either. The tenants aren't terribly smart--The Let's Split Up Syndrome comes into play at least thrice."Vernon, what is this?" "Just an old sack, throw it in the corner." I take that back--actually, the old black dude is the only level-headed one of the bunch. It doesn't save him, though. Nor are we saved from the pace of this film. The kid dies at the beginning, then nothing happens for a long, long time. I was thinking that the last quarter had better be pretty great, or the movie would be a big bummer. There wasn't anything particularly awful about the film (except the title), but it was mostly just mediocre and dull. It took me four sittings to get through it all.
Line To Remember: Moustache Guy: Look, we've got to get to her before she gets to us.
Old Black Dude: And get my ass killed by some old crazy white woman?
Best Scare: there's a creepy voice that calls/whispers to the old woman a couple of times, but that's it, kids.
I'd Recommend It To: The film was not at all noteworthy, so I don't know who I'd tell to see it.

Total Skulls: 14

Sequel
Sequel setup
Rips off earlier film
Horror film showing on TV/in theater in movie
Future celebrity appears
Former celebrity appears
Bad title
Bad premise
Bad acting
Bad dialogue
Bad execution
MTV Editing
OTS
Girl unnecessarily gets naked
Wanton sex
Death associated with sex
Unfulfilled promise of nudity
Characters forget about threat
Secluded location
Power is cut
Phone lines are cut
Someone investigates a strange noise
Someone runs up stairs instead of going out front door
Camera is the killer
Victims cower in front of a window/door
Victim locks self in with killer
Victim running from killer inexplicably falls
Toilet stall scene
Shower/bath scene
Car stalls or won't start
Cat jumps out
Fake scare
Laughable scare
Stupid discovery of corpse
Dream sequence
Hallucination/Vision
No one believes only witness
Crazy, drunk, old man knows the truth
Warning goes unheeded
Music detracts from scene
Death in first five minutes
x years before/later
Flashback sequence
Dark and stormy night
Killer doesn't stay dead
Killer wears a mask
Killer is in closet
Killer is in car with victim
Villain is more sympathetic than heroes
Unscary villain/monster
Beheading
Blood fountain
Blood hits camera
Poor death effect
Excessive gore
No one dies at all
Virgin survives
Geek/Nerd survives
Little kid lamely survives
Dog/Pet miraculously survives
Unresolved subplots
"It was all a dream" ending
Unbelievably happy ending
Unbelievably crappy ending
What the hell?