Video Nasty #2 : Unhinged

Synposis: Three teenage girls are travelling to a music festival when they crash their car into a ditch, most likely because they're being pursued by a camera man in a helicopter playing cheesy synth music. They awake in a mysterious Mansion, inhabited by a spinster and her man hating mother. One by one the girls are stalked by a mysterious sexually repressed killer, who reveals his true self in an utterly bizarre climax.

In 2010 i'm attempting to watch and review all of the films on the DPP Video Nasty list.Click here for an explanation.

From the outset Unhinged has all the classic hallmarks of a Slasher movie. There's unnecessary nudity and as soon as the DJ on the crackly car radio has warned the girls of unexplained disappearances in the local area, they crash the car. And all of this happens within the first ten minutes. Unfortunately, instead of maintaining the momentum the films slows to a crawl and never really gets back to walking, or more suitably, stalking pace.

The lack of pace is surprising considering the film's attractively short running time of seventy nine minutes. I think the directory and his script monkey made two mistakes. Firstly, if you're making a slasher film you really need more than three people to kill. Secondly, write more then twenty minutes worth of a script. Rather than writing more dialog then your average Pingu episode, the film makers decided to flesh out the film with excruciatingly slow shots of, well, nothing. One could argue that the intention of such languid shots were to deliberately build tension. If that's the case then it's ruined by the Rick Wakeman wanna-be noodling on the 303 whenever there's some dead air to fill.


The acting was worse then one could expect from a low budget film, the three girls focus so much on their lines that they forget to act. The stand out performance has to be the scene stealing eldery mother, who has two fantastically melodramatic Jekyll and Hyde scenes at the dinner table. When talking to the girls she's a loveable grandma figure (with bizarre Shatner-esque intotation), but when talking to her daughter she's a physco man hater, venting her misandry at her 'slut' of a daughter. As if the barn storming schizo act wasn't enough she sporadically stops mid speech and becomes enticed by small silverware in front of her, grasping at them for some inexplicable reason (see picture).

Other than the mad mother the only other redeeming factor of the film is its ending. We discover that the mother has a son who lives in the shed due to her irrational hatred of cock bearers. The brother is obviously the killer and as he chases the Final Girl she shoots him dead. In a fit of rage the sister then reveals herself to be the killer and also a man, before bludgeoning the remaining girl to death with his hair chest on display. What I love about the reveal is that the he-she's voice literally drops three octaves (think Judy Dench suddenly talking like Brian Blessed).


The film really is dull and despite a few bizarre moments (the mother, the ending) I can't say I'd recommend that anybody watch it. As a physcological thriller it's poorly acted and follows a mostly predictable path. As a horror film the horror is almost non-existant, a five year old wouldn't find this scary. There was promise with the first kill, carried out by an ominous death character (see picture). Unfortunately the film makers didn't capatilise on this truly scary image and instead settled for a P.O.V. axe murder and a shemale axe attack.

I have no idea why this film is a video nasty, although I do agree that the public do need protecting from films as bad as this. To label it obscene wrongly gives it credit for achieveing something on an emotional level, which it clearly doesn't. I've been more emotionally affected by burning a piece of toast.