Entry 63: The Power (1984)

The Power (1984)

Dir: Stephen Carpenter & Jeffrey Obrow

"Pray for them.  They have unleashed...The power."

 

In honor of my impending birthday, Mrs. Basement of Sleaze took it upon herself to mop up all the blood and semen and sweep away the rat corpses and stale popcorn down here.  Now that I'm living like a king in a freshly-cleansed basement, I figured the best way to show my appreciation would be to take in a movie and write about it.  It's 1:30 in the morning, however, so this is gonna be a quickie...

A group of college kids come into possession of an Aztec idol and, during a seance at a cemetery, bad shit happens and a maintenance worker winds up dead.  They bring their story to a pair of bickering, will-they-or-won't-they tabloid reporters.  The male half of this intrepid journalistic duo winds up with the idol, which turns him into a rubbery-faced monster who proceeds to stalk the kids.

I'm not going to put about as much effort into this entry as this film's two (?) directors put into it's production, which is none at all.  The heroine and villain being adult tabloid reporters is the only interesting/unique aspect of this entry into the 80s slasher catalog.  This film first caught my attention as a young man when I saw some intriguing stills from it in an early edition of John Stanley's Creature Features movie guide.  Sadly, the film itself is an aggressively-mediocre mashup of John Carpenter's Halloween and Sam Raimi's Evil Dead, but bereft of the directorial stylishness of either of those classics.  Co-writer/co-director Carpenter is best known today as the creator of the inexplicably popular television series Grimm.  For 80s horror completionists only.