Curtains (Richard Ciupka, 1983)

One of the most original in the wave of early '80s slashers, Curtains survived its troubled production and unsuccessful theatrical release to slowly earn cult status (a gif of its most memorable scene is frequently used on social media). It's an imperfect movie with a few bad scenes and some underdeveloped characters, but the premise is fantastic, it's weird as hell, and when it works, it really works. If the filmmakers had taken the time to give the characters more depth (and get along with each other), this thing would have been great.

Canadian producer Peter R. Simpson was riding high off the success of his 1980 hit, Prom Night, starring Jamie Lee Curtis, and was keen to make another slasher movie, with a slight change in formula. Simpson had correctly observed that most slasher movies were about teenagers or college kids and thought a slasher about adults would tap into an ignored market. The kids and horror freaks would still go see it because it was a slasher, but adults who had dismissed slashers as teenybopper stuff may go see one about grownups, Simpson figured. He asked Prom Night screenwriter Robert Guza Jr to write an adult slasher, and Curtains was born.

Completing the creative team was first-time director, Belgian cinematographer Richard Ciupka, who was fresh off the TV movie An American Christmas Carol, starring a heavily prosthetic'd Henry Winkler as the Scrooge-like Benedict Slade, and who would go on to Louis Malle's Atlantic City and regular work with Claude Chabrol. Ciupka and Simpson quickly clashed and would continue to clash throughout production. Simpson wanted a commercial slasher movie, Ciupka wanted an art film disguised as a slasher. They ended up with a confused but fascinating combination of the two.

Ciupka angrily quit mid-shoot in 1980, production was halted for a year, Guza (who would go on to a long and successful career writing soap operas) rewrote parts of the script (most of those scenes were shot but cut), new crew members were hired, and Simpson stepped in as replacement director, finishing the film, including the final two dramatic scenes, in 1982. The directing credit was given to Jonathan Stryker, the name of John Vernon's director character in the movie. Have any other movies been officially credited to a fictional character from the movie? Curtains was finally released in '83 to poor reviews and empty theaters. All this hoopla helps explain the somewhat disjointed feel of the movie, but it's pretty remarkable that we have a finished product at all and that it's so much fun. And the killer has one of the great creepy masks of '80s slasherdom.

Curtains is about the casting of a lead actress in the title role of Audra, one of those Oscar-bait career-making dramas based on a bestseller about a mentally ill woman. The film's director, the aforementioned Jonathan Stryker (the aforementioned John Vernon), is one of those Svengali cult-of-personality types who loves playing mind games and preys on the women in his orbit. (Vernon is so good at playing this blowhard, self-absorbed, predatory, hilariously pretentious guy.) His on-again, off-again romantic partner, aging (by Hollywood's standards) movie star Samantha Sherwood (The Brood's Samantha Eggar) has been promised the role (she even bought the movie rights to the novel as a gift to Stryker), and she goes as far as faking insanity to get herself committed, all in the name of research. Stryker, who was wildly on board with the fake insanity plan, visits her in the institution and decides the method to the madness has become a little too heavy on the madness. She's too crazy for the part now. He throws her under the bus and announces a plan to cast the lead from a pool of six younger contenders, who will audition for him at a weeklong retreat in his country home (filmed outside Toronto).

The aspiring leads are drawn from a wide variety of show business backgrounds, not just acting, and include an established actress, an up-and-coming actress, a musician, a dancer, a figure skater, and a standup comedian. We don't get to know these women very well, with the exception of the aspiring actress, Amanda (Deborah Burgess, who doesn't even make it to the audition but has an extended scene before her demise that is packed with detail), and the comedian, Patti (Lynne Griffin, who was also in Black Christmas), but we do know they are the targets of a killer in a creepy old woman mask even if they don't know it yet.

We also get a funny cameo from veteran character actor Maury Chaykin as the agent of one of the women, and Michael Wincott has a small part as the caretaker of the country house. Wincott's role was butchered in the edit, so he amazingly never says anything. You see him grinning it up at the dinner table, having sex in a hot tub, acting suspicious in the woods, and drunkenly driving a snowmobile while guzzling vodka, but you don't hear him talk. The guy has one of the most memorable speaking voices in film, and they cut all his lines. I was reminded of a vaguely similar situation in another early '80s slasher, 1981's The Prowler. Lawrence Tierney, possessor of one of the all-time great gravelly voices, has a role in that movie, but he plays a mute. Hilariously, I think the legendarily difficult Tierney demanded his character not speak, but the Curtains team were the ones making the poor decision to cut Wincott's lines here.

The murder scenes are surprisingly not too gory for an early '80s slasher, but each one is disturbing and surprising in its own way. The ice skating scene, in particular, is one of the great '80s horror scenes. You've seen the gif, now check it out for real. The basement scene, in a maze full of movie props, is pretty fantastic, too.

Even though Curtains was directed by two different people with two different creative goals in two separate years, and even though not all of it comes together (an early scene has a character remark while shuffling through some papers, "everything seems to be in order here," second only to "you just don't get it, do you?" and slightly above "turn in your badge and your gun" in rusty movie cliché speak), it's an oddball movie with memorable scenes, a sense of humor, a sense of style, and some truly wild moments. It stumbles as often as it runs, but it's one of a kind and very much worth seeing.