Canadian director William Fruet has enjoyed a long career in the lower-budgeted arena with many genre films to his name (Cries in the Night/Funeral Home (1980), Trapped/Baker County, U.S.A. (1982), Spasms (1983) et al) but never really found himself the object of adulation by anything but the smallest of cult followings. And that’s in no small part due to the fact that his films are mostly undistinguished. Not terrible by a long chalk but just unmemorable and unambitious. In Death Weekend, his second feature and first genre film, he’s channelling Wes Craven and the result is one of Fruet’s better offerings, an effective exploitation shocker that owes much to Last House on the Left (1972) (Death Weekend was also released as The House by the Lake), bringing some of Craven’s socio-political satire to the standard issue home invasion thriller.
Boorish, womanising dentist Harry (Chuck Shamata) takes his latest conquest, fashion model Diane (Brenda Vaccaro) for a weekend at his remote country retreat where he’s supposed to be throwing a party though in fact there are no other guests. Long the way they antagonise a group of thuggish locals, Lep (Don Stroud), Runt (Richard Ayres), Frankie (Kyle Edwards) and Stanley (Don Granberry) who follow them to Harry’s home and proceed to terrorise the couple. They trash the house, Lep rapes Diane and kill a couple of innocent bystanders before murdering Harry. Alone and seemingly defenceless, Diane starts to fight back, killing the intruders one-by-one until she’s able to flee, an enraged and homicidal Lep in hot pursuit.
Death Weekend was produced by Ivan Reitman – later of Ghostbusters (1984) fame – and executive produced by John Dunning and André Link who had previously brought David Cronenberg to the mainstream with Shivers (1975) and who would later oversee the likes of My Bloody Valentine (1981), Happy Birthday to Me (1981) and Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone (1983). Together they virtually created so-called Canuxploitation and Death Weekend is an early, and better than average, example, though it seems to working uncommonly hard to look as American as possible. Indeed, it fits in rather nicely with that strand of American “backwoods horror” that followed in the wake of Deliverance (1972) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974).
It’s a perennial problem or Canadian horror that to an outsider there’s often very little to distinguish the films from those being made south of the border but if you’re going to make films that look and feel American at least make them well and that’s what Fruet does here. His own script is more interesting than most films of this kind, bringing to the film some of the same class politics that informed the earlier work of Wes Craven. Lep brings a barely controlled anger to the film, railing against Harry’s materialism (who, in his opening scene, brags about making “$25,000 dollars a year more than the average doctor”) and resenting his wealth, success and sense of entitlement (“you think it’s class, don’t you?” demands Lep of Harry’s home shortly before he and his gang trash it, “you think you’ve got a lot of style, huh?”). One could bristle at the representation of the working class as British, thuggish and sexually predatory but that’s par for the course for this sort of thing and in fairness Fruet hardly paints his middle-class protagonists in the most favourable light.
He wastes little time setting up the conflict between the two camps, the interloping middle-class couple who ply the dim-witted locals with alcohol to get them to work for them cheaply and the loutish, beer-swilling working class thugs. Once established, the relationship between the two sides disintegrates rapidly and the film becomes more a battle in the ongoing class war than just another rape-revenge film. It scores points by making the men on both sides as unlikable as each other – Lep is a rapacious sadist but Harry is a sexist, entitled arsehole so it’s hard to empathise with either of them. Harry is so appallingly superficial that it’s only after the thugs starting trashing his precious home that he’s stirred into action, and even then his first response is to try to use his wealth to buy his way out of danger.
Which leaves the film largely on the shoulders of Brenda Vaccaro as the embattled Diane and she does an excellent job, more than holding her own against the formidable Stroud, portraying Diane as a gutsy and resourceful survivor rather than a clichéd avenging angel. She’s a more practical and assertive woman than is usually found in this sort of thing and her descent into violence seems more believable – she’s not looking for payback, she’s simply trying to stay alive. She’s not impressed by Harry’s wealth and certainly isn’t as intimidated by Lep as he would like her to be. In one of the film’s best scenes it’s he who seems intimidated by her independence, confidence and refusal to be cowed by him. When she stops struggling while Lep tries to rape her, it completely throws him, leaving him bewildered and unsure how to continue.
A subplot with idiot drunken handymen is every bit as annoying as that with the inept cops in Last House on the Left but Death Weekend has plenty of nicely timed shocks, a smattering of gore (the killing of Runt is particularly gruesome) and some nicely pitched satire and commentary that doesn’t threaten to beat the audience over the head. It’s a film that deserves more attention that it’s had over the years (in terms of the sexual violence it’s less explicit that Last House on the Left or I Spit on Your Grave (1978) which helped keep it under the radar, though it did fall foul of the British authorities who confiscated copies during the 1980s “video nasties” furore. It certainly remains the most interesting of Fruet’s genre films and if that sounds like damning with faint praise it’s not meant to. As an efficient piece of no-nonsense exploitation, Death Weekend is a cut above.
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