This late in the day slasher film is the proverbial mixed bag. Notorious for a while for its goriness, none of that happens util the second half, the first being a rather joyless plod in which our flavourless cast are established and red herrings are introduced. It was the first feature film directed by Scott Spiegel, who had co-written the script for Evil Dead II (1987) with his friend Sam Raimi and was based on an 8mm short film he’d made a few years earlier titled Night Shift.

The film is set almost entirely in a supermarket after hours. The customers and day staff have gone and the night shift have moved in, stocking shelves ready for the next day. Craig (David Byrnes) the angry ex -boyfriend of cashier Jennifer (Elizabeth Cox) turns up causing trouble before being thrown out into the night by the other staff. Soon enough, the night shift is being picked off one by one by an unseen killer whose modus operandi is initially fairly tame, but who becomes increasingly inventive as more and more of the staff’s tools and equipment becomes available to him. Soon, only Jennifer and Craig – who has been set up as a red herring – are left, fighting for their lives against an increasingly blood-thirsty killer.

No-one in their right mind watches a slasher film for its plot and this one is pared back to the extreme, just one location, a cast of identikit victims and, in the latter stages, lashings of old-school practical effects gore. In fact, the gore is all here, which makes it all the more galling that the distributors and producers insisted on an ‘R’ rating which resulted, originally in the removal of 5 minutes or so of the more grisly moments, later all restored. And once it gets going, it’s a messily effective film, with bizarre deaths and body parts flying in all directions. Sadly, to get there, we have to put up with 40 bloodless (in all senses of the word) minutes of Spiegel trying to get us interested in the dull cyphers he populates the narrative with.

He also displays what could either be a degree of insecurity about his directorial skills or an overwhelming desire to emulate the outré stylings of Raimi. He frequently finds the oddest angle from which to shoot – through bottles, up from the dial of a telephone, or from the inside of a shopping trolley being pushed around the aisles. At first, it’s quite endearing, but Spiegel overdoes it and it ends up simply looking gimmicky and not a little irritating. Nor does he yet have any grasp of how to generate suspense, instead having his characters wander about forever in long, drawn-out scenes of people doing nothing in particular but doing it very s-l-o-w-l-y.

But he certainly knows how to choreograph the grisly doings of Robert Kurtzman, Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger, an early outing for their KNB EFX Group. And they really are the stars of the show, the set-pieces being far more inventive and original than anything Spiegel brings to the party. Stabbings, beheadings, people crushed to death by hydraulic garbage disposal units, sliced with bandsaws and forced on to meat hooks are all grist to this particular mill. And very nicely done it all is too. It’s also notable -and we certainly have to credit Spiegel with this – the majority of the victims are male and not  he scantily clad women too often found in these sorts of things.

In fairness though, its really just another gory slasher, one of the last of its breed for a while in fact before the genre mutated into the post-Silence of the Lambs (1991) serial killer films. It has something of a reputation based on the very gory stills printed in the likes of Fangoria and the fact that the film was cut for so long. But it’s not really up to much. It should be noted that many of the home video releases come in sleeves that tend to give away the identity of the killer one way or another, the only “surprise” that the film has to offer. But as it’s very obvious who that killer is right from the start, perhaps it doesn’t really matter that much.

Spiegel went on to direct several other genre films, including From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money (1999), My Name is Modesty: A Modesty Blaise Adventure (2004), and Hostel Part III (2011), write Thou Shalt Not Kill… Except (1985) and The Nutt House (1992), and produce Hostel (2005), 2001 Maniacs (2005) and Hostel Part II (2007). He introduced his friend and colleague Lawrence Bender (they co-wrote the story for Intruder) to a former video shop worker and aspiring young director named Quentin Tarantino and together they made Reservoir Dogs (1992), and he’s continued to make cameo appearances in many a Sam Raimi film, even his later Marvel films (Sam, his brother Ted and, very briefly, Evil Dead star Bruce Campbell all turn up among the doomed cast of Intruder).