The Mutilator (1984)

"The Mutilator" managed to elude me during my video store-crawling teenage years, which were spent rabidly devouring the bulk of the slasher sub-genre, all the way up until very recently when I finally got to checking it out. There was definitely some promise in certain areas of this relatively 'fringe' slasher, but ultimately it's a snooze-fest.

A little boy tries to give his dad a birthday surprise by cleaning his rifle collection, but accidentally fires a shot through the wall, killing his mother. Daddy goes off the deep end upon discovering this mishap and we cut to years later where the son is on fall break from college. He gets a phone call from his estranged father who asks him to head over to his beach house to take care of some tasks for him. Along with his friends, sonny-boy heads to the house where Pops is lying in wait to start shedding some blood...

We get way too much of these bland characters interacting and walking around a beach in between, what ARE, actually pretty solid kills for an '80s slasher flick. There are just way too few of them and I wasn't finding all that much suspense or anything else of interest on tap, here. The killer is just a middle-aged dude so there's not much imagination there and of the three chicks in the movie, none of them were even remotely attractive. So - aside from a good decapitation and a surprisingly strong scene involving a girl getting a large hook in the vag - "The Mutilator" didn't have enough of the 'goods' to get me all that fired up.