In short: Hide and Go Shriek (1988)

A bunch of teenagers (cough) – I’m not going to pretend their names or the actors are of any import though I have to admit that Bunky Jones is quite the name - decide to celebrate their high school graduation by an act of the wildest depravity their little minds can come up with: letting themselves be secretly locked in over the weekend in the large furniture store belonging to one of their dads to play hide and seek and have sex. Whatever happened to Lovers’ Lane?

Unfortunately for all involved – characters and audience – a cross-dressing gay killer (spoiler, I guess) is locked in with them too, and starts killing them off in frequently hilarious ways for no reason I could make out.

I could spend a paragraph or so bemoaning the homophobe text (subtext it certainly isn’t) of (future TV producer) Skip Schoolnik’s Hide and Go Shriek but that would mean I’d have to pretend to take this entry into the slasher cycle more serious than I do, and – one might argue – more seriously than it deserves. Still, if this sort of thing – understandably – bugs you, you might want to avoid this one in particular.

It’s not that anyone would miss much not watching Go Shriek. While I do approve of the film’s clear attempts to vary the slasher formula in a few elements – we don’t have a final girl, for example, but a final group of idiots – it’s not as if it makes much of these variations, because most of the film still consists of many scenes of the actors making out, deeply implausible murders, and a lot of walking, sneaking, and running to and fro through the bland and boring furniture store. It’s not exactly exciting.

At least the film’s title is pretty honest: there is indeed a drawn-out game of hide and seek going on in the film (or two – one among the teens and later one between the teens and the killer), and the last half hour or so does feature a lot of shrieking; for a change, the male characters are shrieking as much as the female ones, by the way. That last third also does suddenly see Schoolnik’s generally bland but not offensive direction try for some mood-building via semi-atmospheric red emergency lights and other not completely stupid little tricks. Unfortunately these attempts still don’t distract too well from the fact the characters have been running through the same handful of rooms for an hour now.


This is also the point when the actors – who were bad but not horrible before – seem to lose the plot completely, getting up to very funny hysterics that fit the slapstick feel the so-called fight for their lives takes on rather well. Note to directors: it’s never not funny when your characters are trying to defend themselves with the manikin arms and legs they have stolen, so you might to avoid it when you’re trying to make a horror film.