Studio:   Shudder
Director: Brandon Christensen
Writer:   Ryan Christensen, Brandon Christensen
Producer: Michael Peterson, David Hiatt, Matt Manjourides, Justin Martell
Stars:    Jessica Clement, Ryan Robbins, Summer H. Howell, Keegan Connor Tracy, Matty Finochio, Ben Cockell, Bryn Samuel, Savannah Miller, Sofie Kane, Max Christensen

Review Score:

Summary:

While a masked killer stalks a babysitter, a small-town sheriff embarks on a desperate hunt to uncover the murderer’s identity.

Synopsis:

“The Reaper,” a serial killer disguised by a black hood and skull mask, uses a handheld camcorder to tape himself stalking, terrorizing, and then finally murdering Emily Golding as the young woman babysits siblings Mark and Marina Gray. The main clues found at the crime scene are a dead dog and the fact that an automatic garage door was the entry point into the home.

Sometime later, Emily’s sister Deena returns home from college to parents still devastated by their other daughter’s death. Following a brief encounter with former high-school friends Willis Hanover and Chad, the latter of whom is often seen around town filming with a camcorder, Deena visits her longtime friend Haddie McCallister. Later, Haddie calls Deena to ask if Deena can take her place babysitting Sheriff Rodney Arnold’s young son Max because Haddie became suddenly ill. Deena agrees.

Meanwhile, an unmarked package containing a garage door opener appears on Sheriff Rodney Arnold’s doorstep. Accompanied by Officer Butch Cassidy, Rodney goes to the house where Emily was murdered and confirms his hunch that the opener belongs to that garage.

When Rodney and Butch return to the station, their receptionist Dottie gives Rodney a second unmarked package that was delivered to her. The package contains a VHS videotape labeled “Night of the Reaper – The Camper,” which turns out to be The Reaper’s home video of him killing Conner Davis, a camper whose death two years ago had been ruled accidental, but the sheriff had always thought was suspicious. A dead dog is seen in the footage.

On their way to investigate the campsite where Conner died, Rodney and Butch stop for a brief conversation with forest ranger Elizabeth Talbot as she tends to a dead dog on the side of a road. At the campsite, Rodney and Butch recover another unmarked package containing a VHS tape labelled “Night of the Reaper – The Babysitter,” which features a clip of Emily Golding’s murder.

From a license plate briefly glimpsed in the new footage, Rodney and Butch bring camcorder enthusiast Chad into the station for questioning. Chad denies the sheriff’s accusation that he may have been an accessory to Emily’s murder. Rodney and Butch watch the current tape in Chad’s camera and see the footage of Chad and Willis encountering Deena earlier.

Despite Butch’s insistence that they aren’t going by the book, Rodney goes to Willis’s apartment to confront the other young man. Rodney finds another “Night of the Reaper” videocassette on Willis’s bed. Willis enters the room. The angry sheriff immediately punches Willis in his face and arrests him.

After a game of hide-and-seek with Max, Deena becomes alarmed by a dead dog found outside Rodney’s house. She subsequently realizes there is an intruder when she sees items including the sheriff’s deceased wife Abby’s wedding dress and a newspaper clipping about her car accident death placed around the house.

The sheriff returns to the station with Willis to discover Butch released Chad from custody. Rodney watches the new Reaper videotape, which ends up revealing his wife was not killed in a car accident like he had been led to believe. In actuality, The Reaper caused Abby’s wife to crash and then he repeatedly bashed her head against the steering wheel to kill her.

Enraged, Rodney confronts Willis at gunpoint. Willis explains he was instructed to give the tape to the sheriff, but he doesn’t reveal by whom.

Deena calls 911 not to report The Reaper’s break-in, but to misdirect the police to a phony bomb threat. Deena then surprises The Reaper by attacking the intruder and taking the killer captive.

The Reaper is unmasked as forest ranger Elizabeth Talbot. Through a taunting videotape, Deena reveals she figured out Elizabeth was the killer, so Deena elaborately orchestrated the entire evening by drugging Haddie to make her miss her babysitting gig, sending Max to safety at a neighbor’s house, and leading the cops somewhere else so she could capture her.

Over a walkie-talkie, Deena directs Elizabeth to look for her outside. In a clearing decorated by Halloween skeletons, Deena hobbles Elizabeth by firing a shotgun at her leg. Deena then reveals she is the sister of Elizabeth’s previous victim Emily Golding, which is why she wanted revenge. Before Deena can do anything else, however, she is knocked out from behind by Chad.

Deena recovers in the kitchen where Chad, revealed to be Elizabeth’s accomplice in a relationship where the duo sees themselves as macabre filmmaking artists, tends to Elizabeth’s wounds. Deena tells Elizabeth she saw her at Emily’s funeral. Suspicious, she followed Elizabeth home and uncovered the secret stash of videotapes and the garage door opener she sent to the sheriff, which is how Deena deduced The Reaper’s identity.

Chad warns Elizabeth they have to flee because he slit the throat of a police officer who was sent to his house before he arrived. Hearing Willis, whose help Deena enlisted as part of her plan, on the other end, Chad snatches a walkie-talkie from Deena. Unaware that the device was booby trapped, Chad triggers a small explosion that blows off his head.

Elizabeth uses the opportunity to capture Deena. Deena wakes from another bout of unconsciousness in front of a TV playing footage of her sister’s murder. Elizabeth taunts and repeatedly stabs Deena in her legs, but the sheriff arrives in time to shoot Elizabeth dead.

Deena confirms she sent Rodney the package clues because, knowing he was as devastated by his wife’s death as she was about her sister’s, Deena knew he would want to be there for Elizabeth’s final moments. Before the sheriff can call in Elizabeth’s death, Deena convinces him that they shouldn’t have to go to jail for her murder. Rodney and Deena agree to keep the secret of what really happened as they frame events to make it look like Elizabeth merely disappeared.

Review:

John Carpenter’s “Halloween” (review here) will always be the undisputed king of babysitter slashers as well as movies set around October 31st. No one can forget its immensely memorable opening, where a six-year-old Michael Myers dons a mask, stalks up a staircase, and viciously stabs his sister Judith to death before their parents catch him clutching a bloody knife. The entire first-person sequence, cleverly designed to look like one shot, lasts about four and a half minutes.

The next scene reintroduces Michael 15 years later as an inmate at Smith’s Grove Sanitarium. Amid a dark and stormy night ominously lit by headlights and lightning flashes, Michael leaps like an animal, smashes a window with his bare hand, and commandeers a car from the terrified nurse accompanying Dr. Loomis. It’s barely been ten minutes since the pumpkin appeared next to the title, we haven’t even met Laurie Strode yet, and Michel has already more than earned his moniker of “The Shape” by becoming a mute, faceless, frightening force of pure evil.

“Night of the Reaper” is filmmaker Brandon Christensen’s take on the “masked maniac terrorizes babysitters” concept. Clearly inspired by Carpenter’s classic, the movie means to evoke retro vibes using fuzzy VHS snow flickering over opening credits and conspicuous close-ups on vintage Coke cans to confirm the setting is the 1980s. The story doesn’t explicitly take place on Halloween, yet that seems to be the season, what with suburban homes all decked out in plastic jack o’lanterns and cardboard skeletons adorning doors in the neighborhood.

Contrary to how “Halloween” starts with its focus on Michael Myers, “Night of the Reaper” centers its prologue on the titular killer’s current target. Emily has her hands full tending to young siblings Mark and Marina. After calming the boy’s fears about something in his closet, Emily heads downstairs to indulge in a familiar scene of “left home alone” lip synching to loud music and rebelliously smoking a cigarette. Initially unsettling circumstances like a dead dog outside and mysteriously moving teddy bear escalate into a dire emergency when Emily realizes there’s an intruder toying with her. By then, it’s too late, and someone in a black hood and skull mask finally attacks at the end of an overlong 11-minute introduction to depict one person’s death.

“Night of the Reaper” moves on to an indeterminate point in time later, when college student Deena returns home to parents so distressed by an unspecified tragedy, dad is virtually catatonic. First, Deena has run-ins with former friends Willis and Chad, the latter of whom has a habit of running around town with a camcorder, something that will later link him to the killer who likes recording his crimes. Then Deena stops into a drugstore to nod at a forest ranger and converse with a pharmacist while picking up a prescription. One more stop left to make before actually heading to her house, Deena visits her good gal pal Haddie next, and the two of them talk turkey about various things like Haddie’s crush on Sheriff Rodney Arnold, a widower whose young son Max Haddie is slated to watch later.

In the meantime, Sheriff Rodney has errands of his own to run. When an unmarked package arrives on his doorstep, Rodney acts on a hunch and traces its contents, a garage door opener, to the babysitter death seen earlier. Unmarked boxes continue popping up like dropped breadcrumbs, with each subsequent one containing a videotape of “The Reaper’s” home movies, some of which show deaths no one even knew were murders.

Where “Night of the Reaper” hits a hard snag with its comparatively calmer tone is in not establishing the same sense of dread that “Halloween” does. When we follow Jamie Lee Curtis around Haddonfield, we occasionally see Michael’s shoulder step into frame, his distant figure disappear behind a bush, or him standing still by a station wagon outside her classroom. There’s an unsettling suggestion that he could be anywhere, could strike anytime, and he seems to always be at least one move ahead of people who aren’t aware of his presence.

When we follow Deena and Rodney, on the other hand, they’re just collecting exposition or encountering possible suspects without any accompanying eeriness. Other than a dead dog found near each body, there isn’t much mythology to the mystery of The Reaper, who at this point is only an indistinct killer in an ordinary disguise. Aside from quick clips of his previously recorded crimes, we don’t see anything substantial from him until he starts stalking Deena more than halfway through the movie, so the audience doesn’t have an outstanding reason to perceive The Reaper as a persistent threat.

Plot progression hits another disconnect in that Deena and Rodney’s different journeys don’t directly intersect until the climax. Deena has to take the job babysitting the sheriff’s son after her friend Haddie drops out, but weirdly, there isn’t a scene where Rodney approves the switch, or says goodbye to Deena before leaving his son in her care. They talk on the phone one time and that’s it, so their halves of the film feel like separate stories.

“Night of the Reaper” finally finds its first burst of originality with a short series of late-inning twists. Until then though, suspense mostly comes from Deena simply flinching at shadows or offscreen noises, then tiptoeing toward them or staring with wide eyes. Already routine, this horror comes off as hollow because the killer’s motive remains unknown, and so does the motive of the primary player in the twist. When the truth does come out, there’s barely enough time for an “oh, c’mon” reaction before a sudden death provides another surprise.

It's admirable that “Night of the Reaper” tries something unexpected with the slasher formula. It’s equally appreciated that the movie tries to appear bigger than its low budget by spending some coin to bookend the soundtrack with Pat Benatar and Blue Oyster Cult needle drops.

But due to the nature of how the secrets have to be hidden for so long in order to have a chance of working, the reveals end up feeling forced, and they don’t hold up to the slightest bit of refrigerator logic in hindsight. It’s like the entire script was structured solely to lead to a gimmicky “gotcha!” with little regard for being grounded in a reasonable amount of disbelief suspension. That might be good enough for amused viewers to whom the outcome may come as an entertaining shock. “Night of the Reaper” has a harder time landing with anyone understandably disinterested in the blander buildup of context-lacking clues and an empty impression of any imminent danger.

Review Score: 50