Destroyer (1988)

This site’s purpose is to celebrate weird movies, but I don’t think I’ve seen many movies more off-kilter, yet more unambitious, than Destroyer, a self-referential slasher flick that stars an ex-football player, Lyle Alzado, as its relentless, sociopathic killer du jour. Destroyer cooks up two novelties for us. The first is that the movie takes place in a prison and, in fact, was really filmed in an actual abandoned prison. The killer’s victims-to-be are a film crew, led by embittered but idealistic director, played by our man Anthony Perkins, who seeks to make a masterpiece women-in-prison film Death House Dollies. Little do they know that someone, a serial killer named Ivan who was supposed to have died in the prison riot that led to the prison being shut down and that took place at the same time as his failed execution via electric chair, is still there and has become fixated on the crew’s stunt woman, Susan Malone. As Malone (as she’s called by everyone, including her boyfriend and film researcher, David, for some reason) keeps receiving mysterious notes and the like, the former warden of the prison disappears along with several other people. Plus the janitor that still takes care of the prison grounds doesn’t seem to mind too terribly when he does stumble upon the corpse of the warden...

The second novelty is that, like Return to Horror High, Destroyer tries to be a b-movie that plays out on the set of a b-movie. Anthony Perkins, the Director, has high ambitions and talks of artistic integrity, but in reality it’s obvious he’s making schlock…hey, schlock like the movie itself! While it’s always amusing to see a terrible movie wallow in its own crapulence (with apologies to Mr. Burns), the film doesn’t capitalize on its own attempts to stand out from the crowd of ‘80s slashers – actually, it doesn’t even really seem to try.

The film might as well have just taken place among a group of grad students studying the architecture of prisons for whatever reason or a bunch of teens looking to find a get-away. The few glimpses of film-making we see are rushed and unrealistic but, when it does try to play its “these people are making a film like the one you’re watching” angle, it falls totally flat. None of this is the fault of Anthony Perkins, who takes a deadpan but funny approach as a third-rate director with a first-rate sense of his work. In fact, it’s tempting to think that Perkins’ interpretation of the role is a bit inspired and that he’s pulling his character from some of the people he’s had to work with over the years. The fact that the movie was actually filmed in a prison does lend to some atmospheric and grimy backgrounds, but it’s not really taken advantage of, especially in the film’s climax which only has long, long pursuits down an endless series of dark corridors.

Neglected, too, is our killer himself. Lyle Alzado, before his death by brain cancer in 1993 (which incidentally he blamed on his history of steroid use), was actually a pretty good actor. In the opening scenes, he just about works as a deranged serial killer who is about to die yet is more interested in watching a cheesy game show on TV, up to the point he is strapped to the electric chair, by merging over-the-top campiness with his genuinely threatening physical presence. By the end of the film, after being out of the plot for a long period of time (at some point you wonder if the screenwriter realized, "Oh yeah, this movie's about a burly murderer in a prison! I almost forgot") Ivan's killing spree starts in earnest before suddenly we're just left with David and Malone playing Alien in the prison as Alzado becomes a villain that's neither campy nor intimidating. Until the end it feels like we're watching two movies, one a slasher flick and the other a bad comedy about a b-movie crew.

I wish I could just write Destroyer off, which seems to have been forgotten even by Anthony Perkins fans, as an awful b-movie, but there's nothing in its execution or in its premise that's really offensively terrible. It's just a lazy movie that doesn't exploit the oddness of its setting or its villain or its potential for funny meta-commentary on low-budget, exploitive b-movies. There's even an entire sub-plot, about David's research leading him to suspect corruption in the prison led to the riot, that doesn't lead anywhere. In fact, the whole movie just feels like two or three half-baked ideas thrown together. It isn't hard to see why director Robert Kirk gave up directing anything but historical documentaries after this; the entire movie feels like the output of someone who signed on to a job he couldn't stand and quit after the first month.

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