Synopsis
He's coming home to bury the hatchet...
This family guy's got it all wrong. Instead of building a united and loving bunch, he destroys entire families in a single swipe. He must have gone on one-to-many family vacations.
1989 Directed by John Murlowski
This family guy's got it all wrong. Instead of building a united and loving bunch, he destroys entire families in a single swipe. He must have gone on one-to-many family vacations.
Le liquidateur, La porta della paura
South African slasher from Gibraltar Entertainment, though neither of the studio’s heads, Wayne Crawford nor Andrew Lane have anything to do with it. Producer duties fall on Karl Johnson – recognizable as a bald muscleman who acts as a heavy in such films as Jake Speed, and associate produced a few of the late 80s Crawford actioners.
South Africa as Anytown, USA makes the distinct lack of Black extras a little harder to digest. The few locals that add a backwoods charm to the proceedings, actually make it seem more like Australia. The premise sees two groups of vacationers rent the dilapidated house of a serial killer, and NOT consider it a good idea to vacate the property when hearing…
Weasel is a pretty good looking punk for 1983, but its 1989 and he goes by Weasel, so most of his peers give him a hard time (He would totally fit in with the punks in ROTLD, but then again it's 1989, big difference). Apartheid in South Africa ended in 1994, so 1980s SA movies and actors appearing in South African movies were given a hard time (but nothing compared to a twitter hard time, imagine Donald Pleasance's twitter feed after appearing in River of Death (also 1989), so it's no surprise that Return of the Family Man pretends to be American. The real question is do I have a point? Actually, Return of the Family Man's real crime is that the kills are mostly off screen and tame. As slasher fans, does anything else matter?
Don't you know who this man is? This is the biggest son-of-a-bitchin' mass murderer in the Pacific Southwest.
Two groups of people accidentally rent out a rundown old mansion for their vacation. When they trek into town, they discover the house belonged to renowned mass murderer, The Family Man (named for targeting entire families). Coincidentally, The Family Man escapes from prison and heads home during this very same weekend.
It takes too long for The Family Man to finally return home and we're stuck watching the characters roam about not doing much. Once he does arrive, the final third turns into the fun slasher you've been waiting for though.
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100 Horror Movies in 92 Days
Film 42/100
Daily Horror Scavenger Hunt 7 – January 2019 Day 6: Watch a horror film from a country that is south of the equator. (South Africa)
So this is a South African movie that is trying to convince us that it's an American movie, which would work better if everyone in the movie (mainly the supporting characters) didn't have strong accents. It also tries to convince us it's a slasher. Which would work better if any of the kills were shown or if it didn't take over 45 minutes for the killer to arrive at the final destination and start killing the "teens" (ok maybe they're supposed to be early 20's), with only a couple of other kills up until then.…
Even though it was made in 1989, this film is indeed a sequel to the Nicolas Cage film, The Family Man.
English review below
Die Einführungssequenz erinnert vielmehr an ein Drogen-, Gangsta-, Action-C-Movie der frühen 90er Jahre Videotheken-Ära, als an einen Slasher Film.
Das Budget war augenscheinlich ziemlich gering und alles wirkt recht hastig inszeniert. Die Story erinnert zu Beginn an Becky. Ein psychopatischer Killer flieht mit Hilfe von Gewalt und Mord aus einem Gefangentransporter. Anschließend mordet er sich fröhlich durch eine Kleinstadt. Eine Gruppe erlebnisorientierter junger Erwachsener trifft parallel bei einer Bruchbude ein, die ihnen als Feriendomizil vermietet wurde. Dreimal darf geraten werden, wer in dieser Bruchbude zuvor gelebt hat. Der Film hat fast nichts zu erzählen und wirkt schlampig konzeptioniert. Viele Szenen sind Füllszenen und sollten vermutlich den Film auf eine abendfüllende Spielzeit bringen.
Die Figuren wurden am Reißbrett…
There's no doubting the effort and energy that went into making this comedy-heavy slasher movie, with a lot of time spent on unnecessarily elaborate situations and ideas, where a lazier film would just shoot its characters sitting around their summer holiday home for ages, before walking about in the dark interminably. To its credit, this doesn't do that. But that doesn't mean it's any good. Its villain is Schecter, a convicted serial killer known as the Family Man due to his love of slaughtering entire households. During his transfer from one prison to another, Schecter inevitably escapes and makes his way back to the mansion he owns outside a small town, but two groups of vacationers are already staying there.…
I remember being a kid back in early '90s, spending the night at a friend's and reading my first issue of Batman: Shadow of the Bat. Batman was trying to stop a serial killer, Zsasz, who would kill entire familes and pose them in wholesome tableaux. That creepy imagery never really never really left me, and I remember it popping up again in another comic book, Grant Morrison's The Invisibles. There was even a comic serial killer who went up against John Constantine, also called the Family Man. He had the same M.O. and also first appeared in 1989.
This movie only capitalizes on that unsettling hook once, with the plot revolving around a group of random but likable people. It's like if Jason Voorhees spent an entire movie terrorizing a retirement facility. I mean, it could still work, but it's not what you signed up for.
Solid '80s slasher flick with a few memorable moments.
Masochist March
5/31
About what you'd expect from the director of Santa with Muscles (1996) attempting (and miserably failing) to make a slasher film, where the ridiculous opening scene had no lasting relevance and the only memorable aspect was its use of ethnic stereotypes which completely ruined the tension. Big yikes.
Slasher films are my favorite and I'm always trying to find any that I can put right in front of my eyeballs. This one comes from South Africa and it does a nice mix-up of adding humor to the horror. The first scene basically starts with a pizza boy's delivery gone wrong with a cocaine gang and half naked women. The film later gets more into the plot and reminds you of The Stepfather meets A Nightmare on Elm Street. It's a far from perfect slasher but it still has the chops to entertain you.
First that poster up there is not accurate; this is no murder porno, friends. This is in fact a pretty standard slasher film, a rather chaste one too.
BUT THIS IS NOT THE ONLY DECEPTION! Though very clearly filmed in a country outside of North America this movie swears up and down it’s filmed in America. Never mind the copious evidence this is very much not true.
A wiggly little nothing of a man and his friends go to shithole cabin out in the middle of nowhere and then continue to stay in the shithole even with its bedroom without all its walls, news of an escaped serial killer in the area, evidence the serial killer is coming their way, and other such Big. Red. Flags.
Honestly if I had to elevator pitch this one I’d say “imagine the first Halloween movie but as a segment from Are You Afraid of the Dark?”
I don't know about you, but I wouldn't feel comfortable around a man with a knack for killing families. In fact, if I did encounter such a man, I would run for the hills quicker than you can say "recently deceased distant cousin." Not that I would want to run for the hills, what with the rough terrain and the possibility of tripping on a pothole; but at least I wouldn't be risking my life by sitting next to a mass murderer on a prison bus. Could always be worse, couldn't it? Well, sometimes a film is so unremarkable that it doesn't bring anything new to the table, which is where Return of the Family Man comes in. At times,…