Movie Review: Boardinghouse (1982)

Synopsis: After inheriting a house with a long history of death, Jim Royce decides to turn it into a boarding house for aspiring models and actresses, creating his own personal harem. Soon after, the violence returns and guests begin to die.

Who's in it? The movie stars John Wintergate, Kalassu, Lindsay Freeman, Brian Bruderlin and Selma Kora.

Review: My wife and I finally had a couple hours to ourselves yesterday evening and, after getting some loaded nachos from the local bowling alley, decided to watch a horror film. It had been a while since we last watched a 1980s slasher, so I ended up picking out Boardinghouse.

I should have gone with a different movie.

I think the best way to describe this film is it is so bad, it was hard to tell if it was supposed to be a legitimate horror movie or a spoof. Most of the characters were comically one dimensional, especially the women, who inexplicitly answered Jim's (Wintergate) super creepy advertisement in droves (how in the world did he turn out to be the good guy?). Plus, the special effects looked extremely cheap and fake, even for a film from the early 1980s.

I probably could have overlooked that if the movie's plot had been coherent. The film's editing was, in a word, choppy. Characters would be having a conversation, and it would switch to a new, unrelated, scene mid-sentence. This made it hard to follow the story, which had an emphasis on telekinesis, which may or may not have been something the killer was doing, at times, seemed like it was the house itself that was evil. By the time the killer was revealed (and it wasn't a surprise), I no longer cared.

Of course, for a while, I was beginning to wonder if we had accidentally picked out a soft-core porn film that was posing as a horror movie. The women loved walking around topless and there were two sex scenes before the first murder occurred. I am going to chalk this up to the writers hoping the nudity would distract from the bad plot.

Final Opinion: My wife and I both agreed we should have had something stronger than loaded nachos before watching this mess of a movie.

My Grade: F

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Here are some reviews of other 1980s horror films:

Movie Review: Blood Beach (1980)

Movie Review: Alligator (1980)

Movie Review: Graduation Day (1981)

Movie Review: Sleepaway Camp (1983)