Cameron's Closet [1989]

Pudgy young Cameron [Scott Curtis] has been involved by his sweaty Dad [Tab Hunter] in a series of psychic experiments that have caused him to concentrate so hard on the figure of an Aztec demon that the creature has been dragged into existence and taken up a home in between the old socks and comic books in the kid's bedroom wardrobe. Hunter goes into the closet and carelessly falls on a machete, decapitating himself; Cameron's Mum's moron boyfriend gets blinded and thrown out of the window; the cop on the case is having [bad dreams about wandering through the corridors of hell [yawn!]; Cam's uncle has an incestuous shower fantasy that ends with a bloody mess; and a very poorly articulated monster occasionally looms out of the fog to make trouble. Cameron's Closet is a collaboration between two of horrordom's least talented. Director Armand Mastroianni - Marcello's cousin - made his debut with the teenkill clone He Knows You're Alone in 1980, and hasn't had a theatrical release in this country since, with dodos like The Supernaturals. And screenwriter Gary Brandner gained some spurious notoriety as the author of the novel John Sayles and Joe Dante ignored when scripting The Howling. Here, Brandner, writer of paperback trash like The Brain Eaters, is adapting his own book, and gets to show off his total, banana-fingered inability to handle dialogue, characterisation or credible plotting. For a while, the film at least manages to be screechingly funny, especially when the to-be-blinded boyfriend is sweatily posing in boxer shorts and auditioning for the role of Marc Antony, and the incredibly thick leads the troubled cop and a bimbo psychiatrist are trying to puzzle it out. But then terminal boredom sets in, unrelieved by lousy splatter effects and an overworked music score, winding up with an absurd finale that would be put to shame by a sub-par episode of Dr Who. Ugly, stupid and dull.

First Published In: City Limits [issue unknown]

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