By Geno McGahee
In 1989, the most famous of the horror characters to come back from the dead after electrocution was introduced to the fans in Horace Pinker from SHOCKER. He wasn’t the only killer that was zapped and came back that year. The hilarious Max Jenke from THE HORROR SHOW was also a return from the dead slasher, and I really thought that that was it, but I just got the chance to watch the 1988 THE DESTROYER and that travels the same path, but it is not nearly as good.
Ivan Moser (Lyle Alzado) is obsessed with a game show (for some reason that is never explained) and is ready to walk that last mile. He gets the chair, but is quite jovial about it. Unfortunately, during his death, there is a power outage in the prison and a riot. Things get strange, but the assumption is that Moser is dead.
The prison gets shut down, but it is re-opened to film an exploitation film by writer, David Harris (Clayton Rohner). The film that is being shot within the film is remarkably worse than the one you’re watching, and that is an accomplishment. Anthony Perkins of PSYCHO fame plays the director, Robert Edwards, in this, and you can tell that his heart is not in it. This must have been just a cash grab, and I can’t necessarily blame him. This movie doesn’t give him anything to work with and he just goes through the motion as the stereotypical pushy director.
Susan Malone (Deborah Foreman), David’s girlfriend and stuntwoman for the film, has been having nightmares about Moser and has a very bad feeling about the production, but she forges on. Actually, there are many townies that stay away from the closed down prison out of fear that there is something bad happening there. As the movie within a movie moves forward, strange things start to occur.
Moser still roams the prison and the film cast and crew are being killed off one by one…well, not really one by one. This movie gets very confusing because one minute, 50 crew members are there, and then they are all gone, only to be all found in one room dead at the end. Moser becomes obsessed with Susan and hunts her down through the prison as David attempts to save her.
The only person that seemed to give a shit about this movie was Alzado. He was the only thing that made this film watchable. His funny facial expressions and continual maniacal laugh was very amusing, but the film was so incomplete and undeveloped. This was loaded with filler and very little more until the death scenes and outside of two of the deaths, there really wasn’t much to the kills. I don’t know if they ran out of money or ambition, but they really got lazy at times with the action and death scenes.
THE DESTROYER had one idea: killer comes back from the dead to haunt a prison, but other than that, they had nothing. There was no character development and most of the characters were just empty stereotypes. It sucks because Alzado had something that could have been worked with and turned into a horror character that ran a few flicks. He would be the opposite of MANIAC COP and had THE DESTROYER been good and had a good run, they could have done a great crossover film, but it wasn’t meant to be.
In the end, THE DESTROYER is a mess and I cannot recommend it. It might be worth a watch to see the maniacal laughter of Alzado and one of the last performances of the great Anthony Perkins, but there’s not much more.
Rating: 3/10
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