The eighties were a decade ruled by the slasher film. The success of the Friday The 13th, Halloween, and Nightmare On Elm Street franchises spawned multitudes of imitations… some good, some bad, and some downright terrible. In the past, I'd have said that The Slayer was in the downright terrible category, but to be fair to director J.S. Cardone and his cast and crew members who clearly worked hard on this picture, a lot of that had to do with the horrible presentation the film was given on home video. Now that Arrow Video has worked their magic on this obscure picture, it's only fair the film be given a reappraisal.

The story revolves around two couples: Kay (Sarah Kendall) and her husband David (Alan McRae) and Kay's brother Eric (Frederick Flynn) and his wife Brooke (Caro Kottenbrook) who head out of the big city to a remote island for a little rest and relaxation. Despite the warnings of the oddball pilot who gets them there, the group decides to stick around in spite of the nasty storm that is heading their way. Cut to an unknown lone fisherman type who gets smacked outside the head with a paddle and then back to the story.

Kay is a painter. She claims that she gets inspiration for her art from the disturbing and unusual dreams that she has. These more often than not tend to come completely true shortly after she wakes from them. She becomes quite perturbed when she dreams of David being decapitated and low and behold, when she wakes up, he's missing. One by one, an unseen killer stalks and kills off the remaining tourists until only Kay is left. Will she be able to stop him? Will she make it out alive?

The Slayer has a few things going for it, particularly when viewed in its uncut form as it is presented on this Blu-ray debut. The first of these positives is the quality of the kill scenes and the murder set pieces. There's some pretty strong gore in some of these and the effects used to bring that gore to life are rock solid. The movie also benefits from some genuinely great locations. Shot in and around Tybee Island in Georgia, the film makes great use of some somewhat rustic locations and very cool beaches to create some nice atmosphere. The lighting employed in the film is also occasionally pretty impressive, helping to further solidify the visual style employed in the picture. Again, this was all almost impossible to appreciate in past editions where everything was murky, dark and sometimes just impossible to decipher.

But The Slayer is not a perfect film. There are logic gaps here (you could say dream logic applies to counter this criticism, and that's fair enough but it doesn't really change the facts) and for all the film's quirks and oddities, it's fairly predictable. The acting isn't great, but neither is it awful, it's simply average. There are some occasional pacing issues too. None of this kills the movie, however. It's fairly entertaining stuff particularly if you don't think about it too much. Enjoy this one for its weird regional flavor, decent kills and genuinely solid atmosphere, everything else is a bonus.

Video:

The Slayer never got a legitimate DVD release in North America, but it did get one in the UK through Vipco and it was absolutely terrible. You couldn't tell what was going on in many of the darker scenes and the framing was all wrong, Arrow's new Blu-ray, taken from a new 4k scan of the 35mm negative, presents the movie on a 50GB disc in an AVC encoded 1080p high definition transfer framed at 1.85.1and it's quite a revelation. It still doesn't make The Slayer a particularly good movie but it does at least allow you to appreciate the fact that it's reasonably well shot and makes good use of color. Skin tones look nice, there are no compression issues, the pictures is quite clean. This looks about as good as The Slayer can realistically look, it's hard to imagine anyone familiar with how the film has been treated on home video in the past taking issue with the picture quality here.