Best movie of this year hands down!

Fresh and Exciting

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

THE REDEEMER is an early slasher film with a character all of its own and plenty of creepy atmosphere to see it through, even if the story is rather light and stretched out. It was made on an indie budget which means that what takes place is very low budget indeed, but at the same time it manages to achieve a level of realism that a slicker production might have lacked. A bunch of former high school students head off for a class reunion but find themselves in a deserted, run-down old school and pursued by a masked maniac. The kills are inventive and there are some genuine creepy moments here, although elsewhere the tale is hampered by the inexperience of the cast and crew. Still, it's fun to see a slasher film made before certain tropes and cliches became entrenched in the genre.

Combining elements from both the slasher and the demonic horror sub-genres, The Redeemer sees a group of old college pals gathering at their now abandoned school for a class reunion where a killer is waiting to punish them for leading sinful lives.The film opens in surreal style with a young lad, Christopher (Christopher Flint), emerging from a lake and boarding a bus, travelling to a church where he joins a tone-deaf boys' choir and gets bullied by a fellow chorister brandishing a knife. Soon after, we see the killer claiming his first victim, the school's caretaker, using the corpse to mould himself a latex mask which, in true Scooby Doo style, he wears to fool the group of unsuspecting, soon-to-be-dead friends.The film then cuts to the arrival of the six victims, each of whom is guilty of one of the seven deadly sins. Once everyone is inside the building, the killer, disguised as the caretaker, locks all the doors and windows and, discarding his mask in favour of several other creepy guises, proceeds to bump off the victims one-by-one, his job made all the easier by the fact that the morons continually split up to wander around the vast school on their own.The death scenes vary from completely bloodless to reasonably gruesome, the most graphic being a guy turned into a human torch (cool full body-burn stunt here) and another poor sap getting a large blade dropped point down onto his head from a height; however, anyone raised on a diet of '70s/'80s slashers will probably still find these rather tame in terms of gore.What makes the kills much more fun and a bit more disturbing are their macabre trappings: the burn death is caused by a creepy life-size doll holding a blowtorch, while the blade death happens during a bizarre stage show in which the killer controls a freaky marionette. Another murder—a drowning in a sink—sees the killer wearing a disturbing clown get-up, while the final death scene reveals the killer to have two thumbs!Once the six friends are all dead—the film is fairly unique in that there are no survivors—the action returns to the church where it is revealed that the killer was the priest (who I believe was being controlled by Christopher, who also has two thumbs). After taking care of the knife-wielding bully, the boy returns to his lake.Frequently baffling, with awkward pacing, poor acting, and unlikeable characters, The Redeemer is far from a great movie, but it is so strange that I still recommend it to any self-respecting fan of bizarre, obscure cult horror.

A Few years ago, I found this at a Flea Market, after catching the trailer on the VHS of The Wizard Of Gore years earlier. All I remembered was that it seemed like something worth the three dollars the guy was asking, but after years of being burned in my search for decent-bad cinema, I wasn't all that shocked to discover that Class Reunion Massacre is, in fact, not worth the three dollars I paid. I like old B-horror because it's different, because it's outlandish and rebellious, because it can be refreshing compared to all the big-budget, super-hero garbage of today. But none of that means anything if it puts you to sleep.Typical Horror plot. Some kid walks out of a lake, gets on a bus, and goes to Church, where we find a rather loud Priest doing his thing...and I'm sure all of this has something to do with the six "sinners" the story now revolves around. Four People I barely noticed, Mr. metro- fem, and a lesbian are headed to their 10 year high school reunion where they can sit around and eat, and "act", and wonder where the hell everyone's at. With the doors now locked, one by one, everyone is taken out by the redeemer, some guy who probably fancys himself some kind of righteous/sadistic chameleon, hence the killing in the name of God, and constant wardrobe changes. Feeling tired yet? Class Reunion Massacre is mostly made up of endless conversations and ironic killings meant to punish sins such as gluttony, and drinking too much. This film manages to be blasphemous against Christianity, as well as B-cinema. I expected very little, yet was somehow still disappointed. What I find most irritating about Class Reunion Massacre is I can almost detect a hint of potential somewhere in there. The atmosphere is all it has going for it. Ultimately, this is not a good horror movie, not a good B-movie, Class Reunion Massacre, for the lack of a better word, is a failure. Actually, I wouldn't mind a DVD release, with some audio commentary, which might shed a little light, because I just know I missed something. I don't get it. There's way too many positive reviews for this... come to think of it, I'm wasting my time here. I could be reviewing something worthwhile, like Nightmare In A Damaged Brain...

I would like to preface these comments by saying that I saw this movie on a poor quality double feature DVD (paired with Andy Milligan's "CARNAGE") that I picked up at the dollar store, so I honestly wasn't expecting much from CLASS REUNION MASSACRE (aka "THE REDEEMER: SON OF Satan!") from the get-go. I read some reviews of the film on this site and several others before viewing it, and I noticed a lot of comments about its "dreamlike" or "surreal" quality. After watching the movie, I wonder how much of that "dreamlike" quality was intentional and how much was just dumb luck on the director's part. There were a few interesting scenes in CLASS REUNION MASSACRE but for the most part I found myself laughing at the screen more often than not.Here's our "plot" more or less: six people, each a cartoonish stereotype representing a "deadly sin," (a greedy lawyer, a vain gay man, a lesbian, a rich bitch, a male chauvinist pig, and a promiscuous former teen-queen) return to their now-closed high school for a ten-year reunion, where they quickly discover that they're the ONLY people in the school building aside from a psychotic killer who locks the doors and proceeds to pick them off one by one while wearing a variety of masks and costumes. Our six victims, to be blunt, are idiots. After nearly every death scene, the remaining survivors invariably sit around looking dejected and discuss "NOW what are we going to do?" until the crazed killer strikes again, rather than doing the logical thing, like trying to smash out a window, break down a locked door, or whatever is necessary to escape. They also tend to stand around in shock and horror after every death while the killer makes a long, drawn-out speech about their sinful lives, letting him say his piece rather than simply rushing the guy and trying to kick his ass. Oddly enough, our killer (who is a fire-and-brimstone priest, judging from the not-very-helpful exposition shown at the beginning of the movie) seems to have no connection to the six people other than the fact that they're sinners and he hates them. If he had gone to school with the six and they'd shoved him in a locker or otherwise mistreated him in some way in the past, then perhaps the rampage would make sense. I'm not even going to get into the kid with an extra thumb (?) who rises mysteriously out of a lake (!) at the prologue of the movie (accompanied by some of the most annoying synthesizer music ever recorded) and is not seen again till he returns there in the epilogue, because those scenes feel like they were pasted in from a different film. The prevailing theory seems to be that the kid is actually "The Redeemer" and that he's the one pulling the strings (those of you who've seen the movie will get that reference, I'm sure) behind the Priest's murder spree, but overall CLASS REUNION MASSACRE isn't coherent enough for the viewer to know for sure. It seems to me like the makers of the film were trying to mesh the then-popular "Satanic child" genre (i.e. "The Omen") with the slasher film genre, but they bungled both sides of the equation. The highlights for me were the teen-queen character, a Farrah Fawcett wanna-be who was wearing a short skirt, and one kill scene involving a pendulum hanging from the ceiling and a creepy puppet in a clown suit. Otherwise, CLASS REUNION MASSACRE was 90 minutes that I should've put to better use, like clipping my toe nails or watching paint dry.