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Deadline
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| Year: |
1980
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Director: |
Mario Azzopardi
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| Stars: |
Stephen Young, Sharon Masters, Marvin Goldhar, Jeannie Elias, Cindy Hinds, Philip Leonard, Tod Woodcroft, Bev Marsh, Carole Pope, Kevan Staples, Rough Trade, Mary Risk, Kevin Camroux-Taylor, Philip Akin, Bill Yak, Virginia Reh, Louis Negin
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| Genre: |
Horror, Drama |
| Rating: |
  5 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
Steven Lessey (Stephen Young) is a popular author of horror fiction, but while his head is brimming with ideas, he cannot seem to settle on something that would lift his work to the next level he wishes. His home life is sailing into troubled waters as his wife (Sharon Masters) is developing a substance abuse habit that he has not cottoned onto yet, and his three young children are feeling neglected, not to mention growing morbidly curious about the content of his books and movies. Today he is due to give a talk to university students where he will show a clip from one of the films adapted from his script, but not everyone there is happy to see him, and he finds despite how well he does, there are plenty who see the horror genre as pure, tawdry trash...
Including, apparently, the writer and director of this movie, a Maltese gentleman in Canada called Mario Azzopardi who spent most of his career directing television episodes, but moved to the Great White North in the late nineteen-seventies to make the most of the tax shelter breaks the Canadian industry was offering. These resulted in a shedload of chilly, unfriendly-looking movies, as if something happened to usually friendly Canadians when they got behind a camera that turned them, in the worst-case scenario, into misanthropes with pretensions, though as Azzopardi was an immigrant artist, something must have rubbed off on him as he acclimatised to his new surroundings. Sometimes you got David Cronenberg, sometimes you got Food of the Gods II.
This little item had aspirations to take down the horror genre, and to do so it staged scenes from its lead character's writings, but plonked into the action with no rhyme or reason, as if to be dismissive of the sort of sequences that were the bread and butter of the industry at the time. Therefore you got two little kids tying grandma to the bed and setting her on fire, a woman drowning in a shower of blood, a baby "committing suicide" in the womb and gorily killing its mother in the process, and so on. If these were intended to be reminiscent of Stephen King, a writer who speaks far more eloquently in defence of his chosen field than the Lessey character does here, then they failed, they were more like Shaun Hutson, or worse, Garth Marenghi, and what we saw was so geared for shock that they seemed absurd.
The director took the hackneyed line that there is so much genuine horror in the world that you don't need to create the fictional variety, not twigging that these tales would be escapist, and therefore an antidote to the reality Azzopardi was so intent on promoting. Anyway, wanting to teach his representative Lessey a, er, lesson, he put him through his own personal Hell by effectively blaming him for his wife's breakdown and at the halfway point, a family tragedy designed to go "Aah, do you see?" when it appears to have been triggered by a scene from one of his movies. His point being, you cannot write shockers and chillers without experience of emotional turmoil in your own life, which is plainly nonsense. Deadline has a small cult following among fans who respond to its cheesy interludes and "Down with People" posturing, but most of its dubious pleasures stem from how daft it is. If it had been made decades later, it would have crowbarred the internet in there somewhere, put it that way. There's even a love theme at the end - music by Sam Bari.
[Available on Arrow Player. Click here to join the Arrow Player website - there's a free trial available.]
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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