The Sleeper (2012) - 1.5/4

I had high praise for filmmaker Justin Russell's previous film, Death Stop Holocaust. Like Death Stop Holocaust, The Sleeper is a throwback, this time to '80s slasher movies instead of '70s grindhouse horror. But what made Death Stop Holocaust so good, what made me praise it, was certainly not the 'grindhouse' style it affected, nor any of the throwback qualities in an of themselves; it was the nightmarishness and the willingness to experiment in an almost Lynchian way with creating terror, quite contrary to anything in the grindhouse style. With The Sleeper, however, Russell does not seem aware of what made his previous film good, as he excises the best parts of Death Stop Holocaust and this time runs with pure throwback.

The Sleeper concerns a maniac who decides to terrorize a sorority with creepy phone calls and, eventually, a hammer jabbed in the eyes. As sisters begin disappearing, the house mother calls the police. Our attentions are focused on a new pledge, who is naturally set to be our final girl. Of course, some subplots involve the horny frat boys who want to bed some of the sorority sisters. If you know your '80s slashers, it's just a waiting game until most of the cast is killed and the final girl escapes and kills her pursuer.

The problem with The Sleeper isn't so much being a full-on homage. I like '80s slashers very much. However, being a lightweight connoisseur of the subgenre, I'm also very well aware that many slashers are bad, not in the good way, but in the very dull way. They're not all indie splatter hits like Maniac! and The Prowler, subtle classics like Halloween and Black Christmas, or even second-tier honourables like American Gothic, Just Before Dawn, Hell Night, or He Knows You're Alone, or even the Halloween sequels. You have a lot of rubbish like Night School and Prey, or, at the very worst, Blood Lake. In fact, even some of the memorable slashers aren't that good. Black Christmas and The Prowler are accorded much more respect than their artistic or entertainment values warrant.

My point is that Russell doesn't make The Sleeper an homage to the really good slashers, but to the bad ones. From the credit graphics onward, it's clear this is one of those made-on-the-cheap Canadian co-production sort of slashers no-one really remembers because they were too banal to be worth the neurons. I could best describe it as He Knows You're Alone meets Black Christmas. The phone calls and sorority house are Black Christmas, albeit not as good, and the killer, whose identity is irrelevant, reminds me of the He Knows You're Alone killer.

The very unfortunate reality is Russell is so incredibly successful at making his homage that it plays exactly like one of those bad '80s slashers. There are already far too many bad '80s slashers as it is, we didn't need one shot on DV. It's an interesting experiment, but one whose success entails its failure. Had Russell veered from his project course, as he did in Death Stop Holocaust, he could have had a very interesting picture. But The Sleeper is just too faithfully a throwback, to a frankly misguided cinematic space, that it's not very interesting at all.