A couple moves into a new home and find success and happiness, but soon their dream becomes a nightmare when they hear chilling voices in the night, vandalous attacks and a faceless, nameless menace threatens to destroy them. The law won't help, and when an intruder is shot and killed, their ordeal has just begun.
USA
USA
Longterm television actress Hildy Brooks (The Iceman Cometh) gets behind the camera to direct this almost impossible to find thriller from the writing team of Wayne Crawford and Andrew Lane, released the same year as their biggest hit Valley Girl.
A deconstruction and condemnation of Death Wish style vigilante revenge flicks, Trial by Terror is reminiscent of Crawford's earlier God's Bloody Acre in its leftist politics and subversive attempts at getting a humanist view across. The film tells the story of a couple (Wayne Crawford and Kay Lenz) whose dream of home ownership is quickly derailed by constant torment from a local gang, and the comedically ineffective response by the police. Taking matters into their own hands, the couple purchase…
This film could be called "Broken Windows Theory: The Movie," and since it came out only a year after the Atlantic Monthly article of the same name, it's not a stretch to assume it was inspired or at least influenced by it and similar articles. It feels like an alarmist magazine profile come to life.
I went to a huge amount of trouble to get my hands on this VHS, because it's the sole directorial credit of actress Hildy Brooks, co-stars Kay Lenz (for whom I have a giant Stripped-to-Kill-shaped soft spot), is female-edited, and was written by the Valley Girl team + a female screenwriter whose sole credit is this and two TV episodes. The hidden-gem potential felt so…
Death Wish drivel, but it’s got Martin Landau & “The People’s Champ” Colleen Camp. (Both in supporting cop roles).
A couple moves into a house and is terrorized by faceless teenagers. After a killing an intruder the husband visits the dead kids family and we get this tearful monologue:
“I went to their house...I wanted to find some monsters. It was just this woman & all these little kids. They had nothing. They couldn’t speak English, no one could tell me why.”
Which got an audible OOOF outta me.
Like Over the Edge from the Adults perspective, but who wants that?
I did like the actor who plays the husbands boss is visibly drunk & the couples full tilt meltdown when they come home to find their house vandalized. Reminded me of Mink Stole in Desperate Living.
A woozy, sickening crime commentary that makes itself out to be the motion-sick, worm-addled conclusion to what Death Wish was putting down with Charles Bronson. Crime rose dramatically from the 70s through the 1990s in the United States as Nixon and Reagan policies dug a violent trench through the already-feeble welfare state that was being fought for from the 1930s to the 1970s. Five decades of struggle and too-slow, excrutiating progress was brought to a swift halt, almost entirely by one man. This is the fallacy of our "democracy," the eternal joke of the great western democratic experiment. Reformism is a cyclical farce that always ends in disaster and in the undoing of everything good that the people struggle for.…
