Moving into their new Hollywood appartment, Nell (Angela Bettis) & Steven
(Brent Roam) are shocked by the state it, & the hole building, is in -
everything leaking showers, defective buzzers & ovens to endless renovation
works & ahmmering late at night. & while Steven - a young doctor - is
hardly at home in the first place, Nell is pretty much driven crazy by the
place - & she doesn't even know yet that a killer's roaming the building as
well.
However, soon she notices people from the building disappearing, including
her hippie next-door-neighbour Saffron (Sara Downing) & her jogging mate
Julia (Juliet Landau), & after the police won't believe her since she has
already placed a false alarm once, she starts some investigations of her own
... & soon finds out that the building is missing one appartment at every
floor, & that some symbols, mounted at every bloor as decoration, might
actually be runes to gain access to the missing appartments ... & gaining
access she does, only to find rooms full of corpses, new & old, & a
secret staircase ... but by now the killer has taken notice of her presence
& chases her to his maze of secret rooms.
But who could the killer be ?
Byron, the slimey building manager (Greg Travis) ?
Ned, the creepy handiman (Adam Gierasch) ?
Chas, the has-been movie actor who seems to know everything about the
building (Rance Howard) ?
Luis, the doorman (Marco Rodriguez) ?
Might it even be Steven ?
Nope, it's the Phantom of the Opera (Christopher Doyle) - & believe me,
I was as surprised about this as you might be as there were no precursors that
the Phantom would even be in this movie.
... & the Phantom of the Opera closes in on Nell rather quickly, but
thank god Steven came home just in time, & he figures out all the clues
that Nell has taken all the film to decipher in no more than 5 minutes before
forming a rescue party together with Byron & Luis - who of course die in
the process, they had cannonfodder written on tgheir foreheads right from the
beginning anyway - , & like a knight in shining armour, Steven saves Nell
from the Phantom of the Opera, even though the Phantom of the Opera plunges a
knife into his belly.
Of course in one of this overused twist endings, the Phantom of the Opera
isn't really dead & comes after Nell again ... & maybe yet again after
the movie is over since - wouldn't you know it - his corpse is never found ...
This not-too-bad slasher might be Tobe Hooper's best movie after Texas
Chainsaw Massacre - which isn't saying much since he has turned out
mainly crap after that movie -m, as Hooper here at least tries to build up
& maintain suspense, & for a good part of the movie that even works.
However, when he throws in the Phantom of the Opera towards the ending (though
it's not called that, actually, but Coffin Boy, a boy who fought his way out of
his dead mother's womb when she was already in her coffin) it just turns silly,
since it throws pretty much the whole mysticism-murder-mystery-build up
out of the window, instead aiming for the near-supernatural serialkiller
variety that has already been overused in the 70's with the Friday
the 13th- & Halloween-series. & when the film
takes a macho-turn with Steven - who has done pretty much nothing during the
rest of the film - turning up to save his little woman, that's really too much
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