10 Underappreciated 80s Slashers

Seen by genre aficionados as one of the quintessential Slasher movies, The Mutilator doesn’t mess around with any complex plotting – it more or less gets down to the business of killing teenagers in ways that pushed the envelope at the time for gore and violence.

This was originally released as Fall Break, and feels like a bit of an extreme Point Horror for the screen under the context of that title. The story starts with a young Ed Jr killing his mother by accident with his father’s gun, an act that drives a wedge between father and son over the years.

Several years later, Ed Jr is at college and planning his fall break when his father contacts him to close up the family beach house - this gives Ed Jr and his friends somewhere to spend a few days partying. We soon learn Big Ed has hung around in wait for the teenagers and immediately starts to murder them in pretty horrific ways, setting the plot up for an inevitable showdown between Father and Son.

This is a no frills killer flick and Big Ed is a fantastic and brutal villain, he very rarely speaks and unlike other movies of the genre we know who is committing the murders from the outset. The effects work is some of the absolute best for the time, giving us some brilliant kill scenes.