13. House On The Edge Of The Park (1980)
Alex is a mean as hell thug who follows a woman to a carpark, rapes her and strangles her, taking her locket as a souvenir. Later on, Alex is working in a garage with his dumb friend Ricky. They are discussing going to a disco later. Suddenly a car pulls up. A yuppie couple - Tom and Lisa need their car fixed. Ricky solves the problem and the yuppies invite Ricky and Alex to a party. They arrive at a large house and three more yuppies are there - Gloria, Glenda and Howard. The yuppies are looking for kicks and so are Alex and Ricky - this generates considerable tension. Gloria asks Ricky to do a striptease to a record, Alex is displeased with this humiliation, and he is further annoyed when the yuppies play a rigged game of cards with Ricky. He takes Howard, beats him and urinates on him, tying him to a piano leg and declaring that it is his party now. Rape, abuse and degradation is the order of the day with Alex's rape of Lisa being a lowlight. A teenage girl called Cindy arrives at the house and Alex slashes her boobies up. Ricky objects to this and Alex promptly disembowels him with the razor. Meanwhile Tom has found a gun and turns the table on Alex, shooting him a few times and booting him outside. The yuppies converge on Alex. Apparently the young woman he killed at the start of the film was Tom's sister and this has all been a set up to get revenge on Alex. They all shoot at Alex and he dies. Presumably this will be seen as an act of self defence. The premise of the film is extremely dopey - the whole revenge bit on Alex is daft, but House on the Edge of the Park still retains many interesting elements. There is the appearance of the legendary David Hess as über scumbag Alex and also the appearance of Giovanni Lombardo Radice as Ricky. Both perform very well in the film. For hardcore gore fans and sleaze fans, the movie delivers the goods in spades. And it has an amazing disco soundtrack from the legendary Riz Ortolani. The film works as a very gratuitous violent movie. It will disgust the vast majority of viewers, but if you know your Euro horror, you will probably enjoy it because of its perversity.