Girls Nite Out

source: Girls Nite Out

I had high hopes for this slasher flick after learning that the killer wears a bear suit. Afterall, there's not many slasher flicks out there where the killer wears a bear suit is there? However, Girls Nite Out is very dull and nothing much seems to happen. There's a few nice death scenes, but they are spread out too much and there's loads of boring scenes in-between. The outside scene in the trees is quite good, especially the part where the killer attacks the girl in the cabin. The ending is one of those that makes you think "huh?" - I imagine the film makers thought it was clever - but really it was just silly. If you're a slasher completist then you may want to seek this out, but for anyone looking for an Entertaining Nite In - avoid it.

A sorority holding a scavenger hunt are attacked by a person wearing a bear suit, claiming to be somebody that is already dead. The company (Thorn Emi) that financed this picture must be ashamed of themselves, because this has got to be one of the worst slasher flicks from the 80's. It is good for a chuckle here and there, especially when the killer is killing the sorority girls with his bear suit. Otherwise avoid it. 2 out of 10.

A vicious psycho wearing a beat suit stalks and slaughters cheerleaders on a college campus during a scavenger hunt. It's up to security guard Mac (sturdy work by the always dependable Hal Holbrook) to stop the wacko. Director Robert Duebel relates the absorbing story at a steady pace, stages the bloody'n'brutal murders with nasty aplomb (the maniac screaming harsh words like "*" and "*" while butchering the gals adds an extra unsettling misogynistic edge), generates a good deal of tension and dark atmosphere, makes fine use of the college location, and comes through with a supremely creepy mood for the genuinely surprising ending, with a real doozy of a chilling final image. The solid acting from a capable cast holds the picture together: Julia Montgomery as the perky Lynn Connors and James Carroll as likable jock Teddy Ratliff make for appealing leads, David Holbrook delivers a suitably smarmy turn as obnoxious oddball jerk Mike Pryor, Richard Bright does well as the hard-nosed Detective Greenspan, and Rutanya Alda contributes a winningly spirited performance as friendly cafeteria waitress Katie "Barney" Cavanaugh (plus Alda really cranks the ferocious intensity to the alarming ninth degree at the jolting conclusion!). The college students are an engagingly goofy bunch; their wacky antics in the first half are pretty amusing and thus give the much more serious and harrowing second half an additional savage punch. The inspired use of bouncy and upbeat golden oldies songs on the soundtrack provides a further effective contrast to the ugly killings. Slice'n'dice fans will enjoy seeing Friday the 13th Part 2's Lauren-Marie Taylor and The Burning's Carrick Glenn as two of the psycho's victims. The shadowy cinematography by Joe Rovers rates as another definite asset. Kudos are also in order for the eerie score that largely consists of hellish moaning and groaning noises. And the bear suit the nutjob somehow manages to work, too, thanks mainly to the wicked Freddy Krueger-style knives on its paws and those strange googly large greenish yellow eyes. A worthwhile body count opus.

I remember back in high school, there was an English teacher who flunked me once because I deliberately spelled "night" as "nite" in an essay. I wish I knew about the existence of "Girls Nite Out" back then already, so that I could have told him even films use this spelling. Anyways, right after winning a high-school basketball match, the whole insufferable cast of teenage dorks is preparing for a big house party. Imagine yourself the type of flamboyant and outrageous party where the deejay plays irresistible hits like "Yummy, yummy, Yummy, I've got love in my tummy" and where the loudest, most annoying guy of the bunch tells eerie stories to petrify the girls. He tells about Dickie Cavanaugh, a former war veteran who went bonkers, killed a local girl and got put away in the loony bin. Naturally the killer escapes right in time to join the fun, as the very next day the school's famous annual scavenger hunt contest kicks off. The killer wears the basketball team mascot suit – a bear – and ingeniously replaced the fake plastic claws with genuine knives. He also phones the school radio whenever he makes a kill. The school's security guard is the father of crazy Dickie's very first murder victim and he's no less than Hal Holbrook! It's quite an accomplishment for a film like this to cast Hal Holbrook! Whoo! I really can't be too harsh on "Girls Nite Out", actually, because it's full of good intentions and potentially interesting ideas. The scavenger hunt sub plot, for example, is imaginative and the killer's outfit is hilarious. It's a bloke in a bear suit coming gruesome murders! How awesome is that? Makes you think differently of all those people in Disneyland and other theme parks, doesn't it? Ever wondered there could be psychopaths underneath those smiling, friendly faces?

Great dialogue there coming from David Halbrook's character. Wait a minute, HAL Holbrook plays the security guard in this movie. I wonder how that happened? Actually, I found it very funny that in practically every scene Hal Holbrook is in he doesn't appear in the same shot with any other character, like he shot all his scenes in one day and they edited him in where needed. I gave this movie a 1. There is no suspense, the killings look stupid, there are no characters to care about, it's just a mess. Julia Montgomery looked better at the bottom of a pie in Revenge of the Nerds. They even put in an interrogation/flashback sequence to fill the audience in on events we witnessed just 20 MINUTES AGO. I fast forwarded through the last half hour just so I could find out who the killer was. . .What a waste of time. OK, the bear suit was cool.

Absolutely one of the worst slasher movies I have ever seen. As Jim Harper writes in his book on slashers, Legacy of Blood, "Watch it if you have to, but you'll probably wish you hadn't." This recently came out on DVD from Media Blasters. The picture quality is about as good as one might hope for a cheap 1984 slasher, although the sound was very much out of sync as if the whole movie had been badly dubbed. No one else seems to have mentioned this, so I wonder if my friend's DVD player could have done that somehow? The title of the movie doesn't seem to relate to the film itself. There's no "girls' night out" type thing going on, and a lot of the movie focuses on male characters. Someone is found hanging in a hospital. For some reason, he's taken to be buried at night. Someone kills the drivers. The mystery is, was he not really dead or did someone else come along? A bunch of college students are having a scavenger hunt with clues given by the campus radio DJ. The DJ plays oldies, and in fact plays "My Baby Does the Hanky Panky" and "Summer in the City" twice. Lazy guy! The killer steals the goofy-looking bear mascot uniform of the college, adding large serrated knives into the claws. This could have been good, but the killings are really poorly done. The killer makes whispering calls to the DJ. There are a lot of phone calls in the movie. There's a fair amount of talking, too, that doesn't serve the plot or character development much. Oftentimes, dialog is devoted to recapping events. We even get tape recordings of conversations we heard quite clearly the first time. There are a lot of one-shots of characters, particularly of the DJ and the campus security guard. It made their scenes easy to shoot, I guess. About the only creepy image in the movie is of a dead woman who is posed in a seated position on a floor against a wall. She's tied up with something. No nudity in the movie that I recall. There is a bath scene, but it is a bubble bath. When the bather gets out, I don't think the camera shows even her bare shoulders! It stays safely on her head. In the end, the killer is someone I don't remember seeing earlier in the movie. When one shot towards the end appeared on screen, I said out loud, "oh, that better not be the final shot of the movie." Sadly, it was. Very poor ending to the movie.

Horrible film about a killer in a bear suit killing sorority members during a scavenger hunt. The acting and direction isn't any worse then other slasher films of the 80's, but with no scares, and a laughable premise & death scenes this does stand out as one of the worst of its kind. Rated R; Graphic Violence, Sexual Situations, and Profanity.

Set at Dewitt University, a small Ohio college, this one starts out as a routine drama after a basketball game which Dewitt U wins the title cup. Afterwards, the first 30 or more minutes has the guys of the team partying, drinking, talking and talking with their co-ed girlfriends, etc. Then, an unseen killer, posing as the mascot for the basketball team, begins stalking and killing a number of young girls from the cheerleading squad. Mostly riping their throats out with a hand-made 'claw' in one of the paws made from kitchen knifes. Meanwhile, Mac (Hal Holbrook) is the campus security guard, looking very puzzled to what's going on, who wades through a series of red herrings. Not the best of the early 1980's slasher flicks, with the bear costume the only original thing about this one. Worth a look for horror fans, with some nice touches to the low-budget. Contents: seven killings; inferior slaughter; one psycho in a bearsuit; no sex or nudity; lots of Golden Oldies on the soundtrack; much duller and dumber than usual. Note: proper punctuation is not all this one is missing.

Girls Nite Out (1984) * (out of 4) This entry in the slasher genre was made during the height (1982) of the era but it didn't see a theatrical release for a couple years and it's easy to see why. Our story takes place at a college where a maniac is going around slashing people up. That's pretty much all you need to know except it's important to point out that the killer has stolen the team's bear mascot outfit and that's about the only original thing you're going to find here. I'm really not sure what it says when you consider that it took four different writers to come up with this thing unless they just tried to keep outguessing one another in regards to how unoriginal they could actually get. The film's first thirty-minutes features all the suspects being introduced and of course there's a backstory about something bad that had happened previously. At around the thirty-four minute mark we finally get our first kill and then we're waiting around another twenty-minutes for the next one. For a slasher film it seems that the four writers knew how to throw in every cliché that they could yet they didn't seem to remember that fans of the genre wanted nudity, violence and gore. Well, there's not any nudity to be found and what violence we do get is rather childish and we're basically just left with seeing the aftermath. The murder weapon is like a bear claw that the killer uses to cut out the victim's throats but again, we really don't get to see much. The performances are what you'd expect to see from a film like this but we do get Hal Holbrook picking up a paycheck (or agreeing to appear if the producers gave his son a role in the film, which they did). At 96-minutes the film runs way too long, features a boring story and the entire identity of the killer just isn't very interesting. GIRLS NITE OUT has pretty much been forgotten and for good reasons.