Appointment with Fear (1985) User Reviews

Forget the appointment!

[lost-in-limbo · 2/10 · 22 August 2009]

Um, yeah. It's puerile… not wonder why the fetchingly detailed video artwork is eye-catching as it draws you in (and how many times have we've been fooled by that?) to only to find when you watch it. Boy what a mistake! Hey a friend gave this one to me (with a smile on his face), but in all honesty I don't know what to make of 'Appointment with Fear'? If this was supposed to be a supernatural slasher, it wasn't much of one. So randomly bizarre and tacky, but even more so deadly dull. It does seem to have a lot going on with something always happening, but the terribly thought-out material (it's a wonky script) is a complete shambles with numerously pointless developments (what was the deal with bum they virtually kept as a pet?) and unrelated padding that throws out ideas with nothing to entirely back it up. All of this build-up and all we get is one abysmally meandering set-up after another with no real groundwork. Tacked on is a lame climax, with an even lamer freeze ending. Ugh!

The concept which has a criminal lying in hospital in a coma, but managing to leave his body in a spiritual sense and go after his baby (no not teleporting, but in his mysteriously white van in psychical form) to murder it for the reason of staying the king (something of a Egyptian Demigod) for another year. He takes care of his wife, but the baby finds itself in the care of some hopeless teenagers that spend the night at forlorn house in the desert. Soon they find themselves caught in the terror in trying to protect the baby, as a lone, worn-out police detective is the only one who they can turn to.

I guess you call it plain dumb, or simply an interesting idea poorly realized, which has got to count for something. Director Alan Smithee (yeah I wouldn't blame them not wanting their real name tagged to this project) shoddily puts this low-end feature together with blotchy imagery and distracting techniques. The unhinged music score is overkill, editing around certain sequences is jerky and it seems to lose concentration with the camera closing in on redundant images… e.g. dolls? However it demonstrates a fluid glide in some looping camera shots when centering on the action at the remote villa. Then you even begin to question that! Atmosphere is non-existent with inept staging of the deaths (as most of them occur off-screen) and what we do see is impulsively ramshackle. They're bloodless and tensionless… oh no that's not good and our good old villain looks quite plain (while trying hard to evoke a serious face of pure evil!) and what he does is no better… driving about or just loitering around. As for the performances they're mainly annoyingly drab and oddball, however I didn't mind Michele Little as the main heroine, even though her constantly recording sounds with her microphone got numbing. The cast is made up by some faces that appeared in other horror/teen features like Debi Sue Voorhees, Kerry Remsen and Michael Wyle. James Avery shows up in minor part too.

"Appointment with Fear" is a drawn-out and hackneyed appointment that's well worth missing.

Appointment With Crap

[Vomitron_G · 2/10 · 12 September 2005]

I recently found a copy of this film on video at a video-store which was selling ex-rentals. I instantly remembered the cover (which was kind of cool and not shown here on IMDb - It was drawn by E. Sciotti who did the artwork for DEMONS, PHENOMENA, GRAVEYARD DISTURBANCE, NEON MANIACS,...) and the title from the days when I was an 11-year old kid. It also read on the cover "From the man who brought you HALLOWEEN - Moustapha Akkad presents". So, I guess any fan of horror-movies would give this one a chance, no? Well, was I in for a surprise...

The storyline: A dying woman, sitting on a porch in broad daylight, hands over her baby to an unsuspecting teenager asking her to protect it from her husband... who's lying in a coma in a mental institution. The teenager and her friends decide to go to this villa (to party, what else for) while being tracked down by the husband's döppelganger (emerging out of his sleep using some astral-projection or something)

Does this sound cool to you? Well, it's not. While this could be the premise of a more or less original supernatural slasher movie, instead you get bored to death, real slowly and painful.

The characters are all stupid, retarded or just plain weird. Even the baby looks like a mongloïd (so it's very funny when someone says "Oh, he's so beautiful") There's also an old bum with mental issues who lives in the trunk of a car. The detective, Kowalski, who tries to track down the husband/forestking/demi-god/döppelganger/killer(dig this?) has almost nothing to do. He always arrives too late at the scene of the crime, always sets fire to his car with his cigarettes (which is actually kinda funny and a good excuse to insert a car-explosion in the plot) and doesn't even save the day at the end of the movie. But he IS the best actor of the whole cast.

Then there's the villain. Who does even less than nothing. He's supposed to be an Egyptian Demi-God or something, but he has absolutely no special power whatsoever (except the fact that he can't be killed by bullets or fire). Most of the time he's standing in the dark, waiting, walking around or just sitting and contemplating. But he does carry a knife and crashes through a window (most exciting scene of the movie). But, face it, nobody crashes through a window like Jason Voorhees does!

I think there's a bodycount of five in the movie, but all of the killings are offscreen (yes, total rip-off). Or maybe at one point you see something rolling over the ground for approximately 1/3 second. I think that was supposed to be a decapitated head.

Needless to say the production-values were rather low on this movie. But they did manage to hire some dancers to do this hilarious 80's dance-scene with awesome choreography ("Why?", I kept asking myself, "Why?") How they eventually kill the villain, I will not give away in this review, but I can say that the dance-scene seemed to have a purpose after all... (curious? Rent the movie)

Oh, did I tell you about the completely unnecessary subplot about a traumatic experience of teenager Heather, involving a baby and a bathtub, which she expresses through her paintings (watch the almost incomprehensable flashbacks)

One more thing I liked about this movie was the mesmerizing look of the plastic tree with the white light coming out of it, symbolizing everything our godly villain stands for (I guess).

I almost forgot: this movie has some scenes in it which contain gratuitous nudity (but what do you want, it has teenagers in it)

OK, enough said! Except for the fact that Moustapha Akkad wasn't even on the credits of this film (only a production-assistant named Malek Akkad was mentioned in the end-credits). He must have had the common sense to realize he didn't want to have his name linked with this picture. A shame the promotional staff used it anyway.

The only good thing about this really bad movie I now proudly own is the nice cover by E.Sciotti. So for all you good horror-movie lovers out there: A year before this movie got released, another movie about a supernatural killer which emerges out of dreams was made: A NIGHTMARE ON ELMSTREET. So go see that one, or any episode of the HALLOWEEN movies or , hell, you can even check out THE GUARDIAN if you like your horror mixed up with mystical nanny-villains, trees and babies. But avoid APPOINMENT WITH FEAR at all costs, unless you have the right sense of humour or like to be amazed by a movie that set new standards for unlogical film-making in 1985.

A possible cure for insomnia.

[alansmithee04 · 2/10 · 15 July 2005]

A thoroughly disagreeable entry into the slasher genre, this film began life as "Deadly Presence". After the producers saw how gawd-awful the film really was, they fired Thomas and shot some more footage. Gowan's detective character and a bunch of others were added in a sort of parallel story and the whole thing renamed "Appointment With Fear." Aside from a couple of performances, this cinematic disaster's only redeeming value is its score. Written by ace composer Andrea Saparoff, the music is the only thing lending a little eeriness to what is otherwise an hour and a half of scare-free tedium.

Recommended audience: Weevils, chunks of granite, D-cell batteries and very very minor Egyptian deities only.

Uniquely weird slasher flick

[lazarillo · 26 May 2011]

This movie is indeed an incoherent mess, but it's so weird in its very concept that I can't believe it is merely an exercise in incompetence (despite the bad reviews and the "Alan Smithee" directorial credit). But neither is it one of those annoying, would-be "cult" films that tries very self-consciously to be "weird". It is UNIQUELY weird, which is the mark of a TRUE cult film, even if it obviously doesn't have any kind of a cult following.

It starts with a strange detective following an escaped mental patient who is driving a white van (shades of producer Mustapha Akkad's most famous movie). The mental patient stops to bloodlessly stab his ex-wife to death while she's sitting on someone's porch with their infant son. The dying women gives the infant to a ditsy teenager, who has just been performing a mime routine at the birthday party of a cranky old man next door. The ditsy teen gets a ride home with her very cute friend (Michelle Little), who doesn't seem to notice she is now carrying an infant. The friend is pretty weird herself--she constantly eavesdrops on people with a directional microphone and she has a pet hobo named "Norman" sleeping in the back of her flat-bed pickup truck (a "Crazy Ralph" type given to strange, philosophical soliloquies). Rounding out the cast is the cute girl's would-be boyfriend, who rides around on a motorcycle with a female mannequin in the sidecar, and a couple--a guy named "Cowboy" and a blonde girl--who are frequently playing cards and having sex, sometimes doing both at the same time. Eventually this kinda turns into a slasher movie as the killer comes after his newborn son, but a very bizarre one featuring astral projection and the Egyptian god of nature. . .

The most recognizable actor here might be the busty Debbisue Vorhees who played "Jason's" most gratuitously naked murder victim in "Friday the 13th Part V". She has a similarly perfunctory role in this as a casual friend of lead, who, while waiting for her friend to come home, strips down to her panties for a quick dip in the pool for no apparent reason, and is subsequently murdered. (It's not a much of a part, but I doubt anyone will complain). It's also nice to see Brioni Ferrell, who was memorable in Roger Corman's "Student Nurses", but never did much after that. She plays the mother of the ditsy girl, and is usually clad in a skimpy bikini for reasons that have nothing really to do with the plot. There are more boobs than blood in this one (but not really enough of either), and the action comes to a dead halt several times for a synchronized New Wave dance routine or some other weirdness. It probably won't appeal much to hardcore slasher fans, but I actually kinda liked it for some reason. . .

UGH

[waha99 · 1/10 · 13 August 2003]

Horrible, dreadful stuff. You know you're in for a film with little inspiration behind it when a mid-80's dance number in inserted in what could have turned out to be the best scene of the whole flick-the sex scene!

Sad and insipid; it makes other horror films of the 1980's look great in comparison.

Ouch, my poor eyes!

[Coventry · 1/10 · 4 May 2006]

Don't make the same mistake I did, please… If some person, whether it's a good buddy or a complete stranger, ever tells you not to watch this film, then take the advice and DON'T WATCH THIS FILM! "Appointment with Fear" easily ranks in the top 3 most retarded movies ever made and there's more than one reason why it ended up being directed under the pseudonym of "Alan Smithee". The basic premise is imbecile to begin with, not one dialogue in the entire stupid script makes any sense, and – despite being labeled as horror – it's completely gore-free and without tension. Worst of all are the insufferable characters, which give you the impression that this whole film-project had to be one giant lame and very unfunny joke. Allow me to introduce some of them: The 'hero' is a cop who wears suits that already went out of fashion in the 1930's and he has the strange habit of setting his own car on fire by accident. The female lead is a teenager who allows bums to live in the back of her pick-up truck and, as some kind of hobby, she monitors random people's conversations with a giant (and not very discrete) microphone. Her best friend likes to paint her face blue for no reason and she also give mime-shows to her senile grandparents. The heroine's boyfriend, to finish with, is a long-haired loser who keeps a modeling dummy in the sidecar of his motorcycle… Why? Because it's cool, of course! The "plot" revolves on a crazy killer who's in a coma but at the same time he walks around killing people whilst looking for his baby-boy son. He's supposed to be an Egyptian Demigod, even though he looks like an ordinary idiot. The whole thing is slow and every newly introduced sub plot goes nowhere real fast. The music is horrible; crappy 80's dancing is shamelessly used as padding and even the brief nudity-flashes are boring. Oh, and did I mention it's entirely gore-free? What a total piece of crap!

I feel cheated

[GoreMonger · 1/10 · 24 July 1999]

I was looking through the "Videos For Sale" bin at a local Blockbuster and came across this title. I saw that it was produced by Moustapha Akkad and it sparked my interest. I'm a huge fan of the Halloween series, to which Akkad has contributed greatly. On that basis I decided to buy it. The most exciting part of this movie is the ending credits. Only then do you know that the torture session is over. That's also when the true horror of the film set in for me..........I actually paid money for this garbage. Avoid this title at ALL cost. Moustapha Akkad should be ashamed to have his name associated with this title.

From the man who brought you Halloween!

[BA_Harrison · 3/10 · 3 April 2021]

Don't get too excited... this isn't an obscure movie by director John Carpenter, but rather a supernatural slasher from producer Moustapha Akkad, who fails to repeat the success he had with Michael Myers. This movie is such a mess that original director Ramsey Thomas was fired, with Akkad re-shooting and re-editing the film, slapping the resultant cinematic turd with the shameful pseudonym Alan Smithee. When a horror film gets the Alan Smithee treatment, you know it must be bad.

The film opens with a man staking out a house; he leaves his car to place a tracking device on a station-wagon. A woman emerges from a house carrying a baby; she drives off in the station-wagon, the man following in his car. They are followed by another man in a van.

Next we are introduced to Carol (Michele Little), who is using a parabolic microphone to record her ditzy friend Heather (Kerry Remsen), who is across the street, putting on an interpretive dance/mime performance for some old age pensioners (senior citizens love interpretive dance - who knew?). While this is going on, the woman with the baby pulls up at a nearby house; she gets out of the car, and hides her baby in a bush; soon after, the man in the van arrives. He wants to know where the baby is, and when the woman won't tell him, he sticks her in the side with a big knife and skedaddles.

Having finished her dance routine, Heather goes to see what is wrong with the woman, who has slumped on some steps. Barely alive, she tells Heather, 'Don't let him harm my baby', and hands the nipper over. Now, at this point, any rational person would call the police and give the baby to the authorities, but Heather is ditzy, remember? She keeps the kid, taking it to a party where she, Carol, and some other friends are celebrating their graduation. This makes the girls targets for the man in the van, who is actually the physical manifestation of the spirit of Attis (Garrick Dowhen), a patient in an asylum who has mastered the art of astral projection; he is the father of the baby and believes that he must kill it in order to remain being the God of Nature. Are you still with me?

Now this might not seem all that strange to those who actively seek out bizarre horror films, but there's more weirdness - so much more - guaranteed to have you scratching your head in bewilderment. There's Norman the philosophical bum (Danny Dayton), who sleeps in the back of Carol's pick-up truck; Bobby (Michael Wyle), Carol's love interest, who rides around on his motorcycle with a female mannequin in his sidecar, and who likes to play hide and seek before sex; and Cowboy (Vincent Barbour), boyfriend of Carol's pal Samantha (Pamela Bach-Hasselhoff), who, in the film's most oddball moment, appears outside the house where the girls are partying and joins a dance troupe in gyrating to some bad '80s music.

When Attis shows up for the finalé, the dancers vanish as mysteriously as they appeared, but Carol isn't helpless: she has her handy microphone to help locate the villain, and an even handier AK-47 which she uses to shoot the place up. She eventually destroys Attis by impaling him with a very pointy may-pole, the killer disappearing in a cloud of leaves. During all of this, the man with the tracking device, who we learn earlier on to be police sergeant Kowalski (Douglas Rowe), turns up to take the baby into care - but why are the child's eyes glowing green?

All of this nonsense is told in such a disjointed, eccentric manner, with wooden performances and lousy dialogue, that the film might possibly be the worst horror ever; either that or it's a surreal work of misunderstood genius. I'm torn between giving it 1/10 for being totally crap, or 6/10 for being a one-of-a-kind oddity. The only fair thing for me to do average these scores out to 3.5/10, although I am forced to round this down to 3 for only delivering brief side boob from the well-endowed Deborah Voorhees, who happily went nude for Friday the 13th: A New Beginning.

Appointment with Fear

[HorrorFan1984 · 3/10 · 27 April 2020]

An Egyptian king of nature must kill his newborn baby in order to keep the title for another year. He'll have to knock off a few teens in this mid-80's sleepy slasher - Appointment with Fear

In the middle of the day, a woman is followed by a man in a white van and then stabbed to death with a few bystanders around that witness the incident. Just before she dies, the woman gives her small baby to one of our main characters Heather and tells her to take care of it and keep it safe. Police officer Kowalski knows who the man who did it, but the problem is that the same man was locked away in a psychiatric hospital and all drugged up when the killing happened. There is mention of astral projection and the ability make things happen in the world despite not physically being there to do it (out of body actions).

We see the man in the white van following around the films heroine Carol and the other teenage bystanders from the murder earlier in the day (plus some of their friends). It appears that the man is trying to kill his baby because of an Egyptian power that makes him king of nature for another year if he can accomplish the murder. The remainder of the film is the man following the teens up to a large house party they are having in order to kill the baby that Heather took at the beginning.

Let's be real, Appointment with Fear is not a very good movie at all technically speaking. The quality of this movie is terrible when it comes to editing. We get strange voiceovers that don't match the actual voice of the actor who is talking. Plus there are a few times you can catch a shadow of the director or camera person in the frame. The actual plot and storyline with the astral projection serial killer is not terrible, but isn't used as much as it could have been which makes it overall super weak. There was not one standout in the acting department that was anywhere close to competent except for maybe Douglas Rowe as Sgt. Kowalski.

I did want to give this movie a rating of 4 at least, because it didn't start all that bad for a lacklustre 80's slasher. But an hour in, you at least expect SOMETHING to have happened to push the story along and to see more murders. Well none of that happens and the movie just kind of falls into a complete mess category for me.

3/10

I kinda love this dumb movie

[BandSAboutMovies · 6/10 · 19 October 2019]

If there's one adage that watching slasher films teaches you, it's to never judge a book - or VHS tape - by its cover. Any time you see the words "from the man who brought you" or "from the people behind" you may not be getting the whole story.

Appointment With Fear is "from the man who brought you Halloween..."

Dear reader, if you were anything like me in the video store days - or now, as I grab a movie and try to convince my wife to watch it - you might read that legend on the cover and think, "Well, I never heard of this John Carpenter movie!" That's when you realize that if you want to watch these kinds of movies, you need to learn what that line means.

Here, the man is really Moustapha Akkad, the producer of every single Halloween film up until 2002's Halloween: Resurrection. In fact, other than four other films - this would be one of those four - that's his complete output. So one assumes that if anyone wants to be the "man who brought you" it would be Moustapha.

Before introducing the world to the man with the darkest eyes, he produced and directed the film Mohammad, Messenger of God, a movie that he hoped would bridge the gap between the Western and Muslim worlds. Seeing as how Muslims dislike any image being made of Mohammad, even making this film was near-impossible, necessitating him needing to finish it in Libya, as Muammar Gaddafi allowed him to film the final six months of the picture there. The vilified world leader would also fund Akkad's 1980 film Lion of the Desert.

Sadly, Akkad died in 2005 along with his daughter, the victim of the 2005 Ammad bombings. Today, he has streets in Syria and downtown Beirut named after him, as well as a school in his hometown of Aleppo.

Appointment With Fear was directed by Alan Smithee, who again if you haven't learned a lot about movies, you'd think was the worst director ever. But the name was a pseudonym created in 1968 by members of the Directors Guild of America. It was to be used whenever a director, dissatisfied with the final product, proved to the satisfaction of a guild panel that they'd lost creative control of the film. The director was also required by guild rules to never discuss their involvement with the film.

Here are a few examples of Alan Smithee's filmography:

Student Bodies: This 1981 slasher send-up was directed by Mickey Rose and produced by Michael Ritchie, who used the Alan Smithee name to hide his involvement.

The Twilight Zone: The Movie: Second Assistant Director Anderson House used the pseudonym for the first segment of the film, a rare example of a second unit director taking the name. He was distressed over his involvement in the scene where actor Vic Morrow and two children were killed.

Bloodsucking Pharaohs In Pittsburgh: The Alan Smithee here was Dean Tschetter, who was the art director of The Wraith and has gone on to be an illustrator for Disney films such as Mary Poppin's Returns and The Sorcerer's Apprentice.

The Birds II: Land's End: Even though Rick Rosenthal asked for his name to be stricken from this film, when Showtime put it out on VHS, they left his name on the box art. Whoops. Tippi Hedren was even less lucky, as she was in the film yet doesn't play anyone connected to her role in the original. She said of the film, "It's absolutely horrible. It embarrasses me horribly. I'd hate to think what he {Hitchock) would say!"

Hellraiser: Bloodline: After completing his vision of the film, original director Kevin Yagher (yes, the very same special effects expert of movies like Child's Play and the second through fourth Freddy Krueger films, as well as the TV series) quit the movie after Miramax demanded new scenes, reshoots and a happy ending.

The Alan Smithee behind Appointment With Fear was Ramzi Thomas, who worked with Akkad on several films, including being a script consultant on Lion of the Desert and a producer on Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers. This film was originally called Deadly Presence, but after Akkad saw the first cut, he fired Thomas, re-shot a considerable amount of new footage and then re-edited the movie himself.

This is the only film Ramzi would ever direct. And strangely, this is a slasher that no one discusses. Well, get ready.

A lot of this movie can be traced back to 1974's Psychic Killer. Except here, the killer is a comatose man in a hospital bed who has been possessed by the Egyptian tree god Attis. You have to love a movie based on a god who was raised by a he-goat before he was set to marry the daughter of King Midas. As their wedding song was being sung, she became transcendent with power and he was so moved that he cut off his penis. Any priest that follows Attis must do the same and become a eunuch before gaining the title of Galli. And oh yeah - he's also the Phrygian god of vegetation, as his act of cutting off his John Thomas is seen as a representation of the fruit which dies in winter, only to be reborn in spring. I'm certain he was honored, but seeing as how his disco stick never grew back, I'm not sure exactly how much.

I told you all of that for basically no reason, as none of this mythology figures into this film. But hey - at least we all learned something today.

The film begins with a man getting out of his van and stabbing his wife, who gives her baby to Heather (Kerry Remsen, Pumpkinhead and Ghoulies II) a punk rock babysitter with crazy blue Jem and the Holograms makeup. Yes, I realize this movie already makes little to no sense.

Detective Kowalski is on the case, though. He discovers that the man who stabbed his wife (known only as "the man" in the credits and played by Garrick Dowhen, who is also in Land of Doom) is in a mental facility but is able to astrally project himself. He's under an Egyptian curse which forces him to kill his baby so that he can continue being King of the Forest.

Heather's friend Carol (Michele Little, Radioactive Dreams, My Demon Lover) is a snoop who loves her crazy parabolic microphone and records everyone and everything. She's kind of like Negativland's The Weatherman, who recorded nearly every single moment of his life and transformed it into bursts of music. Except, you know, her recording makes her into a detective.

The ancient spirit gets busy, blowing up the detective's car, killing a vagrant, sending evil dreams to Heather and then killing one of their friends named Samantha (Pamela Bach, one-time wife of David Hasselhoff) in the jacuzzi.

James Avery - Uncle Phillip himself - shows up, as does Debi Sue Vorhees, who was Tina in Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, which was made the same year as this movie. In this movie, all she does is eat cheese, show a little side boob and then get killed.

The ending is nonsensical, as the killer finally gets the baby and tries to sacrifice him near a tree. Carol keeps shooting the killer to no effect before piercing him with a pole. Her boyfriend Bobby saves the baby, whose eyes soon glow green. Is the baby the killer now? Why didn't the psychic force just go into the baby from the beginning?

I have more questions. So many questions. Why does Bobby keep a mannequin in his sidecar? Why does Heather put on mime shows for her senile grandparents? Why is there no gore? Why do Carol and Bobby play hide and seek before they have sex? Why does the homeless man live in the back of Carol's truck? Why would he act as a servant for these kids? Why did they go to that big mansion? Why did the makers of this film stage an elaborate dancing scene just as the action was heating up?

I fear that in writing so much about this movie that I've made it sound like a pretty solid affair when it's anything but. It's a slow, plodding and boring mess that only rewards you with insane bursts of strangeness, as if it were made by aliens from another planet who had no innate knowledge of how human beings speak, act or exist with one another. It's the kind of movie only I could fall in love with. And that's why I won't recommend it to you, because it's much like the baby in this film, a strange green eyed monster that must be protected from the coma-induced no cock having Egyptian gods of the world that only want to give this movie one star on IMDB and say that it's a horrible film.

What I could gather...

[Beast-5 · 28 June 2002]

I fast-forwarded through most of this movie searching for something, anything interesting,but never found anything. A bunch of bland morons stalk around in the dark and some guy lies around in a coma,and he's possessed by a tree spirit or something. Moustapha Akkad went from HALLOWEEN to THIS. A complete waste of valuable celluloid.