By the time Curtains made it to theaters in 1983, it didn’t know whether it wanted to be a highbrow Hitchcockian thriller for grown-ups or a bodice-and-viscera-ripping slasher aimed at the kids — and how could it? The writer and director wanted to make the former (with a plot focused on six actresses vying for a juicy role in a film while snowed in at the prospective director’s mountain retreat), and producer Peter Simpson knew he could sell the latter. “The model for director Jonathan Stryker in both [Curtains director] Richard Ciupka and [writer] Bob Guza’s minds was Klaus Kinski,” Simpson told the vintage horror blog The Terror Trap. “And I said, well … good luck explaining that to the teenage audience.” Disagreements eventually led to Ciupka walking off the job, leaving it to Simpson to finish himself — which he did, with a new crew (hence two sets of credits for “Act I” and “Act II”), after the finished half of the film sat on a shelf for a year. I found myself rooting for the movie all the way through, even if its tangle of half-cooked subplots peppered with sexual intrigue and kills (including a famous one that will make you think twice about ice skating alone) offers more misdirection than genuine mystery. Grab a pal and a tub of popcorn and see if you don’t do the same. STEPHEN TRAGESER
Curtains
