ARE YOU IN THE HOUSE ALONE?
It'll make you wish "no" means "eject"

  Don't ask me why this 1978 TV movie got a youth-restricted-viewing sticker at Blockbuster - other than an off-screen rape (and some talk about it), you'd scarcely know it from an extra-long afterschool special.  Hell, I don't even know what makes it a horror movie, except for the lurid box art.

A young woman (Kathleen Beller, who is or was married to geek-rock pioneer Thomas Dolby) is raped, and she's afraid to say who.  So the film, ever accommodating, takes us back a lil' ways to show us what all led up to that ghastly night.  She's a high school student who's into photography, and she's recently been dating a new guy, so its smiles all around.  (and she has an absolutely brilliant smile - her hair's way too long and has more split ends than a hippie commune but I'm tellin' you, that smile is bewitching)  Unfortunately, she doesn't have all that much to smile about for long (boo!) because some jerk is sticking stalker-type notes in her locker and harassing her on the phone.

I wasn't really sure what to make of this movie at first; it's made obvious from minute one that it's about rape, but the approach at first seemed like a super-tacky riff on the ol' "She was askin' for it!" thing, which needless to say put me off just a wee bit.  But as the film progressed, it, well, progressed, and showed more level-headedness in the approach to the subject matter, even though the conclusion reached in the end is totally glib and over-simplistic.

None of that makes for a very good movie though, hell, this pooch almost put me to sleep a number of times.  Once it was made clear that Beller wasn't going to be doing any more smiling, all that was left to sustain my interest was 35-year-old Blythe Danner's dead-ringer resemblance to her daughter (you might've heard of her) and the lengthy parade of bad, bad fashion.

Check out the doo-wop trio with matching red jackets.  Or the guy with the plaid tam-o-shanter (showing up in at least three scenes).  And Dennis Quaid is here too, 24 years old with an ugly pink sweater (a phase he was still trying to grow out of six years later in Dreamscape).

All that's left to hold this turgid mess together is a LOT of filler with the girl's parents, and a few possibly unintended chuckles.  Funny how times change...how many high-school photography teachers can you think of which can get away with saying "Gail, why don't you take a sexy self-portrait.  Knock yourself out, sweetheart."?

I don't mind a movie that isn't really worthy of its subject matter, but if it's going to ask me to take it seriously, it had better earn it.  Not recommended to anybody except people curious about what Gwyneth Paltrow's going to look like in ten years.

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