Susan Tyrrell must have led an interesting life.  Being Oscar nominated for Best Actress for 1972’s Fat City didn’t dissuade her from going on to do Andy Warhol’s Bad or playing Queen Doris in Richard Elfman’s deeply weird Forbidden Zone. 

In 1981, she starred with Jimmy McNichol in the off-beat horror film Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker.  She’s his aunt, and she takes him in after his parents die in a horrible collision with a truck that’s hauling logs.  In an impressively gruesome sequence, we see (in slow-motion, no less) one of those logs go through the windshield, then through the driver’s head and then out the back window.

That happened because the driver discovered too late that the brakes weren’t working.  I wasn’t surprised by later dialogue where a character raises the possibility those brake lines had been cut.  And there’s only one person we can suspect of having done that.

Cut to 14 years later, and McNichol is the star of his school’s basketball team.  It is made obvious from the first time we see Tyrrell with him that she has strong incestuous urges.  This probably doesn’t bode well for Julia Duffy, as McNichol’s girlfriend.  Tyrrell even refuses to let her come to the house for his birthday dinner the next night, as she will be his “date”.

It’s no surprise how poorly she will react to the full-ride athletic scholarship he’s been offered to an out-of-state college.  She will stop at nothing to keep him by her side.  In a scene with odd beats and pacing, she seduces a TV repairman in her home, then changes her mind when he gets randy, and she then stabs him to death.  In what seems like impossible timing, McNichol arrives home just when the murder happens, and he ends up holding the bloody knife.

As if Tyrrell’s behavior wasn’t schizophrenic enough, she’s upstaged by Bo Svenson when he shows up as the lead detective.  For somebody who played detectives in so many movies and TV shows, it’s like he forgot how to act like one for this.  His behavior is distracting and, as he’s playing a detective, he’s from professional.

You see, he’s convinced McNichol is gay and, because of that orientation, the boy killed the repairman.  Those offended by the word “fag” will be appalled by number of times the detective says it.  He also holds such interesting beliefs as McNichol must be gay because he was raised by a single mom.  Svenson will twist any new information to support his theories and reject anything that challenges it, even when fellow detective Britt Leach can tell Tyrrell is the murderer.  He even deduces might not even be the first time she’s killed.

Tyrrell’s performance is the reason to see this film, both for reasons both good and bad.  It is impossible to take your eyes off her in any frame she’s in.  At first, she has odd twitches that hint at a cracking psyche.  In the third act, she flies straight off the rails in a hysterical, deeply batshit manner that a better director would have reigned in. 

Go figure, that third act is when the picture succumbs to the conventions of the slasher genre, which is a shame, as it had been an unsettled and unsettling mess before then.  The film defies expectations of what one would expect from a murder investigation film, as a viewer would identify with the detective by default.  But Svenson is so immediately repellant, I had trouble figuring out where our sympathies are supposed to lie.  We were more than halfway through the film when it started to dawn on me this homophobic psychopath is the other villain, and we are supposed to instead champion such figures as a closeted basketball coach.

Earlier, I mentioned the odd pacing of the murder scene, and that is something which plagues the movie throughout its runtime.  Just as it is hard to define exactly what makes great editing, it is often just as confusing to pinpoint what constitutes bad editing.  All I know is I found myself aware of the seams, which is never a good thing.

In addition to the odd performances from Tyrrell and Svenson, there are some other interesting aspects of Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker.  I was pleasantly surprised to see Bill Paxton, younger than I have seen him before but already fully-formed as an actor.  He effortlessly steals the few scenes he’s in. 

I also always find it interesting when movies wear their influences on their sleeve, such as Tyrrell’s shrine to the Virgin Mary, which immediately brought to mind Carrie.  And if one shrine seems a fair indicator of an unbalanced mind, what does one make of the revelation Tyrrell has two shrines?

Dir: William Asher

Starring Jimmy McNichol, Susan Tyrrell, Bo Svenson

Watched on Code Red blu-ray (which also has a fascinating bonus feature of select moments of Tyrrell watching the film for the first time)