Overrated classic but still watchable

Rating: 9/10 (21 February 2013)

When her friends start dying in their sleep of apparent suicides, a teen finds the source of the strange incidents to be the returning spirit of a killer murdered by her parents and seeking revenge against the children and must find a way to stop him.
This here is one of the more controversial of the classic-era horror films because a lot of what makes it so appealing is due to historical significance and reputation rather than any actual merits of the film itself. The main source of the film's reputation is the rather clever and unique manner of the killer's back-story, which here is made to showcase one of the more common archetypes of horror, the sins of the mothers and fathers repeating to their sons and daughters, but is done with such a unique and original take that there's a sense of originality in the work and that makes for some of the best sequences in the film like the bed-attack where she levitates in mid-air while being ambushed, the first encounter in the alley and the final showdown in the house with all sorts of nightmarish situations being utilized in the battle by both sides. These are high-quality scenes that work not only because they're incredibly creepy but also due to the big action-spectacle they endow the film with, and when it's coupled with the fun special effects present and several ingenious kills, this one does have some positives. The main flaw to this one, though, is the fact that there's a hidden clue to the film's sense of reality-bending that really makes it easy to write off a lot of what happens and takes a lot of the sting out of this one with how it handles its' main villain. That really makes this one feel a lot less creepy than it really is, as well as the ending which undoes everything that's happened and doesn't seem to really offer much beyond a lame jump, but otherwise this one still has some going for it.
Rated R: Graphic Violence, Brief Nudity, Adult Language, and an off-camera sex scene.