Appointment with Fear

Plot synopsis:
A man (Garrick Dowhen) in a white Ford van gets out and stabs his wife on the portico of a house. Before she dies, she gives her baby to Heather (Kerry Remsen) and urges her that he must be kept safe, knowing that his father will try to kill him. The case is followed by Detective Kowalski (Douglas Rowe), an off-beat, seedy looking detective. Kowalski later finds out the killer is in solitary confinement in the state mental facility but is somehow leaving his body in spirit and is under an Ancient Egyptian curse which gives him a need to kill his baby to be "King of the Forest" for another year. Kowalski later visits a specialist seeking advice on how to confront the Ancient Egyptian spirit and curse. Carol (Michele Little), a friend of Heather with a love of recording sounds, spots the white van following her in her pickup truck and becomes suspicious. She informs her love interest Bobby (Michael Wyle) of her fears and he dismisses them and punctures the tire of the van which is parked nearby.
Heather takes the baby to a luxury mansion house, where she takes care of it with Carol. She has a dream in which she predicts the murder of the baby and becomes extremely anxious. Detective Kowalski meanwhile has his car hijacked in the wilderness by the killer spirit and blown to smithereens. The killer learns of the baby's whereabouts and unknown initially to Carol, kills another of her friends and an old vagrant who lives in the back of her truck at the house. He then murders Samantha (Pamela Bach), another of Carol's friends in the jacuzzi. After discovering Samantha, Carol runs outside with a shotgun and shoots at the white van, although the killer is not present. Then, after discovering the body of her other friend, Carol remarks that she thinks the killer is trying to kill the baby. Carol orders Bobby to go upstairs and to protect Heather and the baby and vows to "kill the bastard". Bobby discovers that Heather is missing and the baby is alone and then departs on his bike/side car and finds the detective. The killer breaks in through a window and is set on fire by Carol, prompting the spirit to leave the burning body and manifest himself again. The killer is then seen leaving the house with the baby in his arms and is confronted by Carol with a shot gun and orders him to give up the baby. When he refuses and lays the baby down by a tree and attempts to perform a ritual, Carol shoots him several times, with no effect. Bobby and the detective arrive on the scene and the detective urges her to pierce the killer with a nearby pole. As she does so a dramatic scene occurs with a flash to the body in the mental ward and it explodes and is followed by a strong wind where the spirit had been. Bobby presents the baby in safe arms to Heather who remarks "Isn't he beautiful". As she looks away supernatural green lights appear in the baby's eyes as the credits roll.

Tags: murder

Review:
Uniquely weird slasher flick.
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.
Forget the appointment!.
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.
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..
UGH.
UGH.
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!.
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!.
A possible cure for insomnia..
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..
I feel cheated.
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..
What I could gather....
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..
Appointment With Crap.
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?
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.
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..
This is one of the worst pieces of junk I have ever seen, as not a damn thing happens until the final 10 minutes.
This is one of the worst pieces of junk I have ever seen, as not a damn thing happens until the final 10 minutes.
All the characters are boring and stupid, and the story is incredibly boring, plus the music score was way too cheesy for my liking.
I stupidly bought this for a $1 at a pawn shop because Moustapha Akkad was the executive producer for this, but I regret spending even a dollar, and the ending was just plain stupid, plus the surprise at the end with the baby was completely predictable.
There is tons of walking around, lots of boring dialog, and hardly anything happening to keep you interested and, there is absolutely no gore what so ever, plus the acting is extremely bad!.
There is no one to root for, and most of them I wanted to get killed off, plus it was also very hard to pay attention to at times as well.
The dialog is very bad, and it's extremely cheap looking and amateurish, plus it's got no imagination or creativity at all either.
I have nothing else to say about this turd, other then this AVOID!.
The Direction is terrible.
Ramzi Thomas does a terrible job here with inept camera work, and keeping everything moving at a snail's pace.
The Acting really isn't even worth mentioning.
Overall AVOID!.
BOMB out of 5