Sweet Sixteen

Storyline

Sweet Sixteen, A beautiful lonely girl named Melissa tries to make new friends from a town she’s currently living in. The only problem is, each of the boys that she spends time with end up brutally murdered. Her sixteenth birthday is on the way, but Melissa turns out to be a suspect when it seems she’s the last person who has seen her boyfriends alive.

A terrific Early 80s Teen-Terrorizing Classic With a Wonderfully Hysterical Climax!

Sweet Sixteen, Talented, if somewhat workmanlike filmmaker Jim Sotos became briefly notorious for shooting the sexually audacious Grindhouse roughie ‘Forced Entry’ (1975) before making this intriguingly sedate, well-polished slasher in ’83 that initially appeared to get a little waylaid in the plentifully overstuffed hack n’ slash fear forest of the early 80s. ‘Sweet Sixteen’ (1983) has now proven itself to be remarkably resilient fright flick, since it was robustly made, with a remarkably intricate plot given extra gravitas with a considerably weighty, more than capable cast, featuring preternaturally stolid sheriff Bo Hopkins, reliable scenery chewer Susan Strasberg, serially shifty Michael Pataki and the eternal B-movie slime-ball Don Stroud! After a bellicose barroom scrap between long-haired, fleet-fisted Jason (Don Shanks) and his perma-sweaty, inebriate antagonist Billy Franklin (Don Stroud) the serial slashing begins in earnest with Billy’s younger brother Johnny’s (Glenn Withrow) drunken tryst with said titular ‘days-away-from-sweet-sixteen’ Melissa Morgan (Aleisa Shirley) having anything but a happy ending! With the beleaguered town’s increasingly indignant populace now in a royal ferment about these grisly slayings the sharply-paced thriller escalates into an engagingly bloody-minded whodunit, and wherever dusky, raven-haired temptress Melissa may choose to tarry in this dusty backwater town a ruinous corpse is sure to be found sprawling bloodily in her beauteously teen-aged, seemingly innocent wake! Melissa’s elaborate birthday bash becoming the tumultuous catalyst for this rather neglected slasher movies final curtain carnage, with a long-fulminating family secret erupting dramatically from an especially vexatious id thereby engendering a wonderfully hysterical climax! ‘Sweet Sixteen’ certainly isn’t the most outrageously gruesome offering of the period, but the film’s delightfully twisty-turny narrative, uniformly solid performances and the titillating, fleshly-roving eye of Sotos voyeuristic, camera translates into some terrific early 80s teen-terrorizing grooviness!

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