.
Another I wached a few minuess of on TCM when I came in last night, a 1980 slasher thriller film called
He Knows You're Alone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Knows_You%27re_AloneThe film received mixed-to-negative reviews, including one by Tom Buckley of The New York Times, cited "uncertain pacing, halting performances and innumerable technical flaws", while praising the performance of male lead Don Scardino.[18]
The Boston Globe's Michael Blowen faulted the film's script and direction as "slow and strictly second rate", adding "the production values are only slightly better than those in my uncle's home movies".[19]
Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times deemed the film a "standard grisly rampaging killer fare... there are the usual bows to Hitchcock... but He Knows You're Alone is really no more than just another by-the-numbers piece of sickening trash".[20]
In their October 23, 1980, edition of Sneak Previews, critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert lambasted the film as "gruesome and despicable", likening it to similar slasher films, such as Friday the 13th, Prom Night and Terror Train, all released the same year.[13]
Jack Mathews of the Detroit Free Press wrote, "Rarely has a horror movie worked so hard for so little. There are so many cinematic shock tactics employed—tacky eerie music announcing the killer's presence, shadowy forms in the foreground and background, slamming doors, blown light fuses, hands on shoulders etc.—that you're numb by the sixth killing."[21]
Jimmy Summers of BoxOffice magazine gave the film a negative review, noting, "He Knows You're Alone is another one of those low-budget thrillers that should carry in the credits line: "Based on characters and ideas developed by John Carpenter."[22] Additionally, Summers noted the lack of on-screen violence as leaving the "more blood-thirsty horror fans feeling cheated".[22]
John Dodd of the Edmonton Journal similarly deemed the film "unoriginal and unnecessary", and a "bloody, boring walk down the aisle".[23]
John Herzfeld of The Courier-Journal, however, praised the film's opening film-within-a-film sequence as a "wry twist", concluding, "Despite the incompetent script and some irregular pacing, He Knows You're Alone does deliver a few surprises and some suspense".[24]
As of September 2023, the film holds a 30% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 10 reviews.[17]
I got through about the first 30 minutes, and then only came back to it after that on commercial breaks from another movie I started watching instead. Aside from very early roles by Tom Hanks, Paul Gleason (the high school Dean in
The Breakfast Club, and the bone-headed detective making Bruce Willis' mission far more difficult in
Die Hard), and a few good looking B- and C-list actresses, several of whom debuted in this movie, there wasn't a lot to hold he attention in the film.
Some of the one-liners in the savage reviews of it are both funny and appropriately brutal.
