Weekend of Fear (1966)

Directed by Joe Danford [Other horror films: N/A]

Okay, this is an interesting one.

Weekend of Fear has a pretty generic plot – a young woman (Mikki Malone), following an argument with her fiancé (Tory Alburn), finds that she’s being stalked by a mysterious man (Kenneth Washman). And that’s it – it’s a short film, running at about 65 minutes, and much of it is Malone’s character trying to hide from Washman’s, all the while wondering what the threatening man wants.

Based on that plot, Weekend of Fear doesn’t have much going for it, that is, unless it was overly suspenseful, and I hate to say it wasn’t. It’s the execution of that plot that makes the movie stand out more. It doesn’t make the movie good – it just makes it noteworthy.

What’s also noteworthy is the fact that this was a lost film for a long time. I watched what seemed to be a VHS rip on YouTube, so how this was released on VHS at one point, yet was lost for decades, is beyond me, but there you go. So lost was this film that, even now, after it’s been unearthed since June 11th, 2021 (the date of said YouTube video), it has only 22 votes on IMDb, and watched by only 19 members of Letterboxd.

So we have a previously-lost black-and-white film with a somewhat basic plot, and the way they chose to do the dialogue gives it an extra notable feature. See, most of the dialogue here is first-person narration, being the thoughts of the main character (Mikki Malone). A couple of other characters have their thoughts examined, but it’s 98% Malone’s.

What dialogue isn’t first-person thoughts is obviously dubbed afterwards, and it’s always awkwardly done. There’s a “conversation” at the end of the film that doesn’t feel remotely like a real conversation because of this.

It’s an odd, clearly lower-budget film. I appreciate that it has a regional feel, and seems to have been filmed in California, but that doesn’t make the film itself any better. Even at 65 minutes, it felt like it was dragging, and the suspense definitely felt muted, partially, perhaps, because of the way they went with audio (not that there was much in the way of dialogue, and without first-person narration, this could have been a silent film).

Even another thing worth noting – while I do think this can classify as a horror film, it’s also very much a psychological thriller. Technically, I know there are people out there who don’t think Psycho is horror, which I think is a stretch, but this movie is one that I could see that case being made with better justification. I think some of the sequence with the woman hiding from the man, and portions mostly in the latter half of the film, can move the needle a bit toward horror, but as always, it’s up to each individual viewers (and for what it’s worth, IMDb currently labels this ‘horror,’ whereas Letterboxd labels it ‘thriller/mystery.’

And speaking of which, the mystery behind why this man is stalking the main character is laughably ridiculous. We find out toward the end of the film exactly what’s going on in a lengthy monologue by a character we didn’t even know up to that point, which is always a good sign. It just felt goofy, and even goofier is that final sequence, and a quick camera zoom and freeze-frame to play us out.

Mikki Malone (in her sole role before a string of pornos in the 1990s) does okay here. She certainly looks frightened at times. Other times, though, she looks bored, and if I had to read the script for this one multiple times, I can understand that. I’ll give it to Kenneth Washman that he looks threatening with a knife. Ruth Trent did add some amusement toward the end, but that’s not to say it was a great performance.

Weekend of Fear is a fascinating little movie, but I don’t think it’s a good one. To be fair to the film, I don’t hold it against them that they didn’t want to film a traditional people-talking-to-each-other movie, and veered in another direction, but it’s also fair to say that I don’t know if that was a stylistic choice or a choice made for them by some sort of budgetary constraints.

It doesn’t really matter – Weekend of Fear, even at it’s short runtime, just drags too much. It’s not exactly terrible, but I think calling it an underwhelming experience is more than fair.

5.5/10