DAUGHTER OF DEATH (1983) ***

Director Paul Nicholas made this the same year he directed the immortal Chained Heat.  Hey, when you’re hot, you’re hot.  Like that film, it features the sexy Sybil Danning.  In fact, both movies would make a good double feature, even if they are as different as night and day.

Dr. Wilding (Tony Franciosa) has a precocious daughter named Julie (Isabelle Mejias) who loves freaking people out with her pet snake.  Instead of being interested in boys, she’d rather be out hunting with her daddy.  When she witnesses her mother raped and killed by an intruder, Julie doesn’t lift a finger to help her because she thinks this will be her chance to be with her daddy forever.  However, daddy moves his mistress (Danning) in almost immediately, which sets Julie down the path of revenge.

Nicholas gives us several sequences that play with our expectations and/or just plain gross us out.  The scene where Julie witnesses her mother’s death is truly shocking, mostly because it’s our first inkling of how twisted Julie (and the movie) can be.  The part where she plays a game of hide and seek with her new stepbrother and locks him in an empty refrigerator is genuinely suspenseful too, and the scene where Julie catches her father in bed with her stepmother and imagines it's her he's making love to is appropriately icky. 

Danning is great as the likeable stepmother who becomes the de facto Final Girl in the end.  Not only does she deliver a strong performance, she also gets a terrific topless scene.  Franciosa does a fine job as well as Julie’s clueless father.  Mejias makes for a good psycho too.  A Killer Kid movie is only as good as its Killer Kid and Mejias is a memorable one.

For an hour or so, Nicholas creates a gonzo anything-goes atmosphere that puts you on the edge of your seat.  Once Julie tracks down the rapist who killed her mother and hires him to knock off her stepmother, things start to get a bit farfetched.  The final reel is so entertaining that it makes up for some of the lapses in the third act.

Nicholas didn’t do a whole lot after ’83.  He only directed three movies after that sterling year, his last being Luckytown in 2000.  All I’ve got to say is come back, Paul.  We miss you.

AKA:  Julie Darling.  AKA:  Bad Blood.  AKA:  Julie.