SWEET SIXTEEN (1983)

SWEET SIXTEEN (1983)

Tagline: Why are all the boys dying to meet Melissa?

(Horror, Mystery, Mamma We’re All Crazee Now) [R]

In this one, a 15-year-old teenager Melisa moves into a town where the strain between the Native Americans and the rest of the town was strained to say the least. So as young men are trying to either date or violate Melissa and start showing up dead, the blame goes to Greyfeather an elder in the area. After he is quickly murdered, the town looks for another Native American to blame, but who is really the killer? 

First off, the biggest thing that throws me off in this entire movie is the fact that there is a super cheesy song right in the middle of it about Melissa that would have been far more suited for GREESE than a horror flick. This thing comes right out of the blue and just smacks you in the face in between kills just as you are getting drawn into the film. The other thing that distracted me was that I kept expecting Dr. John Morgan played by Patrick Macnee (THE HOWLING) to turn into a werewolf. 

This is one of the slower-moving 80’s horror flick and even though we get a couple of killings at the beginning there really isn’t any action for about 45 to 50 minutes. What does carry the film in spite of that, is the tension in the town and some really good performances. Unlike a lot of thrown-together 80’s slashers, this thing has a pretty solid dialog which really helps and the cast is actually pretty good.

Acting-wise, the biggest star from my perspective was Dana Kimmell who plays Marci. She is pretty solid in this and you get to see a bit of character growth for her as a person who kind of starts to get won over by another character. Horror fans will know Dana as the final girl Chris from FRIDAY THE 13TH PART III. She stopped acting in 1990 and her last film was also a horror movie called NIGHT ANGEL. Don Shanks plays Jason Longshadow and is fine but doesn’t get much screen time. He is mostly known for HALLOWEEN 5: THE REVENGE OF MICHAEL MYERS. Patrick Macnee who I mentioned earlier plays Patrick Macnee. He definitely plays a very unlikable character here, but this movie is full of people that suck. Aleisa Shirley plays the movie's main character Melissa and is fine for this role, but isn’t great. She is also known for SPACEHUNTER: ADVENTURES IN THE FORBIDDEN ZONE. 

In the 80’s there were like 100 million slashers and most of them are pretty rough with cheese and nostalgia levels keeping them alive to this day. SWEET SIXTEEN in spite of its cast is largely forgotten. You can find this on DVD, but I rarely ever see it referenced by the 80s horror community. One issue here is that in spite of some good writing and a pretty unexpected but simultaneously lackluster ending is that it’s just not that interesting or scary on a slasher horror level. 

Overall this isn’t one of those movies I don’t feel the need to watch again and I wouldn’t put it in my Halloween-Horror-O-Thon. It’s not absolutely terrible, but it’s not fantastic either. The moral of this movie is don’t be a racist and that not everything is what it appears to be.

SWEET SIXTEEN gets a 3 out of 7.

GRAPHICS ARE THE PROPERTY OF SWEET SIXTEEN PRODUCTIONS AND ARE USED FOR REVIEW PURPOSES ONLY.