‘Sweet Sixteen’ (1983) - Jim Sotos. 

Talented, if somewhat workmanlike filmmaker, Jim Sotos became briefly notorious for unleashing the erotically audacious Grindhouse roughie ‘Forced Entry’ onto a sin-seeking audience in 1975. Making this competent, intriguingly sedate slasher in ’83 that, sadly, got a little waylaid in the overstuffed hack n’ slash fear forest of the early 80s. Deservedly renewed on HD, ‘Sweet Sixteen’ has now proven itself to be a remarkably resilient fright flick. Robustly made, the engaging plot boosted by a charismatic cast, featuring preternaturally stolid sheriff, Bo Hopkins, ace scenery chewer, Susan Strasberg, serially sinister Michael Pataki, and the inimitable szeeze-ball, Don Stroud really out-skeezed himself! 

After a bellicose bar-room scrap between long-haired, fleet-fisted Jason (Don Shanks) and his sweaty, perma-inebriate antagonist, Billy Franklin (Don Stroud) the serial slashing proceeds in earnest! Billy’s younger brother Johnny’s (Glenn Withrow) drunken tryst with ‘days-away-from-sweet-sixteen’ Melissa Morgan (Aleisa Shirley) providing an anything but a happy ending! With the town’s increasingly indignant populace in a royal ferment about these grisly slayings, Sotos's sharply-honed slasher engagingly escalates into a bloody-minded whodunnit. Wherever dusky, raven-haired temptress, Melissa tarries a corpse is soon to be found in her beauteous, seemingly innocent wake! At her elaborate birthday bash, a long-fulminating family secret erupts from an especially vexatious id to provide the catalyst for some righteous final act carnage.

While ‘Sweet Sixteen’ certainly isn’t the most outrageously gruesome offering of the period, it is, perhaps, one of the most underappreciated. The delightfully twisty-turny narrative, uniformly solid performances, and the titillating, fleshly-roving eye of Sotos voyeuristic camera translates into some thrilling early 80s teen-creaming, blood-spilling grooviness! ‘Sweet Sixteen’ remains a terrifically watchable slasher with a memorably hysterical climax!

(I can’t say too much about ‘Forced Entry’ without incriminating myself, but in a truly free-thinking, non-judgemental society one should still be able to draw one’s own conclusions to a film’s merit, regardless of its perceived immorality!)