'Death Weekend' (1976) William Fruet.

Slick, cocksure rich creep, Harry (Chuck Shamata) is on a breezy weekend jag with his fiesty squeeze, Diane (Brenda Vaccaro) when they fatefully have a high-speed vehicular beef with a boozy gang of thugs that grimly escalates into a thrillingly tense, sporadically brutal home invasion nightmare! Also known as 'The House by The Lake', this pacy Canadian exploitation gem is less sleazily mean-spirited than 'The Last House on The Left', and yet, for me, 'Death Weekend' is more of a riotously entertaining hell ride! Matching, William Fruet's gutsy mise-en-scene, the continued watchability of his 'Death Weekend' is, perhaps, due to the memorably combative sequences between, Don Stroud's hyperbolically hateful villain, and, Brenda Vaccaro's bruised, yet resolutely unbowed Valkyrie.

Fruet's gritty backwoods Canuxploitation, while derivative, is a luridly well-made, darkly compelling B-thriller that concludes dramatically in a gruesome, spectacularly vengeful manhunt. While it would be fair to say that the grindhouse wheel wasn't reinvented with, Ivan Reitman/Andre link's production Death Weekend, it is certainly no less crushing than its sleazier US/ european counterparts. The escalating frenzy of redlining Muscle cars,home-invading headcases, arbitrary sadism, and righteously bloodthirsty revenge is percolated to an espresso shot of visceral intensity by capable director, William Fruet!