If you saw Maxwell Caulfield go berserk in The Boys Next Door and thought to yourself, “Hey, I want to see him play another sexy crazy person,” then Mind Games is for you. The ’80s were close to ending when MGM dropped this thoroughly odd psychopath movie that, while never quite reaching its potential for memorable mayhem, delivered just enough cheap thrills to keep you watching.
The days of not-so-hot serial killers in movies looked to be over when Mind Games was released, what with filmmakers then playing on the audience’s conflict between attraction and repulsion. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I realize, yet Caulfield was an objectively attractive man. And if you’re like me as I watched Mind Games, you are constantly negotiating between your feeling hot and bothered for Caulfield’s character, and your feeling disgusted by his crimes. There was also the should-be appreciated fact that filmmakers, in this instance director Bob Yari and writer Kenneth Dorward, understood that ugliness doesn’t equal malevolence. Evil often comes in pretty packages.
Caulfield plays the seemingly charming and harmless grad student in this movie, and his latest victims are the Lunds. The father and young son (Edward Albert and Matt Norero respectively) take to the traveler immediately, whereas the troubled Lund matriarch (Shawn Weatherly), a former fashion designer who’s since become resentful of her homemaker role, is wary. And she’s right to feel that way, because Caulfield’s character is secretly unhinged. We see the first sign of his deranged behavior after he takes the Lund boy out for an overnight in the nearby woods. What should have been a ghost-stories-around-the-campfire kind of night ends up being more wreck-some-random-house-and-kill-the-family-pet.
The antagonist gets entangled in the marital discord happening inside that road-tripping RV before carrying out his own nefarious plot. The wait before reaching that point, though, is rife with family drama, ropey acting and general corniness—David Campbell’s music choices will cause tonal whiplash—so if you’re expecting some masterclass in domestic tension, like in The Stepfather, then you’re going to be disappointed.
That said, Mind Games offers mild amusement and, at times, creepiness. The villain’s diary confession, regarding his plans for the Lunds, is more unsettling than anything that actually happens in the movie. Well, besides a scene of a grown man stripping down to his tighty whities and sharing his sleeping bag with his equally underclothed and much younger companion. That part was skeevy, even for me.
Watch Mind Games on YouTube.
Short Cuts is a recurring series that spotlights unsung, overlooked and underrated horror. These mini-reviews single out the reasons why these titles might be worth your time.
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