Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker
It was both a tragedy and a miracle, Bill and Anna Lynch killed on their cross-country road trip to visit her parents when the brakes on their car failed in the mountains, their car colliding with the truck in front, careening off the road and into a ravine, plunging into a river where it exploded, but their young son Billy safe back home in the care of his aunt, Cheryl Roberts, who raises him as though he were her own.
Fourteen years have passed, and Billy is the star of the high school basketball team, looking to the future and hoping for a scholarship which will allow him to attend the same university as his girlfriend, aspiring photojournalist Julia, but Cheryl thinks his ambition should be simpler, staying home, as devoted to her as she has been to him, refusing to accept that he is growing up and has desires of his own.
A tangled thriller of a deeply dysfunctional family released in 1981 and later classed as a “video nasty” when it arrived in Britain under the title The Evil Protege in 1987, the subject matter of Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker is not as extreme as might be anticipated for a film carrying that notorious label, but nor is it what might be expected from William Asher, a director most associated with the throwaway feelgood fluff of the beach party movie genre.
Starring Jimmy McNichol and Julia Duffy as Billy and Julia, both older than the teens they play, she almost thirty at the time of filming, the film belongs to Flesh + Blood’s Susan Tyrrell as the monstrous matriarch Cheryl, controlling, clingy and with no boundaries, masquerading as caring guardian but oblivious to anything but her own needs, unable to face rejection and reacting with rage and violence when challenged, sabotaging Billy’s tryouts when he dares to defy her.
A prowling animal with no impulse control, a murder at Billy’s seventeenth birthday party leads to questioning by Detective Joe Carlson (Snowbeast’s Bo Svenson) who is unconvinced by the story he is told but who fails to follow up, instead led in a different direction by homophobic prejudice when he finds out victim Phil Brody (Project Blue Book‘s Caskey Swaim) was in a secret relationship with basketball coach Tom Landers (The X-Files‘ Steve Eastin), the only adult with whom Billy has a healthy and appropriate relationship.
School bully Eddie (Aliens’ Bill Paxton’s second credited screen role) using this revelation as ammunition, beyond the outrageous opening car crash scene, shot by Jan de Bont who was soon replaced as cinematographer, for the most part Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker focuses on emotional rather than physical trauma, disturbing viewing which falls into cliché as it tries to resolve itself but carried by Tyrell giving a fearlessly unhinged performance wrenched from Greek tragedy, the worst monsters those who convince themselves love justifies their actions.
Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker will be streaming on the Arrow platform from Monday 16th March
