Jenõ Hódi is the founder and managing director of the Budapest Film Academy. He studied in America at Columbia University, where he was taught by Milos Forman, Brian De Palma, Frank Daniel, John Avildsen and Dusan Makavejev. This all leads us to the films he made in the U.S., and like any director breaking into films in the 1990s, he made movies that would succeed on video and cable, like Guns & Lipstick and the vampire movie Metamorphosis. That also means that he has an erotic thriller on his resume. Or a slasher. It’s in-between, so maybe, just maybe, it’s a Giallo.

John Doe (Joe Paradise) is a maintenance man at Gotham College who deals with the abuse he’s given every day by killing rats in experiments and lining their bodies up in a fridge. He has a plan to use laced ice cream to murder women, which will get him a million dollars. What will he do with all that money? I don’t think he knows or cares.

One of his victims was almost Denise (Darnell Martin, who would go on to direct I Like It Like That, thanks Outlaw Vern!), who survives and ends up having an undercover cop named Dino Andretti (Jeffrey R. Iorio) protect her and her roommate Pamela (Monica Breckenridge). The police think John Doe is going to come back after Denise, and they’re right, as he comes after her just as Pamela finally shoots her shot and tries to go from roommate to partner. That’s a horrible time for a slasher killer to show up, but here we are.

But how he does it pushes this movie into another place. As Pamela is swimming, John pelts her with basketballs in the dark before getting close and killing her. Then, he Weekend at Bernie’s her body and then uses a chain to try and choke the life out of her. That’s commitment. How does she fight him? She uses a pitching machine to blast him right in the nuts.

Alright, I love this movie.

Not only does this have a heavy metal song over the credits, but the killer quotes Hall and Oates. The director made this at Columbia with other students before he graduated, yet it’s better than so many other slashers despite coming out in late 1988. A heroine who stops eating ice cream—which saves her life—so she can do a shower scene? I’m shocked that this isn’t winking at us more.

Dino may be the worst slasher cop ever, as he stays in the apartment with the girls, trying to make it with both of them, goes through Denise’s underwear, exposes himself to Pamela, and turns on gigantic sunglasses — the kind you buy on vacation as a joke and never wear — when told to settle down. He then ends up in a relationship with the final girl because you can’t get thrown off the force for this kind of behavior in a 1988 direct-to-video slasher movie.

Defund the slasher police!

How has this never been released by Vinegar Syndrome? It’s totally their kind of movie!