Six folks gather together for a ten year high school reunion at their old alma mater located in the remote countryside. The motley bunch are knocked off by a mysterious moralistic psychopath (a gloriously hammy, stylized, and theatrical performance by T.G. Finkbinder, who went on to become an English teacher after he quit acting!) for their various "sinful" indiscretions. Director Constantine S. Gochis, working from an unflinchingly dark and grim script by William Vernick, does a sound job of building a considerable amount of gut-wrenching suspense and delivers a potently brooding atmosphere of pure dread and absolute hopeless gloom. Moreover, the murder set pieces are quite brutal and upsetting: one guy gets set ablaze with a flamethrower, another fellow has a dagger dropped on his head, a woman is drowned in a bathroom sink, and so on. The solid acting by the capable no-name cast helps a lot, with praiseworthy work from Damien Knight as greedy, cynical shyster lawyer John Sinclair, fetching future 80's "Head of the Class" sitcom regular Jeanetta Arnette as sweet, but promiscuous harlot Cindy, Nikki Carter as stuck-up rich snob Jane, Michael Hollingsworth as vain, preening actor Roger, Nick Carter as gross, lazy glutton Terry, and Gyr Patterson as lovely lesbian Kirsten. Moreover, the main characters are surprisingly well-drawn and even pretty sympathetic individual beings who aren't totally deserving of their ugly untimely fates. In addition, there's a striking ambiguity evident throughout which gives this picture an additional profoundly unsettling flesh-crawling creepiness: Whether this singularly sick and mean-spirited film is a savage condemnation of a rigid puritanical ultra-conservative morality run viciously amok or a stark endorsement of the same warped religious values is certainly open for the viewer to decide. Harsh and unpleasant for sure, with some perplexing oddball touches (what's that vague wrap-around stuff about an extra possessed thumb all about?),but undeniably effective and often genuinely harrowing just the same.

THE REDEEMER is an early slasher film with a character all of its own and plenty of creepy atmosphere to see it through, even if the story is rather light and stretched out. It was made on an indie budget which means that what takes place is very low budget indeed, but at the same time it manages to achieve a level of realism that a slicker production might have lacked. A bunch of former high school students head off for a class reunion but find themselves in a deserted, run-down old school and pursued by a masked maniac. The kills are inventive and there are some genuine creepy moments here, although elsewhere the tale is hampered by the inexperience of the cast and crew. Still, it's fun to see a slasher film made before certain tropes and cliches became entrenched in the genre.

Combining elements from both the slasher and the demonic horror sub-genres, The Redeemer sees a group of old college pals gathering at their now abandoned school for a class reunion where a killer is waiting to punish them for leading sinful lives.

The film opens in surreal style with a young lad, Christopher (Christopher Flint),emerging from a lake and boarding a bus, travelling to a church where he joins a tone-deaf boys' choir and gets bullied by a fellow chorister brandishing a knife. Soon after, we see the killer claiming his first victim, the school's caretaker, using the corpse to mould himself a latex mask which, in true Scooby Doo style, he wears to fool the group of unsuspecting, soon-to-be-dead friends.

The film then cuts to the arrival of the six victims, each of whom is guilty of one of the seven deadly sins. Once everyone is inside the building, the killer, disguised as the caretaker, locks all the doors and windows and, discarding his mask in favour of several other creepy guises, proceeds to bump off the victims one-by-one, his job made all the easier by the fact that the morons continually split up to wander around the vast school on their own.

The death scenes vary from completely bloodless to reasonably gruesome, the most graphic being a guy turned into a human torch (cool full body-burn stunt here) and another poor sap getting a large blade dropped point down onto his head from a height; however, anyone raised on a diet of '70s/'80s slashers will probably still find these rather tame in terms of gore.

What makes the kills much more fun and a bit more disturbing are their macabre trappings: the burn death is caused by a creepy life-size doll holding a blowtorch, while the blade death happens during a bizarre stage show in which the killer controls a freaky marionette. Another murder—a drowning in a sink—sees the killer wearing a disturbing clown get-up, while the final death scene reveals the killer to have two thumbs!

Once the six friends are all dead—the film is fairly unique in that there are no survivors—the action returns to the church where it is revealed that the killer was the priest (who I believe was being controlled by Christopher, who also has two thumbs). After taking care of the knife-wielding bully, the boy returns to his lake.

Frequently baffling, with awkward pacing, poor acting, and unlikeable characters, The Redeemer is far from a great movie, but it is so strange that I still recommend it to any self-respecting fan of bizarre, obscure cult horror.