The Rockville Slayer is perhaps one of the most difficult movies I've had to review. It wasn't difficult due to insurmountable depths, or thematic inaccessibility. No, it's a simple, straightforward slasher/whodunit: who hacked up four teenagers, and a few other choice victims later on, and why? It doesn't get more cut-and-dried than that, folks.

No, what makes this movie so tough is that, at times, a really liked it. I mean really liked it. It's charmingly simple and stupid. The actors turn in decent, if often unremarkable performances, with the exception of the awesome Robert Z'Dar (more on that later). Hell, despite being rife with cliché and full of gaping plot holes, it's a brainless, fun flick. Unfortunately, it simply doesn't gel together the way it could have, and should have.

After winning the homecoming game, four teenagers decide to park their cars out in one of the many fields in the lonely cow-town of Rockville for some window-fogging fun. The two boys, Tim and Steve, are as eager to discuss the game over walkie-talkies as they are to get in their dates' pants, culminating in Tim actually cooing “Did you see that pass?” as he buries his head in his girlfriend's breasts. Classic.

All of the heavy petting and gridiron innuendo is cut woefully short when Tim hears Steve and his girlfriend screaming over the walkie talkie, and attempts to drive over to investigate. This was one of the films brief flirtations with logic: something bad is going down, and the character actually makes an attempt to stay as safe as possible. Brilliant! Of course, the battery in the car is unable to provide the juice to start the engine (that's what you get for trying to use K-Ci and Jojo to your advantage, buddy), so Tim has to walk over anyways. Needless to say, all four are murdered before the title card even pops on screen.

The next day, the corpses are found by Deputy Sheriff Charlie Fisher (the peculiarly named Circus-Szalewski), who gets the double whammy of finding his little brother hacked up (Tim was his sibling) and watching his father's reaction to the discovery, despite attempts by Sheriff Duncan (Joe Estevez) to keep him away from the scene. The state sends in the quite tasty Detective Amy Rodgers (the adorable Nicole Buerher) to investigate. They determine that the killer was Jessica, an escaped mental patient who happens to be the older sister of one of the murdered girls. As they haul her in for questioning, she goes berserk, killing Amy's partner before she gets gunned down by Duncan. Case closed.

Or not. Charlie and Amy can't quite understand why Jessica would strangle her sister then stab everyone else, or why she would even kill her sister in the first place. Needless to say, it all gets complicated, with everything somehow tying together with Mary Burns (Linnea Quigley), the town bike who Charlie's father had an affair with years before, and a mysterious stranger lurking around town (Robert Z'Dar).

The main problem with The Rockville Slayer is that, to be brutally honest, the plot is a train wreck at times. There are certain scenes that have little to no bearing to the plot whatsoever. A prowler breaks into Amy's apartment, yet there are no repercussions felt later on in the film. Charlie, normally a teetotaler, gets drunk (off of two beers! Go Chuck!) and spends a hallucinatory night in the hotel room where his father slept with Mary Burns. Dare I forget Robert Z'Dar, who comes completely out of left field to tie up the plot with almost no indication of his existence up until his full introduction. The movie seems less like a full, cohesive film and more like a series of isolated events that feature the same characters.

But yet some of those isolated events blew me away. Robert Z'Dar, looking rather puffy as “The Man,” completely steals the show in the few minutes he's on screen. He's completely insane, and he shows it with unrestrained gusto. He's a pretty commanding presence, and a damn good actor as far as B-graders go. All of the other actors were quite competent, if a bit hammy at times, and the few gore scenes that were present were really damn good. Unfortunately, as I said before, these pieces never fully meshed together into a complete whole, leaving me rather disappointed at the wasted potential.

Video quality was very nice, with no print damage or grain to be found. Dark scenes had a little bit of artifacting here and there in the blacks, but overall it looked pretty good. The same can't be said for the audio, however. To put it simply, this movie is one of the worst mixes I have heard on DVD. While everything sounded all right, the mixing was positively horrendous. In stereo, the dialogue was almost incomprehensibly quiet in contrast to the sound effects which practically blow your speakers out. In 5.1, the problem becomes even worse, as the center channel can't hope to overcome the other four speakers as they punish your ears with overwhelming effects. Extras are limited to a director's commentary which wasn't particularly compelling, and a brief trailer.

I really, really wanted to like The Rockville Slayer, but the brief flirtations it had with greatness simply can't overcome the countless flaws. Sadly, it's destined to be forgotten.