Critique: Whoa. Something scary is going on in Potter's Bluff and just about the whole town is in on it. Don't trust anyone in Potter's Bluff! But the people of Potter's Bluff aren't quite as friendly as they originally appear to be. Mr. Dobbs the coroner and Sheriff Gillis, if neither of them is in on it, have an impossible case to crack. This always overlooked film has recently found play on the scifi channel March 2002, written by the playwrights of Alien, is a very well made and suspenseful horror movie, with a few memorable chills. The acting is top rate--Jack Albertson's last film--, and the story is chilling. The music is good, the make-up special effects are very good and you won't know what's behind this nightmare until the very end. Watch for the tow truck driver Harry. He's Robert Englund who played Freddy Krueger in the Nightmare on Elm Street movies. Stan Winston, who won the Oscar in 1994 for special effects for Jurassic Park and directed Pumpkinhead brings very frightening effects here without making a mess and the duo that brought you Alien, Ronald Shusett & Dan O'Bannon, wrote the effective screenplay. Like in his later zombie project Return of the Living Dead, which he also directed, a very tight script (Alien and Total Recall are excellent - O'Bannon co-pens a little-known winner.

Plot Summary: "Welcome to Potter's Bluff - A New Way of Life" reads the sign. It ain't kidding. The people of Potter's Bluff seem friendly enough, and they sure do love their cameras! A Photographer "Freddy "taking pictures at the beach, meets a beautiful woman "Lisa" who right away takes off her shirt to be photographed for Playboy Freddy promises. She asks "Do you ant me, Freddy?" As he approaches her the Potters Bluffers beet him with a shovel, tangle him in a net, gas him and casually light him on fire while filming and photographing. They light him on fire after beating him nearly to death. Starts with a bang! Sheriff Gillis (James Farentino) meets with nattily dressed Coroner William G Dobbs to investigate a car flip in which they discover the burned Freddy. The locals toy with returning cop (M.A. in criminology before he came home) as waitress--she who lit the match--exclaims how terrible the occurrence was, while serving the sheriff coffee. A drunk seaman guy is likewise massacred by the community. Sheriff meets with nostalgic coroner and self-styled artist--fighting the death of memory--by restoring the dead for a final presentation. Sheriff asks if the Freddy could have been burned then placed in the car? Sheriff asks hotel guy, who says there was a guest disappeared yesterday. They search the room of a photographer, but there is no evidence of a name. The hotel guy testifies that the sheriff's wife visited the disappeared man. She testifies that he sells photographic equipment to the school naming him George LeMoin. So they make out. Sheriff asks Principal Haskell, who says the school bought no equipment. Sheriff visits burned LeMoin. The doctor the nurse--playboy girl enters and murders the mummified Freddy with a syringe to the eye. The mortician complains that an unidentified corpse means no "magic" reconstruction for the family. After the grizzly deaths of two strangers in a short time, Sheriff Gillis begins to suspect foul play.

Untrustworthy wife arrive home, Gillis askes her where she's been? She maintains it was school meetings, and has to leave for PTA. She hands him a roll of film by her students to have developed. The next outsiders to drift into town are looking for gas and who waits on them but he murderous waitress and the formerly burned up photographer Freddy. Whoa. After they are forced off the road, they seek help at a dark house where they are photographede and surrounded and murdered by a cross-section of Potter's Bluffers. Driving through town Gillis hits a man who flees minus his arm. When Gillis can't find his bulletts, he discovers a Wichcraft volume bookmarked to making zombies, beneath which is a ceremonial knife. Janet claims she is teaching a unit on witchcraft. On the phone, Coronor Dobbs admits that the burnt man may have been burnt elsewhere. Towtruck Harry pulls the family's car from the ocean . Hotel guy reports he just saw the missing man working at the gas station--"You ask your wife!" Gillis watches his wife delight the children with her lecture on zombies. The creepy part, she testifies, is that the master has to hide the heart of the zombie. A dirty old man takes a hichhiking teen girl to potter's bluff where a gathering photographs her and stones her to death. As the 30's music plays, Dobbs restores the crushed woman's beauty, before she sits erect--reanimated. The coroner tells Gillis that the flesh on his bumper is 3 or 4 months dead, after which the coroner makes a shocking discovery before being murdered with acid by townspeople. Dobbs arrives to report to Gillis that the dead woman was body-snatched, and lets slip that Janet visits him all the time and recently insulted him by insinuating he had knowledg of the black arts.Gillis receieves a telex requesting the body of George Lemoyne be transferred home, and visits Dobbs to find assistant Jimmy applying mortician's wax to himself. Gillis orders graveyard sam to dig up Lemoyne while he looks for Dobbs, who emerges from a morgue coffin. Meanwhile Sam and Gillis coffin of Lemoyne, which contains only a wrapped heart. Gillis speeds off to photograph Freddy and telexes a search for criminal record of Dobbs and send Freddy's polaroid to St. Louis. He retrieves Janet's film from the coroded-hand pharmacist, and runs in to a changed coroner, who laughs at his questions regarding reanimation. A telex from Rhode Island confirms that Dobbs was dismissed, cencured and ejected in Providence for unauthorized use of bodies. Gillis races home and plays his new film chronicaling a sex murder in which she played the bait and featuring Dobbs. He screams at Dobbs who puts on a multimedia display of his triumphs including Janet, "My crown Jewel," a drowning victim. His work never sickens, never ages, is more beautiful than the living. Janet enters spouting spousal gibberish, and when a piece of her face falls off, Gillis shoots her: "Dan I'm dead. Please bury me!" Gillis shoots a grateful Dobbs and returns to the cemetery to find Janet in Lemoyne's grave begging him to bury her, which he does, as Dobbs plays Sentimental Journey and preserves himself. Crying on her grave, Dan is consoled by the entire corroding town. When Gillis returns to get Dobbs, he sees that the mudered man in the film is he himself.