The director has humorously pre-empted reviewers making snide reviews by including in the end credits a comment about saying that his film is a ‘stinker’.  Sight and Sound were wittier in a caption for a still, ‘Smellsville’.

The Reeker here is an updated version of the Grim Reaper.  His tools are far more power driven than a mere scythe.  And his smell is, of course, the stench of death.

It’s a pity in so many of these films that the central characters are so unpleasant/hedonistic/amoral that it is very hard to care whether the Reeker gets them or not or in what order they go (usually in a rather Puritanical way, the most permissive gets it first).   That said, there is an eerie atmosphere here as most of the action takes place at night in a deserted desert motel, ominously named ‘Halfway’ and five twentysomethings are bamboozled by mysterious sounds and part bodies and then terrorised by the Reeker.   Michael Ironside who can be counted on as a regular movie heavy is in fact a pleasant character who deserves more interest and sympathy than the main group even though one of them is blind and a girl from Johannesburg (therefore, she says, it takes a lot to scare her) are more congenial.

Just when you thought the ending was going to be more than a bit flat, there is a twist that turns the whole thing into a rather grim purgatorial kind of story.

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