AniInterview Sorry, this movie sucks

VividSimon Simply Perfect

Acensbart Excellent but underrated film

Cooktopi The acting in this movie is really good.

Caroline Phillips A creepy, darkened furniture store sets the stage for this better than usual slasher flick. The characters are fairly interesting and the set pieces aren't too bad. There's a crazy nasty decapitation in the unrated version of the film (the Code Red Blu-Ray includes this as an extra feature) that will truly boggle your mind. It might be one of the best effects I've ever seen. Hide and Go Shriek has a lot in common with other 80's body count films like Chopping Mall and The Initiation, so if you enjoyed those, you might get a kick out of this. It's worth a look for 80's slasher fans.

Mr_Ectoplasma "Hide and Go Shriek" follows a group of high-schoolers who have just graduated. Naturally, to celebrate their adulthood, they decide to spend the evening throwing a small party in one of the kids' father's furniture store after hours. But a cross-dressing killer has arrived to crash their party game of hide and go seek.Drawing on pre-established slasher traditions that were honed by many films in the early–mid-eighties, "Hide and Go Shriek" doesn't really get any points for originality. The setup is predictable, and the furniture store setting is reminiscent of the shopping mall backdrop in "The Initiation" or even "Chopping Mall." Kids have sex, they are effectually murdered, and a jarring synth score punctuates the deaths. What the film does have that distinguishes it a bit is the gender-bending killer, which, save a few rare instances, does mean the film was a bit ahead of its time. Director Skip Schoolnik plays with the killer's image effectively, providing eerie fleeting shots of a masculine figure in a negligee running through the store; the prologue of the film shows the killer being raped, which sets the stage. At other times, the killer appears in men's clothing, donning a blonde wig stolen from store mannequins. Each of the images are well composed and eerily rendered.The acting is a mixed bag, and some less-than-stellar dialogue doesn't exactly help matters, but by eighties slasher standards, the performances here are far from the worst. In true slasher fashion, the gore is ramped up here, with some brutal and inventive death scenes. As is the case with the majority of the film, the last act isn't particularly fresh or interesting, but the reveal at the end is definitely unorthodox in the slasher world.Overall, "Hide and Go Shriek" is not bad as far as eighties slasher films go, especially those from the latter half of the decade, a time when the well seemed to have run dry. The film doesn't offer much in way of surprises, but it is an entertaining and mostly well made film. The scuzzy, gender-bending villain who shifts from guise to guise is what really makes the film stand out, and is where most all of its tension and intrigue is generated from. 7/10.

acidburn-10 "Hide and Go Shriek" came out towards the end of the 80's where the Slasher Genre was going stale and many of them going straight to video. Hide And Go Shriek though was one of the last and one of the best titled, even though it is a fun ride there's just not enough of the teens die.A small group of teens have just finished high school and are heading for college and are about to celebrate they're last summer as youngsters, so they get the idea to have a party in a furniture store which is owned by one of the teens father. Unbeknownst to them, a tattooed ex-con, who works at Fine Furniture, lives in the back. The teens set up shop and begin a night of trysts and games of Hide and Go Seek. But someone else has stayed after hours and they begin playing a deadly game of dress-up and die.Hide and Go Shriek plays its hand with an unusually sleazy manner. Not that the murders are particularly graphic, but there's enough homoerotic subtext to keep even the most practiced film geek on their toes. From an early and hilarious scene involving two boys working out together before one of them says "see you in the showers," and takes a healthy bite out of a banana to the killer dressing in drag, it's a feast of euphemisms and cross-dressing.It would be easy to say that this movie was oddly cast with untypically regular looking kids with a penchant for dinosaur earrings, surfer shorts and skinny ties, but alas, it was only the end of the 80s where stone-washed was a household word. With a mixture of good acting and bad acting, the killer and the bimbo (Annette Sinclair) stand out as the most interesting and talented of the bunch. But Rebunka Jones (credited here as Bunky!) comes across as the most memorable character in the film. In all her banana clip glory, she sneers and leers so much you start fantasizing about her ugly demise.All in all "Hide And Go Shriek" is a fun enjoyable ride, it certainly has it all irritating teens, nudity, bad acting interesting death scenes even though too many of the teens survive adding less tension to the final scenes, a definite must see if you're a fan of the 80's horror scene.

Skutter-2 Hide and Go Shriek is probably a slightly better than average slasher movie. Kind of damning with faint praise really but it does what one would want from a slasher movie and doesn't really excel or stand out in any particularly negative or positive way. The plot revolves around a group of eight teenagers, four couples, who decide to have a post-graduation party in the furniture store, which is owned by the father of one them, one night. Unfortunately for them there is a killer in the building along with a scary looking ex-con who is an employee of the store and living there temporarily who might have some connection with the killer. Naturally they get up to the usual slasher teen hijinks and are picked off one by one.It would kind of redundant to go into a detailed plot description of Hide and Go Shriek as it follows the standard formula or the slasher pic with little straying from the formulas. It begins with a pre-credits sequence in which we see the killer, a dude in cruddy tenement slum putting on a suit and liberally applying makeup to his face, although we don't actually see a proper shot his face, before picking a prostitute and knifing mid-coitus. I initially thought that there would be some kind of twist revealing the identity of the gender confused killer given they make such a point of not giving us a good look at his face but nothing like that happens. After this we are introduced to our leads before they move quickly to the slaughter point, were they are to be locked in for the night and are slaughtered. There're a fairly unremarkable bunch, complete with eighties big hair and styles, all quite bland and whitebread- there are no token dorks or ethnic minorities and are conceivably a group of individuals who might actually hang out together. I will give the director credit for casting a slightly hotter than average group of actresses and for getting three out of the four naked during the movie, with the fourth coming close. I think he should have, purely for the completion's sake.... no other reasons, honest.For the first two thirds of the movie the plot seems to revolve around reason for the group of characters to split up. Playing hide and seek (Twice- once would have seemed a strange thing for a group of supposedly seventeen year olds to be doing but twice, even stranger), splitting off to have sex and looking for the missing members of the group once the killer finally starts to pick off some of their number. It actually takes a while and the kills are fairly thin on the ground as the killer spends a lot of time hanging around and acting creepy and menacing in the shadows watching the teens. The setting is actually quite good but the building seems like an odd choice for a furniture store- multiple stories, a seemingly labyrinthine layout, a clunky service life. The cat and mouse stuff is kind of fun. The killer has a penchant for disguise, namely dressing in the clothing of his victims in order to lure the others to their deaths. He particularly favours the woman's clothing, making use of the wigs from the store manikins, and at one point puts on the lacy black lingerie one of the girls had brought to surprise her boyfriend. Needless to say he is surprised. Just another thing you will never see Jason or Michael ever doing. For the most part he keeps to the shadows and when we do get a good look at him in the climax he is again wearing a lot of makeup and in S&M getup. He is certainly one of the more memorable killers from a generic eighties slasher.To the films credit once it hits the fan and the teens realise what is happening they act in a reasonable manner for this kind of movie. They actually stay as a group and don't split up, even the more panicky ones don't completely spaz out and run off on their own at any point, and try to get out of the building. Despite a few bad decisions they do behave in a fairly rational manner for characters in this kind of dreck. The conclusion is over a bit too quickly and there is a very predictable 'twist'.On the whole Hide and Go Shriek is an amusing runaround if you're in the mood for a cheesy and derivative eighties slasher. It has all the components you could ask for- gore, cheesy synth music (Reminded me of the works of John Carpenter), bad acting, gratuitous nudity, eighties fashion victims and a memorable and hammy bad guy.