Movie Review: Sweet Sixteen (1983)
So this is only really a movie that I’m aware of because it’s mentioned in the Crystal Lake Memories documentary, considering Dana Kimmell (Friday the 13th Part III) is in it. She’s not a great actress or anything, but I think she’s beautiful, and I’m all for looking into relatively obscure slasher films of the 1980s. Some are pleasant surprises, but most suck. I took my chances.
And this movie is quite obscure. It doesn’t have a single critic review on Rotten Tomatoes (and has an abysmal 19% audience approval rating), and it has fewer than 1,000 ratings on IMDB.
The story revolves around a new girl that has come to a small Texas town. Melissa Morgan (Aleisa Shirley) is turning sixteen in a week when the movie starts, and she has a habit of being the last person to see a bunch of men that end up violently killed. The first is Johnny Franklin (Glenn Withrow), who had been making out with Melissa before he dropped her off at home and was confronted by her father (Patrick Macnee). He got stranded on the road, and got stabbed an exorbitant amount of times.
We then meet the Burke family. We had met Hank Burke (Steve Antin) the night before, as he was friends with Johnny, and we now meet his sister, Marci (Kimmell), and their father, Sheriff Dan (Bo Hopkins, American Graffiti). They investigate Johnny’s car, and Marci finds his body.
Marci is my favorite part of this movie, and not just because she’s played by Dana Kimmell. She’s actually a really fun character, someone fascinated with murder mystery novels, and who wants something interesting like that to happen in their town. She comically tries to help her father with the investigation, and is the first one to confront Melissa about the murder, with her father and brother following shortly after.
Melissa tries to blame it on a Native American she had met the night before, Jason Longshadow (Native American actor and stunt performer Don Shanks, who played Michael Myers in Halloween 5). There is some kind of attempt at racial commentary with Native Americans, and it’s not 100% successful. But I appreciate that the movie attempted something by showing them as outsiders and victims of racism.
The Sheriff and Dr. Morgan go to talk to Jason about the murder, and he doesn’t know anything about it, of course.
Meanwhile, Melissa’s mother, Joanne (Susan Strasberg), a native of this town, is planning on getting everyone together to celebrate her daughter’s sixteenth birthday, which Sheriff Burke thinks is a good idea.
At school, Marci is going around talking about the murder, spreading suspicion of anybody at the school. Melissa meets Tommy Jackson, the captain of the football team, who she starts seducing so that he’ll pick up some marijuana for her. He gets stabbed that night when he’s waiting to meet a dealer. Melissa finds his body after getting scared by a Native American, Greyfeather (Henry Wilcoxon).
Marci and her brother wind up at the crime scene after their father and the other police are already there. Melissa insists that Greyfeather must have done it, but Sheriff Burke is skeptical.
Some people overhear this, and go and kill Greyfeather offscreen. Sheriff Burke finds the body in an apparent suicide, but Marci of course knows that wasn’t the case.
Marci confronts Melissa and says that she now has blood on her hands. When she sees that Melissa is upset, though, she backs off a bit, and tries to be nice. It’s an abrupt transition, and all of a sudden Marci is sort of on Melissa’s side, even defending her when talking to her brother.
Sheriff Burke learns some stuff about Jason, and he goes to his place and finds a bunch of knives there, which I guess were Melissa’s father’s. It all comes moments after the movie went out of its way to make Dr. John Morgan out to be suspicious, and then immediately we’re supposed to be suspicious of Jason. It’s strange.
We eventually find out what Jason’s MO supposedly was, and it’s thin. His mother was killed by a white drunk driver, who got off with a white judge and white jury. This all happens while everyone but Sheriff Burke is at the birthday party. Everyone but Jason, I guess, who’s being held at the police station. He fights his way out of his jail cell, though, beating up the one police officer at the station.
As the party goes on, Hank starts hitting on Melissa, and the two of them take a walk. While this is going on, Sheriff Burke is doing research at the library, looking at old newspapers of unsolved murders. He eventually thinks he has something when he sees an old story of a teen who had apparently hanged herself at a state hospital.
Meliss takes off her dress and goes swimming, and Hank joins her. Jason has shown up, and is watching them as they make out. Two other random guys from the party show up, too, just looking for a place to pee, but being unable to take their eyes off of Melissa.
Melissa comes out of the water and Jason confronts the two men, whom he has deduced were the ones that killed Greyfeather. He pulls a knife, but the two men overpower him, and Melissa sees this. They then try to rape her, knocking out Hank in the process. They end up knocking her out as well. When one of the men goes to get some water, the other man is attacked from behind, with the other one getting stabbed shortly after.
Hank is the next to get stabbed, but he runs off. Marci ends up at the lake and finds the bodies. She finds Joanne, Melissa’s mother, hovering over Melissa, and Joanne pulls a knife. Sheriff Burke arrives and saves her.
Sheriff Burke calls Joanne by the name Tricia, which she responds to. It turns out that Joanne died at the state mental hospital, and Tricia, her sister, assumed her identity.
It’s a strange ending, as Tricia delusionally believes Melissa to be Joanne. Apparently they were both beaten by their father or something when they were young, and I guess that’s why they were at the state hospital. It’s sort of set up about twenty minutes before, when the character that we believe to be Joanne reacts furiously when her father is brought up. But it’s still largely out of left field.
Anyways, Joanne/Tricia kills herself, and the movie ends on a fairly bittersweet moment with Melissa.
As I said earlier, sometimes you get a pleasant surprise with an obscure ’80s slasher movie, and I think this movie is one of those. It’s definitely no masterpiece, and the mystery angle isn’t really paid off in a satisfying way, but I find that it worked.
It worked because of the cast and characters. All the actors do decent jobs, and there are a lot of little details with the characters that make them feel real. Some of the best stuff that I haven’t mentioned comes with Kathy (Sharon Farrell), Sheriff Burke’s girlfriend, who is with him at the library, and has some fun moments as she’s frustrated with him taking so long.
Dana Kimmell may have been the main reason I saw this movie but even had she not been, I think I would have come away thinking Marci was the best part. The performance is pretty good, and I love the relationship she has with her father and brother. The stuff with her trying to be a detective and solve these crimes is pretty awesome. It feels very old fashioned, like something out of one of those murder mystery novels that she’s reading when we first meet her.
I’d wind up recommending this movie. There are some drawbacks, but it’s a pretty entertaining movie. There are a lot of characters, but most of them are quite enjoyable.
Rating: 6/10
