I guess NIGHTMARE ON ALCATRAZ could have been a decent little thriller. It tries to be different, with an actual historical figure taking the place of the anonymous slasher killer stalking 25 year old teenagers around some decrepit, forlorn location where they shouldn't be. The old "randy teens busting into the closed down facility to have an unauthorized party" gimmick is a tried & true formula, CHOPPING MALL being my favorite example. This time they choose Alcatraz and do so on the same day that escaped felon Frank Morris decides to return to find a map to a safe deposit box key. Morris stalks and kills the kids for no apparent reason other than to give the film a body count.
What is strange is that after all of the blood has been shed the story then concerns itself with Morris' attempts to live it up & collect his old loot. Did we really need the scenes where he and his squeeze snooker their way out of a hotel bill? Or attempt to go out for an elegant dinner and end up with an inept effeminate waiter? The movie comes across as two film treatments combined into one script for the sake of economy: A slasher film about kids being stalked in the crumbling remains of Alcatraz -- an idea that would find a more interesting form in SLAUGHTERHOUSE ROCK -- and a film about Frank Morris coming back from obscurity to slice up his old prison guards & find the hidden loot. By combining the two formulae the film waters down either premise and goes on for about fifteen minutes too long trying to give both story skeins equal attention.
Then there is the execution of the film in general, which is too inept to be involving and not goofy enough to be genuine bad film fun. Aldo Ray gets star billing and does his best with an over the top portrayal of Morris but his histrionics are out of place, creating confusion in certain scenes where he carries on in a blind rage with no real motivation. The kids are the usual unlikable bunch but even their murders aren't handled with any finesse, and Morris' motivations in killing them are a mystery. At one point a kid who was dispatched is brought back for a shock sequence where he's still alive and the survivors flee in terror rather than free him, suggesting that the fleeing in terror part was more important than anything else. And when you've seen one group of kids fleeing in terror you've seen them all, really.
The film has nothing new to offer unless it be the pop culture tour of Alcatraz hosted by Muhammad Ali's wife, though I seriously doubt that anybody would be checking out the film for a history lesson.
4/10
