Slashed Dreams (aka Sunburst) (1975)

Director: James Polakof

Starring: Peter Hooten, Katherine Baumann, Ric Carrott, Anne Lockhart, Robert Englund, Rudy Vallee, James Keach, David Pritchard

More info: IMDb

Tagline: Rape is Something That Happens to Someone Else...

Plot: Jenny and her boyfriend are out in the woods for some fun, hiking and skinny-dipping, taking their time to get to their good friend, Michael, who has left civilization to live in the mountains in a cabin he built by hand. One night, 2 rednecks come visit and beat them up, raping Jenny and leaving them to die.

Sunburst (1975)

My rating: 3/10

Will I watch it again? I'd rather be...wait, uh, no.

You know how I loves me some crazy killer in the wilderness flicks. On one side of the genre you’ve got DELIVERANCE (1972) (awesome), RITUALS (1977) (fun) and on the other it’s straight up horror like FRIDAY THE 13th (1980) (quaint), FRIDAY THE 13th Part 2 (1981) (equally as quaint) and FRIDAY THE 13th Part 3 (1982) (less quaint but the quaint's in your face). So hows about a couple of crazy dudes rapin’ and killin’ for fun? Not so fast. This one sucks. It’s close to being a tremendous failure and it’s boring as hell. There’s waaaaaay too much bullshit leading up to the reasons why Robert (Hooten) and Jenny (Baumann) leave the big city to search out their ‘back to basics’ friend, Michael (Englund). Once they leave, it takes a while to find Michael’s cabin. While skinny dipping, Levon (Keach) and Danker (Pritchard) show up and creep the hell out of them and leave, only to return that night for some backwoods fun with Jenny. The rest of the picture has Jenny saying very little as she's understandably traumatized, Robert leaving her alone to find these guys and ends up finding Michael instead. Michael spends far too long talking to Jenny to get her to come around and snap out of it and then there’s the big confrontation between Robert and the trashy brothers.

The shape of things NOT to come.

It’s yawnsville from the get go. The only thing I really dug was seeing Rudy Vallee as the old guy who owns the general store and tells the kids to stay away from them there woods. Everything else was just ‘hurry up and wait’ for not much to happen. We get a hint of Baumann’s cans which looked promising but the lack of exploitation, action or even threat of danger (the bad guys are hardly in it) keeps this from being anything I’ll ever consider watching again. It’s going bye bye.


I should’ve known this was going to suck by the lame ass title. The original title is SUNBURST but the version I saw is called SHATTERED DREAMS. Really? That’s the best they could come up with? I don't know which one is worse. Well I guess at least the title didn’t promise anything it couldn’t deliver. The sun didn't burst but there were probably some dreams being shattered...especially the dream about getting through the night without being raped.