Murders start happening in a small Texas town where the heads of the victims are taken. The cops are investigating and Charlie turns out to be suspect # 1. I know that might sound interesting, but this amateurish early 90s horror flick isn't as good as it sounds. As well the sub-par acting brings this down. Not worth your time seeking out this rare horror movie.

In the tiny town of Pakoe (pronounced Pak-oh-wee), a masked maniac is pruning the pitiful population of 1251 by sawing the heads off teenagers. Could the killer possibly be hulking, disfigured tree-surgeon Charlie (Chuck Whiting), whose arrival in town just happens to have coincided with the spate of grisly murders? Well, duh! This isn't called 'The Night Brings Charlie' just for the fun of it. Of course, this being a dumb early-'90s slasher, the local sheriff and his men are utterly inept, remaining oblivious to any clues until late in the day, meaning that quite a few heads roll before the end credits do.Director Tom Logan opens his film with a buxom, blonde teenager arriving home after a date, but kills her off before she can get inside and take a shower (boo!); her headless body is found the next morning by a paperboy (whose shocked reaction is priceless), but the killer's gruesome handiwork remains off-screen. With a missed opportunity for some gratuitous female nudity and a complete lack of splatter, it proves a rather disappointing way to start a slasher.Thankfully, Logan soon sets about rectifying the matter, and before long he has delivered a spot of graphic violence (a bloody throat slashing and decapitated corpse) and what must be one of the most pointless (but welcome) shower scenes in any horror film, more than making up for his oversight at the beginning: as a busty babe busily soaps herself up, the killer loiters menacingly on the other side of the shower glass, before eventually slinking away leaving the girl totally unharmed (and very clean). The director also successfully ticks off quite a few genre clichés, with dumb teenagers ignoring common sense, an obnoxious jerk who likes to jump out and scare girls for a laugh, a totally unnecessary nightmare sequence, and creepy phone-calls from the killer.From the halfway mark, there is a noticeable loss of momentum—the film becomes mired in dull police procedure and the script tries to be a little too clever for its own good with an extremely convoluted twist—but Logan picks things up again for the fun final act in which a guy has his (rubber) hand skewered by shears, a trio of bikers meet the business end of an axe, and the killer finally sets his sights on Jenny (Aimee Tenaglia), teenage step-daughter of town coroner Walt (Joe Fishback), pursuing her with a chainsaw, the power-tool of choice for any discerning movie maniac (even one whose messed-up face is the result of a chainsaw accident).

Here's another very obscure and tiresome late 80's/early 90's slasher (seriously, where do they keep emerging from?) with an ultra-thin plot and dim-witted characters, but hey, at least there's also some exciting gore and welcome gratuitous nudity on display as well. Thank God for that! "The Night Brings Charlie" – can't help loving the title – is one of those horror flicks that don't seem to bother giving the maniacal killer a double identity. Charlie is simply and straightforward introduced at the beginning, along with the rest of the uninteresting characters. He's a gardener who wears a bag over his head, but everybody seems to think that is completely normal. For you see, Charlie's face got heavily mutilated in a "chainsaw accident". How the hell can that even happen?!? Who "accidentally" cuts up his face with a freaking chainsaw? Either way, even though this appears to be the smallest community in the entire USA, Charlie can get away with cutting off teenager heads with a tree saw, making prank phone calls to the police force and even single-handedly modifying the number of population on the town's welcoming board. The local coroner, who has to investigate all the headless bodies, becomes very worried for the safety of his own teenage daughter. Heck, who wouldn't become nervous if you live in the town with the world's most incompetent police force looking for a deranged killer who's right under their nose? After a few pointless but nevertheless exhilarating sequences, including a totally random showering interlude of a very hot chick with a lovely thong and an impressive pair of blouse-bunnies, the plot suddenly makes some very peculiar and even downright retarded twists that are nearly impossible to describe. Charlie has a doppelganger? Or someone who copycats his sinister appearance? And, finally, there's a very absurd twist that basically comes down to this: they guy whom you have been suspecting to be the killer since the beginning of the film already is, in fact, … the killer! Awesome! And now that's listing weird aspects anyway, there are a number of kooky supportive characters in this film as well, like a teenager with two different haircut styles, a bossy police radio operator and a Oliver Hardy look-alike coroner assistant who walks in and out of the screen during the most inappropriate moments. "The Night Brings Charlie" is a bizarre mixture of off-screen killings and explicitly nasty on screen murders. The film has a really stupid climax, but at least it's never boring. So, no complaints.

I'm not a big fan of slasher flicks as a genre, but even by the standards of low-low-budget exploitation, this one is really lame. Even on a nudity-and-gore level, it's incredibly boring (there is some of both, but it's all sort of...meh). Before the home video revolution, it might not even have been released theatrically (though it might have; after all, *Plan 9 From Outer Space* played in theaters). There is precisely one good (and competently-delivered) line in the entire movie; I assume they stole it from somewhere.The acting is among the worst I have ever seen. I mean, even Ed Wood had a couple of competent actors, and the rest tended to be ludicrously hammy, which can be fun to watch. Anyway, most of his actors could pretty much pass as literate. Here, those who don't read their lines like cigar-store Indians sound like they learned them phonetically. And this film does have one distinction: it manages to be badly underplotted for most of the movie, then laughably overplotted for the ending.(Update: I should have singled out the actress playing the receptionist as an exception. She is by no means wooden. Not that she's good, but she certainly isn't wooden.)Even the worst slasher flicks are generally good for a few Puritan meditations on their grotesque offensiveness, but with this one, there doesn't even seem to be anything there to work up a moral outrage about.And you know the funniest thing? They clearly expected to make a sequel!It's so bad and boring that it actually becomes fascinating in a weird way. I sat enrapt through much of the video wondering why anyone would go to the bother of making it.