by: Dr. Boogie

...CONTINUED

After all that excitement, I guess it's only natural that we have to endure another break in the action. Let's go pretend like we're invested in the other characters.

Jen and Dave are making time while Tim watches from the cooler. Booooring.

Randy almost eats an eyeball that found its way into an olive jar. Whoever the killer is, he's moving way faster than you'd expect. He even has time to snatch a knife off the wall while Randy is stowing some stuff.

At this point, you're probably thinking that Randy is next. He works in the meat department, he's surrounded by meat hooks, cleavers, saws, and knives, and he's almost always by himself and in really bad lighting for a department where cleanliness is supposed to be a high priority. Well it turns out he's just a big murder tease.

Not like his brother.

Joe is busy chopping produce with weird, twisting chops when the killer gets the drop on him.

I mean, gets the CHOP on him! Hahahahahaha!

Poor Joe. You had so little to do in this movie that I had to look up your character's name after the fact because you really had no involvement with anything.

Okay, don't want to get too excited. Let's slow everything down by doing a little round robin with the ones who aren't dead yet.

Bub and Dave are stocking the shelf when Bub asks Dave to toss him his box cutter. Unfortunately, this does not result in the killer snatching the box cutter out of the air and stabbing Bub in the brain. He's too busy dragging Joe's corpse away presumably so he can arrange more body parts around the store like that eyeball in the olive jar.

Meanwhile, a small ladder falls on Randy, mildly annoying him. He's still not next on the list.

That spot goes to Tim, who is lured away from his post when a door goes slightly ajar.

Even this childish ruse was probably more thought than needed to be put into tricking Tim. He's already five or six beers into the evening. If the killer had waited another hour or so, he probably would have passed out on his own. But then it would have been much harder to pull this off:

If nothing else, you've got to admire the force and trajectory of that arterial spray. That and the generic "beer" cans.

There's no time to pretend like Randy is next before we move onto the real next victim: Bub.

Bub is operating some kind of diabolical press in the back of the store. How he hasn't managed to fall into this thing before now is a real mystery. Regardless, the killer hides behind the elevator and lets Bub roll out a long monologue about how Tim is a dick who threatens to give him wedgies. Apropos of nothing, if you close your eyes during this sequence, you'll swear that Bub was played by a young Joel Hodgson.

Bub is so damaged that he never fully realizes that he's talking to Tim's upright corpse in the cooler. I have to assume the killer was waiting for the horror to wash over Bub, but when it becomes obvious that he's never going to get it, he springs into action.

Between Bub's screaming and all the beer cans getting knocked over, there's a lot of noise pouring into the otherwise quiet store. And yet all of this goes completely unnoticed by Dave and Jen who don't even have the excuse of fooling around to explain why they would miss it.

Come on, you knew this was coming. Who sees a crushing machine like that and doesn't immediately think about someone getting caught in it? Would you want to watch a movie that had a big crushing machine but didn't show it crushing anything/anyone?

No you wouldn't!

Again, worth the wait, but the killer really could've just shoved him in there while he was hiding behind the thing. Or at any point, really. Bub was not exactly a wily opponent.

Back at the meat locker, Randy spots suspicious package. Somebody wrapped up a severed hand, and wouldn't you know it: Randy's on the hook for it.

Puns.

Take that, you uppity lobsters! Always waving those claws at me as if to imply that if you didn't have those rubber bands on, you could take me. You are not tougher than me! You are a lobster!! You are already in the tank! The battle is over!!!

Anyway, Dave is stocking the shelves still and asks Bub to throw his box cutter back. The killer does so, leaving the blade exposed. Again, no brain stabbing, but the resulting cut on his hand does send Dave to get the first aid kit. By the deli slicer.

As great as it would be to see the killer shave layer after layer of Dave's face off, and then bundle the layers back together and put them in the display case, that's now what happens. He wanders off to the bathroom wondering why there doesn't appear to be anyone else in the store. He spots a pair of feet in one of the stalls and decides to bust in, like you do.

Dave is not fazed at all by the sight of severed feet in his friend's shoes. They're just pig's feet, he rationalizes. Yeah, freshly bleeding pig's feet. Get them at your local Ralph's now!

Since Dave isn't adequately scared yet, the killer leads him around the back area and up into the attic where they story a bunch of loose Halloween masks. It seems like he's going through a lot just looking for his friends, but I guess it beats doing his actual job.

So either the killer dragged Danny all the way up into the attic, or Danny dragged himself into the attic and then posted up near the ladder to flag down anyone who came nearby. Also worth noting: Danny still has one good eye left. Since his other one was destroyed by the bill spike, the killer must have gotten the eyeball for Randy's olive jar from Linda. So either he raced outside right after killing Danny, snagged the eyeball, and plopped it in the jar while Randy wasn't looking, or he popped it out right when he killed her and just dusted the pocket lint off it when he dropped it in the jar. This guy has some moves.

Oh yeah, Dave's plight: while squirming away from his dying boss, Dave looks out a window onto the rest of the store and sees Craig has gotten inside. Worse yet, he's right behind Jen! So Danny is almost dead, Dave is in the attic, and Craig and Jen are on the floor, I wonder who that leaves to be the killer? And when will he finally finish Dave?

Now the killer is just showboating. The meat hook assist kick followed by the tiniest of cuts from the meat cleaver makes you wonder where he's going with this. And Dave starts to wonder that. too.

He drags Dave toward certain doom, and though Dave had a moment to grab the meat cleaver as it lay on the floor, he whizzed it down his leg. And speaking of whizzing down his leg, during this sequence, Dave starts shrieking the best shrieking I've ever heard in a movie. Fear, sure, but he sounds like Daffy Duck with a kidney stone.

Maybe seeing that bandsaw at the end of his journey gave him the extra motivation.

I guess all that screaming and flailing caused all the blood to drain out of his head. And also replace it with a goofy wax replica.

There's still plenty more of Intruder to see!
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