Intensity: The Thanksgiving Horror That Wasn’t

A Thanksgiving Horror Film Festival of One PT3

By Buttonface

Then I tried Intensity, what I believed to be a movie from 1997 but was actually a miniseries from 1997. Does a miniseries with two parts count as a miniseries? Maybe a “Two Night Event”, I dunno. With the death of TV and the rise of the bingeable miniseries online, the world needs to figure out where to file TV miniseries.

Intensity starts out with some heavy Stephen King vibes. It would take a more well-knowledged horror historian than myself to figure out if the Stephen King vibes are because King is the “king” of the TV movie, or the “king” of horror, or is it that Dean Koontz is a wannabe Stephen King. Lotta grey area there.

I finally thought that I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to do this without comparing the whole thing to Stephen King. The first people they show are red heads, I think both with green eyes. Do you know how uncommon that is, yet in every TV movie in the ‘90s they all have red hair and green eyes. Not sure if that’s a ‘90s thing or a King thing?.

Basically, it’s about a girl with some fucked up parents that inadvertently gets herself kidnapped by a classical music loving serial killer, well played by John C. McGinley. There’s a lot of tension and hiding, she gets away, but goes back to save a girl instead of getting the cops because… we’ll it was the ‘90s, man.

It’s funny how twenty-twenty hindsight makes the world look, seeing movies in the current social climate. From the eyes of a man that believes that women need way better roles in movies, you would think that I would take issue with the movie from the ‘70s or ‘80s. And, while they definitely had their chauvinism, this ‘90s flick seems all the worse for having what they felt was a strong woman lead.

She is really just an unrealistic hysterical woman that talks to herself too much (same). To be fair she does get tougher, maybe that’s the character development, I dunno, but if it is, Dean is laying it on thick… like ‘90s thick. The ‘90s had a way of doing that. I mean when you were in it it all seemed legit, but damn, have you tried to go back and watch Pump Up the Volume? Don’t.

Perhaps I have bias seeing how the ‘90s is when I was at my most rebellious and hormonally charged, a ball of hate and teenage fuck energy, so… let’s move on.

I guess my final call on this is that it ain’t no Thanksgiving movie, even though it does take place around Thanksgiving (refer to Die Hard). I ended up enjoying it. My only regret is I didn’t watch it with Mrs. Buttonface. I think she would have enjoyed it going on in the background of her usual homeostasis, on the couch, vaping like the Caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland, and playing Animal Crossing on her tablet.