Intruder Is Going Back to Theaters With the Gore Restored

Nearly all of KNB EFX Group’s work on its first feature was cut out before the movie reached video shelves. That footage is going back in. Grindhouse Releasing is taking the unrated director’s cut of Intruder, Scott Spiegel’s 1989 supermarket slasher, into art-house theaters across the United States and Canada this holiday season, in partnership with Full Moon Features.

The version most American viewers grew up with was the Paramount Home Video tape, an 83-minute R cut that ran about five minutes shorter than the 88-minute director’s cut and lost most of the effects work along the way. Grindhouse is playing the long one.

“I’ve always wanted to do something with INTRUDER,” Grindhouse owner Bob Murawski told Rue Morgue, calling Spiegel a longtime friend and the film underrated and underseen. It is a movie that, in his words, “literally delivers the groceries.”

Sam Raimi’s Editor Owns the Label

Murawski founded Grindhouse Releasing in 1995 with Sage Stallone, and he has spent the decades since cutting Sam Raimi’s pictures, from Army of Darkness through Drag Me to Hell and the Spider-Man films. He won the Academy Award for Best Film Editing for The Hurt Locker alongside Chris Innis. Raimi, for his part, is in Intruder, playing a stock boy named Randy.

‘Evil Dead II’ Alumni Stock the Shelves

Spiegel directed his first feature here, built out of his own Super-8 short Night Crew, and wrote it with Lawrence Bender, who produced and who would go on to make Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction with Quentin Tarantino. Spiegel had co-written Evil Dead II with Raimi two years earlier, and he brought a fair amount of it with him: Dan Hicks, Sam Raimi, Ted Raimi and Bruce Campbell all turn up on the night shift.

The rest of the crew is Elizabeth Cox, Renée Estevez, David Byrnes, Eugene Robert Glazer and Burr Steers. Greg Nicotero takes a bit part on the picture his own effects house was staffing.

Grindhouse has not posted dates yet and is pointing bookers to its own site. On a film that was KNB’s first job, the five minutes that came out are the five minutes worth the trip.