My childhood bedroom had dressers for my clothes – no closets. But I can imagine the terror a child must feel late at night, imagining the “monster in the closet”. Particularly if it’s anything like the deadly beast skulking around in Cameron’s (Scott Curtis) closet.
Cameron is a cute little button-nosed kid of about 10 or 11, who likes sports and lives with his elderly father (Tab Hunter). When Pops is killed by the thing that lives in Cameron’s closet, poor Cameron is sent to live with his self-absorbed mother (Kim Lankford) and her abusive, egotistical live-in boyfriend (Chuck McCann). The monster, not picky about which closet it lives in, but rather whose, goes along for the ride.
When the mean boyfriend chases Cameron into the kid’s closet with the intent of giving him a spanking, he’s pretty surprised when he has his eyeballs ripped out of his head, is thrown through the 2nd story window, and lands as nothing but a bloody heap on the roof of his beloved classic car. After the death of two father figures, people start to wonder about Cameron. Is he really that protective about men going into his closet? Or could it be… SATAN?!
Mom decides to team up with a down-and-out cop (Leigh McCloskey) and a concerned therapist (Mel Harris) to see if they can stop Cameron’s unwanted friend before it can kill again. Of course, this being a typical low-budget 80s stab-n-slab horror flick, that doesn’t happen right away. Despite the never-ending buffet of beheadings, blood and beatings, Cameron’s Closet is one old chestnut that should have stayed behind closed doors. The movie’s plot, such as it is, seems only an excuse to kill a lot of people nobody could care less about.
The acting is not too bad in Cameron’s Closet. The direction is all right, but the monster is really, really cheesy. The special effects in the death scenes are really fake-looking. The filmmakers would have been a lot better off leaving the closet critter to our imaginations.
The only additional release material on the DVD are a couple of trailers for other unrelated titles. A “whatever happened to…” section might have been interesting; I wonder if the kid who played Cameron went on to work at Closet World, or what? (He never appeared on the big screen again after this turkey.)