Critics Review

The movie boasted one of the most disturbing scenes in cinema in which a character willingly and joyfully hanged herself at a birthday party attended by young children. It also features a particularly disturbing decapitation scene, one of mainstream Hollywood's first. "If there were a special Madame Defarge Humanitarian Award for best decapitation," wrote Kim Newman in Nightmare Movies (1988), "this lingering, slow-motion sequence would get my vote."