While Psycho was one of the great films of all-time, we've all had to pay a high price ever since. The slasher genre was ignited by the phenomenal success of John Carpenter's Psycho homage "Halloween", and an interminable series of slasher movies followed in the late '70s and early '80s. Halloween II, Happy Birthday To Me, Friday the 13th, The Final Terror, Visiting Hours, Prom Night and He Knows You're Alone are just a handful of titles that spring to mind. He Knows You're Alone is a fairly forgettable example from 1980, but it has sporadic moments of suspense and is of curiosity interest as the movie debut of Tom Hanks.
A knife-wielding killer (Tom Rolfing) preys upon young brides-to-be. Years earlier, he murdered his ex-girlfriend on her wedding day and has been pursued ever since by the cop, Len Gamble (Lewis Arlt), to whom she was due to be wed. The disturbed psycho starts a new campaign of bride-brutalising, first stabbing an engaged woman in a movie theater, and then stalking resourceful young Amy Jensen (Caitlin O'Heaney, in a very winning performance), whose future husband is away on a bachelor weekend. One by one, Amy's friends fall foul of the killer, until she seeks the aid of her ex-boyfriend, oddball morgue attendant Marvin (Don Scardino), in escaping from her stalker.
Director Armand Matroianni (son of actor Marcello) borrows heavily from earlier genre entries. His build-up in the murder sequences is almost identical to Carpenter's use of lighting, music and point-of-view camera shots in Halloween. The gore is kept to a minimum (apart from a quite bloody severed-head-in-a-fishtank scene) and a greater emphasis is placed on suspense. Alas, many of the "suspenseful" moments are rather fluffed because the director makes it too obvious when the jump-out-of-your-seat moments are about to occur. Hanks has a very small role as a psychology student who gives the film's self-referential speech about why people love to be scared by horror movies. He's competent in the role, but one wouldn't have predicted from this evidence that he would go on to become a super-star. A major flaw with the film is that Tom Rolfing's killer character is supposed to be a bride killer, but he breaks his own rules on numerous occasions by hacking down victims who are not brides-to-be. In fact, some of his murders are so senseless and unmotivated that he comes across more as a rampaging killing machine than anything else. It just seems to me that films of this ilk should at least make a small amount of sense, at least on their own terms.He Knows You're Alone is a competent and forgettable slasher film... if you're a fan of the genre you'll like it, if you're not you won't.
