Sweet Sixteen

In the small Texas town of Sun Valley, all the boys are going crazy for the new girl Melissa. Beautiful, confident, and no stranger to smoking a joint or indulging in underage drinking, Melissa — still a few days shy of her sixteenth birthday — has caught the eye of men and boys alike. But things take a sinister turn when the boys she gets involved with start winding up dead, viciously stabbed in a series of seemingly frenzied knife attacks. It falls to Sheriff Dan Burke to investigate this perplexing rash of killings, aided in part by his eager, mystery-loving daughter Marci. Faced with mounting pressure from the townspeople, who are eager to point the finger at the local Native American population, can Sheriff Burke figure out why all the boys are quite literally dying to be with Melissa, before even more blood is shed?

A superlative slasher emerging from the tail end of the subgenre’s golden age, 1983’s SWEET SIXTEEN pulls together an astonishingly high-profile cast including Bo Hopkins (Mutant), Patrick Macnee (The Howling) and Susan Strasberg (The Manitou), alongside turns from genre regulars Don Stroud (Death Weekend) and Don Shanks (Michael Myers in Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers), as well as Friday the 13th Part III’s Dana Kimmell. Helmed by director Jim Sotos (Forced Entry, Hot Moves), Vinegar Syndrome is thrilled to unveil the UHD world premiere of SWEET SIXTEEN, newly restored in 4K from its original camera negative, presented in both its original theatrical and international versions, and loaded with an exhaustive array of new and archival extras.