You read the book.  Now see the movie.

I always had this perverse curiosity about the underbelly of a bowling alley -- you know, just what actually goes on in that netherworld of Brunswick pinsetters and ball return mechanisms.  Thankfully, a film comes along to give me a sort of sinister National Geographic backstage tour.

One nerd and two dofusses have the temerity to spy on the gals of Tri Delta Sorority during one of their paddling initiation rites. "Institutionalized sadism," is what one sorority babe calls it.  The guys are caught with their pants up, and in the obtuse logic of all films of this genre, must break into a bowling alley and steal a trophy to make amends.

Only the trophy they swipe happens to be the solitary confinement of an "imp," part-ghoulie, part critter, that was imprisoned some thirty years earlier when a ne'er do well league bowler summoned him up from the depths to swell his pin count.

The imp is glib and a sort of wise-cracking Alf-type who sounds suspiciously like the talking plant in Little Shop Of Horrors.  He is also capable of lies and tons of physical damage, as his victims soon discover in all the cracks and crevices of this bowl or horrors.

There's your usual slasher mayhem, gore, beheadings, nude shower sequences, nerd cliches and Linnea Quigley who comes gum snapping along as a Ramboette break-in artist.  Unfortunately, Quigley keeps her clothes on for this movie.

Blonde Quigley is becoming a compass point for this style of film.  Find her in the credits, and you know you're in the theater of the absurd.  Here she plays her usual sexy but brusque female with a chip on her shoulder the size of a Baltimore Orioles baseball fan, but manages to hold on to her head in this goofy bloodbath while others around her literally lose theirs.

In the farthest of far out senses, you've got a winner here: a great title, a nutcase story line, great-looking sorority babes and idiosyncratic chuckles.  Bowling balls up on this one, Roger.