On Wednesday I showed you the cover to Fangoria #61 with a cover story on the movie Rawhead Rex. And I told you I’ve been fascinated with that movie since 8th grade. Yesterday I showed you the guts of that Rawhead Rex feature story (pun intended). Well, for my inaugral Fangoria Movie Friday I finally watched Rawhead Rex and now it’s time to see if it stands up to what I thought it was going to be.
As I’ve mentioned, Rawhead Rex was written by Clive Barker and released in 1986. Here’s the terrible and confusing poster for the movie.
What the hell is going on with that poster? Needless to say, that didn’t clear up anything for me about the nature of this movie before watching it. Horrible, horrible poster.
As background, I enjoy some of Clive Barker’s early stuff, but I’m not really a devotee. So his name alone on this movie isn’t really doing anything for me. The movie will have to stand on its own. Unfortunately, bottom line, it’s not very good. Very low production value. Very low kitsch value. Not a lot to love. Sort of straight forward slasher monster movie. No subversiveness. Really just a by-the-numbers job. Very disappointing.
The story is about an ancient pagan fertility god, Rawhead Rex, who is awakened in a small town and starts going on a killing spree. That’s basically it. And I’m seriously giving more information than the movie gives you. There’s long stretches of no killing and long stretches of no boobs or nudity. So, as an 80s monster/slasher flick, this really kinda blows.
You want to know how bad this movie is? They actually put the below sentence in the plot synopsis on Wikipedia:
“On the road, Howard’s daughter needs to go to the bathroom, so Howard pulls over and lets her go by a tree.”
Someone wrote that. Specifically to be published online. For the movie’s plot description. Seriously. However, they had to put it in there because that scene is a crucial part of the movie. THAT’S WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT.
While I can’t really recommend it, let’s look at a few things worth mentioning.
Here’s the title card and a face shot of Rawhead Rex after he’s awoken from his thousand year slumber. The makeup/costume work on Rex is not good. You can’t tell by this small static picture on my blog, but it’s pretty bad. His design would be cool in a comic book, maybe, but on the screen, it’s less than stellar. And his big reveal during the awakening, which you see in the poster above, looks like complete dogsh*t.
This is a stained glass window found in a church discovered early on by the main character played by David Dukes. At first glance he doesn’t find it odd that a church would have a giant red monster with huge fangs and bones and skulls all around him captured in a stained glass mural. I mean, I’d be like “HOLY SH*T! WHAT THE F**K IS THAT AND WHY IS IT ON YOUR WINDOW?!”
A clear Easter Egg for fans of Angus Scrimm and the Phantasm movies. The first of which was released in 1979.
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Cavalcade of Awesome 