It’s all Tim Kincaid’s fault.
I mean, Robot Holocaust is an amazingly stupid post-apocalyptic movie, full of the weird and eccentric, complete with sock puppet monsters, the world’s most annoying robot pal, and a girl with an incredibly heavy Bronx accent trying to sound like an Italian countess. Mutant Hunt, his second science fiction film, isn’t as deliriously absurd, but it does have trashy charms of its own.
So it was inevitable that I would check out his third entry into the genre.
You have to wonder whether it is the law of diminishing returns. Each one of these films seems to have been less interesting than the last.
But the promise of something on the level of Robot Holocaust — or even Mutant Hunt — will get me settled on the couch with mild expectations and a few hopeful snacks.
Now the story is definitely familiar as it got used by countless other SF films in the Eighties. I have to wonder whether Breeders was meant to be a direct rip-off of Humanoids of the Deep (only without all the sea stuff), as has the same basic setup: mysterious creature runs around raping women.
However, while the Roger Corman creature didn’t seem too picky as long as the girls looked good and wore bikinis, here this creature prefers virgins, for purely health-based reasons.
Now considering that Tim started in the porn industry, and would go on to greater fame afterwards making gay porn, it seems very strange that all the scenes involving these young victims are remarkably unexciting. They all find some reason to shed their clothes or take a shower before the creature attacks, one even does nude aerobics. Mind you, he only ever shows boobs and butts, even though this requires a lot of careful editing at times. Ironically, all I found myself thinking about through most of these scenes was just how pale the butts waved in the camera looked.
And, yes, the boobs, too.
This sort of thing bothers me, even if I’m not watching a low budget exploitation sci-fi horror film for the boobs. I mean, hadn’t your makeup girl ever heard of spray tan? You can easily fix this sort of thing.
So there are a lot of women turning up who have been attacked by some creature and they are so traumatized that they can hardly talk about it. A police detective and the head psychologist at the local hospital team up to discover what is going on.
However, we don’t see too much of this as the story has to keep introducing new girls who will soon be victims. I was a bit surprised that one particularly unexpected character turned out to be on the monster’s attack list as she was a longtime fashion industry professional and we never got the slightest hint that she might be a virgin.
Although we did get a little warning when she took off her clothes.
Dead giveaway, right?
[Spoilers ahead!]
It all ends with a rather small scale big finale, of the sort where you keep saying to yourself, call for backup! Call in the army and the marines! Get a bigger gun!
But, sadly, yelling that at the screen just doesn’t seem to help in these movies. The good guys are always terminally stupid.
You can’t fault the setting — the lost and forgotten system of tunnels under Manhattan — although this proves in practice to be a series of uninteresting small rooms. Even though these would have been everything from old railroad stations, or sewer tunnels, or abandoned and long built over public buildings, it all looks bland and brown with nothing to make it at all interesting.
In this tiny brown room, they find the alien nest, which turns out to be sort of a giant hot tub filled with naked girls, bathing in enough goo to make sure that we only see boobs. This is mostly just stupid, and the poor girls, many of whom actually got a fairly good part in the early half of the film) are reduced to just moaning and washing their bare bodies with more goo.
Only it is far less thrilling than it sounds.
And, far worse, we then get an utterly absurd solution to the alien problem which has so little to do with what we actually see on screen that you end up suspecting that they only made the most half-hearted attempt to make sure their location matched the script.
I mean, it’s only a exploitation horror film. Who cares whether it makes any sense?
*Sigh*
[End Spoilers]
If you haven’t quite figured it out by now, I’m not recommending this one. There are a lot of far better exploitation films out there, and it’s hard to understand how a film could show this much TnA without making it the least bit interesting or exciting.
And darn it, no sock puppet monsters! Instead, the alien creature looks pretty bad and seems to be a so-so mask coupled with a rather variable sort of suit which is neither very telegenic nor particularly consistent in its appearance.
It does, however, give us the usual rather dumb last-minute twist which makes even less sense the more time you spend thinking about it.
Or, in other words: watch at your own risk.
And don’t say I didn’t warn you…
rivets on the poster 