Movie 8
The Being (1983, dir Jackie Kong)
(https://i.imgur.com/RSApSVN.jpg?1)
I wasn't expecting much when I picked this out of a lineup on Amazon Prime, but then I saw that it was directed by Jackie Kong, director of Blood Diner. Blood Diner was a lot of fun and I was hoping this would be too, and I wasn't disappointed. This was the first of only a handful of movies she directed in the 80's and it was a lot rougher than Blood Diner. The script is pretty bad, the main actor is the director's husband/producer and obviously not a real actor (in a film that mostly wastes José Ferrer and Martin Landau in supporting roles), continuity between scenes was obviously not a major concern, the monster effects are pretty trash and I think they knew it because they didn't show it off very much. The full-on monster puppet was only seen at the very end and it was never on screen with the actors, so I'm guessing it wasn't full sized. The rest of the times, it's only seen in the shadows or in quick cuts, and it's either a much cheaper puppet or a kid/midget* in a cheap costume.
Despite all that, it was a fun bad movie. Kinky Friedman appeared in a minor role as one of the dumb hicks protesting the opening of a massage parlor as part of the mayor's wife's campaign to sweep away smut, in a subplot that goes nowhere but was good for a few laughs. It also had Golden Age Hollywood actress Dorothy Malone as a crazy old lady that gets her house pelted by bratty kids yelling "Witch, Witch, you got bitched, smells like something from a ditch!"
2.5 "We have to conclude that dumping toxic waste into the aquaduct is perfectly safe" out of 5
spoiler (click to show/hide)
* After I wrote this, I looked it up to see whether it was kid or a midget that played the monster in the costume scenes. Jerry Marsh, actual card carrying member of the Lollipop Guild. :lawd
(https://i.imgur.com/QmsLRK9.jpg?1)
90 minutes of jump scares, followed by 10 minutes of TWIIIIIIIIST that basically invalidates the rest of the movie.
The setup: Eli is a boy in a plastic bubble who's parents take him to a creepy mansion to undergo some super experimental gene therapy to cure his immune deficiency. The doctors are hiding things, his parents are hiding things, Max from Stranger Things shows up and she's hiding things. Some ghosts show up too, but they're really just there to pad the movie out until we can get to THE TWIST.
The twist:
spoiler (click to show/hide)
Eli is a spawn of Satan. His mom was barren until she had literal sex with the literal devil in order to give birth to him (the logistics of which are left to the viewers' imagination) and now Eli is about to come into his satanic power. His disease was a lie that his parents cooked up as an excuse to keep him indoors all the time where they could keep an eye on him, the doctors were actually nuns of some holy order dedicated to wiping out Satan's kids, and the treatment was just them pumping him full of holy water to weaken him enough so that they could kill him with the Daggers of Megiddo. His dad and the nuns knew the whole time that the "treatment" would end in them killing Eli, but his mom thought that they were somehow going to cure him of his satanism. In the end he incinerates and upside-down crucifies the nuns with his mind, crushes his dad's head, and then burns down the facility. He spares his mom (now reduced to a gibbering mess) and meets up with Max (also a Satan spawn, who was watching him to see if he would prove himself worthy). The three of them head out to the road to find more of Satan's kids to hang out with. THE END.
The ending is a such a 180 from anything that happened earlier in the movie that it's impossible to take it serious. This shit had me howling. :lol