rawhead rex

[clive jr]

i think the subject says it all what do you think?

[Chadzilla]

I actually saw this on the big screen when Empire Pictures (Big Bad Charlie Band's first smack at a film company).  It was in some greasy, sleezy dive called the Electric Theater on Market Street in SF.  They would show a triple bill fpr week then rotate it to something else.  I even saw Ghost Town (Empire's final gasp) there.  Others were Dolls, Transmutations (aka Underworld) and Necropolis!

Back to Rex -

This was a fairly faithful adaptation of Barker's story, but it just did not work all that well.  I particularly missed the part of the story with Rex lounging around with the lead character's kid's corpse, scooping the guts with a finger and scarfing them down.  Yuck, but extremely effective (Clive has forgotten just how Grand his Guignol used to be).  I still liked the movie though, but the monster needed to be better.  It was just some guy in a phony looking masked.  And his mouth was far too small.

[Inukko]

Little known fact about Underworld: Back in `82,
an obscure electronic act called Freur wrote
music for this film.  Later on, Freur would
break up, and the remaining members would start
another band called, yep, Underworld!

That said, how was the movie?  I've never
actually SEEN it...

[Chadzilla]

Not much, and the score was nothing special either, electronic music buzzing, humming, clicking and thumping.  At least Rawhead Rex was exciting.  

The best thing about Underworld was the Clive Barker HATED it so much he decided to do his own movie and do it 'right'.  He made Hellraiser.

[ER]

Strange story, painfully bad movie. I did learn that being afflicted with moon flux might save one from the predations of some primordial monsters, which is good to know.  Tough break, men!

[WingedSerpent]

Strange story, painfully bad movie. I did learn that being afflicted with moon flux might save one from the predations of some primordial monsters, which is good to know.  Tough break, men!

For those who don't  know, in the short story, Rawhead Rex is described as being incredible phallic shaped as he is the embodiment of male rage and aggression.  With that, plus what he does to the priest character, he really does feel like the edgelord monster.

[ER]

In some of his early work Clive Barker was intentionally really funny, like I'd be reading him and an unexpected jolt of humor would leap out, like John Wayne in the haunted theater gunning the man down for going to the bathroom, Wayne thought, right in the middle of main street, and I'd just lose it, laughing uncontrollably, and I think when those inclusions of humor hidden in his works like landmines stopped being one of his trademarks, Barker's power as a wordsmith went with them to the point I haven't known him to have done anything worth reading since around the mid-nineties.

All that said, at the time I first encountered them as a teenager I found the castration scenes you alluded to in Rawhead hysterical because to me at the young age I read the story it was such a forbidden topic, a violation of polite norm to be seeing such a thing described in the page. The creature was so mindless he thought the pain shrieks of his victims were some sort of accompanying background sound, and it was like reading Gary Larson gone mad.

The movie was one long flatline of cheap, charmless monster by the numbers bad cinema.

[Allhallowsday]

RAWHEAD REX sux arse. 

http://youtu.be/TSLX1IDR1d8 

[claws]

I always sigh when the woman in the kitchen drops the stew to the floor. It looked so darn delicious!

[chainsaw midget]

If you see a still of the monster design it doesn't look bad.  It still doesn't look to bad in night scenes when it's standing here looking menacing. 

When it has to move really quick it looks cheesy as hell though and when you see it in the daylight it just looks like one of those really expensive costumes from a Halloween store, you know the ones that everyone is impressed by but nobody ever buys.

[Alex]

Rawhead Rex always made me think of Sran from Terrahawks for some reason. I mean there are vague similarities, but they aren't overly alike so I've never quite understood my association of the two.

[Allhallowsday]

^ It's the teeth.  (And they both look kinda like a dick.)

[JJ80]

It's not the best horror movie ever but the Gardai characters and the possessed deacon were entertaining and it did use the remoteness and beauty of the rural Irish village well.