Humongous

Second slasher effort from Paul Lynch. HUMONGOUS pits a group of stereotypical early eighties youngsters against a demented hermit on a remote island. So far so good...

A group of fun loving teens head out on a luxury vacation aboard a large boat. Eric (David Wallace), Nick (John Wildman), Donna (Joy Boushel), Carla (Janit Baldwin), and Sandy (Janet Julian) are in deep, dangerous waters when they come across Bert (Lane Coleman) stranded on a lifeboat. They let him climb aboard before the six of them continue on their doomed excursion. As the warm summer's day gives way to a foggy night sky, the overly cocky Nick looses control of the boat and it crashes into some hidden rocks. Just after they all manage to jump into the safety of the cool water, the ship bursts into a ball of flames and disappears into the depths of the ferocious sea. The group manage to swim to a nearby rocky shore, where the screams that pierce the haunting night sky make it sound like it's inhabited by a pack of wild dogs. Bert knows of the stories of Idah Parsons, a lonesome woman who lives all by herself on the island and keeps the animals for protection. They hope that maybe she can call for help. When Nick goes looking for her and doesn't return, the gang begin to realise that there is something far more sinister than a group of mutts or an elderly lady lurking in the dense forest that surrounds them...

As where PROM NIGHT owed more than a touch of inspiration to HALLOWEEN, Lynch's second effort looks as if it's more influenced by backwoods slashers such as THE BURNING or FRIDAY THE 13th. In one scene Sandy dresses as the killer's mother to try and trick him into thinking it's really her. I had to check the cover to make sure I was watching Steve Miner's second edition to the FRIDAY series! But as I've said before 'pinching from your peers' is a common practice in slasher cinema, so this didn't particularly surprise me! To be honest there's loads to recommend about HUMONGOUS. For a start there's some genuinely fine acting on display. David Wallace who plays the heroic Eric is brilliant and so was his leading lady Janet Julian. Director Lynch keeps things smooth throughout and adds some interesting ideas of his own. One bit that immediately caught my attention was when John Wildman was searching the boathouse for some help. He hears strange grunts coming from the other side of the gate and moves closer to see if he can see what's making the noise. He finds a hole big enough to look through and moves his eye up to it to see what he can spot. He jumps back in shock, when he sees a grotesque eye looking through the same hole back again! It's the little touches like that , which can make a movie all the more memorable. The butcher himself is pretty darn creepy too. He's your typical backwoods psycho, in the tradition of Jason, Marz and Cropsy! Big, mean deformed, surly and nasty! He also possesses super human strength and lets just say you wouldn't like to meet him on your way home late at night! He makes his presence known pretty early on in the runtime and he doesn't stay far out of sight for long ever after! So with all that HUMONGOUS has going for it how could it possibly ever fail?

Well...there's a terrible lack of lighting in the night scenes. Some of the best moments of the film can barely be seen because it's just too dark! We only get to see the killer's face for a couple of seconds tops, all the other shots either have him surrounded by silhouette or it's just too poorly lit to get a good view! You may think that this is only a minor set back and I'm over reacting, but when you've watched through the best part of the feature in broad daylight and built yourself up for the 'final showdown' so to speak, it pretty much spoils it when you can barely see a damn thing that's going on! I'd have thought that a director as experienced as this would've been able to handle a problem like that with ease. But that inconsistency alone prevents this flick from ever touching true greatness. As it stands it's not rubbish, but still, with a little more care with the lighting this could've been a classic.

In the odd small way, this manages to even outshine the director's previous effort. It's far more brutal with a stronger emphasis on horror. But due to that aforementioned flaw PROM NIGHT remains the best of Lynch's slasher work. That said though it's still worth watching for the superb cast and some exciting sequences. But be warned...bring your night vision goggles!

I very much enjoyed Humongous. Yes, it's dark, yes, it's slow, but it's honest. The story is unlikely but plausible. The acting is sufficient to convey the story, and even good by Janet Julian. I immediately contrasted it with Last House on the Left... gritty and plausible, good stuff done by talented amateurs. It is best seen on a TV/monitor with the brightness turned way up.

It is easy to overlook slasher horror of that period due to production quality or unknown performers, but, the early 80s was a boom time with VHS/beta reaching market and semi-professional gear coming to market. With the advances came a greater variety of scripts and interpretation, tho perhaps without the backing of large studios or with less finesse. Don't be so shallow as to overlook them, for they seem to have had quite an influence on the diversity of fringe cinema today.

Give humongous a go if you're a fan of the genre.

A woman is raped, but her attacker is devoured by dogs. Several decades later, a group of teens arrive on the island, but fall victim to a humongous, deformed mutant; the result of the rape. Starts out interestingly enough, but quickly goes downhill with cliched characters and routine script. It's biggest problem though is it's awful lighting and you never ever get a good look at the creature.

Rated R; Rape, Brief Nudity, Violence.

A hulking, brain-damaged beast stalks teens trapped on a remote island: not exactly the most original of plots, for sure, but it sounds like a lot of fun, doesn't it? Unfortunately, despite this one having many of the raw ingredients necessary for a hugely enjoyable slice of trashy 80s horror, it screws matters up with mundane direction, very dark photography, virtually no decent gore, and a creature that is hidden away in the shadows for most of the film.

Humongous begins with a promising pre-credits sequence set in the 1940s, in which a young woman is raped on Labour Day by a drunken party-goer, who immediately gets his comeuppance when a dog rips him to shreds.

The action then moves to the present day (ie., the early 80s), and sees five teenagers—Eric (David Wallace), his girlfriend Sandy (Janet Julian), nerdy sister Carla (Janit Baldwin), hot-headed brother Nick (John Wildman), and Nick's slutty squeeze Donna (Joy Boushel)—taking a trip on a lake in a motor cruiser.

After becoming lost in a bank of fog, the group happens across a man named Bert stranded in a lifeboat, who warns them that they are approaching some dangerous rocks. Nick seizes control of the boat, but crashes it, and the friends are forced to leap for safety and make for a nearby island, which according to Bert is home to a crazy woman and her pack of dogs. Bert's info, however, is not entirely correct: the old woman, who turns out to be the rape victim from the prologue, has recently died, and her dogs have been devoured by her hideously deformed son, who is on the loose on the island and still very hungry!

The rest of the film sees the teens, and an injured Bert, being hunted and killed one-by-one by the ravenous monster; it's all par for the course, with the expected false scares, sudden deaths, the discovery of the creature's lair, and a scene blatantly cribbed from Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981) in which final survivor Sandy tries to confuse the killer by masquerading as his mother.

Although director Paul Lynch seems content to to deliver a by-the numbers product, the film does boast two marvellously tacky scenes that I feel are worthy of note: Donna the slut tries to warm up a shivering Bert by taking off her top and pressing her breasts against him; and Sandy falls backwards onto a mouldy corpse, which somehow becomes attached to her. If only Lynch had included more trash of this calibre, or just gone for a higher level of blood and guts, I might have thought more highly of it. As it is, it's just another title in a long list of instantly forgettable backwoods horrors.

Humongous has been largely forgotten amongst the glut of 80s slasher flicks. However,that is a shame. It's certainly no masterpiece,not even of the slasher genre,but it's quite interesting and better than quite a few of the other,similar films released around that time.

It opens with a brutal rape,and it almost gets the movie off on the wrong foot as although not that graphic it's hard to watch. Then we jump forward to the usual small group of young people discovering an island. Much time is spent of them wondering about,which does make the film a little slow,but there is a fair amount of suspense,sometimes underlined by the synthesizer score,which shouldn't work but does. As has often been said before,the film is too dark,but some of the photography is pretty good,which makes one wonder if the darkness was a deliberate experiment which didn't quite come off.

This movie was obviously {well,in the versions I've seen} heavily cut,during the killings we cut away just before we think we'll going to see something nasty. There's just about enough suspense to almost compensate,and the acting isn't too bad,but gore hounds will probably be disappointed. The climactic scenes are pretty exciting though and even though you still don't get much of a look at the monster,this is actually quite effective.

There's a underlying element of sadness to Humongous which is provided by the film's back story,and it's perhaps this which most sticks in the mind. Nothing in the film is especially remarkable,but it does have it's interesting elements. It certainly deserves a proper,uncut DVD release,and far more than some of the other films of this type which already have been!