Rawhead Rex, le monstre de la lande

This is an hilarious horror flick, if you like bad movies and especially if you remember Glenroe et al from the 80's..its a veritable spot the face. I loved the fact that the 'bad' priest was church of Ireland, another classic Irish touch.

I found this really amusing, as I love this sort of bad movie. You'll never look at a fairy fort or ring fort the same way after seeing this!

So the year is 2011 and time has not been kind to poor old Rawhead Rex (1986) and the monster horror genre in general.

Anyone who has read Clive Barker's short story Rawhead Rex knows that this is a downright disturbing and wicked tale. The monster Rawhead has sexual issues, he hates women, he pisses on priests and has an appetite for eating small children/babies. However, all these awful things are what makes the story such a page turner and adds more depth to what would otherwise be a mindless monster work.

The movie Rawhead Rex (1986) suffers from a very low budget. The main offender is Rawhead's mask itself. Its cheap rubber with little to no animatronics and the rubber shakes as the actor tries to move quickly. A higher budget would have done this monster so much justice, if only a creature master like Stan Winston had gotten involved, this would have been a whole different movie experience.

I would love to see Rawhead Rex remade today with all the trimmings, but unfortunately Hollywood is a complete mess. Bad actors are thrown into quick PG-13 horror crap fests and CGI technology has become the only main focus of everything.

I think it's time for someone to step up to the plate and re-boot the monster movie genre. Rawhead Rex could be an action/monster movie extravaganza if remade correctly. Hollywood simply refuses to take any chances and because of this, the horror genre is more or less dead. In the end, Rawhead Rex is still an enjoyable monster flick for the bored late night horror buff. But it just doesn't measure up to the more well-made 80s monster classics like "Pumpkinhead".

"Rawhead Rex" was one of several "unknown" films I prided myself on "discovering" during the late 1980s, when friends would visit for a day or four. I seemed to have a knack (seemingly lost, now!) to pick out videos I had never heard of, which turned out to be surprisingly quite good. Rawhead Rex was one of these.

I found it a quite riveting, scary movie. As with almost all horror movies, I thought a few things could have been done better. Still, Rex was infinitely more satisfying to me than a number of present-day "horror" flicks which center on someone hacking people up with a knife for no apparent reason or which drift confusingly between reality and halucination.

I thought the monster looked pretty convincing -- then again, I was weaned in the pre-Speilberg era. I have to agree with the reviewer who said the scene where Rex kills the farmer in the shed and the wife sees him from the kitchen window, then tries to hide, is quite scary. So was the boy glancing up from his comic books in the van, to see Rex standing outside.

I loved the touches with the stained glass puzzle & the chief detective's stunned "I'll be d****, the Yank was right" when he looks at the horrific crayon drawing made by the young survivor of the trailer park attack, too stunned to speak. (The severed arm was a very nice touch, too.)

Anyone who thinks Rawhead Rex was "hilarious," is no horror fan. It may not have been one of the genre's best efforts ever, but it was one of a number of very meaty horror flicks of the 1980s which are still have plenty bite today (pun intended)!

Im the kind of person who alot of the time will buy movies before I have even seen them. That was the case with this movie. I loved this movie! People say it was cheezy, maybe a little but if you love cult horror, get this movie. Its defently a fun little satanic film and I would recomend it to anyone that are fans of the horror / cult genre.

As well as delivering some of the shoddiest straight-to-video horror efforts ever made, the 1980s were also notorious for making stars of the real brains behind most projects - the writers. Popular authors such as Stephen King and Dean Koontz saw their names frequently advertised above the movie's title, used as the main selling point over any actors attached or the director in charge of the adaptation. One of the biggest names to emerge in the decade was Clive Barker, whose pull-no-punches approach and love of the stomach-churning side of sexuality provided a racier alternative to the milder King and Koontz. He would really make his mark in 1987 with his directorial debut Hellraiser, but before that came Rawhead Rex, adapted from a short story from Volume 3 of his Books of Blood series.

Just why Barker seemed so intent on bringing Hellraiser to the big screen himself is made perfectly clear after watching Rawhead Rex, a cheap, schlocky monster movie which Barker himself wrote the screenplay for, but quickly disowned after seeing the final product. Set in Ireland, Rawhead follows American Howard Hallenback (David Dukes), who drags his whole family to the cold, wet countryside in a bid to discover his roots and research sites that may be of religious and historical significance. But little does he know that nearby, a farmer has moved a sacred stone and unleashed the snarling demon Rawhead Rex upon the world. The peculiar priest Declan O'Brien (Ronan Wilmot) starts to act even more bizarrely when he encounters a strange vision after laying his hand on the church altar. Soon enough, mutilated bodies are being unearthed and citizens are vanishing, and with the police seemingly clueless, it's left to Howard to uncover the truth and send the monster back where it came from.

Directed by George Pavlou, Rawhead Rex is a terrible movie, losing points on everything from the camerawork to the acting (although Dukes actually isn't bad). The monster itself looks like hastily clumped-together paper mache school project, with a permanent open-mouthed expression unable to disguise the clear signs that the actor inside is struggling to see where they're going. It's offensive to the Irish, and just about anybody else with reasonable taste in cinema. Still, like many horror movies from the 1980s that receiving a pounding from the critics before gathering dust in the local video store, this is tons of fun for anybody with a weakness for tongue-in-cheek trash. It has a sense of humour, and certainly isn't afraid to have the most helpless of victims be dragged away by the rabid beast when you really expect them to turn up alive. Barker was understandably embarrassed but this certainly doesn't damage his reputation, and is enough to tide us over until Barker hopefully gets around to his long-planned remake.

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