Grotesque

My review was written in October 1988 after watching the movie on Media Home Entertainment video cassette.

Various low-budget filmmakers team up for the forgettable "Grotesque", a horror exercise aimed primarily at the video trade.

Awkward structure has Linda Blair fronting for the first few reels, driving home for a family reunion, accompanied by pal Donna Wilkes. Her dad Guy Stockwell is a super makeup effects expert, treated to a dose of gore when a gang of punkers (who've had a run-in with Blair on the road) invade the house and start killing everyone.

Blair escapes in the snow and is saved when an overgrown, slow-witted relative is set free from his secret room by the punkers and goes on the rampage. Cops led by Charles Dierkop (of tv's "Police Woman" series) believe the punkers' story blaming the relative for all the trouble.

Though surviving and hospitalized, Blair is written out of the film at this point, with Tab Hunter taking over the lead role as her plastic surgeon uncle. He takes he law into his own hands and predictably avenges his family's massacre by surgically mutilating the punkers' faces in yucky fashion.

Makeup effects here are unimpressive. Credits include many familiar names from indie pics, ranging from composer Bill Loose to "The Love Butcher" co-director Mikel Angel. Luana Patten, absent from the big screen for two decades, has a small role as a gothic old lady in an opening film-within-a-film segment.

Hunter attacks his unsympathetic role with some relish, but Blair, who previously toiled for helmer Joe Tornatore in reshoots on "Nightforce", has little to sink her teeth into.

This has to be one of the most bizarre and stupidest movies I've ever seen, I mean what the hell were the filmmakers going for with this confusing mess (I suspect drugs were involved). The plot centres on a family and the daughter's friend taking a vacation at a cabin in the mountains where soon a gang of crazed punks breaks into their home and slaughters the entire family, except for one hell-bent on finding the supposed secret stash which turns out to be something more than they've bargained for.

On paper the movie might sound like an interesting concept with the director and writers not keeping the story within one horror subgenre as it starts as a home invasion flick, then morphs into a slasher movie and then it turns into a revenge flick towards the end. All of these elements might sound like it's a unique combination of styles, but in fact it's a muddled mess with these abrupt changes becoming more jarring than interesting.

Everything's just half-baked in this horrible mess of a movie, even the twist which in the hands of more capable filmmakers could have worked. Despite having several familiar faces in the cast such as Linda Blair whose charm couldn't save this mess, Donna Wilkes, Tab Hunter and Robert Z'Dar, each of them deserve far better than this. The overacting by the supposed punks isn't entertaining enough for me to sit through this ever again.

Overall 'Grotesque', well it's a fitting title as everything about this fits that title, but not in a good way.

I did like what one reviewer said about this film's plot drunkenly staggering all over the place. It does. I first saw this movie, like others I review on IMDb, when I was a kid, on the USA network. I saw it from the beginning to the part when the dad gets clubbed by the hoodlums, and then my mom turned it off, saying, "you don't need to see that". Then I think we watched COPS or something. I remember it was on USA's Saturday Nightmares. Well, I just moved to a new town, and the local video store had a worn out old copy of this movie so I rented it. I saw a few parts I had remembered and some I didn't, but the bottom line is it's a good movie. There is some truly bad acting, and some violence that is just plain mean. There are also some really stupid plot holes, but if you like '80's horror, then this is not too bad. The plot does jump around a bit; the whole thing flashes around like it's the plot to some big network action pilot. Also containing stupid dialog and an out-of-place ending(but some truly exploitative violence), this is a good film for any '80's horror buff. Oh, and the Frankenstein/Wolfman ending is only on the TV version. Whoever has a tape of that TV version should treasure it I guess. Three stars.

After watching Linda Blair's HELL NIGHT and discovering a lost '80s gem, I decided to check out another of her post-EXORCIST works, hoping to find something almost as cool. Unfortunately, I chose GROTESQUE, a film about as cool as plunging your hands in boiling water.

A special effects man in Hollywood (who should've been out of a job years ago based on the quality of his work!) takes some time off to spend a quiet weekend with his family in the mountains. But trouble comes knocking in the form of a homicidal Billy Idol and his friends, looking for some Hollywood money and willing to kill for it. But the punks might find more than they're bargaining for...

GROTESQUE has absolutely no idea what kind of film it wants to be. It starts off with a light horror-comedy exposition before abruptly switching gears to a brutal home-invasion thriller. Then it's a cop drama. Then it's a monster movie. Then it's a revenge thriller. Then it decides it wants to be tongue-in-cheek. It's almost as if the director realized his original film was a complete, utter failure and then rewrote the second half, then rewrote it again... and again... and again.

Trouble is, its tone is completely off. Grim home-invasion scenes are soundtracked by bouncy, cheesy synth work. Comedy is abruptly cut off by brutality, and major characters are suddenly disposed of and never brought up again. There's 90 minutes of plot in the first half an hour, then endless sequences of walking through the woods and interrogation scenes in the second. And the film waves goodbye with one of the most head-scratching, incompetent endings I've ever witnessed.

I realize bad movie lovers might get excited reading this review, but it doesn't even deliver the so-bad-it's-good goods. It's mind-numbingly dull, so inept that its ineptness doesn't even provide entertainment. GROTESQUE is one of the worst horror flicks of the decade, and a gung-ho Linda Blair can do nothing to save it.

Hilarious looking over-the-top 'punkers' terrorize and kill an innocent family, only to be stalked by a vengeful deformed son who was being kept in a secret room of the house. Just when it seems that this film is rolling into its conclusion, Tab Hunter makes an out-of-nowhere entrance, marking the starting point of twenty more excruciating minutes. GROTESQUE, which to this point was merely somewhat painful, now crosses the "near-lethal" line.

Throwaway horror bunkum, and a sad example of how its once-promising star, Linda Blair, was somehow reduced to being a fixture in sub-B material.

3.5/10