Humongous

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.

I was present at Delmonte in the Pines resort when they filmed this movie. My parents took us there every year. It certainly was no great film, BUT we got to see the actors and the old resort house/area and boat house area in between filming. I was a kid, 9 years old, but I remember seeing dobermans in large fenced areas for the movie and the actor who played "Humongous" was sooo tall, but very nice. They did actually blow up an old boat house out on a little island. When they did that, I was going to bed in the new resort area and remember being afraid of the noise, and the filmed "screaming" from the movie being shot. For a low budget film, it was totally cool to see the remains after the shoot, the old boat house, the props left behind and they ripped an entire floor out of the old resort main house, and there was "blood spatter" etc. in it. That was truly a cool experience.

This Canadian slasher is definitely one of the better slashers of the 1980s and is unjustifiably panned by everyone. When HUMONGOUS was released the biggest criticism against it was how predictable or derivative it was and it was dismissed as being just another slasher. Yes, there's a very familiar feel to the story-line but most slashers are basically the same movie done over and over again so I don't see this necessarily as a bad thing. But the fact is HUMONGOUS actually tries to be different and in some ways, it succeeds in being different. HUMONGOUS is more the unofficial companion and has more in common to that other Canadian horror film, RITUALS, than to HALLOWEEN or Friday THE 13Th. Both HUMONGOUS and RITUALS have almost the same kind of deformed killer who lives in the backwoods. The killer remains unseen until the very end. And there's an obvious Canadian feel to both films.

The beginning of HUMONGOUS is brutal and sets up the familiar story-line of a gruesome incident which happened in the past that will affect a subsequent generation. In this case, the film starts in the 1940s. After a woman from a rich family is raped, she decides to live in seclusion on an isolated island where she gives birth to a deformed kid. Flash forward 40 years and we see a bunch of horny young adults who were vacationing on another island and as they're heading back to the mainland on their boat they crash on the island where the woman lived after one of the passengers, Nick the hotheaded brother, takes control of the boat and rams it into rocky shore. Everyone leaves the burning boat and they all have to go to the island and the rest of the story is basically about the group surviving on the spooky island where there's a monster killing them one by one.

The atmosphere is very good and the cinematography is actually good too. Some interesting camera positions. But like many have mentioned already, many scenes during the night are EXTREMELY dark and it's difficult at times to know exactly what's going on. I set up my TV's brightness level to the max and the image was improved greatly but there were still some moments were I didn't see anything at all. As annoying as the dark scenes were, I believe this was done deliberately, not because the film is a low budget movie and they couldn't afford lighting but because that's what the director wanted. The darkness was at times carried to an extreme which can only be attributed to a director's decision and not some low production value. With that said, I personally find it fascinating that so much happens in the dark. The darkness is stylised. Notice when the monster crashes through the door or when the boathouse catches fire, how the brightness of those scenes create a shock. I think the director wanted to shock people with light by having most of the action happen in so much darkness. In a movie theater, after watching scenes that happen mostly in the dark, a quick shot of a bright image creates tension and actually hurts the eyes. It's like when you wake up in the morning and how the bright lights outside the windows hurt your eyes. Well, that's what Paul Lynch tried to recreate here by having so much of the action take place in near total darkness. The monster's appearances during those brief scenes of brightness must have been startling in a dark theater.

The acting is mostly serviceable but the last three survivors, Janit Baldwin (the girl with the glasses), David Wallace (the blond guy) and Janet Julian (the last girl) are much better than your average slasher actor. The gore is limited and in a way it's unfortunate. I'm not a gorehound but I thought the film needed a bit more blood to be that much more creepy. The biggest weakness of HUMONGOUS (aside from the extreme darkness) is the score. There's almost no music. When the film starts getting scary it's no coincidence that it coincides with the moment when the score finally makes its presence felt. The jazzy music during the opening and closing credits didn't belong in this kind of film though. And the story itself is actually interesting and there's an underlying lurid aspect about it that's fascinating. Dogs are a major part of the underlying story and something tells me they have more to do than meets the eye.

Anyway, I personally like HUMONGOUS. The poster is cool and I really like the title. As a real horror film, it's definitely more successful than Lynch's other horror opus, PROM NIGHT, and a good portion of other slashers made in the same period and those made today, like I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER, which was obviously inspired by this film.

In 1946, a woman is raped during a party on her father's island. Her dogs come to the rescue, viciously attacking her attacker.

More than thirty years later, two brothers, their sister, and their two girlfriends go out on their large boat on a large lake. One of the brothers is a rather disturbed individual, who fires a gun he has nearly pointed at his brother at point-blank range, among other things. They have some trouble navigating the boat at night, and come across someone stranded in his boat. They bring him aboard, and he's grateful. He tells them about the island they are near, where a crazy old lady lives with lots of dogs.

The psycho brother decides he wants to try driving the boat at night, though they had anchored already. He grabs his gun when they try to stop him. The boat runs aground and blows up, landing everyone on the island.

Though they had heard dogs barking, the only dogs them come across are skeletons. There's no sign of the old lady, and someone starts killing them off. It's no secret that the killer is the old lady's son, the son of the rapist, presumably. Though we never get a good look at him, a diary they find indicates he has acromegaly. Having that doesn't make a person a monster (André the Giant and Rondo Hatton, among others, had that condition). Evidently he is brain-damaged as well, or severely screwed up because of the way his mother raised him.

The movie is pretty derivative. I've seen quite a few movies where at some point a young woman pretends to be a killer's mother to try to save herself, for example. At a couple points, the good brother, his girlfriend, and his sister reminded me of Fred, Daphne, and Velma, respectively, from Scooby-Doo.

Many of the scenes take place at nighttime, and on the videotape, yes the picture is often almost completely or completely black. Evidently this was not true when the film had been projected, so it is probably a matter of a bad transfer.

Most of the reviews would have you believe that this is completely terrible, but actually it's not such a bad effort. It's predictable, to be sure, but directed with more skill than you'd expect, with a score that reminded me (in a good way) of Italian horror movies of the period, and a cute, fairly smart heroine in Janet Julian. Reports of it being "too dark" are true to a degree, but greatly exaggerated; have you seen the much better-known "Hell Night"? (**)