The Strangeness

THE STRANGENESS is about an abandoned mine, it's valuable contents, and the hideous whatsit that lives there.

After an earthquake, and a pair of mysterious disappearances, a group of six surveyors / geologists and their guide head for the mine. For the snotty, greedy head of the team, gold is more attractive than science. Unsurprisingly, horror and death ensue.

The story is straightforward, and plays like the second cousin of BEAST FROM HAUNTED CAVE. The characters are fairly familiar, 1980's monster fodder. The monster itself, apart from a few noises and glimpses, takes forever to show up! Until then, semi-drama, clunky "humor", and general ding-a-ling dialogue pad things out.

About the creature: It's a stop-motion, H.P. Lovecraft-type nightmare, complete with squiggly tentacles and an oozing, vertical mouth! Is it worth the wait? Sort of. There's an awful lot of extra-thick cheeeze to wade through before we get a -brief- look at this thing.

EXTRA POINTS FOR: Some of the gooey death scenes.

Worth a watch...

My boss at the time and showed it to us at a Halloween party at our office. He is the Chris Huntley that co-wrote and acted in it. He knows it's bad, we know it's bad and we all agree that the monster looks WAY too much like a vagina to be coincidence. Maybe it was from a gynocological experiment gone wrong.

It was a VERY low budget and the actors were all friends so what you have here is a case of "hey gang, lets' put on a show".

Nobody got hurt and it was a first attempt. Nothing wrong with that. It gave us all a good laugh and it's a great film to watch with friends and make fun of. :-)

This extremely low-budget monster flick centers around a group of mine surveyors exploring an abandoned gold mine in order to see if its worth reopening. They get trapped after a cave in and find they are at the mercy of a strange, slimy creature which seems bent on knocking them off one at a time. The word that most came to mind as I watched this movie was 'desperate'. The script and acting is terrible, the stop-motion monster effects were unintentionally funny, and since the bulk of the movie takes place underground lighting the sets convincingly looked like a logistical nightmare. All that being said however for some reason I felt this movie failed not from lack of effort, but maybe from either a lack of budget, experience and/or lack of creative inspiration. The whole thing came off like it was either a college project or a first film made by amateurs, I have a certain amount of affection for films like that even when they completely miss the mark. I guess what I'm saying is I give it an B for effort and a D- for actual results, not insultingly bad as some low-budget monster movies I've seen but still not worth seeing unless you have a LOT of free time on your hands. I'm voting it a 5.

The Strangeness (1985)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

A group of people hear various legends about a certain cave they are about to enter. They decide to go ahead with their journey and it doesn't take long for them to get trapped in the cave with a giant monster who wants to kill them.

If you're read Stephen Thrower's NIGHTMARE USA book then you'll recognize this title and the various stories that went along with it. This film was shot for $25,000.00, which was an incredibly low amount for the 1950s let along when this movie was made. One should keep that in mind when they're watching THE STRANGENESS because the film doesn't have too much in it. It's one of those films that you can tell didn't have much money to spend and obviously there's not too much to see.

I give the filmmakers a lot of credit for trying to pull the film off but sadly it didn't work. I thought the story was actually something that could have worked, although parts of it did remind me of THE BOOGINS. The cave location should have been put to much better use but sadly the cinematography is just so dark that many times it's hard to see what is going on. Another problem is that the budget didn't allow for a monster so we get a really awful looking bit of stop-motion that is more laughable than anything else.

Trying to pass off a stop-motion monster just didn't work and it's too bad that there wasn't some sort of physical monster here. The performances range from bad to decent but there's not one that would hard or damage the film. You don't have many other special effects in terms of the violence or gore. The majority of the running time has the characters walking and talking and then walking and talking some more. There's no question that the film just doesn't have much happening because they couldn't afford it.

THE STRANGENESS certainly isn't going to win any major awards over its final product but considering what the filmmakers had to work with, buying them a beer if you ever meet them would be a nice gesture.

A group of people decide to explore an old mine "Golden Spike", each of them has a different interest. One wants to write a book about it, other is a photographer, there's also a geologist and finally a couple of guys working for the person heading the expedition, their objective is to see if it's worth investing half a million dollars to re-open the mine. One by one they encounter the monster and to make matters worse all the possible exits appear to be blocked. "winds of hell" mysteriously start blowing, fear sets in, the only lights are the ones from the helmets. The guy in charge snaps, thinking that the rest of the people want to rob his firm's gold, there's no place to hide.

This monster reminded me of Lovecraft's monsters, I'm not a fan of this sort of clay monsters, the tentacles, how it moved. Even though the movie takes place in a mine, it should have had better lighting, at times all you can see is the light on their helmets, which is the same as saying, you can't see nothing at all. The acting deserves mixed reviews, some were OK, others not so much. Overall it's an average story that could have become a good movie if there was a bigger budget.