Rawhead Rex, le monstre de la lande

"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)!

I don't know what the hell the other critics on this movie are talking about but I loved this movie!! I thought there could have been more blood and more plot, but all in all I thought this was a very good movie.

If you've got some time to kill, go ahead.

Apparently, writer Clive Barker was so incensed by this laughably bad adaptation of one of his short stories that he decided the next movie to be based on one of his books would be directed by himself (the result being the rather excellent Hellraiser!). I can't say I blame the poor bloke: for an author to see his hard work turned into such a dreadful movie must be a painful experience.

It's an experience, however, that fans of really bad horror movies will probably find quite pleasurable, thanks to the fact that it not only features some truly terrible acting, but also one of the least convincing movie monsters of the 80s: the titular monstrosity looks like a bargain basement 'predator' (from the Schwarzeneggar movie)—a bizarre combination of pro-wrestler, a Mad Max-style warrior, and a bog-eyed mutant pig with ridiculously huge fangs!

The film opens with an Irish farmer attempting to remove a huge, ancient, neolithic monument from his field (he's obviously a man not too concerned about his country's heritage); when he finally gets the stone to shift, Rawhead Rex, a monstrous, nine foot tall creature that had been trapped underneath, is set free...

The rest of the film is pretty much your basic 'creature on the loose' movie (dressed up with some nonsense about a church built on a site originally used in pagan, pre-Christian rituals) which sees the ancient beast creating bloody havoc in the rural community before finally being defeated by 'girl power'. Along the way, viewers are treated to some pretty cheap-looking gore, a funny moment when the church verger is 'baptised' in urine by Rawhead, a shocking performance by the actor playing the scared gypsy kid, and a wonderfully gratuitous spot of female nudity when a woman is dragged though a caravan window by the monster, causing her top to fall off!

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.

The short story Rawhead Rex is a gory and stomach churning piece of literature appearing in Clive Barker's Books of Blood Volume 3. Reading it one sees the possibilities of a good old fashioned monster on the loose movie. Unfortunately, most of the graphic violence of the story is removed from the film that followed. Although many of the character details remain the same, except that the protagonist and his family are Londoners instead of Americans in the short story. The setting, score, a few actors and the occasional scare make the films worth seeing for true Clive Barker completists. Be warned, what does make the proceedings less alluring is the fact that Rawhead himself is a great disappointment; the direction somewhat poor and from a script by Barker himself I expected more. Not even in league with his superior Hellraiser, effective Candyman or intriguing Nightbreed. Though I must admit I must've seen this film about eight times since it was initially released.

Trivia note: The mother of the American Family is the actress who plays the nurse Joe Spinell skewers in Maniac.