La langue tueuse

Maybe I set my self up for a fall by believing the mini-hype around 'The Killer Tongue', but whatever the reason I found this movie for the most part to be tedious, and generally unfunny. It's equal parts early Almodovar and Peter Jackson without being as inventive or entertaining as either. It also reminded me in places of the underrated 'Accion Mutante', another zany Spanish sci fi comedy, though it was nowhere near as good. The premise of this movie is promising but the execution fails to realize its comic and surreal potential. Melinda Clarke ('Spawn') shows a lot more screen appeal than the mundane script she has to work with, and is easily the best thing about this. Genre fans will also get a kick out of seeing "Freddy" (Robert Englund) and "Pinhead" (Doug Bradley). Personally I was more chuffed to see Eddie Tudor-Pole, a guy who knows the answer to "Who Killed Bambi?".

Man you really can't imagine what this movie is before you see it. Well to start with the plot: a girl lives in a convent, waiting for her boyfriend to get out of jail. Something like a pink meteor falls in earth and a piece of it goes inside her soup. Then she turns into this weird woman in black tight clothes, with a 10 feet killer tongue. To complete this nonsense her poodles are transformed in three really strange gay men, all this while her boyfriend tries to escape from the mad sadistic guy in prison. A must see if you enjoy B horror movies!

Uurrrrggghh!! Where can I possibly start.

The Killer Tongue looked good on the shelf. The cover screams out quotable quotes, like the now obviously sarcastic one from Quentin Tarantino; `Wow!!!'. I should have read between the lines but instead I thought `Wow!!!' It's even got the hilarious one-liner under the title that reads `Go for your gums.' Tack City here we come.

A black, bizarre comedy with a heavy Sci-Fi/Horror element running throughout, The Killer Tongue is an absurd film that you really cannot prepare yourself for. It doesn't really matter what I tell you about it, the good bits, bad bits. it's one of those films that you really have to see for yourself.

The film can lay claim to winning a host of alternative film awards including `Best Actress', `Best Special Effects' and `Best Director', but somehow this is totally meaningless when you're watching a film revolving around a 10-foot, flesh-eating, talking tongue that lives inside the oh-so-cute figure of Candy (Melinda Clarke).

Candy is waiting for her boyfriend to be released from jail. Trying to lay low, she adopts the guise of a Nun whilst living at a petrol station turned nunnery in the middle of the desert. With a very `From Dusk Till Dawn' backdrop, Candy decides that its time to sod-off and wait for her boyfriend elsewhere. which is when an alien being descends from the heavens via spaceship/moon-rock/pod (hard to tell) and lands in her soup! Yep, alien invasion through soup.

So stupid in fact that my brain switched off, Candy then turns into a complete Marilyn Mansonesque figurine that simply has to feed her tongue with human flesh. We're even treated with Candy satisfying her own curiosities with a bit of tongue waggling in the downstairs department. Best bit so far.

Not alone, Candy's' pet poodles also had a good deal of soup that night. As a result we've now got four very camp, "Priscilla" styled drag queens wandering around the house. What follows are scenes involving a lot of tongue wrestling, strangulation and wriggling.

Robert Englund (of Freddy Krueger fame) plays an eccentric, evil jail warden who is partial to a bit of man-on-man. Surprisingly he's great in the role, which makes me wonder what he got into after the Nightmare on Elm Street series of pictures.

A completely off-the-wall, highly unpredictable film, The Killer Tongue is worth watching because you'll probably never see anything quite like it ever again. Bizarre, trashy, sick and twisted it may be, but can it be described as being any good? Hmmmm. Can you polish a turd?

This was Alberto Sciamma's first film, and it won him a Best Director award at the Fantafestival. I don't know what he was aiming for, but he hit something.

While her boyfriend (Jason Durr) is in the cooler, Candy (Melinda Clarke) hides out in a nunnery. Not your ordinary nunnery, but one that runs a gas station in the New Mexico desert.

After some alien magic, Candy grows a long tongue and her poodles are turned into flamboyant drag queens (one is Jonathan Rhys Meyers). This are certainly getting interesting because this isn't just a long tongue, it's a killer tongue. It craves meat! While Candy is getting used to her new tongue, her boyfriend is being tortured by none other than Robert Englund, who is the Chief Guard at the jail.

The nuns don't go away from the story after Candy leaves. One (Mapi Galán) is wandering the desert and comes on some alien rock that gives her healing powers, and another has been transformed by the transvestites.

The huge tongue - we are talking 6+ feet here - transforms and talks! Candy tries to commit suicide, but the tongue heals her just like the nun in the desert heals her boyfriend.

That nun was doing some special healing to Johnny later on, and they barely escaped with their lives after Candy caught them.

Anyway, Candy finds out that a six foot tongue can do things that Johnny can't.

This is one strange movie. It would have been more interesting if the only nudity wasn't two men's butts.

"The Shawshank Redemption" is a wonderful, thoughtful, touching and intelligent masterpiece regarding crime, punishment, and the limitations of the human soul. I guess what I mean is, "The Shawshank Redemption" is a better film than "Killer Tongue". When did I come to this realization? Well, maybe it was around the time in "Killer Tongue" when the hateful prison warden (Robert Englund) gets into an outhouse plastered with pornography only to have an inmate dropped right on top of him from a crane. I think it was right about then that I realized that "Killer Tongue" was not going to be the cinematic masterpiece I had hoped for.

Don't get me wrong, the "hilarious" outhouse shenanigans are not the film's only misstep. Take, for instance, the movie's "hilarious" gag of having poodles magically transformed into loathsome and annoying humans. Before I saw this movie I had a generally positive image of Poodle-Men, but "Killer Tongue" has changed that- I will never vote for a Poodle-Man now! No, no, no! > > My only thoughts that could collect reasonably while this frightful mess unspooled before my unbelieving eyes was that the film-makers had attempted to >. Their movie is near unwatchable- jokes and gore are merely suggested instead of shown thanks to the poor editing, the acting is horrible, the sets are supposed to look off the wall but are pretty bland, parts that are supposed to be outrageous are trite (Sex Starved Nuns? Oh, there's an original blasphemy!), and the whole thing reeks of the incompetence only A-Pix productions can put forth. Parts of it are funny, but still, you can actually smell how bad this movie is. It's mephitic stench reeks from the television screen. Horror icons Doug Bradley (Pinhead) and Englund (Freddy Kreuger) give the worst performances of their careers, and Mindy Clarke was a favorite of mine from "Return of the Living Dead part 3", but is painfully bad in this.

Unless you're a connoisseur of killer tongue movies- and, rest assured, this is the "Citizen Kane" of killer tongue movies- stay very, very far away from this movie. Rent "Death Mask" or "The Wizard of Gore", just run away from "Killer Tongue".