Hamdingers
Just so’s you know’s I care, Jimmy, I did dutifully watch a dreadful horror movie the other night, hoping to bring you another snark-a-licious edition of Hurts So Good. Sadly, the movie – 1989’s The Immortalizer, just didn’t sufficiently meet my amorphous definition of slasher goodness.
The plot was about a group of teenagers being kidnapped by a mad scientist who transplants the brains of rich old people into their firm sexy bodies, and that really does sound ideal. But the teens are all kidnapped and anesthetized in the first five minutes, so there’s no time for the drinking, pot-smoking and fornicating that so richly earns them their horrible fates. The gore is confined mostly to the operating table, so you don’t get those shock makeup-assisted deaths that are so essential, and for a movie with such a fetishistic plot and a lead role for Playboy Playmate Rebekka Armstrong there’s startlingly little nudity.
There’s attributes to note. Clarke Lindsley gives a perversely homely I’m-just-evil-for-the-hell-of-it performance as the mad scientist’s right hand man, he has an accomplished sinister laugh and he uses it every chance he gets, sometimes stopping three or four times to chuckle in a single line of dialogue, then chuckling again afterwards, as if fondly remembering how well he just laughed. And it is pretty damned funny how the small suburban neighborhood this takes place in has exactly one police officer.
But its attempts at self-conscious cult-film oddness all go splat, and the hero is just plain annoying, constantly getting himself trapped or captured or overpowered by 60 year-old doctors. The movie is more about his alternately breaking into and out of the same suburban house over and over again when you really want it to be focused on the heartless slaughter of the young. About the most heroic thing he does is punch a middle-aged woman in the face, and it doesn’t even put her down for the count. Oh, for the trivia-minded, she’s played by Melody Patterson, Wrangler Jane from F-Troop, and she’s maliciously-MILF-y in her way.
And at the end he looks directly at the camera and screams “You don’t get it! You just don’t get it!” and I thought that if Mystery Science Theatre 3000 were still around, that would be the clip they tack on after the end credits. And really, the most I got out of this movie was really wishing that show were still around. The reason this post didn’t go up two hours ago is that it sent me off on some nostalgic web-surfing.
The plot was about a group of teenagers being kidnapped by a mad scientist who transplants the brains of rich old people into their firm sexy bodies, and that really does sound ideal. But the teens are all kidnapped and anesthetized in the first five minutes, so there’s no time for the drinking, pot-smoking and fornicating that so richly earns them their horrible fates. The gore is confined mostly to the operating table, so you don’t get those shock makeup-assisted deaths that are so essential, and for a movie with such a fetishistic plot and a lead role for Playboy Playmate Rebekka Armstrong there’s startlingly little nudity.
There’s attributes to note. Clarke Lindsley gives a perversely homely I’m-just-evil-for-the-hell-of-it performance as the mad scientist’s right hand man, he has an accomplished sinister laugh and he uses it every chance he gets, sometimes stopping three or four times to chuckle in a single line of dialogue, then chuckling again afterwards, as if fondly remembering how well he just laughed. And it is pretty damned funny how the small suburban neighborhood this takes place in has exactly one police officer.
But its attempts at self-conscious cult-film oddness all go splat, and the hero is just plain annoying, constantly getting himself trapped or captured or overpowered by 60 year-old doctors. The movie is more about his alternately breaking into and out of the same suburban house over and over again when you really want it to be focused on the heartless slaughter of the young. About the most heroic thing he does is punch a middle-aged woman in the face, and it doesn’t even put her down for the count. Oh, for the trivia-minded, she’s played by Melody Patterson, Wrangler Jane from F-Troop, and she’s maliciously-MILF-y in her way.
And at the end he looks directly at the camera and screams “You don’t get it! You just don’t get it!” and I thought that if Mystery Science Theatre 3000 were still around, that would be the clip they tack on after the end credits. And really, the most I got out of this movie was really wishing that show were still around. The reason this post didn’t go up two hours ago is that it sent me off on some nostalgic web-surfing.
posted by Nicholas Thurkettle at
2:31 PM
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