1981 horror movie
Rating: 10/20 (Fred: 2/20; Jeremy: 3/20; Libby: 3/20; Johnny: 1/20)
Plot: A prodigal Hittite man is killed by his own tractor, and his wife and her two friends are tormented by some Amish guys and maybe an incubus.
Maybe there's just something wrong with me, but I didn't think this was that bad while my fellow Bad Movie Club jockasses rated it very lowly. This is a Wes Craven jam, and at the very least, he's got some ideas. There's a foreboding setting (Amish country--yikes), some suspenseful moments (including an extended scene with Sharon Stone in a barn, one of those maybe-classic horror sequences with a spider, and a great scene with a snake and a bathtub), and a pair of weird twists at the end that make the thing memorable. And it's got this guy:
Michael Berryman, one of those guys who walks around with his own special effects. I looked him up--he's got something called Hypohidrotic Ectodermal Dysplasia, a condition which means he can't have hair, fingernails, teeth, or sweat glands. Let the records show that I had a joke there but edited it out because I didn't want Mr. Berryman coming along and seeing this. This also has the great Ernest Borgnine who is once again giving it his all in a bad movie that features a little religion. We enjoyed his work in Devil's Rain, too. Here, he snarls about somebody being "a stench in the nostrils of God" which is sort of thing that makes these movies worth it for me. There aren't many scares here if you're looking for that in a horror movie, just that sense of foreboding. The biggest problem, however, is that the whole thing just doesn't make that much sense. I had to look up and read a plot synopsis to even understand what happened during the first of the movie's twists, and the second, although it contained a shot that was kind of cool, seemed tacked-on because it was tacked-on. So I would recommend this movie only to Ernest Borgnine or Wes Craven completists and not necessarily to somebody looking for a movie that is either good or bad. I did like that scene with the snake quite a bit though.
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