Wolff Mann (Jeff Richard) confers with Frank N. Stien (FRANKENSTEIN 1970’s Mike Lane!) in Joe Tornatore’s GROTESQUE. Linda Blair’s in it, too!
stand about staring and a cap- tion reads “To be continued ...” We’re still waiting. Ankh-Venaris, phone home... or at least tell us how the story was supposed to end. The extras are the afore- mentioned wry chat with producer Dmitri Villard (ONCE BITTEN, FRANKENSTEIN GENERAL HOS- PITAL), an interview with an enthu- siastic Brophy, and the trailer. Joe Tornatore’s GROTESQUE is like a Rob Zombie film avant la lettre, which isn’t intended as praise. The in-jokes, the genre vet cameos, the exaggerated demen- tia, the FAMOUS MONSTERS set dressing, the poor pacing, the want of basic human feeling—it’s all here. Like FRANKENSTEIN 1970, it opens with an irrelevant horror scene which turns out to be the climax of a horror movie one of the characters is supposed to have worked on... but, after the story has wrapped up, the film burns and we’re back in the screening room
where monsters Frank N. Stien (producer Mike Lane, essentially reprising his role from FRANKEN- STEIN 1970—not to mention THE MONSTER SQUAD) and Wolff Mann (Jeff Richard) do a comic skit which sits ill with the nasty, if ludi- crous tone of the rest of the pic- ture (this sequence was missing from the version released on VHS by Media Home Entertainment and laserdisc through Image Entertain- ment). Lisa (Linda Blair), daugh- ter of make-up artist Orville Kruger (Guy Stockwell), heads out to the family’s isolated, snow- bound retreat with her friend Kathy (ANGEL’s Donna Wilkes). On the road, they tangle with a pack of “punkers” led by maniacal sadist Scratch (Brad Wilson), and including a young Robert Z’Dar (MANIAC COP) and a shrieking Bunki Z (THE KINDRED). The gang tracks the girls to the Kruger home and torment, abuse and slaughter everyone in the house.
This rouses the ire of hideously- deformed, hidden-away brother Patrick (Bob Apiza), who sets about killing the killers in a rampage of revenge. In a manner more redo- lent of clod-hopping ineptitude than a desire to subvert expecta- tions, several major characters are killed mid-film (one of the top- billed stars lingers in a coma and dies offscreen) and new ones come in, including Orville’s plastic sur- geon brother Rod (Tab Hunter) and the cop on the case (Charles Dierkop), to take the story in a dif- ferent, equally ridiculous direction. The make-up effects milieu allows for the deployment of old props as set dressing, but John Naulin (RE-ANIMATOR) does a clumsy job with the foam rubber- faced mutant brother, which ren- ders farcical several sequences that ought to have been distress- ing, affecting or horrifying. Per- formances are all over the place, with the cockatoo-haired punkers
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