What a world.
The story of Rawhead Rex is a simple one, so this’ll probably be a short paragraph. Howard Hallenbeck is a American writer and photographer who has taken his family to a small village in Ireland in order to study ancient neolithic burial sites. At the same time this is happening, a bit of errant yardwork accidentally unleashes an equally-as-ancient demon onto the Earth, a demon known as Rawhead (for some reason). Rawhead immediately goes off to do what demons do best, which is murder people in gruesome ways, and eventually (about an hour or so in maybe), this turns around back to Howard and we get to move on to the climax. That’s about it.
Rawhead Rex was the second work by Clive Barker to be adapted to film, the first being 85’s Underworld (no vampires or werewolves involved), and apparently Clive was so displeased at the work they did that it drove him to direct the next adaptation of his work, which would turn out to be Hellraiser. Which seems like a bit of an extreme reaction at first, but having watched the film it’s not a wholly undeserved one. I mean Hellraiser was this brutal, bloody psychosexual horror film, Nightbreed was this murder thriller meets Dances With Monsters movie, and then you have Rawhead Rex, which for all but maybe two or three scenes feels like a generic horror film, and not a terribly entertaining one at that. I mean if you’re trying to paint yourself as this master of the macabre, and you’re competing with the guy who got Brian de Palma and Stanley fucking Kubrick on his first couple movies, you probably don’t want your work to look like something from the Roger Corman collection.
That Corman comparison becomes all too real when you set eyes on the title character of our film, Mr. Rawhead Rex himself, who looks a bit like a knock-off Predator with some fur glued on him. Now far be it from me to cast aspersions, the great horror films often work with low budgets, but it just looks so fucking goofy. Especially during the many scenes where you can tell where the actor's head is directed, so with Rawhead’s big floppy face he looks more like Bojack Horseman than a demon that predates Christianity. There are masks that you can get at a dollar store that are scarier looking than Rawhead Rex.
Which could be forgiven if it was a good horror film at heart, but it’s really not. Boring main characters acted out by a middling cast, abysmally slow build-up to a disappointing climax, and despite the movie being about a bloodthirsty monster, a frustrating amount of off-screen kills and implied violence. If you’re not going to be going out into left-field then you should at least know your way around the bases I think, and Rawhead Rex is neither experimental enough nor refined enough to maintain my interest. Not in an overpopulated field like monster movies at least.
No recommendation this time, which seems to be the most common recurring theme this year unfortunately enough. If you’re interested in Clive Barker, you’re better off going with Marathon alum Hellraiser and Nightbreed or maybe Hellraiser 2, which I’ve heard good things about and probably should have watched instead. Or, and this is a wild bit, you could try reading one of his many novels or short story collections. Dude is an author after all, and there’s likely plenty of good stuff just waiting to be discovered. Can you imagine something scarier than reading a book on Halloween? I know I can’t.
