Absurd 1981

"What a see-saw, ding-dong, back-and-forth, whip-flipping donnybrook we've got going here today, folks!" In all my years of watching the NFL (and there've been a few, ladies and germs) I have NEVER heard a description like that by one of the sports analysts. But here, you can expect just such asinine commentary as this Italian-trying-to-pass-itself-off-as-American movie calls the play-by-play on an ages-old game between the Pittsburg Steelers and the Los Angeles Rams (yes, I said "Los Angeles Rams", long before they were the St. Louis Rams).

Monster Hunter aka Absurd is just the first on my list of the infamous "Video Nasties" that I managed to find a list for (going through them alphabetically) and while it goes by many names (Monster Hunter , Horrible , Anthropophagus 2 , The Grim Reaper 2 , et al) it definitely seems that it's given Italian name is the most appropro: this is absurdity at its absolute best.

I've recently watched (and commented on) another Italian flick that was "so bad it's good" but unfortunately, this reeking piece of tripe doesn't earn that award. This was just bad all the way around. If it was, indeed, banned by the UK as one of the "video nasties", I can only assume it was because the film - and everything about it - was "nasty", and not because of the mild gore content. Oh sure, there are some scenes that are not for the faint-of-heart (intestines falling out, etc) but this was mild compared to some of the stuff you see...and most of this was so ridiculous that it was anything but "nasty".

Rather than sit here and pick this apart piece by piece (it would be easy and fun to do) let me just say there was nothing good about this; as mentioned earlier, this doesn't even qualify under the "so bad it's good" label. Even the special effects were sorely lacking and reeked of a very limited budget. There was no backstory, apart from the couple of incoherent lines spit out by the "priest". If I hadn't read the synopsis of the film, I still would have no idea what was going on, or why the villain couldn't be stopped. Even now - armed with that knowledge - the ending doesn't make any sense, based on dialogue in the movie itself. No explanation of why this guy went on a killing spree, why he had some bizarre bloodlust, or just randomly killed anyone and everyone he came in contact with. The acting was as bland as could be, and I had no idea that a person could go on screaming and fighting to stay alive while a drill penetrated through their skull, their brain, and then exited the other side. Talk about precision technique! It was just such idiocy as that that makes this one hard to sit through; there was no explanation for WHY, so much of the movie made no sense. It was basically "Frankenstein's Monster" all over again, except it wasn't a dead body reanimated by lightning...just some guy with a weird physiology that, for whatever weird reason, wanted to kill everything and everyone.

I'd like to give props to some of the "kills" here, but again, they were so utterly ridiculous that they really don't even merit acknowlegement in that regard. Too many loopholes, too many loose ends, too many blatant gaffes in the film to even make the kills interesting.

I will keep going on my quest to watch all the "video nasties" (at least, the ones on the list that I came across, and as many as are available online) but here's hoping some of them are truly "nasty" in the gore/splatter/horror effect...and not merely because of how completely horrid the film and/or acting is. This one was just absolutely awful.