Rawhead Rex, le monstre de la lande

So the year is 2011 and time has not been kind to poor old Rawhead Rex (1986) and the monster horror genre in general.

Anyone who has read Clive Barker's short story Rawhead Rex knows that this is a downright disturbing and wicked tale. The monster Rawhead has sexual issues, he hates women, he pisses on priests and has an appetite for eating small children/babies. However, all these awful things are what makes the story such a page turner and adds more depth to what would otherwise be a mindless monster work.

The movie Rawhead Rex (1986) suffers from a very low budget. The main offender is Rawhead's mask itself. Its cheap rubber with little to no animatronics and the rubber shakes as the actor tries to move quickly. A higher budget would have done this monster so much justice, if only a creature master like Stan Winston had gotten involved, this would have been a whole different movie experience.

I would love to see Rawhead Rex remade today with all the trimmings, but unfortunately Hollywood is a complete mess. Bad actors are thrown into quick PG-13 horror crap fests and CGI technology has become the only main focus of everything.

I think it's time for someone to step up to the plate and re-boot the monster movie genre. Rawhead Rex could be an action/monster movie extravaganza if remade correctly. Hollywood simply refuses to take any chances and because of this, the horror genre is more or less dead. In the end, Rawhead Rex is still an enjoyable monster flick for the bored late night horror buff. But it just doesn't measure up to the more well-made 80s monster classics like "Pumpkinhead".

The writer Howard Hallenbeck (David Dukes) is spending vacation in the countryside of Ireland with his wife Elaine (Kelly Piper) and children researching legends and myths for his book. Meanwhile, a farmer is trying to remove an old column on the field and accidentally unleashes the evil pagan god Rawhead Rex that begins a crime spree in the village where Howard and his family are lodged.

"Rawhead Rex" is a cult trash written by Clive Barker in the beginning of his successful career in the film industry. The plot is flawed and silly, but it is funny to see. My vote is five.

Title (Brazil): "Monster - A Ressurreição do Mal (VHS)" ("Monster - The Resurrection of the Evil") / "O Senhor das Trevas (DVD)" ("The Lord of the Darkness")

The short story Rawhead Rex is a gory and stomach churning piece of literature appearing in Clive Barker's Books of Blood Volume 3. Reading it one sees the possibilities of a good old fashioned monster on the loose movie. Unfortunately, most of the graphic violence of the story is removed from the film that followed. Although many of the character details remain the same, except that the protagonist and his family are Londoners instead of Americans in the short story. The setting, score, a few actors and the occasional scare make the films worth seeing for true Clive Barker completists. Be warned, what does make the proceedings less alluring is the fact that Rawhead himself is a great disappointment; the direction somewhat poor and from a script by Barker himself I expected more. Not even in league with his superior Hellraiser, effective Candyman or intriguing Nightbreed. Though I must admit I must've seen this film about eight times since it was initially released.

Trivia note: The mother of the American Family is the actress who plays the nurse Joe Spinell skewers in Maniac.

"Rawhead Rex" was one of several "unknown" films I prided myself on "discovering" during the late 1980s, when friends would visit for a day or four. I seemed to have a knack (seemingly lost, now!) to pick out videos I had never heard of, which turned out to be surprisingly quite good. Rawhead Rex was one of these.

I found it a quite riveting, scary movie. As with almost all horror movies, I thought a few things could have been done better. Still, Rex was infinitely more satisfying to me than a number of present-day "horror" flicks which center on someone hacking people up with a knife for no apparent reason or which drift confusingly between reality and halucination.

I thought the monster looked pretty convincing -- then again, I was weaned in the pre-Speilberg era. I have to agree with the reviewer who said the scene where Rex kills the farmer in the shed and the wife sees him from the kitchen window, then tries to hide, is quite scary. So was the boy glancing up from his comic books in the van, to see Rex standing outside.

I loved the touches with the stained glass puzzle & the chief detective's stunned "I'll be d****, the Yank was right" when he looks at the horrific crayon drawing made by the young survivor of the trailer park attack, too stunned to speak. (The severed arm was a very nice touch, too.)

Anyone who thinks Rawhead Rex was "hilarious," is no horror fan. It may not have been one of the genre's best efforts ever, but it was one of a number of very meaty horror flicks of the 1980s which are still have plenty bite today (pun intended)!

Apparently, writer Clive Barker was so incensed by this laughably bad adaptation of one of his short stories that he decided the next movie to be based on one of his books would be directed by himself (the result being the rather excellent Hellraiser!). I can't say I blame the poor bloke: for an author to see his hard work turned into such a dreadful movie must be a painful experience.

It's an experience, however, that fans of really bad horror movies will probably find quite pleasurable, thanks to the fact that it not only features some truly terrible acting, but also one of the least convincing movie monsters of the 80s: the titular monstrosity looks like a bargain basement 'predator' (from the Schwarzeneggar movie)—a bizarre combination of pro-wrestler, a Mad Max-style warrior, and a bog-eyed mutant pig with ridiculously huge fangs!

The film opens with an Irish farmer attempting to remove a huge, ancient, neolithic monument from his field (he's obviously a man not too concerned about his country's heritage); when he finally gets the stone to shift, Rawhead Rex, a monstrous, nine foot tall creature that had been trapped underneath, is set free...

The rest of the film is pretty much your basic 'creature on the loose' movie (dressed up with some nonsense about a church built on a site originally used in pagan, pre-Christian rituals) which sees the ancient beast creating bloody havoc in the rural community before finally being defeated by 'girl power'. Along the way, viewers are treated to some pretty cheap-looking gore, a funny moment when the church verger is 'baptised' in urine by Rawhead, a shocking performance by the actor playing the scared gypsy kid, and a wonderfully gratuitous spot of female nudity when a woman is dragged though a caravan window by the monster, causing her top to fall off!