I’ve intended to watch this for a long time, but somehow it never seemed to be important enough to bump it up to the top of my queue. Sure, it’s a bad movie, but I can’t really say that it’s the Best Worst Movie.
The Room is far more notable, far more interesting, and worse on more levels. This is bad, silly, cheap, but also more technically competent. It’s also a foreign production, even if it was made in the US. It brought Italian sensibilities to the direction. This is pretty obvious for anyone who has seen Italian horror.
It’s hard to pick on the acting, since everyone involved seems to be at roughly the same level. No one stands out as being too good for the production. And since I’ve seen Best Worst Movie, I know that most of the cast was pretty new to acting.
What crowns the weird badness of this movie is the story. It starts off with a certain ridiculousness, then it just gets worse from there. Nearly every step on the way gets progressively worse. We’ve got goblins that are vegetarians. They want to eat people, so they get the people to eat weird, green-tainted food, which turns the people into plant matter. Then the goblins eat them. This has so many problems with it, it’s hard to ignore. Why do the goblins want to eat people? It seems like more effort than just eating vegetables. The food is obviously tainted. Cake with green icing makes sense. The weird green spread on every other food is so bizarre that it makes you question why the actors aren’t reacting to it.
There’s a plot point later in the movie where someone makes himself inedible to the goblins by eating a “double decker bologna sandwich.” Was everyone else a vegetarian before they came to town?
There are a handful of sequences that are wonderful in their badness. Most of them are up on youtube. My personal favorite was the weird corn-on-the-cob seduction. I’m a sucker for a terrible soundalike recording of “You Can Keep Your Hat On.”
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