Review: Things (1989)

Directed by: Andrew Jordan
Starring: Barry J. Gillis, Amber Lynn, Bruce Roach
Written by: Barry J. Gillis, Andrew Jordan
Music by: Jack Procher
Country: Canada
Available on: DVD (Intervision)
IMDb

I’ve been meaning to check this out for a while now because I’d read about his strange it was. This curio of Canadian SOV horror was definitely something. I imagine this is the sort of thing William S. Burroughs would have concocted as an incompetent 18-year-old if he had grown up reading EC horror comics and watching Herschell Gordon Lewis flicks. The whole thing is like a gore-laced coke binge. The plot is nearly incomprehensible, but loosely revolves around a man, desperate to have a baby, who forces his wife to undergo so kind of fertilization ritual that instead makes her give birth to monsters. But really most of it is a mustachioed and mulleted young man and his older, slobbier brother walking around a dingey house, seeing and saying lots of weird things that don’t pertain to much of anything. There is intermittent gore that’s effective to varying degrees, a score that alternates between lo-fi Casio bleeps and bloops and spacey psychedelic rock, and the worst acting you can imagine. I do think there’s some value in watching this once, because it’s hard to imagine a movie like this actually existing, but I will never watch it again because I don’t enjoy torturing my psyche. I think if this had had about 30 minutes less meandering, replaced by 30 more minutes of creatures and blood, I would have liked it a lot more. Instead, it ends up being kind of a test of patience.

Rating: 4 out of 10