Saturday, September 11, 2010

In short: Horror House on Highway Five (1985)

From the notes of Denis K., who was found clutching them in his hands, hiding as far away from his TV as possible, gibbering madly:

People are killed by a guy wearing a Richard Nixon mask. A mentally disabled and a mentally ill weirdo (Gary and Dr. Marbuse, I kid you not) kidnap a female college student to torture her with an obviously cold iron. There may be other reasons that make less sense the longer this goes on. Painful, sleazy rock music of various sub-genres randomly blares in the background; an atonal string quartet attacks; doo-wop beckons. Two other college students strand near the killer's house and build themselves some bombs to feel safer. Scenes of perfectly grimy no-budget slasher strangeness are disturbed by the dopiest humour known to man, also dope humour. Lots of corpses are found. More stalking. Marbuse babbles the worst German on celluloid. An overabundance of bad jokes assaults the unwary (again). Acting grates; questions mount. Why am I watching this? What have I ever done to writer/director Richard Casey?

Nixon turns out to be a German rocket scientist/LSD guru/serial killer with the oh-so-very-German name of Dr. Bartholomew, and quite undead and/or just very wormy. Looks like he can become invisible, too. Only the whooshing sounds betray him. Careful with that fork, Eugene! My brain hurts, but I go on.

Dr. Marbuse [sic] dons a home-made swastika skullcap before he's trying to kill a girl with a hand-drill. Please, make the music stop. Oh, look, they stole this part from Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Just that it made sense there.

I'm still not sure which parts of the movie are meant seriously, which are jokes; is there even a difference anymore? Watching this, the dumb, the bizarrely random, the boring and the weirdly disquieting do a little dance to the music of the worst bands in history in my brain. Please make them stop.

 

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