Shrunken Heads (1994)

Backlot New York in the 50/90s! Three kids (actor names redacted to protect the presumably innocent) are geeking out over DC comics – featuring specific superhero names and all –, spending time with their favourite newsagent, Mr. Sumatra (Julius Harris), who is also a former agent of Haiti’s repressive regime, and getting into trouble with the local gang of greasers. Because greasers are still a thing in New York, right?

Things escalate particularly badly when the kids believe they are in an afterschool special and stand up to the greaser bullies. It probably helps that one of our heroes has the hots for bully girlfriend Sally (Rebecca Herbst), too.

Alas, it turns out, these teenage delinquents come from a very different kind of movie than the kids believe they are in, and are actually part of organized crime, in this case lead by Big Moe (a cross-dressing Meg Foster, because at this point, why the hell not?), who has a bigger quiff and an even bigger ego than their underlings. Thus, standing up to Big Moe like a hero gets our three kids killed.

Fortunately(?) Mr. Sumatra is a proper Tonton Macoute, and therefore knows his voodoo. So, obviously, he cuts off the dead kids’ heads, shrinks them and brings them back to life as flying machines of vengeance with their own special powers – one can cast lighting, one has big teeth, the third carries a switchblade(!?).

Time for vengeance, fighting random crime and a valuable lesson about flying under your beloved’s shirt.

If it weren’t R-rated and somewhat inappropriate, I’d call this Full Moon production the kind of entry level horror they just don’t make anymore today. Though, really, this is probably just the particular weirdness director Richard Elfman (indeed the former Oingo-Boingo guy, brother to Danny, who does some of the scoring) prefers.

And who can blame a guy for wanting to make a film that apparently takes place in the 1950s and the 1990s at once, believes a running gag about how a character we are supposed to be somewhat positively inclined towards is a former Tonton Macoute and still glorifies the lifestyle is a good idea, and features a short sequence that parodies the then-current crop of superhero and proto-superhero movies by replacing the hero with three murderous flying kid heads?

As is obvious, Shrunken Heads goes for a certain tone of self-conscious camp and weirdness I often find rather difficult to vibe with in films. I’m of the “if you can’t bother to take your film seriously, why should I bother with it at all?” persuasion, so this sort of thing tends to annoy me more often than not. In this case, however, I found myself at least a little charmed.

Perhaps because the film does aim for a very personal seeming aesthetic, where the goofy and the macabre mix as well as the visual and pop cultural hallmarks of two very different decades, instead of a more generic kind of self-ironic nothingburger; or simply, because the juxtaposition between the childish and the very much not meant for children elements here come together to form something I think most children would actually enjoy rather a lot.

And since I’m incurably childish myself when it comes to horror, I’m pretty much Elfman’s core audience.

Oblivion (1994)

Welcome to the township of Oblivion on a planet we’ll just call Wild West. After all, it’s just like the Wild West from the movies, but in space and with random goofy SF bits bolted on.

Town Marshal – and yeah, the film clearly means sheriff but in a recurring problem is too dumb to know the difference - Stone (Mike Genovese) is shot by evil reptile dude Redeye (Andrew Divoff) in a perfectly fair fight. In fact, Redeye took care of it actually being fair by disabling the Marshall’s force field which would usually have protected him from all harm – something the outlaw doesn’t have; and it’s hardly Redeye’s fault that Stone is the slowest draw on the planet. Anyway, after that Redeye does some actually evil stuff, and he and his gang of idiot wackos (played by people like Musetta Vander and Irwin Keyes) lord it over the town rather badly.

The Marshal’s alienated son Zack (Richard Joseph Paul) is out prospecting - and saving Space Indian Buteo (Jimmie F. Skaggs) from death by giant scorpion – but even once he hears of what has occurred, he is really going to take his time to get up to some revenge, what with him being an empath and – gasp! – a pacifist. He will later turn out to be a crack shot too, for reasons the film of course doesn’t bother to get into.

And that’s because Sam Irvin’s Oblivion is one of those comedies that believes it can escape any question about world building or internal logic by vaguely waving its and and cracking a crappy joke. Which comedies often can indeed get away with. Alas, that trick only works when a film’s jokes are actually funny, so no chance for Oblivion there.

The script was apparently written by great comics scribe Peter David (with the IMDB also giving “story” credits to Charles Band, John Rheaume, Greg Suddeth and Mark Goldstein), though it doesn’t actually feel like it at all. Or really, it doesn’t feel as if any professional writer had had much of a hand in it, but rather like a series of bad ideas and underdeveloped jokes somebody has scrawled on a napkin and called a script. To be fair, one or two of the film’s sixty-nine running jokes are actually somewhat funny. I found town undertaker Gaunt (Carel Struycken) with his habit to always appear shortly before somebody is killed and the resulting social awkwardness whenever he simply goes somewhere for a beer (and so on) fun and indeed funny, but this sort of thing is buried under jokes I felt actively embarrassed by despite not at all being responsible for them.

You’d think that this could still have been saved by the pretty wonderful cast of character actors and troopers – apart from those whom I have already mentioned there are also Meg Foster, Isaac Hayes, Julie Newmar and George Takei to wonder at – but most of them are pressed into bouts of deeply unfunny mugging. The usually intensely charming Takei and Newmar are particularly terrible, also thanks to the film’s insistence on making bad meta-jokes about certain other roles of these two, again and again and again. But really, the only actors on screen who seem to have any idea what they are doing and why are Divoff, Foster, Struycken, and boring love interest to a terrible hero Jackie Swanson (because really, being boring is never difficult). Everybody else seems rather too conscious of how deep the cow shit is they have stumbled into and acts accordingly.

Things become even worse whenever the film tries to turn sort of serious for a scene or two and attempts to treat Zack’s “inner struggle” as if anybody watching cared. Something that is completely impossible to take seriously given the surrounding nonsense, badly written anyway, and done by an actor who couldn’t act his way through an open door.


But hey, the space scorpions and Divoff’s make-up are pretty good, and it’s a mid-90s Charles Band movie without puppets and dolls, so there’s that to say for the whole mess.