He’s Pure Evil. Pure Power. Pure Terror. And pure schlock! Good grief, no wonder Clive Barker himself hated the film despite having written the screenplay for it, and to such an extent that he decided his next movie Hellraiser would be made under a much stricter rule of his own hand. Thus he ended up directing that movie himself. For those that have read the original Rawhead Rex story in Clive Barker’s Books of Blood, or even read the graphic novel adaption by Steve Niles which was wonderfully illustrated by Les Edwards (which is a lot more true to Barker’s original vision of the phallus-formed monster), this movie goes into pure B-horror territory that’s as schlocky as it can get, with a monster design that looks like a demented ogre suffering from a lockjaw condition. In other words: perfect horror ghouls material!
We start off with Howard Hallenbeck, who travels to rural Ireland with his family in order to research some religious artifacts. In that same quiet town a lightning strikes a huge phallus-formed stone column that’s been placed in the middle of a field. Then, Rawhead Rex rises from the dirt after having been buried under there for a long, long time. Now he’s back and ready to wreck havoc on humanity! In the meantime, Howard enters the local church and sees a stained glass window featuring the monster, and the church verger Declan appears to act strangely and don’t want him poking around. In the meantime, Rex himself has started the kill count by offing some locals. When Howard is driving home with his family, his daughter needs to urinate and goes behind a tree. Their son stays in the van reading a comic book, and of course Rawhead Rex appears, killing the boy right in front of Howard and takes the body with him into the woods so he can continue to eat his meal in peace. All of this leads to them reporting this at the police station, where we are presented with one of the most hilariously unconvincing family-in-grief scenes I’ve ever seen. Now, Howard is hellbent on taking the monster down, but things have gotten even more complicated as Rex has gotten his own Renfield in the church verger Declan. There is supposed to be a weapon in the church which can defeat the monster, and Howard must try his best to get it before there’s an even bigger bloodbath.
Rawhead Rex (1986) was directed by George Pavlou, and as mentioned Clive Barker wrote the screenplay. The filming took place in County Wicklow, Ireland, Leinster, Redcross and Laragh. The actor in the Rawhead Rex costume, Heinrich Von Schellendorf, was only 19 years old at the filming and it took two hours to put him inside the costume. The film was given a limited release in the US by Empire Pictures in 1987. The 80’s have given us everything from pure gold to pure trash, everything from masterpieces to disasters to even some disasterpieces. There were a lot of B-horror movies from this decade, and a lot of them actually have a decent entertainment value. This movie falls well within that category, where you can’t really imagine anyone saying the movie is good, but if you have at least a tiny bit of appetite for so-bad-its-good movies, then you will at least have some fun with it. Rawhead Rex is what it is, pure schlock and B-horror where you shouldn’t take it seriously for a moment. The acting is hilarious at times, and while the monster looks more laughable than scary it does have a certain charm to it. It sure does provide a lot of cheesy fun.
Clive Barker talked a little about a possible remake of the movie, but nothing ever came of that. Could have been really awesome, though, if someone made a movie that kept the disturbing and wicked vibe of the original story, and didn’t hold back at all on the gore and nastiness. And of course, with a monster resembling the original vision, maybe something close to Les Edward’s version in the graphic novel. Oh well, I guess we can only dream.
Rawhead Rex was originally released on DVD in the US in 1999 by Geneon, and then re-released by Prism in 2003. Later, a restored version was released on Blu-ray and DVD by Kino Lorber in 2017. It’s also available on multiple streaming sites.
Director: George Pavlou
Writer: Clive Barker
Country & year: UK/Ireland, 1986
Actors: David Dukes, Kelly Piper, Hugh O’Conor, Cora Venus Lunny, Ronan Wilmot, Niall Toibin, Niall O’Brien, Heinrich von Schellendorf, Donal McCann, Eleanor Feely, Gladys Sheehan
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091829/
