After one B-Fest, as our crew was flipping through the channels at the hotel, we saw the local horror host, Svenghoulie, was showing The Hideous Sun Demon. Of course, we immediately stopped surfing and watched it. This led to a fun discussion of how it takes a special kind of person to sit through 24 hours of b-movies, get back to the hotel, and say, “Hey, Hideous Sun Demon is on cable, let’s watch, won’t we?”. Well, there are movies that can make even that special breed known as cinemasochists wonder what the hell we’re doing with our lives sometimes. This, Constant Readers, is one of them.
A government spacecraft crash lands in Satan’s Hollow, Texas after having been lost in deep space for six months. The craft contained experimental animals, which were mutated by radiation. The crash releases a mutated ape, which kills several local teenagers before Sheriff Clint and his officers blow it up using a wired store mannequin as bait.
That’s really all there is to say about this thing, because even though it’s 75 minutes long, there is still no actual action happening until the last five minutes or so. Do you think Horror of Party Beach is boring? Do you think Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter is poorly shot? Then this one’s for you, because it makes every other 60’s teen dance-interrupted-by-a-monster movie look like Oscar bait.
Rex, the teenage delinquent who ignores the Sheriff Clint’s orders to stay out of the woods, cops an attitude for no reason when told to skedaddle. Clint just told him horrible murders had taken place, and he acts like he’s being hassled. Not to mention he dresses like a 70-year-old. And he’s the most well-rounded character of the bunch. There’s an almost totally ignored romantic subplot between Clint and Nurse Joan, and some family tension between Joan and her soon-to-be-delinquent sister Darlene. And some non-characters named Chris and Judy, who I’m pretty sure are supposed to be our heroes, but they don’t do much besides get chased by the ape at the end of the flick.
You’ll notice there are no screen caps accompanying this review. That’s because the movie is so blurry, and the day-for-night so washed out, that you never get a good look at the monster. What you see seems like it’s pretty cool, but I’m guessing exposed to a focused camera and decent light, it’d look like big hairy ass. The only other thing in the movie to look at is the people, and they never actually get around to doing anything but dancing in a very Caucasian manner and looking at each other.
The only good thing about the movie is its idea. If it were done with a budget and talent, it could have been a great monster flick. The image the government scientist gives of the crashed ship, full of dead and dying mutants that have been ravaged by some horrible beast, and the concept of the monster design (a yeti with a face that looks like something Bob Eggleton would paint for the cover of one of the Necroscope books), would be fantastic visuals. If we could, y’know, see them.
Moral of the Story: Nearly 60% of the youth population in the 1960’s was wiped out by monsters that are attracted to stiffly-performed renditions of “The Twist” and “The Monkey”.
