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Sometimes all you need for a movie is a great setting. Take The Strangeness. This is a movie about a group of explorers venturing into an abandoned mine to look for gold. It's a simple premise, but the mine setting carries the movie a long way. It's dark and claustrophobic, and the realities of the setting give the story a great deal of tension even before we realize there's something untoward lurking about in the mine. I'm extremely partial to low budget movies where their production circumstances bleed into the story to add to the suspense. I bring it up constantly but you can see how first wave slashers, like the original Friday the 13th, feel not at all divorced from their shooting locations and take on a real immediacy as a result. Watching The Strangeness you might be fooled into thinking the same applies here, but surprisingly, given the movie's low budget, most of the mine scenes were shot on a well disguised set. While I would have liked to wax poetic about the voodoo of location, the fact is the movie is not hampered by this reality. The sets are that good.
Of course, something needs to happen in the movie for it to be enjoyable as well (you can't go for ninety minutes with only ambling mine footage), and the plot here introduces a monstrous creature that starts killing off our heroes one by one. Anyone making a monster movie in the '80s would have seen or at least been aware of Alien, and this movie shares with that one a kind of sexual menace in the creature design. There's no putting it delicately: the monster looks like both a dick and a pussy. It's cylindrical frame gives it a penis-like stature, while it's mouth opening is unabashedly vaginal in appearance. The monster was designed by Chris Huntley, who claims that this was not done consciously and chalks up the sexual dimensions of the design to the fact that he was closeted at the time. The original design also included a shell, which was supposed to make the monster look like a snail but would have likely looked scrotal in profile. In any case, this is one unpleasant looking mother****er, although it's tempered a bit by some pretty winning stop motion effects (one scene has the monster eating a character, which looks like Bob the Builder getting sucked into a vacuum cleaner). Although it doesn't make that sexual menace diegetic as in Alien, it does share with that movie a nefarious capitalist justification for the heroes' mission. Never, ever trust the moneymen, especially when creepy caves and dick-vag-hybrid monsters are involved.
And it would be unfair for me to chalk up the movie's success to those couple of elements without noting that it's directed quite effectively. The reason that the mine sets are so damn convincing is that they're lit so evocatively. Many scenes are shot seemingly with just diegetic light sources, like the lights on the heroes' helmets or their flares, so that your visibility lines up plausibly to theirs. It almost doesn't matter that you can barely tell the characters apart (an obnoxious writer, a Brit of questionable experience and the boss are the only ones that stand out), because you very much feel like you're in their shoes. I understand that this movie never got a proper theatrical release and only came out on video at the time, and I imagine seeing it on a muddy VHS copy could have made these stylistic choices pretty frustrating, but seeing it on Blu-ray, shot after shot bathed in darkness with just a flashlight or two puncturing the wall of solid black have a palpable effect. The movie's best moment has one of the characters using the flash of a camera for visibility, each burst of light more disorienting than seemingly helpful, until the monster bursts into the frame.
The Strangeness (Phillips, 1985)
Sometimes all you need for a movie is a great setting. Take The Strangeness. This is a movie about a group of explorers venturing into an abandoned mine to look for gold. It's a simple premise, but the mine setting carries the movie a long way. It's dark and claustrophobic, and the realities of the setting give the story a great deal of tension even before we realize there's something untoward lurking about in the mine. I'm extremely partial to low budget movies where their production circumstances bleed into the story to add to the suspense. I bring it up constantly but you can see how first wave slashers, like the original Friday the 13th, feel not at all divorced from their shooting locations and take on a real immediacy as a result. Watching The Strangeness you might be fooled into thinking the same applies here, but surprisingly, given the movie's low budget, most of the mine scenes were shot on a well disguised set. While I would have liked to wax poetic about the voodoo of location, the fact is the movie is not hampered by this reality. The sets are that good.
Of course, something needs to happen in the movie for it to be enjoyable as well (you can't go for ninety minutes with only ambling mine footage), and the plot here introduces a monstrous creature that starts killing off our heroes one by one. Anyone making a monster movie in the '80s would have seen or at least been aware of Alien, and this movie shares with that one a kind of sexual menace in the creature design. There's no putting it delicately: the monster looks like both a dick and a pussy. It's cylindrical frame gives it a penis-like stature, while it's mouth opening is unabashedly vaginal in appearance. The monster was designed by Chris Huntley, who claims that this was not done consciously and chalks up the sexual dimensions of the design to the fact that he was closeted at the time. The original design also included a shell, which was supposed to make the monster look like a snail but would have likely looked scrotal in profile. In any case, this is one unpleasant looking mother****er, although it's tempered a bit by some pretty winning stop motion effects (one scene has the monster eating a character, which looks like Bob the Builder getting sucked into a vacuum cleaner). Although it doesn't make that sexual menace diegetic as in Alien, it does share with that movie a nefarious capitalist justification for the heroes' mission. Never, ever trust the moneymen, especially when creepy caves and dick-vag-hybrid monsters are involved.
And it would be unfair for me to chalk up the movie's success to those couple of elements without noting that it's directed quite effectively. The reason that the mine sets are so damn convincing is that they're lit so evocatively. Many scenes are shot seemingly with just diegetic light sources, like the lights on the heroes' helmets or their flares, so that your visibility lines up plausibly to theirs. It almost doesn't matter that you can barely tell the characters apart (an obnoxious writer, a Brit of questionable experience and the boss are the only ones that stand out), because you very much feel like you're in their shoes. I understand that this movie never got a proper theatrical release and only came out on video at the time, and I imagine seeing it on a muddy VHS copy could have made these stylistic choices pretty frustrating, but seeing it on Blu-ray, shot after shot bathed in darkness with just a flashlight or two puncturing the wall of solid black have a palpable effect. The movie's best moment has one of the characters using the flash of a camera for visibility, each burst of light more disorienting than seemingly helpful, until the monster bursts into the frame.