Hideous!

Dir: Charles Band

1997

***
Charles Band is the unsung master of low-budget, b-movie nonsense and I love his work. After the spectacular Dollmanvs. Domonic Toys but before his venture into the Puppetmaster sequels, Gingerbread Man shenanigans and all that Evil Bong nonsense, he made a funny little horror called Hideous! The story begins with a veteran sewage worker teaching a couple of young bucks the art of sewage maintenance and how to effectively remove unknowns from clogging up the giant sewage reservoirs of their unnamed little town. He tells them tales of all sorts of weird things he’s found during his long career in sewage maintenance and the many strange and unexplainable things he’s found over the years and, as if by pure chance, they come across such a specimen as they speak. It’s strange, gooey and the sort of thing that would put you off your lunch, our veteran takes charge and takes it away to be disposed of. However, it’s clear that he known what it could be and he’s clearly part of an underground group that collects the strange and the disgusting. He calls his contact and sets up a deal, expert in her field, Belinda Yost. Yost then gets in contact with Napoleon Lazar (Mel Johnson Jr.), a collector who is happy to pay top dollar for such a specimen. However, infamous collector of the macabre extraordinaire, Dr. Lorca (played by Michael Citriniti), also wants the specimen and orders his assistant Sheila to steal the specimen away from Lazar while he’s in transit. Lazar insists Yost help him recover his purchase and along with her ditzy secretary Elvina, the trio travel to Lorca’s castle to take back what is rightfully theirs. Unbeknownst to both groups, FBI detective Leonard Kantor is following them, after being tipped off that not all is legal with the transaction. It is probably surprise to no one that the specimens (the preserved corpses of severely deformed somethings) aren’t as dead as they seem and start killing off the group one by one. The film is pretty much a haunted house movie in the vein of House on Haunted Hill but with crude puppets. The beasties are probably among the least scary ever committed to film and are seldom seen but I quite like them. The script is pretty witty too, more than you’d expect from a typical Full Moon picture and a low-budget horror parody anyway. The best thing about Hideous! (the only good thing about Hideous!) is Lorca’s assistant Sheila (played by Jacqueline Lovell). Sheila is loyal to Dr. Lorca but their’s is a mutual agreement. She steals the specimen from Lazar during a holdup, where she stops him in the middle of a snowy forest road topless, and wearing a gorilla mask. She spends most of the film being the intelligent, level-headed and wise member of the group and the one with all the best lines. She also spends the entire film topless. Now I’m no pervert and I find most scenes of nudity in horror films to be somewhat disturbing but I found Lovell’s Sheila to be utterly charming and something of a rare character in these kind of films. It is what it is, the film is quite clear on that and I found it quite refreshing. The ending is something of an anti-climax but on the whole it was fine, not quite the low-budget 90s horror masterpiece I’d hoped for but fine all the same. Criminally, it is Dr. Lorca who finds himself in a shared sequel (Domonic Toys 2) and not Sheila. Michael Citriniti is good but Lovell’s Sheila should have definitely featured in further Full Moon productions, if not had her own series.