Two more Joe Bobs, from one of the last(?) quarterly specials.

The first is Rawhead Rex. It’s an English countryside folkloric monster movie — some guys in a field move a stone, unleashing an ancient evil, which then goes around killing people. Meanwhile, there’s a church that seems to have some clues for how to defeat the monster, because sure, why not put your opaque monster-killing clues into a stained-glass window. Does the monster get defeated in the end? Does it kill a lot of people along the way? You know the answers to these questions.

There’s nothing especially good about this movie, but also nothing particularly bad about it. It does what it sets out to do in a basically competent way.

More impressive is Oddity. So this movie starts out with a woman home alone at night in a big rural house that she and her husband are renovating. It’s unfinished and dark, and she’s been staying in a tent on the vast first floor. At some point, she goes out to her car to get something; after she returns to the house, there’s a knock on the door. Through the peephole[1], she sees a crazy-looking guy, who — it transpires — has escaped from the insane asylum her husband runs. So, y’know, that’s creepy. But then the really creepy thing is that he warns her that a guy snuck inside the house while she was getting stuff from the car, and he’s in there with her right now.

I’m going into such detail here because this is the point at which we stopped the movie not once, but twice. It’s fucking creepy as hell! I mean, it’s a horror movie and setting up a mood of dread is clearly what it’s trying to do, so mission accomplished. But this actually made me realize how little I want actual scariness from horror movies. And so yeah, it was just too intense and not at all the mood that I was looking for on a Friday night, and so we almost just gave up after two attempts at the movie, but gave it a third shot.

And here’s the irony: Like 30 seconds later, that scene ends, and we cut to the credits and a totally different, much less intense, vibe. (It’s reminiscent of a particular moment in Barbarian, actually; if you’ve seen that movie, you know what I’m talking about — just as it’s getting too tense to be borne, suddenly we’re in a very different mood.)

But to be clear: While the movie does relieve that tension, it also sets up plenty of later tension. This is a movie with jump scares and a frequent sense of creeping dread. It’s effective at being scary because it’s just generally a well-done movie all around. The plot is complex, but makes sense, and the characters work well enough. Particularly recommended to those who like their horror on the scary side.

  1. Not sure if “peephole” is really the right word: It’s like a sliding bar that covers up a hole in the door, like they use to give food to prisoners in movies. ↩︎