Sadly Over-hyped

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

THE STRANGENESS is about an abandoned mine, it's valuable contents, and the hideous whatsit that lives there. After an earthquake, and a pair of mysterious disappearances, a group of six surveyors / geologists and their guide head for the mine. For the snotty, greedy head of the team, gold is more attractive than science. Unsurprisingly, horror and death ensue. The story is straightforward, and plays like the second cousin of BEAST FROM HAUNTED CAVE. The characters are fairly familiar, 1980's monster fodder. The monster itself, apart from a few noises and glimpses, takes forever to show up! Until then, semi-drama, clunky "humor", and general ding-a-ling dialogue pad things out. About the creature: It's a stop-motion, H.P. Lovecraft-type nightmare, complete w/ squiggly tentacles and an oozing, vertical mouth! Is it worth the wait? Sort of. There's an awful lot of extra-thick cheeeze to wade through before we get a -brief- look at this thing. EXTRA POINTS FOR: Some of the gooey death scenes. Worth a watch...

The Strangeness (1985) * 1/2 (out of 4)A group of people hear various legends about a certain cave they are about to enter. They decide to go ahead with their journey and it doesn't take long for them to get trapped in the cave with a giant monster who wants to kill them.If you're read Stephen Thrower's NIGHTMARE USA book then you'll recognize this title and the various stories that went along with it. This film was shot for $25,000.00, which was an incredibly low amount for the 1950s let along when this movie was made. One should keep that in mind when they're watching THE STRANGENESS because the film doesn't have too much in it. It's one of those films that you can tell didn't have much money to spend and obviously there's not too much to see.I give the filmmakers a lot of credit for trying to pull the film off but sadly it didn't work. I thought the story was actually something that could have worked, although parts of it did remind me of THE BOOGINS. The cave location should have been put to much better use but sadly the cinematography is just so dark that many times it's hard to see what is going on. Another problem is that the budget didn't allow for a monster so we get a really awful looking bit of stop-motion that is more laughable than anything else.Trying to pass off a stop-motion monster just didn't work and it's too bad that there wasn't some sort of physical monster here. The performances range from bad to decent but there's not one that would hard or damage the film. You don't have many other special effects in terms of the violence or gore. The majority of the running time has the characters walking and talking and then walking and talking some more. There's no question that the film just doesn't have much happening because they couldn't afford it.THE STRANGENESS certainly isn't going to win any major awards over its final product but considering what the filmmakers had to work with, buying them a beer if you ever meet them would be a nice gesture.

Basically an endearingly chintzy and moronic $1.50 version of the nifty early 80's subterranean creature feature favorite "The Boogens," this entertainingly schlocky cheapie centers on a nasty, squirmy, wriggling monster who makes an instant meal out of any unfortunate souls foolhardy enough to go poking around the notoriously off limits Gold Spike Mine. Your standard-issue motley assortment of intrepid boneheads -- hectoring hard-nosed mine boss, cute, but insipid blonde babe, feisty lady geologist, boozy, inexplicably Aussie-accented (!) seasoned old mine hand, charmless doofus, hunky, jolly guy, and, arguably the most annoying character of the uniformly irritating bunch, a nerdy bespectacled aspiring writer dweeb who's prone to speaking in flowery, melodramatic utterances -- trek into the dark, uninviting cave in search of gold. Naturally, these intensely insufferable imbeciles discover that the allegedly abandoned mine is the home of a deadly, ugly, multi-tentacled beast who in time honored hoary B-flick fashion proceeds to gruesomely bag the group one at a time. Directed, co-written, co-produced and co-edited with dumbfounding maladroitness by Melanie Anne Phillips, acted with dismaying flatness by a rank no-name cast, further marred by lethargic pacing, a drably meandering narrative, murky, under-lit, eye-straining cinematography, a shivery, redundantly thudding pseudo-John Carpenter synthesizer score, and a cruddy, herky-jerky stop motion animation wormoid thingie that's only quickly glimpsed at the very end of the movie, this extremely clunky, amateurish and hence quite delectably dreadful would-be scarefest commits all the necessary bad film missteps to qualify as a real four-star stinkeroonie.

My boss at the time and showed it to us at a Halloween party at our office. He is the Chris Huntley that co-wrote and acted in it. He knows it's bad, we know it's bad and we all agree that the monster looks WAY too much like a vagina to be coincidence. Maybe it was from a gynocological experiment gone wrong.It was a VERY low budget and the actors were all friends so what you have here is a case of "hey gang, lets' put on a show".Nobody got hurt and it was a first attempt. Nothing wrong with that. It gave us all a good laugh and it's a great film to watch with friends and make fun of. :-)