User Reviews

It begins as a horrible "horror" flick, but fortunately we quickly find out that the opening scenes belong to a movie-within-a-movie. Then, for the next 15 minutes or so, there are some decent filmmaking vs. reality games that add an extra layer to the film. But when the punks appear, their embarrassing overacting turns this into a bottom-of-the-barrel affair. But wait! After the deformed man avenges the murders of his "family" and gets himself shot in the process, it gets even worse! There are many pointless scenes that go on far too long, especially the two "good cop-bad cop" interrogation sketches. The ending offers a gruesome twist (though ruined by bad makeup effects)....and then the REAL ending comes. It's one of the stupidest and most nonsensical endings I've ever seen, but you have to admit at least that it takes a lot of audacity to dare end your film this way. (*1/2)

Starts with a movie-in-a-movie that's pretty bad: an old woman narrating over shots of a house in a lightning storm. Cuts between her and herself as a young woman, and some possibly rotting creature enters. This is just a way of introducing us to Orville Krueger, a special effects guy specializing in horror movies.

Krueger goes to his cabin/home in the woods. He's joined by his wife, and his daughter brings a friend. He enjoys scaring them. Some "punkers" in a VW van show up, because one of them used to vacation in the area, and heard there was a big secret involving the "Hollywood" guy, and they assume it's money or drugs - to which they'd like to help themselves.

The punkers invade the house, but they find out the secret has more to do with the possible inspiration for Kreuger's grotesque makeup jobs. In the aftermath, Krueger's cosmetic surgeon brother shows up to bring matters to a close (it gets pretty silly).

The punkers all overact. The leader yells all his lines, and at least one of the members laughs in a high voice after everything he says. As punks, they're more reminiscent of Bobcat Goldthwait in the Police Academy movies. A better punk gang would have made the movie potentially scarier.

The snowy location wasn't bad. Linda Blair is OK, but she doesn't bring anything unique.

The movie ends with a freeze frame that shrinks to a small size, and as others have mentioned, some spirited ragtime music that comes out of nowhere as the credits roll.

As a big fan of Blairs cheezy horror movies I found this one enjoyable. It started out pretty good with Blair and her friend driving down the road and getting hurassed by a bunch of punkers, in which I found most anoying and was the biggest downfall of the movie. They drive off leaving the punkers with a thought of getting revenge. Blair and her friend go to a cottage to see Blairs parents and the friend stays the night to get over a recent breakup with her boyfriend. This is all so nice and the movie seems to get on a good start when the punkers break in the house and kill every body except Blair. I mean they didn't even give us a chance to get to know the characters when they were killed off so soon. At least keep the dad with his wierdness for horror films, they could have used him more and made the movie more exciting. Then a monster comes out and chasses after the punkers and tries to save Blair. The rest of the movie is to strange to explain but two of the punkers get off free and are dismissed of any charges of murder and the father of the monster gets his revenge. I liked this movie but they could have extended the use of the characters.

Well, reading the other comments it seems there's at least two versions of this out there. Mine is Media Home Entertainment's, and does NOT have the ending described in the other comments - this version is monumentally lame, but the version described in the other comments, with Frankensein and the Wolfman, sounds legendary.

Otherwise, for those of you under twenty, I want to assure you that, although a lot of weird things happened in the eighties, there were not, as far as I remember, gangs of snarling twentysomethings with Billy Idol hair and dressed in expensive leathers roaming the countryside in VW busses looking for innocent citizens to terrorize. Grotesque would like you to believe this; it would also like you to believe that Linda Blair can run around in the snow for a couple of hours in her jammies and bare feet and not turn into a snow-cone; or that even Tab Hunter is stupid enough to threaten two punkers with a shotgun, demand they get in his car, and then drive off with them in the back seat, where, one presumes, they will sit quietly with their hands in their lap until we get to Grandma's.

Overall, Grotesque is definitely worth hunting down, if you can wrap it up for less than three bucks. No plot? No, this thing has more plot than Gravity's Rainbow.

*************THIS WOULD BE A LOT OF SPOILERS, EXCEPT THERE'S MORE THAN ENOUGH PLOT LEFT TO GO AROUND ************** Linda Blair and a friend drive up into the mountains to see her folks, and are menaced by a "gang" of punkers also on their way to see her folks, on the rumor that they've got a lot of money stashed, because Linda Blair's dad is a famous FX artist. Her dad keeps jumping out at her and her friend with rubber masks and body parts, but he's Guy Stockwell, and charming, so it's OK. The punkers descend on the house, kill everybody except Linda B., but unfortunately let Linda's cousin out of his secret room, who's a large, horribly deformed, essentially sweet but now angry and murderous kind of a guy, who then kills off all the punkers except two, but then a family friend drives up the hill, finds the carnage, calls the cops, her uncle (Tab) drives up the hill for some reason, and after all is said and done the deformed cousin is dead, Linda's in a coma, the two punkers are shaken but not stirred, and the police begin their investigation.

FOLKS, WE ARE NOW ONLY FORTY MINUTES INTO AN EIGHTY-MINUTE MOVIE!!!

Maybe Grotesque was being put out on spec, to get backers interested in a mini-series.

Oh. Robert Z'Dar, my favorite actor with a really big face, is NOT in this version. Also, there's no nudity and the FX are pathetic, But it's STILL worth watching, in horrified fascination, as the plot lurches around drunkenly, banging off doorframes, stumbling over the furniture, just to see whether it finally falls out of a second-story window (it does).

I had a really difficult time trying to find "Grotesque" because currently it's out of print and there aren't signs of a future DVD release. After watching it, I can see why this title isn't available or in plans for getting a DVD release.

The movie starts with an eerie atmosphere and a not so bad plot. Although this movie was released in the late 80's, it used a plot that was very popular in the 70's: revenge. In "Grotesque" we have a retired f/x producer and his family getting killed by a gang of punks (their look couldn't be more 80's!). Little do the punks know that "someting" is watching them as they murder the family. That "something" is a deformed family member that lives hidden in the mansion. One by one, this creature slaughters (without gore!) the punks and takes revenge. Soon after his revenge he gets shot by local police. Also, another member of the family (an uncle) finds the bodies and starts a massive hunt for the killers.

Well, the mess ends with two members of the punk band getting injured and later getting deformed just to be the mock of a creature that hides them in the mansion. After that, a Frankenstein monster and a weird werewolf (terrible costumes by the way) mess with the film and scare the hell out of the audience that was watching the movie (?). The movie ends in a gay insinuation as the monster and the werewolf hug in a weird manner.

"Grotesque" is a total mess. Despide it's 70's movie feeling, the movie lacks of a real plot or character development. In these movies , the viewer needs to have a connection with the main characters to either feel symphaty for them or want them to get killed. In this movie, the audience really does not care about anything! The editing is terrible, not to talk about the f/x which are laughable and cheap. The scene were the uncle is about to arrive to the mansion is annoying! The background music and TOO many takes of the dead family members weren't necessary at all. We got the point. Also, Linda Blair only appears in 15% of the movie's running time. The real main character is the creature! Which by the way, it's very cheesy.

Don't bother trying to find this movie. It's almost impossible to find in even on VHS. I had the luck to find it in an obscure video center and sincerely, I regret.

And I think that's all they had... They didn't have a script.

So the plot, if you want to call it that, is that a woman and her friend to to visit her father's cabin, where he's a FX specialist. Except his effects kind of suck, even for the 1980's... The family is attacked by a gang of "Punkers", I guess because we were all scared of Punk Rockers for about five minutes in the 1980's.

So in the course of their rampage of murder and near rape, they release a super-human monster locked in the basement. Most of the PUnkers are killed, but the remaining two are killed by Tab Hunter, who was the Linda Blair character's unlcle, who was also a deformed monster.

Then it goes to a weird scene where it's just a movie, and Frank N. Stein (get it) and the Wolf Mann decide to show the screening audience why classic monsters are scary. It's like that SNL skit where they couldn't figure out how to end it.

Linda Blair has the unique distinction of being associated with various kinds of horror films. She's been possessed ("The Exorcist" and "Witchery") repossessed ("Repossessed" and "Exorcist II: The Heretic") and stalked by a slasher ("Hell Night"); she's battled a witch ("Summer of Fear") played a witch ("Sorceress") fought zombies ("The Chilling") and, with "Grotesque", she visits the territory of Wes Craven's "Last House on the Left" and Meir Zarchi's "I Spit On Your Grave", low-budget revenge classics that went for ultra-realistic terror with utterly terrifying results. (Linda is to horror films what Dame Judi Dench is to period melodramas; she's practically turned horror film acting into an Olympic event. Her tireless efforts spent making horror films cause Jamie Lee Curtis to look like a slouch.) But here, she steps away from the monsters and ghouls of her career, and faces the ultimate terror: man himself, out of control and violent. With this film she has the chance to play her character's horror with total realism. Her performance is up there with "The Exorcist" as her ultimate victim role. She plays Lisa Krueger, a young woman traveling into the Big Bear mountains with her friend (Donna Wilkes) to visit her family. Her father (Guy Stockwell) is a Hollywood make-up effects man, and her mother a loving and supportive partner to him. On their way up to the house, the young women encounter a band of punks looking for trouble - in particular (and unknown to Lisa) they are planning to ambush and violate the Krueger home. They've heard rumors of a 'secret' up at the family's secluded mountain place, and are convinced that drugs and money must be involved (While the acting of the gang members is of uneven quality, they are eerily reminiscent of the Manson clan, and some of them even manage to rise above the clichés of the script and deliver something terrifying.) That same night the group storms the house and assembles the family, then begins murdering them one by one, leaving poor Lisa to witness it all. (Donna Wilkes, along with Blair, is a terribly underrated actress. She is terrific here - especially her death scene - and was also great in "Jaws 2" and "Angel".) At a moment when the villains are arguing among themselves, Lisa sees her chance and flees, but is cornered in a hallway and has no other option but to jump out the window. From there Lisa frantically runs into the snowy night, clad only in her nightclothes, with a couple of punks hot on her trail. Lisa's cousin Patrick, previously mentioned in the script but unseen, lives behind a bookcase in a hidden room. He is the 'secret' that the punks had heard about. He is hideously misshapen, and mentally handicapped. While he is a hulking, scary man, he has the mind and innocence of a child. He witnesses the atrocities against his family, and vows to exact bloody revenge. So he is a tortured killer, and we get to see his remorse over his own actions. Yet, he cannot stop himself. The loss of his family is too great for him to bear. He kills all of the attackers within reach, and goes out into the night to finish off the rest. Meanwhile, after running until dawn, Lisa is finally caught by one of the killers and strangled. Patrick catches up and kills the guy, but Lisa is unconscious and nearly frozen. Patrick is chasing the remaining two punks when the police finally arrive, and they assume that he murdered Blair's family. Patrick is shot and killed, and Lisa is taken to the hospital, where she must have a risky surgery in order to survive. Enter Lisa's plastic-surgeon uncle (Tab Hunter). As Patrick's biological father, he is outraged by the crimes and the killing of Patrick. The two surviving punks are taken into custody, and they claim that Patrick did all the killing. Uncle knows better; but only Lisa, who may or may not survive her surgery, can save Patrick's reputation, and put the two remaining killers behind bars. When Lisa dies during surgery, Uncle takes matters into his own hands. He kidnaps the two remaining killers and returns them to the house, where he uses surgery to permanently disfigure their faces, and locks them away in Patrick's old room behind the bookcase. Uncle also reveals that he too hides a horribly disfigured face, and therefore understands the true torture of his chosen method of revenge. This is a philosophical and ironic horror film; I can't think of another horror movie that tries to approach themes such as the remorse of the monster, the superficiality of 'beauty', and societal neglect of the handicapped. This movie works on a deeper level than I ever suspected it would, or could: it shows both terrible violence and the power of familial love, and it beautifully renders (thanks to Tab Hunter's touching performance) the fine line between sanity and insanity when an individual is blinded by a need for vengeance. The film has a very unique feel about it. The chase scenes during the cold, snowy night are absolutely realistic, and hauntingly beautiful, and quite reminiscent of Kubrick's "The Shining". Linda's jump out of the window is classic horror, devoid of any camp aspect, and, while brief, the overhead shot of her fall is pure, chilling brilliance. Her hospital scenes are evocative of her work as troubled Regan MacNeil in the "Exorcist" films. She is surrounded by many good players, but it is Blair who single-handedly keeps "Grotesque" together. Her work here is so intense that you feel her character's presence even when she isn't on-screen, and she remains a key character throughout most of the movie. She's the heart and soul of "Grotesque", and as such makes this micro-budget terror flick worth a look.

You want a really bad movie? A really REALLY bad movie? One so bad that it'll make you trash your TV, gouge out your eyes with a rusty spoon and dive off the closest pier? Here you go.

"Grotesque" is the name of your pain and what a pain it is! There's little to no plot to speak of. I watched it on USA a while back and felt cheated and short-changed then. I pity those of you who watched the full version.

Even with Linda Blair in it, she does precious little for the value of this flick (the LEAST she could have done is worn that dress she had on in "Hell Night").

And here's the really, REALLY bad part:

SPOILER (?) -

At the end, it turns out the whole story-line is a MOVIE being projected by a faux werewolf and Frankenstein monster, grumbling about how bad today's horror movies are. So in desperation, they jump out of the projection room and scare the theater audience away, Blair amongst the group. Then, after all are gone, the monsters jump around and hug each other in celebration of their "victory".

• END OF SPOILER

I had a headache clear across my face after watching this. I was robbed, literally, physically, emotionally and psychologically by "Grotesque". Don't let this happen to you!

No stars. You expected anything more?

The monster, should've helped parents when they were being attacked. Movie over.

"Grotesque" starts out with some florid narration that turns out to be part of a "movie within a movie" that's meant to introduce the audience to a special effects makeup expert who is good at creating monster masks and costumes. OK, fair enough, so now we have an excuse for the director to include all kinds of mood shots of demons, grotesqueries, etc. as the story unfolds.

That's about the last good decision the director (or the screenplay) makes.

And, let's see, the synopsis says that a "gang of vicious "punkers"" are the primary motivator for the events of the movie, so that's fine...oh dear. There's over-the-top performances, and then there's...whatever this is. Seriously, punkers? The gang members from "Last House on the Left" and the serial killers from "The Devil's Rejects" just called, they think maybe you should dial it back a notch.

And, let's see...the screen play proceeds to lurch wildly all over the place, unsure if it's going for horror, suspense, comedy, women-in-trouble...holy heck, what's TAB HUNTER doing in here? What's ROBERT Z'DAR doing in here? What's...well, I know what Linda Blair is doing in here, she's trying to keep her career alive, and as an actress she's OK for the part. She screams convincingly, emits fear and panic, etc., like the little pro she was.

OK, so at least we'll have an ending to wrap things up and put "paid" to all the silliness before it...no? Movie, are you sure you're going to go for THIS weird thing, completely unjustified by anything that came before it?

Yeah? Well, fine. Just get it over with and out of my face, would ya?

"Grotesque" actually had a little bit of potential, especially if you liked the implications of "Old Dark House" style movies, or "Last House On The Left" and "The Hills Have Eyes". But the director bites off big, indigestible wads of screenplay that he doesn't have the ability to make work or even watchable.

I would't bother with this unless it's about all you've got to watch.

So this is some kind of slasher flick right? Well actually no. It's more of a home invasion flick meets a rape revenge flick without the revenge.

I'm only writing this review because there are some clever ideas here which get lost due to meaningless scenes irrelevant to the plot. The story should have spent much more time building clues to the reveal.

The plot: Linda Blair and her best friend travel to a small town for a relaxing weekend with Blair's parents. Why do we spend 20 minutes getting to know Blair and her friend as they travel? NO REASON at all! In fact Blair and her friend are not even the heroines. Their characters are simply more victims.

Blair's parents are actually developed more as characters! Mr. Blair is a life long want to be gore FX man. He's never actually worked in Hollywood, he just does it as a hobby. He's spent his whole life playing elaborate pranks on his wife and daughter. As I said, Mr. and Mrs. Blair are developed more as characters than Blair herself.

That night a gang of stereotypical 80s hair metal punks invades the Blair home under in inexplicable theory that the Blair family is rich. They're not. Mr. and Mrs. Blair are beaten to death with random household objects. That's right, the robbers aren't even armed with switch blades.

The murders are being observed by a deformed man. (the first we've seen of him) Is he friend or foe? Well since he does begin attacking the gang he must be OK.

The mutant's sudden appearance leads to a clumsy chase into the woods with the gang chasing Blair into the snow while at the same time fleeing the mutant.

"We need to split up." says the gang's leader, and we can see where this is going. This way the one unarmed man can kill the four of them rather than the four of them simply standing together. The deformed man isn't some giant hulking mass. He's just some deformed guy unable to speak.

By daylight a unit of rangers arrives on the scene. Why? No one's called the police, there hasn't been a gun shot and no one's gone missing yet.

The police shoot and killed the deformed man, despite the fact he's unarmed and hasn't shown any signs of violence in front of them, over the objections of a civilian.

Blair is left in a coma and the surviving gang leader and his girlfriend blame the Blair family murders on the mutant.

What about Blair's friend? What about her? I rewatched this part three times. She just disappears from the film altogether at the house! Presumably she was also murdered?

At the police station they're unable to charge the gang since the sheriff explains, "In a court of law you still need evidence." So their fingerprints all over the house and one the murder weapons isn't enough?

The sheriff also questions the civilian whom turns out to be Uncle Blair. Who's never been introduced. "Why didn't you want us to shoot that man?" Maybe because he was an innocent unarmed man!!!

Immediately after the gang's release Uncle Blair kidnaps them and brings them back to the house, which hasn't been sealed off as a crime scene!!!! There isn't even police tape!!! Instead Uncle Blair reveals himself as a plastic surgeon who's set up an operating room (in the middle of a crime scene).

SPOILER WARNING! The big reveal is that Uncle Blair himself is deformed. His brother used his FX talents to made him a mask to pass as normal. The mutant was his retarded and deformed son. "I didn't have the heart to put him away. So my brother and his wife agreed to hide him for me." So locking his son away from the world and hiding him as a shameful secret was more loving than simply having him live in a home for the retarded? Thanks dad!

Predictably Uncle Blair uses his plastic surgery skills to deform the gang and then locks them away in the same space inside the house where his retarded son was imprisoned. What about getting revenge on the cops whom actually murdered his son in cold blood?

But there's a problem in the projection both. That's right, the film brakes the fourth wall because Frankenstein's monster and the wolfman didn't like the way the movie portrayed them. Yeah... that's the ending.

So as I said, there are some interesting elements here like the deformed plastic surgeon getting revenge by deforming the gang but it all gets lost.

Why do we spend 20 minutes focusing on Blair's character if she's just going to be another victim? Why do they do a great job building up Mr. and Mrs. Blair's characters only to quickly kill them off? And Uncle Blair is a Johnny come lately.

"Grotesque" is a grossly under-performing creature feature.

**SPOILERS**

Taking a road trip together, sisters Lisa, (Linda Blair) and Kathy, (Donna Wilkes) go up to a mountain retreat to get away for a short vacation. When they meet up with special effects master Orville Kruger, (Guy Stockwell) who has done a lot of special effects work, and they reminisce about the past. When local gang-members Scratch, (Brad Wilson) Shelly, (Michelle Bensoussan) Donna, (Sharon Hughes) Gibbs, (Nels Van Patten) and Ear Box, (Billy Frank) show up at the house looking for money, they fight back only to be quickly shot down and put in their place. When they suddenly realize that a vicious monster is amongst them and killing them off one-by-one, forcing them to fend the deadly creature off. Realizing that something is amiss about it, they realize that there's a connection between it and the company they went after, making it harder to stop the rampage.

The Good News: There wasn't a whole lot to this. One of the better parts is that, once the deformed guy breaks out he starts offing them pretty quickly. This is what leads to the best part of the film, the slaughter of the gang-members in a relatively quick period of time, happening quite quickly and really done in a great, brutal style. What's also great about the creature was the fact that it was so freakishly strong that it didn't even bother with weapons at all. A snap of a neck or bear hug was all that was needed to make short work of the victims, which makes for some great times during the rampage. In addition to these, we also get a really impressive facial crushing with the bare hands, a couple strangling and a really nice face blown apart by a shotgun blast, among other kills in here so this does get somewhat messy when it wants to be. The other good part is the fact that we're given more than one enemy, which also goes ahead to show a police-procedural side of the situation that's not normally presented. Once all the mayhem is over, a search party is sent out, complete with posse members and dogs, and after the survivors are found, they're questioned in a long, intense sequence which even plays off the good-cop bad-cop routine with them, which here is nicely handled is a different side that it usually given in these films. The last good part here is the really unique and clever plot, and even though it's basic premise is done to death, the play-out and execution of the tweaks done to it are fairly creative and make for some interesting scenes. These here are all that work for the film.

The Bad News: This here was a pretty underwhelming film with a couple flaws to it. One of them is that the look of the creature wasn't as grotesque as might have been lead to believe. It basically looked like a human that had their face partially melted off, with the jagged edges, jagged ridges and obvious prosthetics sticking out over the eyes, cheeks and around the mouth, which doesn't really do much for me. There's a whole lot more grotesque beings in horror flicks, and in the end it just comes off as incredibly lame and cheesy. The big flaw, though, is that the movie should have just ended at the hour mark, because everything after that point just seems like a waste of time. For instance we have one sequence involving a man walking to the cabin, and we're continuously cut from him to the dead bodies inside piled inside. This is repeated until the man finally reaches the cabin, which takes entirely too long. It's pretty clear scenes like that are only there to fill up the running time, because there's honestly not much more story to tell at that point and the editing of it plays that they're discovering the bodies out of accident but taking an entirely too long to do something that simple. Then when you think the film is finally over, we're thrown an even more ridiculous, unexpected ending, but not in a positive way. There's almost nothing that can be said to put this into a positive spin, but this anti-climax has to be one of the worst endings ever seen in any kind of movie. There's very little left to say how stupid, ridiculous and annoying this ending is, which really just makes it hard to understand where it was going to going before this came in, but this ending totally obliterates whatever good it had and just really leaves the viewer stunned. It's just an all-around mess, and really obliterates what good had come before it. These here are the film's flaws.

The Final Verdict: Bungled by the script woes despite having some really decent things, this one here is a really underwhelming creature feature. Really only see this one for the cheese value, have to see every single film from the creative cast or a fan of creature features, otherwise ignore this one completely for more redeeming fare.

Rated R: Graphic Language and Violence

Reasonably amusing B movie with a number of familiar faces, "Grotesque" was the brainchild of actor and sometime director Joe Tornatore, and it's clear that he's having a fair bit of fun with the horror genre. Ever cute and appealing Linda Blair is Lisa, who travels with her good friend Kathy (the lovely Donna Wilkes of "Jaws 2", "Blood Song", and "Angel") to the mountain retreat of her father Orville (Guy Stockwell, "Santa Sangre"), a special effects artist. Unfortunately, there's a gang of degenerate punks - a common enough element in movies of this time - who are hellbent on retrieving the treasure that they are convinced the old man is hoarding. Having seen the whole thing, it becomes clear for this viewer, now, just what Tornatore and his screenwriter Mikel Angel were attempting with this movie, as the opening sequence turns out to be a movie within a movie. The balance of the thing is played mostly straight, although the way that one false scare is set up for an absurd length of time makes one think that Tornatore and Angel were making fun of this sort of thing in the first place. Makeup effects are really quite tacky but this, again, may well be another attempt to sort of wink at the audience and just have fun with conventions of low, low budget genre flicks. The entertaining cast also includes veteran matinée idol Tab Hunter as the uncle Rod, Brad Wilson as maniacal punk leader Scratch, in a hilariously way over the top performance, Nels Van Patten as giggling associate Gibbs (he may remind the viewer of his uncle Timothy's performance as the villain in "Class of 1984"), sexy Sharon Hughes (the inspiration for Prince's song "Little Red Corvette") as Donna, Charles Dierkop ("Messiah of Evil", "Silent Night Deadly Night") as the local sheriff, cult icon Robert Z'Dar as gang member Eric, John Goff as a producer, Tornatore himself as Charlie, and wrestling star Mike Lane (who'd worked with Bogart on the legend's last film, "The Harder They Fall"). (It's also worth noting that Goff's long time friend and fellow exploitation veteran George "Buck" Flower was the movie's pre-production coordinator.) Some good shocks and atmosphere, but the movie does plod a bit too much. The final third is a bit of a surprise, though, as it goes in a direction that people might not expect - it does, however, lead to a delicious scene of revenge, even if some might feel it doesn't go far enough. Ultimately, though, it's impossible to review this and not bring up the ending, which actually completely pulls the rug out from under us - some people watching may be quite amused, others extremely disappointed; personal taste will likely decide one's reaction. Personally, I found this silly little movie quite a hoot. Seven out of 10.