For my next trick, I’m going to steal a page from The
Duck Speaks’s book (don’t sue, Marl!) and do a
compare/contrast piece on one of my all-time favorite
devil movies, Rawhead Rex, and the eponymous short
story that inspired it.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. “But Ragnarok,” you
might say. “You said in the Petey Wheatstraw review that devil movies aren’t as good when the devil is a
monster instead of a trickster! To that I say, “Shut
up, you! This is my review!” Besides, Rawhead isn’t
really the devil per se. He’s not even a devil,
really. In that case, you’re probably saying, “Then
what the hell are you doing reviewing this movie for
Satan day?” To which I reply, “Rex defies God,
destroys a church, eats children, and baptizes a
priest with his urine. Even Satan isn’t that cool.”
Now, would you stop asking all these damn questions
and let me get on with it!?
Both the short story and the screenplay for the film
were written by the one and only Clive Barker of Barn
of the Blood Llama fame. I’ll be honest, this is the
first Clive Barker story I’ve ever read. I’ve heard
opinions on his stories ranging from Lovecraft-level
genius to dime-store sex novel hack, and as many of
you know, I’m not that big a fan of
supernatural/fantasy/magic stories, which from what
I’ve gathered, is mostly what Mr. Barker writes. But
ever since I read about Rawhead Rex in a book about
dinosaur movies I bought as a little kid (how Rex got
into a dinosaur movie book I have no idea), I was
obsessed with seeing it. A huge, prehistoric demon
escapes his tomb and rampages through rural Ireland -
how much cooler does it get? When I finally found a
copy of it on DVD at the local grocery store (!), I
was thrilled. And not only that, it was way better
than I was expecting it to be. The dinosaur book gave
it a fairly scathing review, and I’ve heard it either
dismissed or flat-out slagged plenty of times, and I
can’t for the life of me figure out why. But I’m
getting ahead of myself here. We’ll start with the
source, a 40-page short story in Barker’s "Books of
Blood".
The scene is set in the small rural Irish town of
Zeal, which is being overrun by tourists. Thomas
Garrow decides to plow and plant a three-acre patch of
land that has, ever since he can remember, been left
to grow wild by his family. The work goes smoothly
until he finds a gigantic stone buried in the earth.
Ignoring an uneasy feeling about the stone, he
continues to dig until the stone begins to unearth
itself and out from under it comes a nine-foot-tall
demon from pre-Roman mythology, Rawhead Rex. Rawhead
was put down in the ground by his enemies hundreds of
years ago, and is now the last of his kind, but even
though generations have passed, his influence isn’t
gone. The local pub is called “The Tall Man”, and its
sign depicts a mysterious shape towering over some
men.
Rawhead tears through the countryside, shredding and
devouring the human usurpers who have overrun the land
he was once the king of. At the same time, he uses a
psychic link to possess the verger of the local
church, using him to protect a mysterious force hidden
in the church which Rawhead is afraid of. When
vacationing Londoner Ron Milton and his family find
out about the grisly murders, they are determined not
to flee back to the city, instead staying in the small
town they intend to make their home.
When Reverend Coot witnesses Rawhead in the lichyard
of the church, urinating on Verger Declan in a mockery
of baptism, he runs inside and calls the police, but
Rawhead has spotted him. The priest tries to hide in
the cellar, but Declan rousts him out and feeds him to
Rex. The police arrive in time to run Rex off with
machine guns, something he is unfamiliar with and his
animal nature fears.
Ron visits the dying Coot in the hospital, and Coot
tells him that there is something in the altar of the
church that Rawhead is afraid of. Ron’s motivation to
destroy Rawhead is hammered home when, on a drive one
day, they stop the car to let daughter Debbie out to
pee. When she screams and he and Maggie run to her
aid to find a dead mole at her feet, leaving son Ian
in the car with his comic books, Rawhead attacks the
car and devours Ian before Ron’s helpless eyes.
While Ron pieces together the puzzle and finds the
idol of an old fertility cult in the altar of the
church, Rawhead is tearing every vehicle in the town
apart, dousing the small village in gasoline. With
the town in blazes behind him, Rex heads for the
church to destroy the hated object of his fear, which
Ron has already discovered and is heading out to use
to destroy the demon once and for all. The remaining
villagers rise up with Ron and overpower Rex, allowing
Ron to use the power of the idol.
I really dig the mysterious origin of Rex. He seems
to be one of the “giants in the earth” that "The Old
Testament" speaks of, although he’s much older than
that, dating back to pre-Roman, and probably even
pre-historic times. The only thing I have a hard time
with is reconciling how powerful he is with how
animalistic he behaves at times. If he’s a
near-immortal being with the capability to mentally
control at least a small number of creatures near him,
and he can only be killed using a particular idol from
a long-forgotten fertility cult, why does he behave in
such a timid manner when confronted with cars and guns
for the first time? Sure, they’re new to him, but he
destroys them easily enough in the end.
Either way, between this, the movie version, and
Hellraiser, Barker is three for three in my book. And
speaking of the movie version…
Seeing as how Barker wrote both story and screenplay,
it’s no surprise that just about every element of the
story shows up as a set piece in the movie. For some
reason I can’t figure out, the names of every one of
the members of the main family is changed. Ron Milton
becomes Howard Hallenbeck, Maggie becomes Elaine, Ian
becomes Robbie, and Debbie becomes…Minty? Minty? Who
the fuck names their kid Minty? Other than that, all
the characters have been left intact.
Their origin is also changed from vacationing
Londoners looking for a country home to vacationing
Americans, and Howard is writing a book on
pre-Christian religions and their leftover elements
which have been adapted into small rural churches,
which actually makes the movie better, because Ron‘s
pot-bellied suburbanite wussiness in the story made
him a very hard character to like. Also, having
Howard not know about the murders until Rawhead eats
his son makes him seem like much less of a blazing
idiot. If I had my family, including two young
children, in a village where there were horrifying
murders (we’re talking people being partially eaten
and dismembered and strung all over their yards, here)
taking place, and I had a safe home to return to, I’d
get the fuck out of there, not stick around to see
what happens! This also means that dumbfuck Ron is
directly responsible for his son’s devourment in the
story.
The order of some events have been changed for the
movie to make Howard’s quest work for the length of a
90-minute film. For example, the urine baptism and
the showdown with Coot and Declan at the church don’t
happen until after Robbie gets eaten, to give Howard
the knowledge to find the fertility idol in the alter
and use it against Rex.
The biggest change comes from the ending. The film’s
relatively low budget didn’t allow for an entire town
to be burned to the ground, so instead of Howard
somewhat anticlimactically smashing Rex’s head in with
the idol, his wife appears to save the day. In the
film, a woman has to be the one to use the idol
against Rex, and instead of just whacking him with it,
Elaine triggers a magical reaction which lights up the
graveyard with fancy rotoscope-animated lightning
bolts and zaps Rex into oblivion, as depicted on a
stained-glass window in the church.
The film also makes Rex less animalistic, and more of
a thinking monster. He’s invulnerable to the police’s
machine gun fire, and has no problem ripping cars to
pieces. For a low-budget monster flick, Rex is a damn
fine-looking beast. Sure, he’s no Stan Winston
creation, but more care than is usually taken in these
things was given to making his eyes flicker with the
fires of hell, his claws retractable/extendable, and
his jaws to distend to unnatural width.
The Irish countryside makes an equally beautiful and
menacingly atmospheric setting for a story of demonic
carnage, and is used to fantastic effect. The few
process shots, particularly the one where Rex breaks
through the ground against a roiling, lightning-filled
backdrop of sky, are typically hokey 80’s stuff, but
it’s stylized enough that it doesn’t come off so much
cheesy as it does eerie and otherworldly.
Just about the only thing that I think hamstrings
Rawhead Rex is the ending. It’s a little over the top
with the magical, floating figure hovering over Elaine
shooting lightning bolts at Rex, and Rex isn’t given
much to do but stand there and roar while Elaine takes
him down. Basically, the movie improves on the very
few things wrong with the story except for the ending.
But in the story, Rex is dead and gone. At the end
of the movie, we’re set up for a sequel which was
doomed never to happen, and frankly, I’m okay with
that. Movies this (most likely accidentally) good
should not be franchised, because the chance of all
those elements that made the original work so
perfectly falling into place again is slim.
It doesn’t get much better than this, folks. Dig up
"Books of Blood" and give Rex a spin, and make sure to
give this criminally overlooked monster flick the
chance it deserves.
The Moral of the Story: Ancient demons don’t just go
away. Make sure it’s dead!
FEEDBACK
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