Thundercrack!
4/04/2005
After a gruelling, chained-to-my-desk Monday at work, I was pleasantly surprised to see another Nicheflix envelope in my mailbox. My evening plans were immediately set; I would run out, grab some Taco Hell, then settle down behind the PC for a cinematic feast whilst relaxing the body and mind.
How much more wrong could a person be?
Thundercrack! is an 'art porn' slash exploitation slash horror b-movie all rolled up into one unsettling, low low budget package. Marion Eaton, a strange, obscure but brilliant 'stage' actress, stars as a drunken, middle-aged widow living 'all alone' in a country cottage. She is charmingly insane, perverse, and her performance is over-the-top but exceedingly well done.
Back story: Her husband was eaten alive by a swarm of locusts years before. In her madness she pickled him and keeps his gristly remains in a couple of tall jars in the basement. Her son, a seeker of all things erotic, is kept in a locked closet because of his elephantitis of the scrotum, which enlarged his testicles to monstrous proportions. To her, 'he no longer exists,' and there is a little more than a hint at incest, though we never actually see her son (except for a brief flicker of his large testicles). Apparently he has a thing for enemas.
Add two groups of strangers looking for shelter from a horrible storm, a snack of peeled (used) cucumber ad nauseum, toss in a deranged, over-caffeinated carny in love with his big, mean gorilla mama (for real), throw in more than a few straight/bisexual explicit sex scenes, and the end result is over 2 hours of celluloid that would at once please and nauseate anyone from David Lynch to John Waters.
I won't go into a detailed review, because I'm saving that for the remastered, restored version that should be coming out sometime in the near future. I will force myself again to sit through 150 minutes of restored Thundercrack! And I will live to tell about it.
Oh, did I mention that it was super cheap, and filmed entirely in black and white?
I have never in my life sat through a film so stupefying and bizarre. This is a one-of-a-kind experience, I must say, and I recommend it wholeheartedly for any fan of the bizarre, the twisted, and the just plain fucked up. Definitely not for the squeamish. No real gore, but there are a couple of gross-out scenes and several truly adult sex scenes. I can't begin to describe the effect of this movie. It's like a love/hate relationship. Kind of like sitting through a painful tattoo, knowing that you will come out afterward a permanently changed person but having to undergo some rather intense pain in the process. Or wiggling a loose tooth for two hours. It was one part Eraserhead, two parts Manos: Hands of Fate, one part Pink Flamingos and two parts sleazy '70s 'shock' porn. Crazy crazy shit.
Check out the OFFICIAL Thundercrack! web site here. Not much there, but enough to visit.
posted by novachild @ Monday, April 04, 2005,
