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Things

Things (1989)

September. 01,1989
|
2.9
| Horror

An impotent husband with a fanatical desire to father children, forces his wife to undergo a dangerous experiment. This results in the birth of a multitude of monstrous THINGS.

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Reviews

Sandy Petersen
1989/09/01

I am a bad movie buff. But "Things" made me hate all of Canada by proxy. It is seriously that bad. I watched it TWICE. Once with a buddy. (He has not visited my house since then, so he might not be my buddy anymore. I don't blame him, really.) Then I showed it at a get-together with about a dozen friends who also love bad films. My hopes were that their good spirits and jolliness would find some seeds of corn in this turn. They were game - they tried to joke and laugh at it, but in the end it was Man vs. Machine. And, sadly, "Things"'s mean-spirited stupidity and bad sound quality triumphed over my friends' willpower - by the end, their spirits were broken. All they could do was sit there glumly and say mean things about my mom. I am a bad movie buff, so I thought I "needed" to see Things. I was wrong. If you are a bad movie buff, and you're considering this, back away slowly. Trust me. You do NOT need to see Things. It is worse than Curse of Bigfoot. It is worse than The Creeping Terror. It might not be worse than the soul-crushing dreariness that is Theodore Rex, but it's a toss-up. Get out while you still can. I actually BOUGHT this thing, and it's sitting on my DVD shelf right now. It's making me dislike the movies that sit next to it on the shelf by association. It's honestly that terrible.

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samthecam
1989/09/02

So you saw Troll 2 and you thought "hahaha, this is amazingly bad, the acting and the script are so terrible, nothing makes sense." Well Things is like bad movie 2.0. Literally everything about the movie is utterly incompetent, from the makeup and prosthetics, to the cinematography and sound mixing. The only real question is where to begin, so to make this easier I'm going to go through every element of the movie and discuss it.Plot: The plot of Things is extremely simple, but handled so incompetently that it turns into the most difficult to follow film since Primer. Halfway through it I realised I had no idea what was going on and why, and why any of the characters where acting in these baffling ways, but the film just continued. It very rarely stops to explain what is happening, and when it does it just gets more confusing. For example, about a third of a way through the movie, one of the characters seemingly explodes (for no reason), firing blood all over another characters shirt. Later on the protagonist hears a noise that somehow signifies that not only did character 1 not explode, he's gone to get help. What kind of noise would signify this? Where did the blood come from? How did the character just vanish? Why didn't he say he was going? This film raises many questions, none of which are answered ever. The filmmakers must be utterly mental, to look at the script and think "yep, this is cohesive and makes sense."Script: As was mentioned earlier the entire thing is impossible to follow, their are cutaways that have nothing to do with the rest of the film, scenes (I'm looking at you newsroom scenes) that are completely unnecessary, but perhaps the most baffling thing of all is the characters. The three main characters all share one trait, and that is that they love to goof around and play zany pranks, but these pranks are played at such inappropriate times that you begin to question the sanity of the characters, although you'd do that anyway. After the Things are born and eat a secondary characters wife the reaction of our three heroes is "Oh no, better get back to the kitchen." And here they sit, telling nonsensical jokes like "how do you get paper children? F*ck a bag lady," and completely failing to do anything about the encroaching menace. This is there sole character trait, and it's one that makes no sense and is totally inappropriate. Acting: Poor across the board, not a single ounce of emotion is brought across by the actors across the entirety of the movie.Cinematography: The cinematography fails largely due to the mental editing, but one hilarious scene stands out. As the characters sit around their table, the once bright light suddenly fades to be ever so slightly dimmer. "Oh no, looks like the lights have gone out," says our protagonist, as he sits in a brightly lit area, the light clearly showing off the characters irritation at this sudden lack of vision.Music and sound: The music could not be more tonally out of place if it was ripped from an episode of Barney the purple Dinosaur, but the audio of the characters lines is baffling. It is badly dubbed over, and the difference between what they originally recorded and what they dubbed over is as obvious as a brick to the skull. The sound is terribly mixed, with some scenes being totally silent except for some music, and others having the loudest dialogue ever.Makeup and prosthetics: This is the only area where the movie is even semi competent, although no real praise is forthcoming. The only positive is at least they had prosthetics, and they did make me feel sick, but only because of how terrible they were. They look hideous, in both senses of the word, both fake and disgusting. Towards the end I was genuinely beginning to feel sick, because of how horrible it all was.Monsters: The "THINGS" do not move. They sit there and look horrible, and then are occasionally pushed along or placed at strategic points to give the illusion that they are attacking someone. At the very least they are not scary in the slightest.As horrible and incompetent as things is, I can't hate it. I was fully entertained the whole way through, because my mind was desperately struggling to understand what on earth was going on. I would totally recommend you watch it, but you'd better be ready for confusion

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Scott LeBrun
1989/09/03

Combine a ridiculous story (actually, there's not very much of a "story"), stunningly terrible acting, lousy sound, endearingly tacky effects, and an omnipresent, overbearing music score, and you have the memorably bizarre and stupid micro budget oddity that is "Things". This movie just goes to show that Canadians can do this sort of thing just as "well" as anybody. It drags and meanders and is often just as tiresome as it is funny. But when it's over, it's the kind of Thing that you just don't forget.Basically, an insane husband whose inability to give his wife a child led them to participate in an experiment that saw her give birth to the creatures of the title. Now a bunch of characters: Don Drake (played by co-writer / co-producer Barry J. Gillis), his brother Doug (Doug Bunston), and Fred (Bruce Roach) are about to experience a night of terror thanks to the machinations of the nefarious Dr. Lucas (Jan W. Pachul).You'd swear these guys, including co-writer / co-producer / director Andrew Jordan, were just making up this absurdity as they went along; this plodding but amusing piece of work does have that feel. The so-called actors in this thing appear pretty amused themselves. (Lovely porn star Amber Lynn appears in a (clothed) part as a reporter. Overall, getting through "Things" is going to be a real endurance test for some people while others may well have a whale of a time. The filmmakers may not be the most technically proficient you'll ever see (to put it mildly), but they make up for that to a degree with gonzo enthusiasm. The splatter is absolutely delicious stuff for whatever budget they bad.Shot on Super 8, this truly walks on the wild and wacky side of Canucksploitation.Five out of 10.

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TheRetardedVacuum
1989/09/04

Things is truly a masterpiece of cinema, and as such it must be shown to everybody young and old so they can bask in the sheer brilliance of this piece of cinematic art. Okay, so that's not exactly true, in fact there is so much wrong with this movie in the first 20 minutes that I could write about it for hours.The plot goes something like this: A man named Doug (Doug Bunston) is tending to his sick wife Susan (Patricia Sadler) when his friend Fred (Bruce Roach) and brother Don (Barry J. Gillis) come over for some drinks and sandwiches. We then cut to some kind of hospital where a doctor is cutting various body parts off of some deformed guy... don't know what this has to do with the rest of the movie. As it turns out Doug let a doctor perform experiments on Susan so they can have a baby because Doug is unable to. This causes gigantic ants to crawl out of her stomach (makes sense, right?) and run amok in the house. It's up to Doug, Fred and Don to kill them all.This movie seems to be one of those SOV movies made by a group of friends messing around with a camcorder (which I totally respect), and it shows here because the acting is terrible, so is the dialog. Some of my favorite lines of the entire movie:"The next time you come with me on a trip, you're staying home" (Well, you can't do both!)Don: "You didn't tell me you were a kindergarten artist" Doug: "You didn't tell me you were an *SSHOLE I had to find that out for myself" Priceless.There are several more but frankly I can't remember them all.The sound is pretty bad as well, there's one part where one character's voice goes really quiet for a few seconds, you can't hear what he's saying, but you know he's saying something. A lot of the characters seem to be dubbed over, quite hilariously I might add, one character is screaming while he is being eaten by "things" and he sounds like the Pillsbury Dough Boy, it's really funny. The sound FX are also laughable, in this movie, the cutting off of a head and the cleaning of a blade with a paper towel sounds like sloppy making-out.The scene where the guy belches and farts cracked me up because, 1. I'm really immature, and 2. it pretty much came out of nowhere.Also, what's with all the random news reports? The movie cuts out several times to show a news reporter (Amber Lynn) talking about a random news report that has nothing to do with the rest of the movie. Also, with how bad the editing is, she is cut off in the middle of a sentence once, and often quick flashes of random images pop up before the report comes up.And what I think is the most obvious problem of all, WHY DID THEY STAY IN THE HOUSE??? Don says it's because their car's out of gas and they wouldn't make it through the woods and they could get eaten by bears or snakes. But later in the movie the doctor who experimented on Susan shows up, meaning he either walked or drove there, the latter being the more likely option but I'm willing to believe anything in this movie. If he walked, it can't be that dangerous, if he drove... DUDE, HE'S GOT A CAR, LEAVE!!!Last but not least, the ending. Without spoiling too much, I can say this: WHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATTTTTTTTTTTT!!!???There are so many more questions I could ask. Like why does Doug always laugh like he has problems? Why was Don sharpening the blade with his hand? Why was Don telling a long horror story that adds nothing to the movie? How can a skull talk? Bestiality Network? Cockroach snack?One "Things" for certain, this is probably the funniest and most entertaining bad movie I have ever seen, I was surely never bored. Which is why I'm giving it a 10 that it probably doesn't deserve, I don't rate my movies on quality, I rate my movies on entertainment value, it's too confusing the other way. If I gave the movie a 1, it wouldn't be because of how horrible the movie is (actually it would), it would be because I wasn't entertained and didn't laugh, and I was sure entertained by Things.Oh, one more "thing", the scene where they are watching a presumably fake horror movie on TV and they have the nerve to comment on what a cheap and terrible movie THAT movie is, was quite jaw-dropping, a grand example of irony.

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