Nowadays, getting your paws on even the most obscure horror flick is as easy as booting
up your computer and searching the web.
But back in the days of analogue TVs and VCRs, gorehounds of discerning taste weren't so
lucky.
In other words: when a horror movie up and vanished, it was all but gone for good.
Hope you didn't plan on sleeping tonight, because these are some of the most obscure
horror films lost to time, and they're so underrated, it's scary.
The Keep
Michael Mann is a pretty beloved filmmaker, so the fact that one of his flicks missed
out on the DVD or Blu-Ray treatment is a little peculiar.
But then again, 1983's The Keep is pretty peculiar too, and nothing like the rest of
Mann's work.
With its eerie, gothic ambiance and World War II setting, it's a far cry from Mann's
typical tales of brooding, handsome, urban coppers.
For whatever reason though, Mann must've thought it'd be neat to adapt a horror novel into
a surreal, nightmarish art film.
And the results are pretty much what you'd expect.
"I WILL DESTROY THEM!!"
Here's the gist: a Nazi platoon encounters an ancient monster in an abandoned fortress.
Then the monster goes on to eliminate the soldiers one after another, as monsters do.
A soundtrack by German electronic pioneers Tangerine Dream and extremely disjointed editing
both serve to amplify the film's dreamlike feel.
And despite The Keep's thematic departure from the rest of Mann's work, the auteur's
signature visual style is as sharp as ever.
It's not exactly a lost classic, and Mann himself tends to act like the film doesn't
exist, but yes, Michael Mann, you did make a movie about Nazis getting pulverized by
monsters.
And, dare we say, it was pretty rad.
Hospital Massacre
1981's Hospital Massacre has one thing going for it: it lets the audience know what they're
in for right from the title card, and it delivers on that promise.
There's a hospital, and a massacre takes place.
Really, the film is a paragon of truth in advertising.
It could only have been more accurate if it had been called Hospital Massacre, and Barbie
Benton Bares All.
That's right, while plenty of slasher flicks take place in a hospital, none but Hospital
Massacre could boast the presence of Playboy model Barbi Benton, who spends much of the
film running in terror from a masked killer who may or may not be a spurned childhood
admirer.
Spoiler alert: He totally is.
The mystery isn't mysterious, the slayings are run-of-the-mill, and the ending is telegraphed
from a mile away, but here's Benton in the middle of it all, looking gorgeous and treating
the whole cheesy, ridiculous enterprise with deadpan seriousness.
It's certainly no Halloween II, but there's no shame in falling short of the bar set by
that timeless classic.
The Beast Within
It was a mostly crappy fright flick with one of the most intriguing marketing campaigns
in horror cinema history.
The trailer for 1982's The Beast Within opens with plain white text on a black screen:
But it doesn't stop there:
Of course, it wasn't the first movie to make such claims, but it actually was unique in
that it totally delivered on its threat.
The film's special effects team weren't household names, but the sequence in question, in which
the teen transforms violently and painfully into one of the most hideous things anyone
has ever seen on film, definitely showed where the heck the movie's entire budget went.
Superior filmmakers have made similar sequences with more soul, but The Beast Within's staggeringly
long and revolting transformation scene is exactly the stomach-churning test of will
its marketing promised.
Xtro
1982's Xtro may have been remembered as just another attempt to cash in on the success
of Alien, if it had been content to just stay put in one genre.
While it begins with a fairly standard alien invasion narrative, it shows its hand in its
completely gonzo back half, where it pays homage to everything from slasher flicks to
zombie movies to Carrie.
Years after a man is kidnapped by aliens, one of the slimy things returns to, erm, "impregnate"
his wife.
But then she gives birth to her husband, a full-grown man, in a manner every bit as graphic
and horrifying as you're imagining.
Things then get really weird as the man imbues his son with psychic powers, which he uses
to bring his toys to life and murder his classmates.
The son then inexplicably develops a thirst for blood, and by this point audiences are
wondering just how many beats from other films this story can accommodate.
Critical reviews were scathing, Roger Ebert said of the film:
"You either go to a monster movie because it was good, or maybe because it was entertaining
trash.
But Xtro doesn't even qualify as acceptable trash."
But fans appreciated writer/director Harry Bromley Davenport's willingness to dump every
single freaky idea in his head into one supremely bizarre movie.
The Stuff
While b-movie auteur Larry Cohen's more recent credits include Phone Booth and Captivity,
his career as both a writer and director stretches back decades.
And he has never been one to let a super-low budget or an insane premise, or both, get
in the way of his good time.
Case in point: 1985's The Stuff, which stars frequent collaborator Michael Moriarty as
an investigator determined to find out what's in … the Stuff, a hot new food product that
bubbles up from a hole in the Earth, is addictively delicious, and may or may not be sentient.
"It's called the stuff, and believe me: Enough is never enough."
The film functions equally well as a cutting satire of American consumerism and as a B-monster
movie, with several memorably creepy sequences, most notably the one in which a couple discovers
that their bed has been infested with the Stuff, a scene that recycled the set used
for Johnny Depp's demise in A Nightmare on Elm Street.
The underrated Moriarty plays perfectly to the material, and the social-satire-as-B-movie
aesthetic was ahead of its time, predating Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop and John Carpenter's
They Live by several years.
The Stuff is a little-seen gem that also happens to boast one of the best horror taglines ever:
"Are you eating it?
Or is it eating you?"
It's Alive
"You see… there's only one thing wrong with the Davis baby, it's alive."
"WHRAAAAAWWRR."
Speaking of Larry Cohen, the auteur showed his stripes early on with his fourth feature,
1974's It's Alive, based on the novel of the same name.
Having mainly trafficked in blaxploitation flicks up to that point, his work took a hard
left turn with this tale of a woman who gives birth to a somewhat … unusual child.
Escaping the hospital, it's hunted by police, its father, and a representative of a pharmaceutical
drug company whose contraceptive medication almost certainly caused the mutation.
It doesn't end well for any of them.
Whether this film represents the most insane possible take on birth control the '70s had
to offer is up for debate.
But its seriously disturbing premise and creature effects have made it a cult classic, to say
nothing of its ending, which probably gives children of the '70s nightmares to this day.
Its bloody climax, in which Monster Baby is finally dispatched by the police, let audiences
relax just long enough to deliver one of the best gut-punch final lines of dialogue in
horror: "Another one's been born in Seattle."
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