Supelice Dreadfully Boring

TaryBiggBall It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

Hulkeasexo it is the rare 'crazy' movie that actually has something to say.

Brendon Jones It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Michael O'Keefe Written by David Duncan and directed by Will Cowan, this horror tale is also known as THE WATER WITCH. A bit scary with situational terror, THE THING THAT COULDN'T DIE, or wouldn't die. Using a dowsing rod on her aunt's ranch, a young female psychic makes a startling discovery. A box is recovered from the ground and it contains a 400 year old head! This is the living head of a 16th century devil worshiper named Gideon Drew(Robin Hughes). The dismembered head's whispers will hypnotize anyone listening to search for its separated body. The dowsing rod figures to be important in the search, no matter who uses it.The players include: Carolyn Kearney, William Reynolds, Andrea Martin, Charles Horvath, Peggy Converse and Jeffery Stone.

Coventry "The Thing that Couldn't Die" actually turned out to be a very pleasant surprise! I was expecting a totally cheap, insignificant and rather silly Z-grade horror flick, but what I got was … Well, I got a totally cheap, insignificant and rather silly Z-grade horror flick, but one that was vastly more entertaining than I thought! The film has a compelling plot, albeit familiar and simplistic, and the atmosphere and special effects are far more unsettling and spooky that I expected for a camp 50's flick like this. Jessica is a shy but beautiful young girl with psychic powers who lives on the Californian guest ranch of her aunt. With her dowsing rod she discovers an antique chest buried deep underneath a tree. Jessica feels that the content of the chest is evil, but her aunt and all the guests at the ranch insist on opening it anyway. The chest contains the bodiless head of a medieval Satanist, and it promptly possesses some of the guest with his penetrating eyes and hypnotizing powers. The head naturally wants to recover its body, which is buried elsewhere on the premises, in order to continue his evil Satan-worshiping activities. Particularly the scenes with the head are effectively creepy and atmosphere. Whether carried by a minion or stored in a hat-box, the head is scary! The actor depicting the head also looks a lot like Vincent Price. The makers of this cheap flick perhaps couldn't afford to hire Vincent Price, but at least they understood that the role required loads of evil charisma and thus opted for the Argentinian born lookalike Robin Hughes. Furthermore the film contains a couple of admirable footnotes, like for example a link with the famous naval commander Sir Francis Drake, and a reasonably good pacing. And, oh yeah, the ending is downright hilarious! This film has the biggest "What … that's it?!?" climax in the history of cinema. Turns out "the thing that couldn't die" dies pretty easily after all.

dougdoepke I expect the movie was made for about a buck-eighty. There's basically one outdoor farm anchoring the action, along with a few tacky exterior forest sets. Then too, I wonder if Robin Hughes' (Gideon) salary was discounted since only his head is used. Still, the acting is better than expected for a Z-production, especially Kearney (Jessica). Okay, the premise is really wacky, even for a drive-in special. Seems some guy from the 1600's lost his head and is now trying to get his headless body back by using unsuspecting members of the farm who fall under his mumbling powers. You keep wondering who will be next. My advice is to do what I did back in '58— keep a 6-pack handy or maybe a 12-pack if you've got an aversion to guys who can't keep their head on straight.

lemon_magic For all its many flaws, I'm inclined to be charitable towards "Thing". There is the nugget of an interesting, creepy, claustrophobic Hitchcock style story here. Put this in the hands of a writer like Theodore Sturgeon or (if you prefer British perspective) Robert Bloch, or the guy who wrote "Day Of The Triffids", and you might have had a nasty, unsettling little spook story that was the best thing in an book anthology of horror and suspense stories.However, someone chose to tell this story as a feature length movie, and a cheap, 2nd rate at that, and so most of the potential is wasted. A story like this really needs a voice like Sturgeon's to bring out interesting quirks of character in a better light. His classic story "The -widget-, the -wadget-, and Boff" is an example of how he can gather together an isolated group of "ordinary" characters and in the space of 40 pages can turn them into the most amusing, sympathetic and fascinating people you've ever met. A good writer can, with a few chosen words, make the reader "see" some of the most vivid and memorable events ever to scar his emotions.Instead, we get a movie where some of the most irritating and unlikeable characters ever made are lumped together and made to interact in unconvincing "Where did that come from??" moments that just lie there. (IE the blond psychic girl declaiming that "You're all evil and I hope you are destroyed!"). We get leaden pacing and slow motion blocking and dull sets and stiff actors. I blame the director for the 'stiff and shallow' part. These are all 3rd rank character actors who never made the big time, but they are also 'real' actors, and a good director could have gotten better performances out of them. We get uncalled for lesbian overtones that make the viewer feel uneasy and exploited without delivering any kind of payoff. (If I'm going to have my baser instincts exploited and feel guilty about it, I want done by stuff staged better than this). And we get over an hour of creepy build-up diffused in about 35 seconds in one of the worst anti-climaxes I've ever seen.Good things about "Thing"? Um, well...some of the closeup shots of the warlock's head silently mouthing its directives were pretty effective. The miserly and shrewish widow rang true to life (even if I wanted to stuff a sock in her mouth). The first scene where the big, "simple" ranch hand silently turns on the oily cowboy and kills him had a bit of shock value, because the plot had taken the trouble to establish the big guy as a fairly sympathetic character. And like I said earlier, the idea of an insidious force from the past turning the members of an isolated community against each other is a good one and can sustain interest far above the actual merit of a bad performance.Which this definitely is.But, as I said, I'm inclined to be charitable, because the director was probably working under a penurious budget, breakneck time constraints and the best actors he could find for the money. Heaven knows how future generations will judge facile crap like "The Cave", "Wrong Turn" or the remake of "House of Wax" 40 years from now. I hope they are charitable towards our own tastes in supporting our generations wastes of film stock.