12 Days Of Dino Dicember # 60: Grunt! (1983)

Back in the mid 60 and 70s cavemen films had come back, going initially for an adventure feel, alongside other dinosaur or prehistoric themed films (most already covered here), but it became clear soon that what made One Million Years B. C. a success wasn’t the stopmotion dinosaur effects by Ray Harryhausen, but Rachel Welch in cavegirl garments, and hence these film began more focusing on the cave girls and the “historical” excuse for pseudo-nudity.

In Italy we had a tradition of sexy comedies budding in the late 60s, so in the 70s some filmakers hopped onto the bandwagon and made sexy cavemen comedies like When Women Had Tails, while others latched unto the more extreme trend of the cannibal films.

It was a fad, in the grand scheme of things, but the genre survived into the early ’80s with stuff like the alredy reviewed Caveman, the one with Ringo Starr, which i assume was the catalyst for director Andy Luotto to try his hand at a caveman slapstick comedy, with Grunt!, indeed one of the more apt titles ever for a caveman comedy, sporting the tagline “La Clava E’ Uguale Per Tutti” (lit. “The Club Is Equal For All”), also used as a subtitle for the kinda modern DVD rerelease it got and which i’m using for review.

You can find the entire movie on Youtube, but you might need to find some subs unless you understand italian, as yes, it’s a dialogue-less film…. BUT there’s also a voice over narration by the director, Andy Luotto (also in the film as the caveman that looks like a Squawkabilly) talking bollocks that intervenes here and there.

Then again, it’s not like it makes the thing have more sense (it’s mostly bollocks, including random homophobic shit and shit tier cabaret jokes), but maybe there are some german dubs around, or maybe french, as far as i know there are no official english dubs for the film.

Which makes sense since there’s just so little voiceover to dub, and no spoken dialogue per sé.

Continua a leggere “12 Days Of Dino Dicember # 60: Grunt! (1983)”

[EXPRESSO] Hatching (2022) | My very own Birdperson

I said it before, many other fellow reviewers said it before, and indeed it’s a great year for horror films. This Finnish body horror thriller being no exception.

The trailer felt a little too honest and overly spoilerish, but it’s actually not, as it doesn’t revolve about a drawn out reveal of the creature, since it shows you fairly quick how it came to be and how it looks. It’s just the bait, so to speak.

The plot concerns a young girl that trains hard as a gymnast to make her monstruosly demanding mother happy, but one day feels bad for a bird that enter their house, made a mess, and was almost killed by her mother, as she later founds the bird isn’t dead yet, forcing her to tearfully finish it.

To placate her guilt she decides to take care of the egg the dying bird crawled back to, only to be surprised at the creature that eventually emerges and she seems to share a psychic bond with…

Aside from the creature being a stunning delight of horror with excellent effects, there’s plenty of outright disgusting moments, and a character that actually one ups the creature in the “monster” factor, the girl’s mother, what a gloriously despicable, narcissistic, commanding, guilt tripping abomination of a human being that you really want to see killed.

And the movie isn’t afraid to go to some heavy scenarios that reinforce the family (mostly the mother) as more than “typically disfunctional”, feeding into the manifest but effective and heavy themes explored, the fairly reinforced symbolic parallels, but the narrative actually develops in an interesting way, the characters are quite good and there’s plenty of that nordic horror stylical furnishings and love for pulling no punches.

Great feature-lenght debut for director Hanna Bergholm.