THERE’S NOTHING OUT THERE (1991)
Tagline: A horror film of comic proportions.
(Horror, Comedy, Love Letter to 80’s Horror) [R]
He is a horror film, a walking talking horror film…
In this one 3 college couples are headed to a house in the woods for a vacation during the school year. Mike is the one in the group that is a massive horror buff and spends his entire time on the trip warning the group about everything they are doing wrong based on horror movie tropes. As the vacation moves along the group realizes they are actually being picked off one by one by a frog-like alien that seems to be there to try and reproduce with the females in the group. Having said that, there is nothing to worry about because…THERE’S NOTHING OUT THERE.
I have no idea if 1996’s SCREAM was partly inspired by this movie, but the idea behind having someone in the film that explains all of the horror flick tropes definitely wasn’t new when that movie came out. I consider SCREAM, “smart horror”, but this movie isn’t really “smart”, we are trying to figure out who the killer is. It’s obvious from the beginning of the movie, but it does have a competent script in spite of the overall simplicity of the plot.
One of my favorite things about this flick is the intro. They utilize some graphics and dialog from the movie to kind of point out what we are getting. I thought it was pretty clever. There are horror flicks where they have a group of college kids or teenagers going into the woods where they are not all couples, but the fact that they took a dude to the woods that is a horror buff and a 7th wheel kind of doesn’t make any sense to me. Then again – this movie was not put upon this earth for me to get it.
As usual, there are some characters I could have done without and some characters that I really wanted to survive, so in that regard, this movie is effective at giving us a mix of personalities. This brings me to the acting which for the most part I liked, but Mike’s character is so annoying it was almost hard to watch any part of this film where he’s talking. Mike is played by Craig Peck (YOU ONLY LIVE UNTIL YOU DIE) who would continue acting up till 2003. Wendy Bednarz plays the ditzy girl Doreen. She is one of those characters you can give or take in a flick like this. Wendy was only in 2 movies but must be quite a bit smarter than her character because he’s gotten into directing movies since this came out. Mark Collver (BARB WIRE) is still getting roles here and there, but he’s just playing a standard sexist jock jerk named Jim in this thing. John Carhart III plays Nick and this and is also kind of annoying but likable. John is still acting and has a few projects coming out. I think the best actress in this film is Bonnie Bowers as Stacy. This ended up being her only movie because she went on to pursue a music career. Her character Stacy reminds me a lot of the confident and witty Debbie from FRIDAY THE 13TH PART III. The rest of the cast did not like her because apparently, she made things difficult for everyone and really didn’t want to do the rest of the film after saying she would do a nude scene, not wanting to do it, then doing it and apparently making a bunch of demands about the scene after that. This also might explain why this was her only role as an actress.
One thing this movie does really well is feel like it’s an 80’s horror flick and that makes sense because that is what they were doing for and it was actually filmed in the summer of 1989. Then didn’t get released till 1991. The director was only 20 years old when he directed this and I can only guess that he was a bit of a pervert because, in spite of having quite a bit of nudity in this movie, everyone involved in production seemed to be upset that there wasn’t enough? Frankly, the movie didn’t even need it.
What might have helped this one out is a better creature design. This thing is like a cross between a frog and one of the boogens from THE BOOGENS. What we do get is a fun soundtrack and an awesome score. Quite frankly this flick covers all the bases and I enjoyed it quite a bit, even if the cast really didn’t.
THERE’S NOTHING OUT THERE gets a 5 out of 7. I have seen it twice now and think it encapsulates some of the greatness found in ’80s horror cheese.
GRAPHICS ARE THE PROPERTY OF VALKHN FILM & VIDEO AND ARE USED FOR REVIEW PURPOSES ONLY.
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