Things (RiffTrax)

Film Year:  1989

Genre:  Horror

Director:  Andrew Jordan

Starring:  Pornographic actress Amber Lynn

RiffTrax Year:  2022

Riffers:  Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy, Bill Corbet

The Movie

Things is a microbudget thriller that was made by a pair of Canadians who filmed a movie at their house the best they could with home recording equipment.  The film is a movie about a group of dudes hanging out in a house before getting attacked by tiny critters who eat them alive.  What are they?  The movie seems to have an idea but doesn't quite make it clear.

Things is a film that started with a Super 8 camera and somehow wound up in video stores across the planet, whether people wanted to watch it or not.  A lot about Things is inexplicable, including why it's as widely circulated as it is.  Arguably that's the craziest thing about Things, how known it became on the VHS market when practically any other time period would have caused a movie like this to just get washed away and quickly forgotten.

This flick looks and feels like it was made by a group of guys who were trying to do their own take on Sam Raimi's Evil Dead, getting together and making a horror movie with what equipment they have access to.  Due to lack of skill, time, budget, and virtually anything they needed, Things instead became closer to "Manos" The Hands of Fate, something that resembles a pasted together home movie with ugly, prolonged sequences beefing it up while also boasting terrible dubbed audio to make the whole ordeal even worse.  The key difference between Manos and Things is that it is possible to follow a plot in Manos.  With Things it's not so simple.

The whole film somehow transcends narrative and becomes a bizarrely surreal experience, like someone having a bad trip and just freaking out for no discernable reason.  It's a movie that feels like it has a storyline but isn't very good at relating it to the audience watching it.  Somehow that becomes a part of its charisma, because the movie bumbles around in a direction that seemingly makes sense to it even if you don't understand why.  If you really dig deep into Things you can identify a traditional horror formula structure in its bones, it just has no interest in letting it flow.

What makes it even worse are sequences that are clearly added in after the film was completed, likely to beef up the film or just add some semblance of sex appeal.  The dream sequence prologue to the picture serves absolutely no purpose, but it exists because the filmmakers thought their horror movie needed nudity so they hired a prostitute of the street and shot a scene with her.  Hiring a hooker seems a bit unnecessary, seeing how the film features an actual porn star in Amber Lynn who was also added to the movie in post.  Apparently they hired her to have her supply nudity in the film at first but the salary they were offering wasn't enough to get her to take her top off, so they gave her a pointless role as a reporter where she just stands in place cluelessly and reads off of cue cards to her right.  The only reason she's still in the movie at all is because they wanted to advertise the fact that she was in the movie even if she didn't do anything other than stand on a cue and look dead-eyed.  However there is only one reason why you would ever rent a movie starring Amber Lynn and she doesn't even do it in this movie.

Makes you wish you wandered to the XXX section and rented something from there instead.

Things is a movie where it clearly took an effort to make it but nobody knew what they were doing.  It's something that shouldn't even be a footnote in cinema but somehow people still know what it is and talk about it today.  That's some sort of an achievement I don't think the makers of Things had in mind when they made it but you have to take what victories you can get.

The Trax

"Oh no, not THINGS!" - Mike Nelson, Werewolf

Just when you thought RiffTrax already offered their most incoherent movie of the year in Winterbeast, they're all like "Hold my beer" and pull Things out of their pants.

Someone who recommends movies to RiffTrax has to be a Joe Bob Briggs fan, because there have been a couple of flicks that RiffTrax has featured after they've been on The Last Drive-In.  Contamination for example, was riffed pretty soon after hitting the Drive-In.  Things is a movie that Joe Bob showed on his show last year, and he and co-host Diana Prince hyped it up as one of the worst movies they'd ever have the guts to show (I actually didn't watch this episode because I missed all of last season due to work scheduling).  Almost a full year later, here were are with a riff of Things.

The big issue with riffing Things is that the plot is damn near incomprehensible, which makes latching onto certain aspects of it and cracking wise challenging.  The jokes then tend to tread a lot of water of Mike, Kevin, and Bill being utterly baffled by what is going on in front of them, and who can blame them?  Things is something.  Nobody knows what, but it's something.

"This movie seems like it was conceived, written, and filmed in under two hours during a severe gas leak."

"And the experience of watching it is how I imagine to die slowly during that same severe gas leak."

It's incomprehensibility somehow does become a virtue because somehow the trio constantly finds new ways of being baffled by this stupid movie, which will change its scene on a dime and not care if you're keeping up.  It's a jarring experience and they are horrified by and resentful of what they see, wishing the movie's far too long hour runtime were even shorter.  Mike, Kevin, and Bill are never at a loss for words during Things, but they do have moments where all they can do is just describe what's happening onscreen because that's really all you can do.  Like describing Amber Lynn's reporter character constantly reading her dialogue like the director had a gun on her.

"Oh man!  What did I do?!"

"Unfortunately the camerawork was so bad that we'll never truly know."

When a joke does connect with this movie, it can bring the house down.  I threw my head back and laughed many times during this riff, which makes me firmly believe it was a successful riff all things considered.  Those who wish to follow along with a silly little movie will find the experience wanting as the movie is probably as close to unwatchable as a movie ever got.  Because of this I'm at a loss of how to recommend this one, because it is funny, very funny even, but it's not exactly worth sitting through.  This is one for those who don't care about coherence and thrive off the trash and the laughs and want that whirlwind experience.  For them I say you can't really do better.

I am forced to fall back on my personal experience and say I had a blast.  The one thing that I find myself hesitant on being glowing about this one is that I think the movie causes it to lack rewatchability.  But I probably thought the same thing about Manos when I first saw it, so I'm going to throw that precaution to the wind and say this RiffTrax is great.

Classic