CELLAR DWELLER
**1/2
When a dose of disposable income comes my way I consistently find myself grappling with the same dilemma. Should I piggy bank those few extra cents? Should I don my pragmatist’s hat and work on those pesky student loans? Do I feed my caffeine and alcohol addictions? Should I branch out to the good lunch meat this month? Ah hell, it’s only a few bucks, why don’t I just rush out to the local thrift store and blow it all on a staggering stack of weird looking old VHS tapes before my brain can torment me further with moral questions?!
After binges like this I typically find myself with more ostensibly shitty horror pictures than I have shelf space to accommodate. Like waking up after a night of hard partying at your buddy Gerald’s Cinco De Mayo shindig next to a web-footed chain smoker named Darla, the hindsight of your actions can be very opprobrious to the ego. Born of Fire? The Great Alligator? What was I thinking?! But for every Head of the Family or Lover’s Lane there exists the joint probability [denoted as P ( A U B)*] of at least one Cellar Dweller.
Now before we go further in this anecdotal film “review” I should spill the beans that Cellar Dweller is not a great movie. It’s not even a particularly good movie. And, in fact, if you are not already a fan of this kind of this thing (and by this kind of thing, I mean 80’s monster gorefests with over-the-top acting, reckless nudity, and funky-synth heavy soundtracks) then it is extremely likely that you will find this a mind-numbingly bad movie! But if..
If…
If the stars are in perfect alignment, and you’ve done your time digging through the dredges as I have - if you’ve endured the bulk of the Troma canon, most Friday the 13th flicks, or any movie by Larry Bishop - then you’ll recognize this for what it is: slightly above average horror sleaze cheese worth the shelf space and the home viewing midnight minutes!
The plot, for what it’s worth, concerns an EC Comic’s-style cartoonist with a book of the dead (hmmm) that serves to unleash his creative juices as well as a flesh eating animatronic demon. (Should have just stuck with The Artist’s Way). But get this! - nebbish cartoonist turned demon conjurer is played by none other than Jeffery Combs of Re-Animator fame! After a few sufficiently gooey moments, and some good camera mugging by this unannounced cult icon, we cue the opening credits, and everything happens all over again! Another artist, this time played by Debrah Farentino, follows in Comb’s footsteps and unleashes the beast again in an art school. There is some pretty good commentary on pop and high art courtesy of the script by Don Mancini (the writer of all the Child’s Play movies and director of Seed of Chucky, here using the pseudonym Kitty DuBoise) and most importantly things remain fun throughout.
So dig Pop’s old VCR out from that attic spot next to Grandpa’s boar head, invite your most sarcastic friends over, lubricate the eggnog heavily with rum, let the midnight hour roll in, and kick back and enjoy Cellar Dweller for what it’s worth. It ain’t no C.H.U.D., but then, what is these days?
* What, no mathematicians?!
- Jasper Oliver
January 16, 2010
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