This one is a little bittersweet given Tobe Hooper's death, but I was going to get to it eventually.
In this Adaptation of an Ambrose Bierce Story by the son of Richard Matheson, evil simmers...
A man goes crazy for seemingly-no reason and kills his wife. He tries to kill his Son too, but...
An unseen creature kills him- in a violent way that I won't show- and we jump ahead to the Son being an Adult Man known for being in The Boondock Saints.
On his Birthday (when he's near the same age as his Dad was earlier), weird stuff starts to happen again. People get madder and start dying.
Oh and this guy kills himself with a hammer. That...is hard to watch.
Things get worse as the violence escalates and our Hero seems to have a full-on break.
Can he regain his insanity or will the Damned Thing rise to power and destroy us all? To find out, watch the Film/Show/whatever.
An interesting, but mixed bag of ideas. The idea of a mysterious thing making people crazy is nothing new. To be fair, the Story that this is based on is from 1893! It still hurts the Film/Episode a bit, since we have no choice but to view it through our modern filters. Fairly standard nature of the set-up aside, the Story is still pretty darn good. As Matheson notes in the Making Of (which doesn't feature Hooper for some reason), he took the basis of the Story (the Premise) and invented pretty much everything else. Everything has a nice, authentic feel to it, making the Horror all the more palpable. Speaking of the Horror, there is lots of gore in this one. It tends to go right to 'shotgun blast' as an effect, which is a little disappointing. To be fair, they shot the whole thing in 10 days and on a tight Budget. Hooper's direction, naturally, is quite good and every Actor delivers in their own way. Flannery makes an interesting Hero and Ted Raimi shines as a strange Priest (below). It all builds nicely to a climax. I'm still not sold on this whole thing and it's a shame that Hooper didn't get too many more opportunities to Direct after this. Sigh disappointedly with me, Ted.
An interesting Story that unfortunately only has one go-to move. The Atmosphere and Direction save it though.
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