Awfully Good: Rawhead Rex

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

Looking for a bad horror movie for Halloween? May I suggest…

Rawhead Rex (1986)

Director: George Pavlou
Stars: David Dukes, Kelly Piper, Hugh O'Conor

A pagan demon once thought dead re-emerges to terrorize a peaceful Irish village, one golden shower at a time.

If you're a horror fan, you should really thank RAWHEAD REX for existing. Not because it's a good movie (even its creator thinks it thoroughly sucks wastewater), but due to the fact that if Clive Barker had not had such a miserable experience with it, he wouldn't have directed HELLRAISER himself and the cenobites you know and love may never have existed.

It wasn't hard for everyone to guess what Linda's favorite Beatles song was.

Barker was one of the most acclaimed horror authors of the 1980s, second probably only to Stephen King (who ironically himself dubbed Barker "the future of horror"), and like any writer of note, he couldn't resist the temptation of Hollywood. RAWHEAD REX was his second screenplay, adapted from a story in his Books of Blood series, and also his second film with director George Pavlou. And after watching it, it's no surprise that Barker demanded more creative control with his work moving forward. There are elements of his original short story present that could have made for an interesting film—mainly the Irish setting and the pagan-Catholic folklore angle—but nothing else about RAWHEAD REX works. The script, the performances, the production values all squander whatever potential the premise had.

But, let's be honest, the majority of the problems with this movie start and end with the title creature.

The human torch was denied a bank loan.

Rawhead Rex fails to work both conceptually as a supposedly scary oncreen monster and physically as a special effect. In Clive Barker's original story, Rawhead was essentially a 9-foot tall phallus with a face that looked like raw meat (hence the name). In the film they turn him in to generic monster with a bulky bodybuilder frame and a black leather outfit that makes him look less like a terrifying demon and more like a rejected member of the band Gwar. The practical effects used to bring the monster to life are also in no way believable. With eyes that are always slightly crossed and a mechanical mouth that hangs open, poor Rex constantly looks like he's suffering from a serious case of derpface. (To give them some credit, the production was reportedly under unrealistically tight time deadlines to pull this off, which is sadly apparent.)

They could've worked around the creature, but the director never figures out how to shoot Rawhead Rex to make him not laughable. They're always doing close ups of the poorly-executed face or cutting to extended wide shots that only highlight how the poor actor inside the suit clearly can't see or move well in it. And for a giant demon with supernatural powers (that include the ability to hypnotize people and grow his fingernails slightly longer), he's wildly ineffective at actually killing anyone. Because of the suit's practical shortcomings, Rex is always just kind of throwing people around, shaking them or slowly biting them while they stand there and wait for it to happen. At one point, he actually slowly strangles a guy to death, which is probably the least exciting way to watch a monster dispose of someone in a horror movie. On some level, all of this makes the movie enjoyable on a "so bad it's good" scale, but that's not what you want or expect in a Clive Barker movie.

The best special effects makeup $17 can buy.

And it's not just Rex that sucks. Everyone in this movie is dumb beyond legally permissible levels, which is made worse by acting that is uniformly terrible across the board. The main character played by David Dukes is a religious researcher who just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time with his family. Dukes enjoyably overacts most of his scenes, especially the one where he watches the monster attack his son, at which point he stops to scream and fall to his knees instead of, you know, actually trying to help the poor child who is being murdered. The character's wife is even worse, a woman we're supposed to empathize with who's only defining characteristic is that she's so horny she only cares about sleeping with her husband and is constantly ignoring or abandoning her kids.

Having poorly written main characters is one thing, but it takes a special kind of movie to go out of its way to make even the extras look stupid. The villagers in this Irish town are so dumb, they actually deserve to have an ancient demon execute a little population control. The townspeople know there's a monster loose in their area that’s killed dozens of their friends and family, but they still continually show up in droves anytime and anywhere he's spotted. There are even times when the supernatural monster is on a murderous rampage and random people will run up to jump on its back or punch it in the stomach. It's like they want you to root for Rawhead Rex to win.

The fourth wall-breaking sarcasm directed at the audience was a bold move.

There's a lot of stupid and/or weird stuff that happens in this movie, like a trippy ending with an out-of-nowhere feminist message that involves the wife heroically abandoning their infant daughter the same day her son died. But if there's one single part that everyone no doubt remembers from this movie, it has to be the "baptism" scene. Rawhead Rex has infected the mind of a local priest, converting him to become one of his followers. Midway through the movie another priest is walking outside when he sees the hypnotized minister fall to his knees in front of the demon and begin pledging himself to the evil deity. As he does so, Rawhead Rex whips out his unholy phallus and begins to urinate all over the smiling Father. The other priest's horrified reaction to this is probably worth the price of admission alone.

It's one of those scenes where you have to rewind to question whether or not you actually saw what you think you saw. But yes, you did see a man of the cloth receive a golden shower from a giant Gwar demon, captured forever on celluloid for all to enjoy. Thanks RAWHEAD REX!