31 Nights of Halloween Horror - The Unseen

The Unseen 

89 mins.

Dir. Danny Steinmann

1980/USA

With a good cast, good director, good special effects person, based on a story by good people, how is this movie not better.  It all starts off with good and builds up tension and then it loses its momentum with the reveal and tries to pick up that momentum again at the end but it is a little too late.

Three reporters, one being Barbara Bach (Black Belly of the Tarantula, Short Night of Glass Dolls, The Great Alligator, The Spy Who Loved Me & Ringo Starr's wife) are off to do some reporting on some festival when their hotel reservations get screwed up and they find themselves with no place to stay.  They meet sweet old Ernest played by great character actor Syndney Lassick (Carrie, Alligator) who convinces them to stay at his big old farmhouse with his wife, Virginia,  just outside of town.  However as the girls soon find out, Ernest and his wife have a little secret in their basement.  It is rather obvious what it is, but the real question is who is the biggest monster in the family?

The premise for the Unseen is nothing new, we've seen it before and we probably have seen it better.  But the set up and tension are pretty good in the beginning of the movie and a lot of that is carried by Sydney Lassick and his wife played by Lelia Goldoni (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Devil Inside).  The biggest let down of the movie for me and what kind of killed its momentum was the actual reveal of the creature in the basement.  You know they are hiding some kind of hideous monster, and it is killing the women one by one, we are waiting for the big reveal the whole time and when it finally happens... it is Flounder from Animal House in like a down syndrome make-up acting more child-like then threatening in the least.  Here I am expecting something like Castle Freak, and ultimately it is a man child.  This really let the air out of the movie for me, they tried to pick up the tension again at the end, but by that point, I was so let down by the monster, it didn't even matter.  With Make-up FX by Craig Reardon, and a story by Kim (Texas Chainsaw Massacre) Henkel and Stan Winston, how did we not get some kind of horrific monster like Humongous or something.  Anything.  Even director Danny Steinmann (Savage Streets, Friday the 13th V: The New Beginning) was so not impressed he went under the pseudonym Peter Foleg on the credits.  The moral of this story is don't fuck your sister, because sometimes some things are better left unseen.