The Cellar (1989).
“He’s watering a damn tractor.”
Directed by Kevin Tenney
Written by some guy who never wrote again but produced four porn movies
Starring Patrick Kilpatrick, Chris Miller, Suzanne Savoy, a baby, and an indian who waters tractors
The Stage.
This creature doesn’t even have a back half.
The Cashen family buys a house in the middle of nowhere not knowing that an Indian put a curse on the place a long time ago that makes snot bubble up out of the ground and created a mutated warthog that chills in the cellar. Willy, their young son who looks like he was yanked directly from the back page of a 1988 Mervyns catalog, tries to make everyone understand that there’s a monster in the house…but by the time they believe him, will it be too late?
The Review.
Me, trying not to turn this off 30 minutes in.
Can you imagine how boring being stuck in the middle of the Texas desert with nothing to do but watch the sand blow around would be? My guess is that it would be just as entertaining as watching The Cellar. I’ve been underwhelmed with many of Vinegar Syndrome’s recent releases but this one was absolutely painful to get through.
None of the characters are interesting. Patrick Kilpatrick plays Mance, the patriarch of the family who’s dealing with the fact that he never sees his kid because he works somewhere drilling for oil or something. He looks like the stunt double for WCW’s Psycho Sid, but at least Sid had some skills on the stick. Mance is just plain dull. His wife is essentially useless and is more used as a baby-holding mechanism once in a while. Willy is your typical annoying “gee-whiz” kid that you’ll hate right off the bat because he likes the Houston Astros, and the other side characters that pop in and out are generally forgettable save for Tommy Boatwright, a teen who probably wasn’t written as someone that’s mentally challenged, but certainly acts like it. Luckily Tommy’s not on screen much, but when he is, you’ll have to fight the urge to turn your TV off. Speaking of, wait until Mance goes to a general store to buy a literal zip-loc bag of like 18 bullets, and you meet the store clerk, who delivers this gem:
“I’ll bet I know what those are for, I bet I do! You’re gonna go huntin’, right? You’re gonna go huntin’!”
And yes, that girl is running a cash register.
I was really hoping for a double knockout in this scene.
Now, I’ll be honest, I was glossing over with boredom about thirty minutes into this pile of shit, so I don’t know if the rules of this Indian curse just soared right over my head, but I’m going to give it a shot anyway. Long ago, an Indian put a curse on the land or the house or something, and if you take a spear out of the ground, bubbly goo starts to come out. It also comes out of the floorboards in the house once in a while, which is weird because there’s a cellar underneath the floorboards, but who cares. There’s also a warthog thing in the basement that isn’t really effective anyway but it comes out once in a while. The creature design is fine, but we only see the front half of it because it’s clearly a person crawling around in a suit. It can also hang out underwater I guess. If you’re gearing up with an email response to explain it all to me, don’t, because I don’t care.
The End.
omg it’s finally over
This movie was hot garbage. I saw a lot of excitement online about this one and I just do not understand it. It’s boring, has very little gore, uninteresting characters, an unremarkable setting, and it just isn’t fun.
The disc looks good and it has a commentary, but the most interesting feature on the disc is making-of documentary called, “From Chicken Shit to Chicken Salad”. I guess I’m still looking for the salad, because all I see…is shit.
