Watch Things For Free

Self-important, over-dramatic, uninspired.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

Shot on Super 8 and 16mm film in 1989 for around $35,000, Things was the first Canadian shot-on-Super 8 gore movie that was commercially released on VHS. I can only imagine what people thought if they ever picked this up in a video store. We used to challenge our friends to finish Bloodsucking Freaks when we were kids, because that was the goriest blast of strangeness we could get in our hometown. I fear what I would have grown up to become if I had seen Things when I was in my teens.Wikipedia is ill-prepared to give a synopsis of this film, saying "A husband with a fanatical desire but inability to father children is driven to force his wife to undergo a dangerous experiment. This results in hatching a non-human life form in his wife's womb, and the birth of a multitude of things."It's kind of about that. There is also a lot of people drunkenly walking around an apartment talking about Aleister Crowley and Salvador Dali, too. There's a lot of beer drinking and arguing. And then there's former adult film star Amber Lynn in one of her first mainstream roles, playing a news reporter who has nothing to do with the rest of the film, with stories about George Romero fighting copyright law.There's also a sandwich eating scene that is given just as much importance as the rest of the plot.This is the kind of movie that I wake up at 5 AM to watch by myself so that I don't have to deal with Becca coming in and saying, "What the F is this S?" What the F is this S, indeed!Canuxploitation.com said of the film, "Shot for pocket change in the bleak suburban wilds of Scarborough, Ontario, Things is nothing less than a violent filmic assault on its audience, putting viewers through a punishing gauntlet of technical ineptitude so heinous that it defies every basic assumption about what constitutes a horror film." They also referred to it as "an entirely dehumanizing film event."I don't know if that's praise or scorn, a fact that seems to sum up most people who have seen this film. We know it's bad, we hate that we watched it and yet we feel that we must share it with others so that they can experience whatever we just watched for ourselves.In no way is this a good movie or one I feel that anyone who isn't prepared to deal with psychological torture to watch. There are Casio keyboard tones distorted, chopped and screwed while people worry about going to the bathroom or discuss how they wished their brother had been born a midget. It's like if David Cronenberg got high on some old weed that you found in your sock drawer and sat down to scream a story at you through a child's megaphone toy, pausing every once in awhile to flip on different channels on the TV.

Things is truly a masterpiece of cinema, and as such it must be shown to everybody young and old so they can bask in the sheer brilliance of this piece of cinematic art. Okay, so that's not exactly true, in fact there is so much wrong with this movie in the first 20 minutes that I could write about it for hours.The plot goes something like this: A man named Doug (Doug Bunston) is tending to his sick wife Susan (Patricia Sadler) when his friend Fred (Bruce Roach) and brother Don (Barry J. Gillis) come over for some drinks and sandwiches. We then cut to some kind of hospital where a doctor is cutting various body parts off of some deformed guy... don't know what this has to do with the rest of the movie. As it turns out Doug let a doctor perform experiments on Susan so they can have a baby because Doug is unable to. This causes gigantic ants to crawl out of her stomach (makes sense, right?) and run amok in the house. It's up to Doug, Fred and Don to kill them all.This movie seems to be one of those SOV movies made by a group of friends messing around with a camcorder (which I totally respect), and it shows here because the acting is terrible, so is the dialog. Some of my favorite lines of the entire movie:"The next time you come with me on a trip, you're staying home" (Well, you can't do both!)Don: "You didn't tell me you were a kindergarten artist" Doug: "You didn't tell me you were an *SSHOLE I had to find that out for myself" Priceless.There are several more but frankly I can't remember them all.The sound is pretty bad as well, there's one part where one character's voice goes really quiet for a few seconds, you can't hear what he's saying, but you know he's saying something. A lot of the characters seem to be dubbed over, quite hilariously I might add, one character is screaming while he is being eaten by "things" and he sounds like the Pillsbury Dough Boy, it's really funny. The sound FX are also laughable, in this movie, the cutting off of a head and the cleaning of a blade with a paper towel sounds like sloppy making-out.The scene where the guy belches and farts cracked me up because, 1. I'm really immature, and 2. it pretty much came out of nowhere.Also, what's with all the random news reports? The movie cuts out several times to show a news reporter (Amber Lynn) talking about a random news report that has nothing to do with the rest of the movie. Also, with how bad the editing is, she is cut off in the middle of a sentence once, and often quick flashes of random images pop up before the report comes up.And what I think is the most obvious problem of all, WHY DID THEY STAY IN THE HOUSE??? Don says it's because their car's out of gas and they wouldn't make it through the woods and they could get eaten by bears or snakes. But later in the movie the doctor who experimented on Susan shows up, meaning he either walked or drove there, the latter being the more likely option but I'm willing to believe anything in this movie. If he walked, it can't be that dangerous, if he drove... DUDE, HE'S GOT A CAR, LEAVE!!!Last but not least, the ending. Without spoiling too much, I can say this: WHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATTTTTTTTTTTT!!!???There are so many more questions I could ask. Like why does Doug always laugh like he has problems? Why was Don sharpening the blade with his hand? Why was Don telling a long horror story that adds nothing to the movie? How can a skull talk? Bestiality Network? Cockroach snack?One "Things" for certain, this is probably the funniest and most entertaining bad movie I have ever seen, I was surely never bored. Which is why I'm giving it a 10 that it probably doesn't deserve, I don't rate my movies on quality, I rate my movies on entertainment value, it's too confusing the other way. If I gave the movie a 1, it wouldn't be because of how horrible the movie is (actually it would), it would be because I wasn't entertained and didn't laugh, and I was sure entertained by Things.Oh, one more "thing", the scene where they are watching a presumably fake horror movie on TV and they have the nerve to comment on what a cheap and terrible movie THAT movie is, was quite jaw-dropping, a grand example of irony.

Sometimes a film comes along and changes your life forever. Sometimes a film makes you question everything you believe in, everything you thought you knew. Sometimes a film beats you down and leaves you broken, whimpering in a corner, nothing but an empty shell of your former self. Sometimes a film waxes so philosophical that your comprehension falters and all that remains is series of abstract and confusing images, their true meaning just beyond the means of your feeble intellect. Sometimes a film is just so ridiculously awesome that it blows your frigging mind. THINGS is one of those films.In 1989, most of the world remained blissfully unaware of the cinematic monstrosity that Andrew Jordan and Barry J. Gillis had unleashed via the then-thriving direct-to-video market. The fact that this film got made is in itself quite amazing, the fact that it got released borders on the miraculous. Apparently, Jordan and Gillis were somehow able to convince Intervision that THINGS cost a whopping $350,000 to make, when the actual budget was more like $35,000. Honestly, that number still seems quite a stretch, unless beer and cheese are obscenely expensive in Canada.THINGS was filmed on Super 8. It's grainy, out of focus, badly lighted, badly acted, and just plain hard to watch. The original sound for the entire film was ruined, which led to one of the most hilariously bad and out-of-sync re-dubs in film history. There are long awkward silences, unbearable static and distortion, and, to make matters worse, Jordan and Gillis are obviously making most of the film's sound effects by mouth. The final result defies words, elevating what would have just been another bad and forgettable movie into a definitive cult classic.As for the story, or lack thereof, THINGS weaves the twisted tale of Doug Drake (Doug Bunston) and his wife Susan (Patricia Sadler). Unable to conceive a child, the couple turns to the evil Dr. Lucas (Jan W. Pachul), who artificially inseminates Susan. As expected, it all turns out rather badly and Susan gives birth to a bunch of… well, things. Fear not, however, Doug's brother Don (Barry J. Gillis) and his wisecracking sidekick Fred (Bruce Roach) are on the scene, ready to drink beer, eat cheese sandwiches, and battle the ant-like things with chainsaws, flashlights, and good old old-fashioned common sense.Don't get too excited though, THINGS doesn't play out like you would expect. Instead it just kind of drags along as if woefully determined to test the limits of your comprehension and frustration. The action scenes are separated by long boring conversations, extended shots of flashlight beams on ceilings, and awkward TV news segments featuring porn star Amber Lynn, who presumably had neither the time nor the inclination to memorize her lines. Other highlights include Don and Fred finding a tape recorder (Evil Dead 2 anyone?) in Doug's freezer, one of the worst riddles I have ever heard, a ridiculous dream sequence, the horribly awesome soundtrack, and Don's epic sci-fi soliloquy.When all is said and done, you need to see THINGS. Consider it an initiation ritual into the cult of bad movies. Rest assured, your first viewing will be hard to finish, but stick with it. Upon completing it your curiosity will draw you back time and time again. As bad as it is, something about THINGS just works, making subsequent viewings ever more enjoyable. It accidentally achieves a perfect combination of violence, charm, weirdness, and unintended hilarity. Buy it now, stock up on beer and cheese sandwiches, and force all your friends to watch it. You'll be glad you did.Final verdict: 9/10

THINGS is notable mostly as a curio, being the mainstream(?) film launchpad of blue movie queen Amber Lynn. So popular was she in the jizz biz, it seemed inevitable that she'd do a non-sexual role. Well...in this stultifying mess, Amber demonstrates that she is, indeed, able to read(!). Her participation consists entirely of prerecorded video footage which features her as a news anchor, reporting a number of random idiocies on a t.v. in the house where this "movie" takes place. She looks just as if she were on a porn set, and reads blankly from a cue-card at the side of the camera(after suffering through a few moments of this, you'll be praying for Ron Jeremy to enter the scene and shovel his hairy business into her flapping maw just to keep her silent).What we're offered, besides the dramatic marvels of Ms. Lynn, is badly shot footage(sans synchronized sound)of drunk morons in a trashy house spouting bits of witless dialog, and a woman in the bedroom who dies while giving birth to several immobile paper-mache bugs that look like baked hams with spindly legs and fangs. That's about all I can say for certain, as THINGS is so unfathomably disjointed and illogically conceived. Sadly, I have little doubt that some will actually find reason to praise this garbage as some sort of "art brut" masterpiece, rhapsodizing with masturbatory ardor over its disorienting surreal quality and experimental concrete minimalism. God help them.1/10...a legitimate contender for "all time worst" accolades.