Humongous (1982)

The Slasher marathon continues with a movie that I’ve watched a couple of times in the past before checking it out again for this marathon. I remember not being impressed with it in the past, but I’ve found that some movies grow on me after time. Is this one of them?

The action starts off in the past, later we find out it is thirty-six years before the events of Humongous. We are introduced to a pretty girl named Ida who is standing outside of a large house where a party/dance is being held. It seems like she is more interested in staying with her dogs than people. A drunken man comes out and starts bothering her, so she runs away. The man is either her boyfriend or wants to be. He chases her, things get violent, and he rapes her. She calls out for help and the dogs come to her aid, injuring him badly allowing her to finish him off. Not bad for the first five minutes.

The action then moves to the present day, which for the movie is the early eighties. There we find out cast of victims being assembled around a pair of brothers, their girlfriends, and the brother’s sister. They hop on a boat to go somewhere and head out onto a huge lake. After some fighting, the brother named Nick is a jerk, they find a man stranded in a broken-down boat. They pick him up and he warns them that it is too dangerous to try and proceed in the dark. So, they anchor the boat to wait for morning. Stuff happens, and Nick wrecks the boat in anger. This means they get stranded on the island where a crazy old lady lives.

Yeah that woman would be Ida from earlier. The rest of the movie is them being picked off one at a time by a killer hiding in the woods. Early on the movie lets you know that Ida had a child from her rape and that child was “defective” so she isolated him on the island to protect him from the world. Now he sees strangers as the enemy and kills them.

Best picture I could find of the killer.

This is an interesting setup and had a lot of potential. But it is executed poorly, which is going to be a common theme in this review. The pacing is terrible with an explosion of violence that grabs your attention followed by almost forty minutes of bickering and bad acting. It really is painful to sit thru. When the killer finally does show up we get some decent stalking scenes that I enjoyed but not much else. There could have been some good scares, but the scenes are poorly staged, and the scares ruined. Seriously we get a bit where the killer rises from the water behind a character. Were they going for a jump scare? Then don’t show the audience he is there until he grabs her. Or maybe they wanted to have that moment where we are yelling at the character to look behind her? Then don’t have her immediately see the killer. See what I mean by poorly executed?

While there are a respectable six kills in the movie with most of them happening off screen. At least until the end where we get a spine and skull crushed by the oversized killer. So, for the majority of the movie we see no gore and when we do finally see something it is mostly sound effects and a small drop of blood trickling out of the mouth. Humongous is a slasher movie without gore and no iconic kill! That’s not good.

This is a bad movie. The story is slow, and we don’t get any of the payoffs (scares, kills, etc.) that one expects from a slasher movie. This one had a lot of potential and should have been a much better movie. I can’t recommend it.

© Copyright 2018 John Shatzer