The Strangeness (1985)

directed by Melanie Anne Phillips
USA
93 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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I watched this because it was directed by a trans woman and the amount of relatively mainstream horror movies directed by trans women is way too small. I probably would have watched it otherwise, though, to be honest- I love that title, The Strangeness! It lets you know that you're not just in for a regular movie, you're in for Strangeness.

Unfortunately this is a regular movie. It's a bog-standard mid-80s monster flick about a group of people who go down into a mine and encounter something that should have stayed down there, peppered with your usual allusions to Native American legends and off-color jokes about a white-people-hating monster that the native population supposedly made up as an excuse to kill whites with impunity. The cultural insensitivity is awkward and inexcusable, but fortunately it is not a large part of the film. Maybe one day we'll get a horror movie with a majority Native American cast wherein they come across abandoned ruins rumored to be the site of some mysterious urban legend involving white people.

Still, I think I might be biased in favor of this because I'm just so fond of horror movies involving archaeology. True, very little technical archaeology is done in this- mostly the characters just mention being archaeologists offhand- and it seems to have been made by someone with only very generic, surface-level knowledge of mining, spelunking, caving, et cetera. But I guess I myself want to go down into a cave so bad that even a crappy 80s movie where a lot of the sets look suspiciously like crinkled-up cardboard (a $25,000 budget effectively explains any and all roughness) is enough to stimulate my imagination.

If you stick through all the boring stuff that generally always arises in films with a group of people in a confined space, you'll be rewarded with a wonderfully low-tech claymation/stop-motion tentacle monster who I unironically love. I don't think movies in the 80s went for realism all the time, and I'm so fond of that. This monster looks nothing like a flesh and blood creature, but it looks like the kind of thing I want to see in a monster movie anyway; I'll take earnest DIY over somebody trying and failing to squeeze a decent creature out of a lacking CGI budget any day. This whole movie could have been condensed into a Twilight Zone episode, but then we wouldn't get the experience of waiting so long to see the monster reveal. Which could be a bad thing depending on your patience.