Shitty Flicks is an ongoing column that celebrates the most hilariously incompetent, amusingly pedestrian, and mind-bogglingly stupid movies ever made by people with a bit of money, some prior porn-directing experience, and no clue whatsoever. It is here you will find unrestrained joy in movies meant to terrify and thrill, but instead poke at your funny bone with their weird, mutant camp-girl penis.
WARNING: I tend to give away major plot points and twist endings in my reviews because, whatever. Shut up.
Horror movies in the late 70’s and early 80’s were really bossy. You weren’t really allowed to go anywhere or do anything.
Don’t Go in the Woods. Don’t Go in the Basement. Don’t Go to Sleep. Don’t Go Near the Park. Don’t Go in the Bedroom. Don't Answer the Phone. Don't Play with your Peeno at Grandmother's.
Preeetty sure you were allowed to go in the house, though.
Don’t Go in the House.
Ah, farts.
Don’t Go in the House is about a man named Donny who is obsessed with fire. So much that he works in a factory whose job is to burn things. One day on the job, Donny tosses a can of something—maybe spray paint— into one of the furnaces just to see it explode. It doesn’t, however, so Donny walks away, disappointed.
And then BOOMO.
The can explodes right in the face of a hapless worker who walked over to do whatever it is these people do to the furnace. Donny watches as the man, covered in flames, twirls around helplessly. People quickly come to his aid as Donny continues to be useless.
“A man goes up in flames and you just stand there like a faggot!” yells his boss later in the locker room.
“I am not a faggot,” Donny says, defending himself, as if one has anything to do with the other. “It covered him up. He wasn’t evil, but it covered it up.”
That’s crazy if you ask me.
“You’re crazy,” agrees the boss. “I always said you were crazy.”
 |
| "I think YOU and ME oughta go OUT some time because we would MAKE a good COUPLE." |
Donny, who isn't crazy, thinks fire has thought patterns and seeks out evil to purify it.
But he isn't crazy.
He drives home to his sick mother, as several disembodied thoughts whisper in his mind.
But he isn’t crazy.
Donny prepares chamomile tea for his mother who sleeps softly in the chair. After a few gentle jostles, mother does not stir. Donny fruitlessly tries to wake his sleeping mother, but it’s too late for her. She’s a fucking dead corpse. He paces the room and tries to convince himself that she is merely sleeping and that she will wake up soon.
“I MADE YOU TEA I MADE YOU TEA,” insists Donny at her dead body.
The voices then begin talking to Donny, trying to calm him. They whisper sweet nothings in his ear and promise that things will be okay, that they will take care of him.
“Can I play my music loud?” asks Donny. He then immediately puts on some disco (loud) and begins jumping on chairs and smoking inside the house.
What a life for Donny this is! Adios, dead mother!
A la better movies about sons who had formerly-abusive and now-dead mothers, Donny begins to hear her voice yelling at him. Donny inspects his dead mother and sees that she’s still dead, but the voices tell him that she must be burned to be purified. Donny doesn’t ask too many questions as he gathers up a box of matches. He then has a flashback of the time his mother the asshole flipped out because her husband left them and she blamed Donny for it, telling him he was evil, and she pulled Donny’s little arms over a stove flame.
Think that’s what made Donny crazy about fire?
Me neither.
We're pretty dumb, though.
The next morning, Donny calls out of work and begins to build something in his house. It’s too soon to tell what it is, but knowing Donny, it’s probably a roller rink.
You know. For disco.
Then he runs off to a store to buy a flame-retardant suit complete with overly-dramatic and creepy face mask.
Later, he charms his way into a closed flower store, telling the girl he would like a small arrangement for his sick mother. He pays for the flowers and then hesitantly leaves, looking disappointed at himself in his truck parked outside the store. Whether it was because he didn’t have the balls to ask her out or kill her remains unseen, although, he does manage to coerce her into accepting a ride from him after she misses the bus.
“Why don’t you come inside and say hello to Mother?” Donny asks along the way.
The girl agrees for some reason and off they go.
Back at the house, Donny leaves, telling the flower store woman that he will be right back. Donny disappears momentarily in the kitchen, but then comes back.
“Mother must be upstairs! I’ll be right back!”
Donny runs up the steps excitedly.
“Mother!” he calls, as flower store woman looks nervous, regretting having agreed to come into the house of a man she doesn’t know and who clearly has issues. He then comes out a few moments later looking worried.
“Mother’s even sicker than I thought! I’ve gotta call the doctor!”
Donny, what the fuck is your plan?
After Donny makes a fake phone call to the doctor, flower store woman insists on calling a cab. She begins to make said call before Donny helps her to be asleep with the aid of a blunt instrument.
She groggily awakes, nice and naked and strung up in a strange, metal, windowless room.
Donny, meanwhile, sits in his own room, staring at the box he schlepped home from his night errands. I wonder what it is.
Oh, that’s right—the flame-retardant suit complete with overly-dramatic face mask.
He walks into his new dungeon of sorts, pours a can of gasoline over the naked body of the flower store woman, and then proceeds to blast her with a fucking flame thrower. She screams in bloody agony as she burns to death, which is almost as painful as having to sit through this movie.
 |
| Lars von Trier's remake of Schindler's List was banned almost immediately, but some critics secretly hailed it as "fucking bad ass." |
Donny watches inside his big astronaut suit, pleased with how his burn room is faring.
The next day, Donny pulls up alongside a woman on the side of the road experiencing car trouble.
“Would you like a lift to the next gas station?” he asks innocently enough.
aka
"Would you like to feel my flames on your cheeks?"
The woman gratefully gets in the truck with him.
“Mind if we drop some stuff off at my house? It’s on the way!”
“Sure!” the woman happily obliges.
Later, as her smoking body hangs from chains and hand-shackles, Donny continues to look more and more pleased with himself.
At a nearby convenience store, Donny spies an attractive woman paying for some items. He blocks her attempt to exit by offering such manly services as, “some help” carrying her groceries, as well as “a ride home.”
The woman clearly isn’t interested and brushes past him, as Donny becomes more insistent.
The clerk intervenes, telling Donny that he’s only bothering her.
“You’re right,” Donny exclaims. “I better go apologize!”
Later, Donny carries that woman's body into his mother’s room and he introduces the two of them. Then, despite how things have been going, Donny begins going even crazier, having spotted his mother’s ghost’s reflection in the mirror behind him, which is genuinely creepy thanks to an intrusive music sting.
He then hears all of his burned women, whose skeletons he keeps in rocking chairs in a room in his house, giggling and laughing at him.
“You bitches!” he screams at them, slapping their charred faces. “You think you can laugh at me? Well…no more laughing!”
He then goes downstairs and puts on his music. Loud.
Despite this loudness, he falls asleep and dreams of women grabbing at him from crevices in a blue desert. He shakes himself awake and sees his flaming, green-faced mother at the top of the stairs, bellowing, “I’ll get you, Donald! I’ll get you!”
Boy, asleep or awake, Donny’s life is the pits.
Donny goes to church to steal holy water to ward off his insane mother, I guess, and has a philosophical argument with the priest about evil. Donny makes his confession and then comes home to forgive his mother. He anoints her face with holy water, making the sign of the cross.
There. All better.
 |
| Donny almost doubled-back after leaving the house, having forgotten to turn on the humidifier for his mother, but then he remembered she was a burnt corpse, and he smiled, relieved. |
Donny calls his boyfriend from work and the two make plans to take some girlies to—you guessed it—a disco!
I love the '70s!
Donny goes to buy a shirt, which takes years. Every second he spends on screen not burning naked women makes this movie that many seconds too long.
He goes to the disco to meet his pallies for the evening, and if you can make it through this scene without checking your watch or e-mail, then you’re a stronger person than I am. To say that nothing even remotely interesting happens in this whole scene would be an insult to nothing.
Donny proceeds to sit and watch everyone dance as he looks boring and nervous. When his date for the evening sachets over and tries to yank him to the dance floor, Donny picks up the candle off the table and smashes it into girl’s face, which is a perfectly acceptable way of declining to dance.
He makes his escape and drives home, as the voices in his head whisper that everything is okay, and that he did good.
Then he picks up two giggling girls along the side of the road.
Jesus, Donny. How do you do it? Is the secret to your success setting women on fire?
Because I’m willing to try that…
Donny takes the girls home and they wander around admiring his big house. Then he shoves them into his secret burn room, and introduces them to his fire. However, he grows distracted in his room of bodies and doesn’t finish the job of burning them alive, which disappoints me greatly, because why else am I watching this movie?
Donny’s boyfriend, concerned about his friend’s growing insanity, goes to get the priest, and together they go to Donny’s house. They rescue the sadly unhurt girls, and the priest wanders upstairs to find Donny.
And find Donny he does. Along with Donny’s flamethrower.
Say, what do you get when you set a priest on fire?
The end of this movie, thankfully?
Almost.
 |
| Disco Inferno, anyone? ZING! |
Donny's collection of burned women get up off their chairs, and in another genuinely creepy scene, slowly creep toward him, their skeleton arms outstretched. If only this movie didn’t have that whole thing called the “beginning” and “middle” to drag it down...
Donny flips shit and burns them—and himself—to death.
The movie ends with a lame attempt at setting up a sequel as a completely unrelated boy gets smacked around by his mother, hears creepy voices in his head, and stares dumbly at the camera.
Cut to Black.
AND DISCO!
