28 June 2009

The Abomination

Cover image from Amazon. Since I never saw the cover I assume this is what you'd find on the market if you could get this video at a reasonable price.

United States - 1986
Director – Bret McCormick (as Max Raven)
Donna Michelle, 1988, VHS
Run time – 1 hour, 40 min.

There are sadly a great number of philistines out there who like to cast aspersion on this film, fortunately you and I are smarter and more attractive than all of those throwbacks, and we know better. Our friends at Metal Thai (Thailand’s first and greatest webzine for Metalheads!”) captured this movie in one sentence; “When the carnivorous creature grew inside the Cody's body, he became to the brutal guy who killed the people to feed the monster!” I doubt I can improve much on that description, but I’ll try and flesh out the details a bit here…
Opening with a ten-minute montage recap of every good splatter scene in the whole movie The Abomination wears its eviscerated heart on its sleeve. (Plus that means you get to watch them twice!)

Cody is an average 20-something Texan boy, working as a car mechanic and living at home with his chain smoking evangelical mother. TV evangelist Brother Fogg has convinced her that the tumor in her lung is an infestation of evil. One night she hacks and spits up a big pulsing bloody lump that she tosses in the trash, but it slithers into Cody’s room and into his mouth while he’s sleeping. Soon Cody is also hacking up bloody throbbing nuggets, all of which compel him telepathically to provide meat food in large and expanding quantities.

Bye, bye Mommy, say hi to Jesus for me.

Grown huge feasting on the devil’s work, The Abomination quickly infests Cody’s house filling any enclosure suited for the awesome practical puppet effects used to create the flesh hungry gore-beast. Wet leathery tentacles bursting from every drawer it feeds on anything that comes too close, dragging it into a gullet big enough for an entire human body to be sucked up and go slipping down its toothy throat screaming and thrashing the whole way. The cozy split-level soon becomes a charnel house where Cody grins sardonically as his mother and girlfriend are each dismembered and eaten. He pitchforks buckets of viscera into the snapping meat holes that strain the joints of every blood caked cabinet. This is truly become the demon seed of evangelism, the flesh eating offspring of idiot faith.

The Abomination is a gut-churning experience in homemade extreme gorror at its finest. Even though it suffers from the usual super-indie problem of generally lousy production, every minute of The Abomination is worth watching simply for the unsettling audacity of meat eating god monsters. Think Bad Taste meets a gospel Deadly Spawn in Texas and you have some idea of what this baby is like.

Sadly, The Abomination is an impossible to find VHS only gem. Thankfully I live quite close to Scarecrow Video, and although I refuse to enter the place because I don’t think I could control myself, my friend Daniel is kind enough to bring these things over to my screening room now and again…


I found the Metal Thai website thanks to an image search that turned up the gorgeous UK VHS cover above, and a bunch of other great images from The Abomination.

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