The hilariously bizarre Rawhead Rex missed the perfect opportunity to become a successful horror movie franchise in the 1980s. George Pavlou's 1986 adaptation of one of Clive Barker's Books of Blood short horror stories went through a short theatrical run before its release on VHS and DVD. Rawhead Rex found a home in dedicated horror fans and catalogs of movies "so bad they're good" despite its poor image quality. In 2017, it finally got a 4K upgrade based on the original camera negative. Because of this, Rawhead Rex has recently come out of obscurity to remind the audience that it could have been a major title.
David Dukes stars as Howard Hallenbeck, an American historian who travels to a remote Irish town in search of religious items. At the same time, a group of farmers awakens an ancient monster called Rawhead Rex. As expected, Rawhead goes on a rampage that involves killing a hormonal teenager in the woods, but also urinating on Reverend Coot (Niall Toibin) as some sort of twisted baptism and facing off against a whole police squad, for a change. Unsurprisingly, Howard and his wife, Elaine (Kelly Piper), defeat the monster at the last moment before an ominous tease of its return.
Although Clive Barker himself wrote the script for Rawhead Rex, the movie failed to garner the same success as the source material. It also didn't capitalize on any of the elements that made other contemporary horror movies the timeless classics that still inspire fans to this day. Released the same decade that Nightmare on Elm Street and The Evil Dead started their enduring franchises, Rawhead Rex opted to focus on the monster's killing spree rather than on the suspense of its actions or the fear of its victims. The decision to display the monster's face so openly was a bold one, but its execution falls short due to the terrible quality of the mask and the abysmal technical aspects of the movie. While movies like Halloween took advantage of their budgetary restraints to establish their killers as horror icons, Rawhead Rex went all out on the silly action.
Rawhead Rex is unapologetically weird, and that's what has preserved it for so many years. It shouldn't have become an exact copy of other successful horror movie series in order to improve, but it should have learned from what was working at the time. For starters, it could have relied on its weirdness to recreate the chilling tension of Friday the 13th with its own unique spin. Even offbeat scenes like the monster urinating on Coot could have made for memorable moments. After all, classics like The Exorcist featured gross surprises such as Regan's projectile vomit and still made them work. Perhaps, a more subtle take on the monster's behavior coupled with its outlandish origin could have even started a new kind of slasher movie.
Nowadays, the ins and outs of horror movies are well mapped out. It's widely known that slashers feature tropes like an evident lack of police force, so Rawhead's plot isn't exactly the problem, as it could have kept the customs of the genre while subverting others. Still, its performances, the monster's design (which resembles raw meat in the source material, hence the name), and the movie's overall sense of suspense really needed to be more serious in order to do justice to Clive Barker's original short story. Unfortunately, what could have been voluntary eccentricity became shoddy hilarity.
It's no wonder why Clive Barker disapproved of the movie after seeing how his screenplay, which had the potential to rival the likes of Hellraiser or—at the very least—Pumpkinhead, devolved into another cheap "creature feature" attempt. Most of the terrifying elements of his original story were on the page, ready to be adapted into a thriving horror franchise. With a slightly bigger budget and some inspiration from Predator's stealth, Jason Voorhees's expressionless brutality, or Laurie Strode's endless fight for survival, Rawhead Rex could have enjoyed a few decent sequels.