MOVIE REVIEW : ‘REX’: NOT RAW ENOUGH TO SHOCK

Sometimes in horror stories, you’re better off not being very explicit. The makers of “Rawhead Rex” (citywide) never quite learned that truism. This shocker, scripted by Clive Barker (Britain’s answer to Stephen King), is at its best whenever it is just suggesting the presence of its title monster: using “Halloween”-style tracking shots, not showing him very clearly or letting some local lunatic babble on about him. Whenever he is dragged on screen, it’s a sorry spectacle.

This is a gent who has supposedly rotted away under Ireland’s soil for thousands of years: a festering mass of putrescence and evil, back for the devil’s work. Yet close up, he looks phony-phallic--like some guy in a latex lizard-man suit, with shiny gray polyethylene pectorals, wearing a Gaelic version of S&M; punk leather regalia and periodically drooling cough syrup. If you met someone who looked like this in a dark alley one night, you’d be in real trouble. You’d fall down laughing before you could run away.

It’s a pity, because “Rawhead Rex” (rated R for violence, nudity and language)--despite arch performances and the usual formula gore--actually has promise. Barker’s idea is not particularly original: Skeptical American researcher and his family stumble on the curse of demons buried under holy ground in a clannish little Irish town. But Barker constructs it well, thickens it with fussy little character details and ironic speeches, builds easily toward an apocalyptic climax. And director George Pavlou and cinematographer John Metcalfe get visuals that occasionally suggest they know Jacques Tourneur and Michael Reeves, as much as Terence Fisher. There’s an ominous delicacy to their Gaelic landscapes, a nice sarcastic counterpoint between the ancient churchyards and modern trailer camps, and lots of tilted tracks through misty, nocturnal forests.

Then the old Rawbean pokes his head in--or the blood starts spurting--and our mood shrivels. Rexy simply looks too new, too rubbery, too Hollywood Costume Shop, to raise any fears about unquiet slumberers in a restless earth. Instead, he looks like he’s been slumbering in a Motel 6, waiting for the Halloween Hop. In this movie, the stained glass windows in the Rev. Coot’s church (a nice notion) are scarier; so is the altar that bends like hot flesh under your hand, summoning up visions; so is the verger of that contaminated parish--gaunt, foul-mouthed Declan the devil-worshiper (Ronan Wilmot).

Maybe Pavlou should have figured out a way to never show Rawhead--perhaps by having the characters stricken with blind terror when he appears, and then shooting from their point of view. With much more reticence, and far subtler acting, his movie might have been a little gem--instead of a laughable misfire.

‘RAWHEAD REX’

An Empire Entertainment release. Producers Kevin Attew, Don Hawkins. Script Clive Barker. Editor Andy Horvitch. Music Collin Towns. Art director Len Huntingford. With David Dukes, Kelly Piper, Hugh O’Connor, Cora Lundy, Ronan Wilmot, Niall Toibin.

Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.

MPAA rating: R (under 17 requires an accompanying parent or adult guardian).