For one generation of viewers, and much of another, Tobe Hooper It is the main culprit of many of his nightmares. The director made the audience fear chainsaws like never before (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), the “snow” of televisions of yesteryear (Poltergeist) and also scored such memorable works as Salem's Lot Mystery (1979). , but it also has several failures. one of them is Spontaneous Combustion (1989).
It's a real shame that Spontaneous Combustion didn't join the American filmmaker's list of classics because I remember seeing it several years after its release (I wasn't even born when it debuted in theaters) and going straight to Google to ask how much of it was “real.” “There could be in this movie fearing, innocent of me at the time, that it could end up in ashes. Years later I tried it again and understood very well why it failed.
Surviving an experiment with atomic weapons
Just over an hour and a half long, and currently available on Filmin (we must thank them more for their work recovering these types of films), Spontaneous Combustion starts off quite strongly, taking us back to the 1950s with a Fallout-esque advertisement about “the “first nuclear relative” in the United States who had gone into a shelter (and injected several serums) to test his resistance to a hydrogen bomb. They survived, but with terrible consequences that they and their son, years later, would suffer, unleashing the events of the plot.
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After a time jump, we find a young man of about 30 years old who little by little develops a certain talent for pyrokinesis (creation and manipulation of fire with the mind) at the same time as charred corpses appear. Will he be the culprit? Everything is presented in a somewhat haphazard way, with the protagonist losing his mind, and his skin, every time he uses his power, ending up giving us a maddening movie with little or nothing redeemable with more developed characters and stories that are not coherent with each other.
I won't go into more details for fear of spoiling what is strictly necessary, but after seeing it the last time I wanted to find out a little more about what happened for a director of Hooper's talent to commit something so tedious to watch. The answer? Once again we are faced with a case of a study eager to take out the scissors and cut footageto such an extent that the film's protagonist, Brad Dourif (The Lord of the Rings) came to call the story stupid.
The Gríma Serpenttongue actor in The Two Towers assured that they changed the montage so much that in the end we ended up seeing what we saw. Thanks to a post by The Anomalous Host we know that the initial intention of its authors was to make a film about the dangers of nuclear energy and the power plants, and in fact we can see some citizen protests in this regard in the background, but it hardly develops. Also its original ending was completely changed… to something much worse.
From my particular cycle of little-known science fiction films from the 80s, where I have recently mentioned quite curious works such as Nemesis or Runaway, this is without a doubt the weakest and I would not recommend it if it were not for the personal affection that I had 20 years ago when I saw it and ended up being “afraid” of dying of spontaneous combustion like several of its characters. But if you dare to see it, you can currently find it in the Filmin catalogue.
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