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THINGS

A COUPLE CANADIANS GOT A HOLD OF A CAMCORDER



★★★☆☆ (Good for One Viewing)

Director: Andrew Jordan

1989



Some films define a generation. Our great-grandparents have Citizen Kane, the Boomers have Bonnie & Clyde. Gen-Xer’s may boast Reality Bites and Singles, but because they’re the latchkey generation who had the time to learn how to use a camcorder, they also birthed one of the world’s great passion projects: Things, a deep-dive into the minds of two Canadian men who had access to a shack, a video camera, and a porn star. They also had a dream.


I used to carry this notebook around with a list of the horror movies I watched. I know why, I’m organized, but according to my most annoying friend, I’m also a Virgo and that’s supposed to explain it. There were four categories in my notebook. The list with a heart meant I should buy the movie, a star meant I’d like to see it again and share it with friends. Pages headlined with an “X” were filled with the ones I hated. The worst list had no symbol at all, meaning those in that section weren’t even worth remembering. In this thick notebook only one movie had its own page and a big question mark.


You know how bat shit is supposed to be valuable? Well, Things is the guano of the horror movie universe. Shot on VHS by some buddies who were likely convinced this would be the next Night of the Living Dead or Evil Dead, it’s an offering to the good-bad movie gods. Watching Things is a rite of passage for any cinephile, but there’s one caveat: You must watch with closed-captioning in order to enjoy it. Do this so you can bask in “dialogue” written by your twelve-year old brother, drunk on ten beers.



The first scene takes place in the corner of an unfinished basement, where a naked woman wearing a plastic devil mask repeatedly asks a main character if she can have his baby. I’m not going to address the elephant in the room, but right off the bat, I knew this actress had to be the girlfriend of one of the guys involved in production. Who else is going to do this for the whole world to see? This is how I imagine the conversation went down between the man and his girlfriend:

 

Come on, babe. We really need a naked woman in this scene.

No.

Horror movies these days gotta have a naked chick to grab the attention of the audience.

No.

We can go out afterwards and get some poutine. My treat.

No. 

How ‘boot this? I gotta devil mask left over from Halloween. Eh?

 

As Things progresses, you won’t just have a difficult time figuring out what’s going on, you also won’t really know who the protagonist is until the almost halfway mark. Our hero, Don, is a mulleted Everyman who stepped out of the “Da Bears” SNL skit. The audience is bounced between scenes of him and his two buddies hanging out in a dilapidated house and clips of a maniacal doctor’s office. By the way, they really want to push the fact that they’re in America, NOT Canada. They do this by insisting the water coming out of the faucet is “American water” and that the fridge is stocked with “American beer”. The inflated confidence that exudes from these filmmakers is utterly charming.


There are a few women actors besides the naked mask-wearer, but their only purpose is to be a cheap kill—with one exception. If you’re watching Things with your girlfriend and you can’t put your finger on where you’ve seen that news lady before, it’s best to keep your mouth shut. That’s uber-famous porn star Amber Lynn(!), dressed like the gold digger your uncle dated in 1983, and despite being credited, Things doesn’t show up on any of her filmography pages, or her Wikipedia page*. It really says something when a porn star considers your movie the worst decision they've ever made.


Things isn’t a good-bad movie like Troll 2 or The Room—it defies any category or emotion. You’ll feel like you should laugh, but you don’t, and you’ll spend one hour and twenty-three minutes saying, “Wait, what?” over and over again. And if you try to figure out the plot, you’ll go mad. Things may be one of the worst movies ever made, but it’s one of the most fascinating things I’ve ever seen.

 

 

*As of the date this review was written.






GENRES: Apocalyptic, Monster/Creature, What the Fuck Was That


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