TerrorVision

The monster is great. The movie around it is not.

Terrorvision wants to be a midnight movie for the VHS generation. It’s got a creature by John Carl Buechler that’s all slime and teeth and attitude. It’s got a catchy B-52s-esque theme song. It’s got production design that looks like Hugh Hefner decorated a funeral home. But it doesn’t have a script worth the effort.

The plot? An alien beams through a satellite dish and eats people. Simple enough. Writer-director Ted Nicolaou surrounds this premise with wall-to-wall camp—swinging parents, a survivalist grandpa, punk rockers, the works. Every character is a cartoon. Every line is delivered with a wink and a nudge.

Here’s the problem: intentional camp is exhausting. Bruce Campbell can get away with it because he knows when to pull back. Louise Lasser in Blood Rage worked because she didn’t know she was being funny. These actors are all mugging for the camera, desperately signaling “Look how zany I am!” Even Chad Allen, supposedly our straight man, forgets his own name when calling for help. It’s too much.

The movie drags. Under 90 minutes should feel breezy, but Nicolaou recycles gags and lets scenes sprawl. The opening model shot—amateurish even by grade-school standards—proves pointless when a character explains everything in act three anyway. Worse, there’s a mid-film detour where the kids befriend the monster. It kills the momentum dead. Just when things should accelerate, the movie stops to play nice with its creature, then awkwardly tries to reboot the mayhem.

The single-location setting doesn’t help. Despite the wild production design, you can tell it’s all studio-bound. Those “backyard” shots? Pure sitcom. The space feels claustrophobic in the wrong way.

Small pleasures exist. Randi Brooks does a decent Judy Holliday impression. The monster watching Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and laughing at the destruction—that’s inspired. And yes, that theme song is single-worthy.

But Terrorvision commits the cardinal sin of cult movies: it bored me. This might have worked as a Creepshow segment—tight, nasty, and out before overstaying its welcome. At feature length, it’s a good creature design in search of a better movie.

Some will love it. Comedy is subjective. But give me the unintentional lunacy of a real midnight movie over this self-aware slog any day.