Within the first fifteen minutes
of this head-scratching sci-fi farce, you’ll have seen the following sights: a frog-like creature skewered
and sliced into pieces while still alive; a creature that appears to
be nothing more than an eyeball on the end of an bloody intestine; a
musical instrument which is part trumpet, part piano and part chicken;
a dog with a sinister human face; over-sized fleas catapulted against
a wall where they explode in tiny geysers of gore and what can only be
described as a long, thin sentient penis flapping through a chute at
a housewife’s face until it’s brutally amputated.
Meet The Hollowheads, by the way, is a family comedy and this is apparently
how we will prepare dinner in the future.
This future, if the film is to be believed, will find the human race
living for no apparent reason in a series of tubes, talking to each other
through tubes and having their brightly coloured gloopy food delivered
into their homes through tubes. Tubes, tubes, tubes. You half suspect
that the makers stumbled across a warehouse full of industrial tubing,
built the sets and then tried to assemble a movie around the result.
The plot, such as it is, goes like this: Mr Hollowhead (Smallville’s
John Glover) works for United Umbilical, the company that manages all
these frickin’ tubes, and he’s been forced to invite his
slimy and lecherous new boss, Marty Crabneck, home for dinner. That’s
it. Yes, a story that struggled to fill most half hour sitcoms in the
Seventies is here stretched out to ninety minutes and bludgeoned to death
with hundreds of metres of sodding plastic tubes. It’s a broad
farce of the “Whoops, it’s the vicar, where are my trousers?” variety,
served up with a self-referential and smug streak of Nineties nihlism.
A pre-fame Juliette Lewis co-stars as Cindy Hollowhead, the ditzy and
rather slutty 14-year-old daughter of the family. She’s got a big
party to go to, and in order to impress a certain young stud she goes
all out to tart herself up, using such potentially nauseating (and thankfully
unseen) beauty treatments as the forbidden “softening jelly” and
the alarming sounding “Femstick”. There follows a dubious
montage in which the nubile adolescent, her face painted like a whore,
cavorts in front of her mirror in a variety of form-hugging outfits,
the camera lingering on her buttocks and gusset with disturbing relish.
Don’t forget, she’s just fourteen.
Mr Hollowhead’s boss, Mr. Crabneck, clearly approves. There’s
yet another queasy scene in which he drools all over the pre-pubescent
girl, pawing her and slobbering over her body. Once again: she’s
fourteen and this is a family comedy. Cindy is hastily packed off to
the party by her spineless father.
The dinner is a disaster, of course, largely because Mr Crabneck turns
out to be a psychotic sexual deviant who delights in making inappropriate
advances towards Mrs Hollowhead while belittling her nebbish husband
to his face. It all escalates to a rousing finale of wholesomely traditional
attempted rape (“No means yes!” bellows Crabneck as he tries
to force himself on Mrs Hollowhead) and a lengthy and violent fight during
which the Hollowhead’s mutilate and assault the rampaging Crabneck.
His back is cooked into an oozing, bleeding mess. He’s stabbed
in the neck with a fork. Two of his fingers are hacked off. And his face
is melted using some sort of microwave device.
With Crabneck’s mangled (yet still living) body lying in the kitchen,
the cops then bring home Cindy, stoned out of her mind on “vapours”.
Just in case you weren’t already creeped out enough by the movie’s
constant undercurrent of molestation and paedophilia, we then learn that
Cindy has been “violated” and it’s implied in a dubious
nudge-nudge aside that one of the cops – an overweight buffoon – is
the guy responsible. See, the fat cop has taken advantage of a stoned
14-year-old! Oh, how we laughed!
Meet The Hollowheads is about as incoherent and painful as movies can
get. Filled with unexplained gadgets and slang, the intent was presumably
to create some sort of Tim Burtonesque spin on The Jetsons’ futuristic
playground, but the obsession with day-glo ooze, sexual deviancy and
those ever-present bloody tubes kill any attempts at genuine satire or
wit stone dead. Still, the slurred stylings of Juliette Lewis are an
almost perfect fit with her ditzy character, and if you’ve ever
fantasised about the star writhing around while dressed as a miniature
jailbait version of Cyndi Lauper then by all means, jump right in.
Need to know: Meet The Hollowheads was co-written and
directed by Tom Burman, a special effects make-up artist whose more famous
creations
include such touchstones of Eighties fantasy as Sloth in The Goonies
and Teen Wolf, which probably explains the amount of rubbery splatter
on display. Burman was also a make-up artist on Frogs (see: Sam
Elliott)
and Prophecy (see: Talia Shire). The role of the eldest Hollowhead brother,
Bud, was played by Lightfield Lewis, Juliette’s real life brother.
His most high profile role since was as a waiter in Jerry Maguire. The
cop who didn’t get the privilege of taking Cindy’s cherry
was played by Bobcat Goldthwaite, the raspy voiced star of the Police
Academy movies. His unbilled cameo is actually one of the high points
of the film, which pretty much says it all.
Honourable mentions: The year before Hollowheads, Lewis had a supporting
role as Lexie (aka Jessie’s Friend #1) in another tonally wayward
sci-fi comedy, the Dan Ackroyd and Kim Basinger effort, My Stepmother
Is An Alien.
Availability: Meet The Hollowheads recently received a very cheap US
DVD release.
