A blond sorority girl is dragged
screaming into her closet by some unseen foe. A blind man searching
for his guide dog fails to notice its corpse
hanging from the closet door, and also falls foul of the mysterious creature.
A little girl playing hide and seek is the next to be yanked into her
closet by forces unknown. And that’s just the first three minutes
of the movie. Just in case you haven’t grasped the concept yet,
the title spells it out for you: there’s a monster in the closet.
Richard Clark is a wannabe reporter, with a job on a newspaper handed
to him thanks to his uncle, the owner. He’s stuck doing obituaries
but wants a shot at the big time. The paper’s ace reporter hands
him a three-week old clipping of the closet killings and tells Richard
it’s a hot lead.
Eager Richard heads off to Chestnut Falls, where the deaths occurred,
and goes to see the sheriff. In the police waiting room he meets a nerdy
kid, nicknamed Professor, who is there with his mother – Diane,
a biology teacher at the local college who has some ideas about what
might be chomping on the townsfolk.
With his slicked-down side parting, enormous round glasses, buttoned-up
shirt and feeble frame, Professor makes for a comical sight. And who’s
playing this weedy uber-geek? That would be a 14-year-old Paul Walker,
looking quite different to the chiselled hunk who would later headline
such pop blockbuster fare as The Fast and the Furious, Timeline and Into
The Blue.
As his name suggests, Professor is a mini-boffin, and when we first meet
him he’s busy recording as many sounds as possible to use on his
energy amplification device. Having bonded with the child prodigy, Richard
ends up invited back to dinner – where Diane takes quite a shine
to him – but the evening is interrupted by screams from across
the street. The monster has struck again. The cops surround the house
and, sure enough, out comes the creature in question. It looks, to be
completely honest, like a poo with teeth. Worse, its gaping maw contains
a second head which resembles a long, pink, shiny penis. The poo-monster
turns out to be impervious to bullets, kills the sheriff with its penis-tongue
and simply stomps off into the night.
This encounter soon escalates into a national emergency, with the Army
advising everyone to padlock their closets while they cordon off the
area. Quite how yellow tape barriers are supposed to stop a beast that
can pop in and out of closets at will is, you guessed it, never discussed.
After a few more futile encounters with the monster even the Army throw
in the towel and the town is evacuated – except for Richard, Professor
and Diane. They plan to electrocute the monster, because Diane has done
some tests on one of its claws and discovered that “it’s
made of electrons”, which does cast serious doubt over her credentials
as a biology teacher. This plan fails dismally, but Professor steps in
to save the day with his
home-made
gizmo,
which
now
fires a
red laser beam.
Sadly, even this fails to work and the trio brace themselves for the
end. Except…the monster is transfixed by Richard. Clearly the monster
is “in the closet” in more ways than one, and the love struck
beast scoops up the startled reporter and retreats into the darkness
once again.
It’s then that Professor has another teenage brainwave – destroy
all closets! The word goes out with dubious haste, and soon everyone
across the world is smashing up their storage space. With nowhere left
to hide and recharge its power, the beast – still clutching its
beloved Richard – begins to weaken. One closet remains – in
the TransAmerica building in San Francisco – but the monster can’t
fit inside with Richard in tow.
Rather than leave him behind, it walks
out into the street and dies. The lack of closets has defeated the menace
at last. “Not the closets”, intones a clergyman, looking
at Richard still trapped under the prone creature. “Twas beauty
killed the beast.”
As that final line (cribbed none too subtly from King Kong) suggests,
Monster In The Closet doesn’t take itself entirely seriously. Thankfully,
unlike most attempts to mix horror and hilarity, it avoids the usual
pitfalls of over the top slapstick and shrill wackiness, and instead
opts for a deadpan silliness which calls to mind a monster movie version
of Airplane. Walker plays the world saving geeky kid with gusto, and
you certainly won’t recognise him as the bronzed Hollywood himbo
currently setting female hearts a-flutter.
Need to know: Monster In The Closet was actually filmed
in 1983, but remained unreleased for four years. The editor on the film
Raja Gosnell, who would go on to a directorial
career
which
inflicted
the live action Scooby
Doo movies on the world. The man inside the brown poo monster suit was
Kevin Peter Hall, the 7’2” actor who also played the Predator
and the titular monster of Bigfoot and the Hendersons, both also released
in 1987. Two years earlier, in 1985, he starred in the short-lived Eighties
superhero show Misfits of Science (see: Courtney Cox) and in 1988 he
appeared in Big Top Pee Wee (see: Benicio Del Toro). Fans of irritating
pop-rap should keep their eyes open for Black Eyed Peas singer Fergie,
then a little girl playing the role of Lucy.
Honourable mention: 1987 also saw the young Paul Walker co-star in Programmed
To Kill (aka The Retaliator), a sci-fi yarn about a sexy female Middle
Eastern terrorist who gets rebuilt by the CIA as a cyborg double agent.
Availability: Monster In The Closet is out on DVD in the UK and US.
