Spontaneous Combustion - 1990

Tobe Hooper made quite an impact with his giant smash hit Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  That should be pretty obvious, as it was a film that we still look to these days with reverence and brings shock to us.  But what else did Tobe Hooper do?  I myself am not too familiar with him filmography.  Looking at IMDb, I have seen roughly half of his movies, and most of them I'd say were pretty good.

That's my opinion of course, and I can see why he fell of the map in terms of popular appeal.  It's plain as day to me that he was going for, and achieved, an almost B-movie appeal.  He delved into areas like camp and under-represented genre tropes such as schlock and remakes.  Reading through his filmography, I wonder if it was his intention to bring horror back to it's 50's and 60's roots, except slightly updated to a 80's and 90's audience.

Tobe Hooper is one of the only directors to make a good early Stephen King movie (The Mangler), a remake of a 50's alien flick (Invaders from Mars), a nude vampire exploitation (Lifeforce), and a straight up horror comedy attempt with Texas Chainsaw Massacre II.  Poltergeist and Texas Chainsaw Massacre are perhaps his only "success stories" in the terms of broad mainstream appeal, and I wonder exactly if he was one of the only true "horror directors" of all time, given that almost everything he ever did was within the realm of horror.

Horror went through quite a change in the early 90's and I'd be hard pressed to come up with a truly great movie horror movie from the early 90's.  The Silence of the Lambs is perhaps the only one I can think of even after some internet research.  It was well known that this was a shitty time in horror, and greats from Wes Craven to Tobe Hooper had some real shitshows coming out at that time.

Spontaneous Combustion was a film I'd wanted to see for a while.  It was even on "my list" for a while, and I saw it came to Amazon Instant.  I dialed it in at work and got paid roughly $60 to watch it if you think about it.  Which, I did think about it.

Spontaneous Combustion was not bad.  It demonstrates a lot of what I've been saying in the review so far.  It hearkens back to yesteryear in horror by having a atom bomb origin and parts of a 50's horror aesthetic in the film, but it clashes those perfectly with wacky 80's-ness, such as a fucking neon tube telephone.

What you have is Brad Dourif as a child of the atomic age, and he keeps on having people around him spontaneously go up in flames.  It's becoming a real common thing, while in the meantime he's suffering migraines and his doctor is concerned about his always high temperature.  He's got special powers to cause flames, as soon enough seen, and pretty soon the real story of his birth and the government testing that led to it become clear.  In the meantime, the flames begin to overtake him, and the people around him have to try and survive.

I liked this just fine.  It had some minor parts that were a bit unclear or didn't make sense, but overall this was fine.  I don't have a lot to say about it beyond that, but fuck it at least you got a decent Tobe Hooper write up out of all of this.