Science Crazed (1991) [copyright 1989]

... aka: Fiend, The

Directed by:
Ron Switzer

Dr. Wilbur Frank's experiments have gone too far so the medical board asks for his resignation. He then ties up a woman and injects her with some kind of formula that will make her pregnant in three hours and give birth in less than a day. She goes to sleep and dies giving birth to the baby. The baby is a fully-grown, growling mutant-man (played by Tony Della Ventura) shortly thereafter. He ends up strangling the doctor and escaping. The doctor's assistants Joan (Robin Hartsell) and Terry (Cameron Klein) - students at the Shelley Institute of Higher Learning - become concerned and decide to check in on him, finding him dead. They then phone a video store (?) where Detective McCoy (Michael Sommers) is slowwwwwly reading a Rambo VHS box to report the murder. Meanwhile, the "Fiend," as the credits call him, shambles along in the hallways looking for someone to kill. An aerobics instructor / personal trainer and a fat woman are then shown exercising... for over eight minutes (!!) with the only breaks being shots of the "monster" dragging his feet through a hallway and "music" that's about as pleasant to listen to as an alarm clock going off at 6am. So how are we rewarded for suffering through this? About 50 shots of a hallway, some grumbling and two off-screen, bloodless murders. One of the girls refuses to even look scared when faced with a man in bloody bandages in the girl's locker room.

We then go to a painfully long scene where everyone is shot in noir-ish half-lighting and there are long... awkard... and... frequent... pauses... between.... every... line... of... dialogue... A woman - no clue who this is even supposed to be - says "Frank was a genius. He may have succeeded in creating a complete man using a synthetic compound which controlled the biochemical structure of an embryo's chromosomes and genes." Uhhh, yeah, ok. Because it's the weekend and all of the police are off duty (?) McCoy forces Joan and Terry at gunpoint (??) to help him hunt down The Fiend. The monster then shows up at the home of that female defender of Dr. Frank's. The monster walks in. The woman gets off the couch and walks toward him. Then the two stand there facing each other. She finally offers her body to him and he picks her up and breaks her back. This whole segment also lasts nearly ten minutes, most of which consists of the monster and the victim standing there staring at each other. Dear Lord, make it stop! Make it stop! Nope, first he needs to shuffle through the hallways some more and strangle a woman after we get about ten prolonged shots of each.

Next up, The Fiend decides to crash a pool party in another painfully drawn-out scene where people sit around reading and saying things to each other we can barely hear for about ten minutes before the monster jumps into the pool, drowns a girl and then picks up a guy and throws him. It goes on to strangle a few more chicks before finally showing its real face (a rubber mask) and getting put down in a parking garage with a machete. The end.

Absolutely one of the worst pieces of shit I've ever had the misfortune of sitting through, this grueling home movie should have never, ever been released upon the unsuspecting public. You'd be hard pressed to find a more drawn-out, padded-out film with such boring, seemingly never-ending scenes as this one. It has, bar none, one of the absolute worst sound recordings ever. When one character talks there's suddenly a lot of fuzz and diffusion, which miraculously clears up whenever the next person talks. Sometimes lips move and nothing comes out. Sometimes lips move and something audible but unintelligible comes out... then suddenly the volume is cranked up loud for the next person. I constantly had to fiddle with my volume throughout, which was irritating to put it mildly. All of the dialogue was dubbed in later and the people who did it - at times - seem to be making a joke of the whole thing. Unfortunately, none of this is even the slightest bit amusing or entertaining.

Usually listed as being from either 1990 or 1991, but posters for Creepshow 2, Evil Dead 2 and Pretty Kill (all 1987 releases) and a 1987 edition of the Toronto phone book tell a different story. This appears to be the only thing the director ever made. The VHS box tries to sell it as an intentionally bad cult film. Sorry, not buying it.

NO STARS!