Cellar Dweller (1988)

Although horror fans, and general movie fans, tend to know some of the big names in the world of practical effects, it always ends up being the same people who get most of the praise, and not without good reason. You have Tom Savini, Stan Winston, Rick Baker, Rob Bottin, the guys who formed KNB (Kurtzman, Nicotero, and Berger). Those who love to celebrate the classics may mention Willis O’Brien and, of course, Ray Harryhausen, but that’s about your lot. Meet someone who wants to wax lyrical about Screaming Mad George (real name = Joji Tani) and you’ve discovered a rarity. Then there’s John Carl Buechler, a special effects artists who had a great knack for making memorable puppet creations with fairly limited resources. He worked with Stuart Gordon a few times, was involved with at least one instalment of each of the big three slasher icon franchises, and gave us those irascible Ghoulies. He also sat in the director’s chair occasionally, this film being one of those with him at the helm, and I think that it is time for Buechler to get the proper praise he has long been due.

Yet another film that I wanted to see for decades, thanks to the combination of the title and the VHS box, Cellar Dweller is a simple and fantastical piece of work. Less of an outright horror movie and more of an adult version of an extended Goosebumps episode, it’s something that will remain enjoyable to anyone who loves the cheap ‘n’ cheerful schlock from the 1980s.

Debrah Farentino (billed here as Debrah Mullowney) plays a comic book artist named Whitney Taylor who ends up unleashing some major trouble when she spends time at an artist’s retreat, headed up by Mrs. Briggs (Yvonne De Carlo). It turns out that there’s a power in the place, a magic that can turn Whitney’s drawings into reality. It isn’t long until the titular cellar dweller starts killing off the other residents.

Written by Don Mancini, this is a brisk and amusing bit of silliness that benefits more from Buechler’s work on the special effects than it does from Buechler’s direction. Not that he does a terrible job in the latter role, but he certainly ends up maintaining a surprisingly lighter-than-expected tone throughout. There’s some attempt throughout the first half to craft some tension, helped by a decent score from Carl Dante, but that soon goes out the window as the daffiness of the main premise starts to outweigh the potential for real horror.

Cast-wise, people are good, not great. Taylor is a decent lead, and it’s fun to watch De Carlo in her supporting role, but few others make a strong impression, with the main exception being Brian Robbins (who would go on to become a director of some shocking Eddie Murphy movies decades later). Robbins plays a friend/artist/love interest and the third act makes the interesting choice to position him as a kind of “damsel in distress”, which may stem from Mancini having fun with the genre tropes. Or it’s maybe just because we are sticking with the female lead for the majority of the movie. The other name to mention here is Jeffrey Combs, only acting in the brief prologue, but doing enough to ensure that this film has an approved Combs quota.

If you end up watching this expecting some lo-fi gore and nastiness then you will be disappointed. This isn’t a blood-soaked shocker. It is, instead, the kind of cosy dark fantasy that we don’t tend to see made nowadays. It will give you a warm glow of nostalgia, it will have you once again remembering why practical effects, as flawed as they are, so often outshine CGI, and it will most likely keep you smiling as it entertains you for the brief, 77-minutes in all, runtime.

6/10

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