This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

RAWHEAD REX is a very cheesy old fashioned creature flick. The cheesiest 80s special effects imaginable. The movie is silly but it is SO entertaining. Although the ending was kinda dumb. Saw this in the late 80s on a rented VHS rental The settings right, with sweeping landscapes, dense forest, and luscious mountains are put on full display. But the films effects are shoddy, acting is terrible, and ending isn't all that satisfying. The creature itself maybe looked scary back then, although nowadays a rubber mask doesn't work too well. Very low budget. The main offender is Rawheads mask itself. Its cheap rubber mask. It just doesn't measure up to the more well-made 80s monster classics like Pumpkinhead.

Arriving in Ireland to conduct research for a new book, a writer unwittingly releases a fabled monster from captivity and must use his family's help to stop it before the creature runs wild through the town.This ended up being a far better and enjoyable monster movie than it should been and has a lot to like about it. One of the better aspects here is the rather decided lack of explanation for the monster's appearance, yet not being that much of a detriment to the film at all. There's not a lot said about his back-story at all, and yet not even the events as they play out provide much explanation since there's four or five different ways it can go about doing things, making this a pretty enjoyable and interesting effort. The location switch to Ireland gives this a nice breath of fresh air as it tends to mean a lot of rather foreign-looking buildings and landscapes, as well as providing a perfect setting for the monster's antics to spring forth from, and those are certainly fun with all the mutilated bodies and burnt skin giving this a nice, healthy amount of gore, and it's rapid pace ensures a ton of them to come without too many down-points. Rather, the main flaw here is decidedly the main character, as the titular creature is a bit of a disappointment. While there's a lot of good work in its design and an ultra-creepy roar, the fact that the make-up for its face makes it look like a deformed gorilla is quite distracting and ruins the great design it could've featured. This here is pretty much it's only flaw, though it's not so bad at all.Rated R: Graphic Violence and Graphic Language.

To sum up the movie, overall: Rawhead Rex is a monster that hunts and devours young boys, stopping only to violate women, and be worshipped as a God. How does he react to the worship? He pisses over his followers, which they eagerly accept as a blessing from their God.This movie is one of the creepiest and most disturbing ever made, and it doesn't matter how cheesy the makeup is. It's creepy and disturbing for the same reason all of Clive Barker's stories are: it's as much sexual fantasy as it is horror.Clive Barker is the creepy old man that sits on his porch all day, asking the young boys who pass if they'd like to sit on his lap and hear a scary story. We're too young to realize why these stories include so much torture and sado-masochistic imagery, and we understand even less why the storyteller seems so excited as he tells it, made all the more excited by the young listener's fear. As a straight, relatively well adjusted man, these dark dreams are all the more chilling, especially at a young age, when everything is already so confusing. Ultimately, no Clive Barker movie is ever as scary or disturbing as the concept itself, and no movie studio will allow the story to be as dark and horrifying as Clive Barker wants it to be. That's why Clive Barker's stories are so great. It's not really about selling books. It's about satisfying dark urges, and terrifying young boys.What I'm getting at is that it doesn't matter if Rawhead Rex looks scary. It's what he does, and the mere concept of his existence that is both terrifying and disturbing, made all the more terrifying when you're young, because let's face it: If Clive Barker dreamed of hunting and devouring young boys, then plenty of others have dreamed it to...and perhaps they aren't as willing as Clive is to merely allow his dark dreams to remain a fantasy.Like it or laugh at it, the story of Rawhead Rex is a dark reflection of the author's soul, and it is that reflection which is truly horrifying.

Rawhead Rex (1986) is proof that filmmakers can lack any sense of creativity given a low budget and a list of unknowns to make a movie. The film's scriptwriter, Clive Barker, has every right to be disappointed at the final result.A monster known as Rawhead is resurrected from his underground prison and decides to wreak bloody havoc on an Irish countryside by killing and eating the town's residents. It's up to a visiting American father (David Dukes) to convince the police that a monster is really on the loose.There's not a shred of creativity or believability to be found within its characters (but at least a group of dumb teenagers know it's not right to go out in the woods alone). The characters are dumb and boring and the monster is just what it looks like: a deformed rubber ape with glowing red lights in its eyes to show that it's angry. Compared to the other terrifying movie monsters of our time, Rawhead Rex is one that stoops at the bottom of the barrel.What's laughable is the story and its crucial plot points. Be amazed at how the cops discover that there's really a monster on a rampage. The baffling ending involving cheesy special effects. And oh, you can't forget this one: a scene in which the monster literally urinates on a priest who worships him.The death scenes are hardly creative. They make the ones in the Freddy and Jason movies look like art.Not a lot of resources went into this movie and it shows. If I could, I would name a lot of low-budget films that are more better than this one. Some come in mind, though. How about the one where Clive Barker took the director's chair a year later?