FrightFest Glasgow review – The Doom Busters
Jack McHenry has been specialising in scrappy little retro horror comedies – the feature Here Comes Hell is a gore movie take on The Cat and the Canary and the short Dungeon of Vampire Nazis is fairly self-explanatory. This is a science fiction horror take on Dad’s Army, which is a lot less obnoxious than the numberless justoutofcopyrightsploitation schlock efforts which set out to trash benign staples by reimagining them as rubbish slasher films.
A patrol of Home Guard folk armed with mops and brooms – Arthur (Tom Bailey), Harold (Oscar Meyrick), William (Timothy Renouf) – and land girl Edith (Jessica Webber) explore the woods where a German plane is supposed to have crashed, only to find an empty flying saucer, gory remains of the local vicar (Charlie Robb) and spiv (Douglas Tawn) and a robot disguised as a nurse (Margaret Clunie) who is on the planet tracking a ‘void raptor’ which has perhaps arrived on Earth in response to a Nazi summons and could spawn a brood of man-eating monsters who could win the war for Hitler by eating English people.
The premise evokes 1980s Charles Band quickies like Zone Troopers, but this was made with far fewer resources even than the average direct-to-video effort of yore … the cast are enthusiastic non-stars (Renouf fares best as the RAF type who literally shot himself in the foot), the plot is a walk in the woods punctuated by death scenes, and the special effects run to a red-tinted big gruesome head which looks like an Alien incubated inside Barney the Dinosaur and hatched into a papier mache lump with teeth.
Bonus points for ‘you have been watching …’
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