Killer Tongue (1996)

 

Director: Alberto Sciamma

Screenplay: Alberto Sciamma

Cast: Melinda Clarke as Candy; Jason Durr as Johnny; Mapi Galán as Rita; Mabel Karr as Old Nun; Robert Englund as the Prison Director; Doug Bradley as Wig; Michael Cule as Frank; David Dale as Portia; Daniel Edwards as Loca

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #219 / An Abstract List Candidate

 

Speak! Speak! Move your fuckin' lips and move them fast!

Odd films always exist, even if you have to dig for them if they have been left from public availability. Streaming, for all my issues with the format for not being reliable for preservation, has thankfully compensated as a great place to stumble over these oddities I am interested in. This one, for example, was a movie I entirely had an interest in because of lead actress Melinda Clarke -, who most will know from Brian Yuzna's Return of the Living Dead 3 (1993), had been on my radar for years. I first knew of --- however, growing up, through her reoccuring guest character in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2001-11), the original Las Vegas set version of the franchise where, staying almost entirely in television work later in her career, she has the character of Lady Heather, a professional dominatrix whose relationship with William Petersen's Dr. Gil Grissom became a potential romance that lasted over a long period of time in the show's running plots.  Her film career is not as substantial as her television work though. Spawn (1997), as a female henchman, is probably the most high profile role, but was clearly cast in mind to her physical beauty only, and is not a good film in the damndest. Return of the Living Dead 3 is in context an exceptional piece, the iconic film in her career (just for the final version of her appearance as a character), if once a divisive sequel to the original 1985 Dan O'Bannon production and one of the few films in said career at all.

Killer Tongue is obscure, a Spanish-British co-production from a Spanish director who would continue to the modern day as a filmmaker. This is also a mid-nineties film; odd films thankfully always exist, but they change as the culture does, so this is a Frank Henenlotter premise if it cross with the post-Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez era of cinema, of a heightened style and crime genre tropes matched with a sensual nineties ambient soundtrack by the director's own band Fangoria. One with a greater awareness than other films then since as I suspect it was influenced a little by Alex Cox's Repo Man (1984) and Natural Born Killers (1994), and with a bit of the history of Spanish cinema there, as I am sure Pedro Almodóvar inspired the fact that, when a meteorite with an alien lifeform provide's Melinda Clarke's Cindy with a sentiment tongue, her four poodles turn into drag queens from the same source.

Candy is the girlfriend of Johnny (Jason Durr), who with two other men pulled off a heist. The couple ditched their friends, but Johnny was arrested whilst she was hiding as a nun for a time among a group running a gas station. The film proper begins when, with his release imminent, she locates herself in an abandoned home with her dogs. The meteorite lands one night, projecting the alien form through the house window into her soup, strong enough upon consumption to propel her into the air from the shock and gives her a parasitic tongue that can extend and make roast chickens explode, requiring human beings for sustenance. The poodles, now human beings due to eating what was split on the floor of the soup, attempt to assist her find said food but she is trying to continually get rid of the tongue until it, with its own mind, tries to convince her otherwise. Contrasting this is that Johnny, on a chain gang in the middle of the desert, is the fixed target of a prison director (Robert Englund), who wants to keep him in jail with his ground, and the two men who were cheated out of the money trying to look for the couple. Englund, chewing scenery like a king, loves tormenting his prisoners, playing golf using Johnny's own head as a tee, and eventually requiring a white bird with a broken wing he calls "Johnny", developing a weird attachment to it as he thankfully becomes a major character in himself.

You could have left this merely as a crime film. Instead, we see a man fellating a petrol pump hose in a nun's hands as a threat. When this leads to split petrol ruining his white suit, he deliberately crashes into a random person's van in the middle of a countryside road whilst driving butt naked and, when that man smashes through his own windshield, proceeds to steal their clothes. It is similar to Raúl Ruiz's Régime sans pain (1985), where in a sci-fi future to win a competition to become the king, the protagonist steals a jacket off a man in a burning car from a random accident. That connection is not out of place, as we get an inside the mouth camera shot out to the world beyond the teeth to match Ruiz's City of Pirates (1983), all in a film where you also get the camera taking a POV from the tongue's perspective as it enters down a victim's throat and right out through the anus.

Killer Tongue's Henenlotter-lite tone does help considerably, especially when the tongue starts to talk, after many attempts to Candy to remove and even burn it off with an iron, developing three pronged fingers and helping the film in its content immensely. Sadly, this is later on in Killer Tongue but it is a pleasure, the film embracing strange tangents as a result, causing one to ask whether it is self pleasure if one's lover is your own (alien) tongue, and when this leads to the pair expecting a baby. Surrounding this is a lot of eccentric content, where even the meteorite is a curiosity, not only a mute nun from the gas station going to it after having visions, but for the fact that direct contact with the rock with water causes things to explode,  something one poor bugger learns urinating up it.  One of the highlights is Englund too by himself. Always a figure who invoked class and elegance, when he does decide to be weird and/or chew scenery, it is a blast, Killer Tongue providing at least one virtue of giving him a part which exploits both.

This is not a profound film, like many motivated by event in terms of the characters antagonising each other, desiring basic things like love and material wealth. It is adequate in terms of how it was made technically, the more prominent aspects its aesthetic style which is deliberately heightened. If you were to remove the build up to out of scenes in this film, it is the kind due to its tone which gets weirder and leads to questions, such as how Johnny ends up threatening to leave a car in the middle of the desert, one he is handcuffed to, for not providing water from the radiator for him to drink. Killer Tongue is stylish, and of the era, a film I wanted to see and was entertaining. Since the key reason I wanted to watch the film was because of her, I will admit that you could have lost Melinda Clarke in among that manic weirdness around her, the tongue itself which is pulled off well in special and practical effects, and someone like Englund stealing the film from the rest of the cast. Even the film itself does dangerously lose her into the role of the downed, villainous woman especially when Johnny shows affection for the mute nun. Thankfully Clarke, who tragically stuck to television for most of her career, had an incredible "it" factor which is not lost, even when decked out in a (symbiotic) black suit from the alien and is trying to cut an alien tongue off that has grown in size. It would have been fascinating as a career if she stayed with genre and cult cinema, but if television was a better direction, one should not complain at a working actor finding something better for their livelihoods.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None