2024 Movie Gauntlet - 6: Watch a movie from the 1970s
Well!!! This was a severe lesson for me in, “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should,” as well as, “If a piece of lost media is THIS hard to find, maybe it’s not worth finding!”
Let me back up.
Last October, I decided to watch 1932’s
The Old Dark House, since I had heard that movie served as the blueprint for one of my favorite cult movies,
The Rocky Horror Picture Show. In my research on
The Old Dark House, though, I found out that it had inspired another raunchy cult film as well — 1975’s
Thundercrack! I was intrigued, but as I decided to look into this movie more, I quickly realized that it was not easy to find. To begin with, it was completely unavailable to watch in any format for decades prior to 2015. These days though, it’s not available on any streaming services, and I couldn’t find it on any pirating websites either. There are some physical copies for sale online, but I wasn’t keen on spending $40+, sight unseen, on a film of this nature. I probably should have given up at that point, but I unfortunately suffer from chronic curiosity, and the elusiveness of this picture only fueled my desire to get my greedy little eyes on it.
And so, after digging through several links of dubious legitimacy, I finally managed to find one extremely seedy adult website that was hosting a watchable rip.
Now, if you’ve seen
Rocky Horror, you might be familiar with the particular campy, queer, sexed-up aura that oozes out of every frame and is interlaced within every song. And seeing
Rocky Horror and
Thundercrack! described almost as cinematic cousins online, I figured that might be the same vibe here, but no.
Thundercrack! is an exceedingly bizarre, shamelessly irreverent and disgustingly pornographic black and white fever trip of a movie, and not in any of the fun ways that
Rocky Horror is. It is just 160 minutes of tacky, sleazy pulp, rife with cheesy sexual innuendo, cringy dialogue, hammy acting and batshit sub-plots.
The
Old Dark House parallels are evident from the jump, with a spooky old house, a torrential late-night rainstorm, a motley crew of travelers and a horny, unhinged host set to greet all of them. A variety of shenanigans quickly ensue, many of them resulting in - or happening during! - sexual acts.
I like to think of myself as pretty open-minded in terms of what I’ll watch, and I think that going into this viewing, I honestly thought that it would be funny. I really did want to have a good time, regardless of any sleaziness I might encounter. But instead, I just found myself massively uncomfortable. It’s not too hard for me to imagine this movie playing well to the right audience, especially in a group setting at some underground public screening or something similar. I, however, just wasn’t feeling it, and maybe that’s because I watched it alone, or maybe it’s just my personal problem to deal with, but no part of this picture ever landed for me. I didn’t laugh, I didn’t feel any hints of eroticism, and while I definitely felt weirded out at points, I was never outright scared by anything.
I know that earlier I called the rip of this that I was able to find online “watchable,” but that was really me being generous. I know that there has been a restoration of this film completed within the past decade, but that was not the version I was able to get my hands on. And I get that the picture quality is not supposed to be immaculate here (it’s a low-budget X-rated film shot on 16mm), but my main gripe was the sound. The mixing is absolutely atrocious, with garbled line delivery and blown out musical cues, plus zero subtitles to help you out. All of this might have been another contributing factor to my lack of enjoyment, but in the end I think
Thundercrack! was simply not my cup of tea.
I can’t in good conscience recommend this to anyone, but one thing I can definitively say is that I have never seen anything else like it … and hopefully I never will again.
