The Three Weirdest Horror Climaxes
Revisiting A Boy and His Dog, Sleepaway Camp, and The Wizard of Gore
Jul 28, 2008 Nicholas Michael Grant
These three movies are amongst the best B-Horror you'll find. Each of them contains fantastic absurdities and bewildering moments throughout, but are propelled into the immortal B-Movie Valhallaplex by their earth-shatteringly brilliant climaxes.
3. A Boy and His Dog
This post-apocalyptic epic explodes into full-blown weirdness halfway through. The first 45 minutes seem like a little bit grittier, more independent version of Mad Max. However, when the boy travels underground to rescue a girl (leaving his dog to the desert), the setting and genre shift. The landscape is no longer desert and junkyard cities, but a bizarre underground cavern populated by people who act like dustbowl era Mississippi aristocracy and dress like Louis XIV’s courtiers.
After absconding with the girl- who happened to be the mayor’s daughter, and an evil schemer to boot- the boy returns to the desert to find his dog almost dead of hunger. The dog tells the boy to leave him behind. The girl tells him to leave the dog behind. The dog and the boy look at each other, and cut to the two eating shish kabob with the girl conspicuously absent. As they walk off into the sunset, the dog comments that she “didn’t have very good taste, anyway.”
This classic has one of the most shocking and unexpected images in horror at its climax. The plot is pretty conventional: counselors and kids at a summer camp are picked off one by one until the killer is revealed and dealt with. What really primes the audience for the ending are the small surreal touches that consistently pop up throughout the movie.
The casual way that the protagonist’s father is killed by a passing motorboat, the uncannily realistic ease with which the preteens curse, and the awkward cruelty of all the campers are all a little unsettling. The audience isn’t quite sure what to expect as the campers converge on the killer, but they certainly weren’t expecting a full frontal vision of (female, underage) Angela Baker’s male genitals, nor the amazing and irreproducible expression on his/her face.
Among the amazing things the seventies handed down to the present, The Wizard of Gore is perhapsgthe most insane. This movie, by horror auteur Herschel Gordon Lewis, is about a stage wizard, Montag the Magnificent, who performs unsettlingly realistic “illusions.” These performances end peacefully enough, but afterwards their effects trickle into the real world: he saws a woman in half who spontaneously mangles in a diner afterward; he punches a hole through a woman with a machine press and the next morning she turns up with a hole in her stomach.
At the climax Montag successfully hypnotizes a television audience, calls forth infernal fire, but is thwarted by a reporter and her nerdy boyfriend. Or is he? As the triumphant couple sip wine after the fact, the boyfriend pulls off a mask and reveals himself to be Montag in disguise. The twists don’t stop there, though- the reporter cackles that she is a more powerful magician than Montag could ever hope to be. Suddenly the camera goes kaleidoscopic and the scene swirls around in crazy fly-vision. The movie resets to its opening monologue and the audience is left baffled, confused, and amazed.
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