Late Night Classics – Spontaneous Combustion

The enigma of spontaneous human combustion (SHC) is considered the most bizarre and frightening of all the phenomena in the world of the unexplained and the unknown. Some believe that stories of SHC are only urban legends, eerie tales of people bursting into flames that never really happened to real people. But this is not the case. Urban legends happen to a friend of a friend, but are really untraceable back to any true original narrator of the event. In the case of spontaneous human combustion, one is left with the charred remains and ashes of individuals who were once fully living, breathing, feeling human beings. [Unexplainedstuff.com]

After his three-picture deal with Cannon Films, Tobe Hooper burned for a comeback as he saddled up for a low budget return to his roots after being lambasted from both fans and critics with his big-budget flops Lifeforce and Invaders From Mars. I have always been a Hooper backer, and I have never really understood why so much venom has been spit his way. Has he made bad movies? Of course he has. But like so many of his genre cohorts have found out, sometimes you can never get away from the movie[s] that put you on the map and there is always the tendency to compare the apples and oranges on his resume. Tobe will forever be linked to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Poltergeist, one of the scariest films ever made and one of the highest grossest fright flicks of all-time. I am the polar opposite when it comes to his catalog of films. I think of Salem’s Lot, Toolbox Murders, and The Funhouse – the overlooked and under appreciated work that is better than the majority of garbage that we are fed these days.

Tobe Hooper grew up in the atomic age and he uses that as his jumping off point for the 1990 horror film Spontaneous Combustion, starring Academy Award Nominee Brad Dourif. In what could be seen as a metaphor for being torched by the Hollywood system, the cigar-chompin’, one-time Dr. Pepper lovin’ Texan co-wrote and directed the first motion picture that I can think of based on the phenomena of Spontaneous Human Combustion. It is the kind of weirdness that you would see in Weekly World News, where there were fabricated stories about people catching on fire and there were actual police photos to prove their validity. It is all about as real as Sasquatch or Bigfoot, but the arcane subjext matter was right up Hooper’s alley and looked like the project to reignite his career.

In the Spring of 1955, a happily married couple volunteer to be test subjects at a hydrogen bomb testing site in the Nevada desert. They appear to escape the experiment unscathed as the levels of radition in their bone marrow come back normal. The vaccine, or anti-radition shots that they were administered every day for months before the blast seems to have worked as the two become the first nuclear family. A monkey wrench gets thrown into the mix as the couple find out they are expecting a bouncing baby boy, who is born with a strange birthmark on his hand. The twosome inexplicably catch on fire and are turned into instant charcoal – a clean kill, a “fire from heaven”.

Lewis Orlander is the chairman of modern technology and has been watching over Sam [Brad Dourif], short for Samson, the name of the project, since he was born. Sam has been secretly matched up with a girl who was conceived during the last above ground test in 1965. He is not having the best birthday as fire flies from his finger and sparks from his hand. A vision of his beginnings sends Sam on a quest to find out the truth, and what he discovers is that they were brought together in hopes that they would produce their own child and they could learn to control “The cleanest killing system on Earth” and have it  become “The world’s most sophisticated nuclear weapon”.

My favorite parts of Spontaneous Combustion are the period piece snapshots that encapsulate the atomic era that I was not around for. In the documentary The American Nightmare, Tobe spoke of his fear of that particular time of his life by saying, “And so I started asking my mother and my father, is the world going to come to an end? I didn’t know if death was going to fall from the skies any time.” For my generation, we were part of wave two in the 80′s when super power Russia struck fear in the hearts of Americans with the threat of World War III. I vividly remember watching The Day After on television and gasped at the thought of civilization being eradicated by politics. The recreated news reel at the beginning of Spontaneous Combustion shows you the fear that rocked the nation as bunkers seemed to be the only safe haven from doomsday.

Perhaps still feeling like he needed to rely on special effects to get his story across, Hooper adds an eclectic mix of pyrotechnics to the plot that seem like rehashes from his past flicks. The light show opticals from Lifeforce are strong and overpower the foundation that was set up in the prologue. That and some nonsensical fluff about Sam becoming one with a nuclear power plant almost derails Spontaneous Combustion into bad movie territory. If you are a cinema snob then move on because this is a forgotten Late Night Classics’ spectacle that should be part of every horror connoisseurs library.

Mick and Cynthia Garris have cameos as patrons in a restaurant, John Landis as a radio station technician, and Tobe Hooper is smoking a stogie in a bathroom as Brad Dourif strolls by.

Jason Bene

I'm just an average man/ With an average life/ I work from nine to five/ Hey, hell, I pay the price/ All I want is to be left alone/ In my average home/ But why do I always feel/ Like I'm in the twilight zone

More Posts - Website

Follow Me: