Ruptured Review: Spontaneous Combustion

Country of origin- USA
Year of release- 1990 
Director- Tobe Hooper 
Stars- Brad Dourif, Cynthia Bain, Jon Cypher

The film begins in 1954, with a fairly irritating young couple called Brian and Peggy. The two of them are involved in a secret government project to attempt to develop a vaccine to protect people from atomic radiation in the event of a nuclear war. Brain and Peggy are given the vaccine and lock themselves in a bunker in order to protect themselves from the blast, but not the fallout from an actual atomic bomb that the military plan to drop almost on them in order to find out if the vaccine works. I don’t know about you, but isn’t it just a bit over kill to detonate a gigantic atomic bomb in order to test whether or not a vaccine has worked on two people? Surly they could have tested that in a lab! The test goes well and both Brian and Peggy are unharmed. Soon after the test Peggy finds out she is pregnant and nine months later gives birth to a surprisingly un-mutated boy who they name Sam. However, just a few days after the birth of their son both Peggy and Brian simultaneously spontaneously combust with much screaming and a great deal of dripping flesh. This scene is kind of expected considering the name of the film, but the way the scene played out it did catch me by surprise.

Thirty four years after his Mother and Father went up like a hot air balloon powered by Glenn Beck, Sam is happily working in a high school and is living a perfectly normal life with his girlfriend Lisa. Sam is brilliantly played by the ever underrated Brad Dourif who puts in a great performance in this one. Sam’s normal happy life soon comes crashing down around him however as he begins to realise that people he knows are beginning to spontaneously combust soon after meeting with him. Eventually Sam realises that he is the inadvertent cause of the deaths, and that he himself is at risk of spontaneously combusting as huge fire spewing sores begin to open up on his body. As Sam struggles to save himself he finds that he is in fact the focus of a major conspiracy that goes right to the top.

This film has a lot of things going for it. Firstly, Brad Dourif playing the ever increasingly frantic and paranoid Sam is perfect in the role, both his bizarre physical acting and his fun line delivery really added to the film. Secondly, this film has some very good practical effects that range from molten flesh to full body burn, all of which are pretty well executed and fun. Not to mention a laugh out loud cameo appearance from John Landis who meets a rather nasty end in this one. However the film does have some major issues. It was shot in eight weeks, and was the only feature film from Tobe Hooper after The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 until Night Terrors in 1993. It has a palpable sense of a developing lack of care as the film progresses, this is shown by its ever more incomprehensible plot and its completely out of the blue character development that is odd to say the least. It also has a number of plot holes that make the last 20 minutes drag a little. Overall considering the quality of Hooper’s previous work such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre this is a poor effort on his part. I think this is still worth a watch though, despite its problems, so I will give it 6/10 just because of how great Brad Dourif is in this one.