Cody Hamman has Film Appreciation for the 1991 horror comedy There's Nothing Out There.
When I was about ten years old, my bedroom situation got an upgrade. I moved into the medium-sized bedroom in my three bedroom home - the room that had originally belonged to my older sister and, after she moved out, had then been passed on to my older brother. My brother hadn't moved out, he had just moved into the basement, but that still meant it was my turn to move from the smaller bedroom to the medium one. I got a new, bigger bed. A waterbed! And for the first time, I got a TV in my room, one which had both a VCR and cable hooked up to it. I was living like a king, staying up beyond my bedtime and watching movies. One of my fondest movie-watching memories from that time in the mid-'90s is when I caught a late night showing of writer/director Rolfe Kanefsky's feature directorial debut, the horror comedy There's Nothing Out There.
There's Nothing Out There may not be a widely well known film, but the fact that I saw it on cable at all is proof that it was an indie success story. Kanefsky was just 20 years old when he made the film on a budget of $350,000. How does a 20 year old get $350,000 to make a movie? His parents taking out a mortgage on their home was a major help, and that's not the only contribution Kanefsy's father made to the project. Victor Kanefsky also produced and edited the film.
The film has a very cliché horror movie set-up, and that's the point. The story centers on a group of six teenagers who decide to spend their Spring Break at a cabin in the woods. Once there, they get up to the usual shenanigans (shenanigans that involve quite a bit of nudity), but then their good times are interrupted when they start getting knocked off one-by-one by an otherworldly creature. Genre fans have seen this sort of thing play out again and again... but what makes There's Nothing Out There stand out from the pack is the fact that one of the teens has seen all of the same horror movies the viewer has. He knows he and his pals are in trouble before they even reach the cabin, he picks up on the warning signs, and he spends the entire first day at the cabin trying to convince his companions that they need to leave before something bad happens. Of course, they don't listen, they even go so far as to toss the poor guy in the basement, they get so annoyed by his behavior. They don't realize they're living in a horror movie until it's too late.
The horror fan of the bunch is Mike, played by Craig Peck. Peck delivers a great, very amusing performance, and the Mike character is what made There's Nothing Out There become one of my favorite horror comedies as I watched it that late night in the '90s. Although I was very young at the time, I had already been a horror fan for several years by the time I saw this movie. I had watched the movies Mike was familiar with, I knew the clichés, and I enjoyed seeing a horror fan get dropped into a horror situation.
Slashers have always been my favorite horror sub-genre, so if I had made a movie like this I probably would have taken a slasher approach to it, sort of like Scream would do a few years after this. I know Kanefsky feels like Scream, another self-aware horror movie with characters who have seen and discuss horror movies, copied his idea, with the Randy character being a rip-off of Mike, but I don't think they step on each other's toes too much. They're different enough from each other that they can each be enjoyed in their own way. Regardless, Kanefsky made his film more unique by not having a masked slasher running around. The threat to the teens in this film is a little, slimy, tentacled alien creature that blasts beams of green light from its eyes. If this green light hits a person in their eyes, the creature can take control of their mind. At least Mike is able to figure out that the thing doesn't like having shaving lotion sprayed in its face.
While Peck steals the show and Mike is by far the best character, Kanefsky was able to assemble a solid supporting cast around Peck. Each cast member stands out in their own way, and Bonnie Bowers really shines when her character Stacy steps up to become the heroine alongside our hero Mike - and she takes on this heroine gig despite the fact that she's stuck wearing nothing but a bikini for a large portion of the film's action scenes.
I was blown away by There's Nothing Out There when I first saw it, I'll never forget how much I enjoyed catching this movie on cable, and I have continued to enjoy it every time I've revisited it in the decades since. I hold this film in such high regard, it's one of the first movies I showed blog contributor Priscilla when I started going to Brazil to visit her. Watching the movie with a Brazilian added another level of entertainment to it, because one of the characters happens to be a Brazilian foreign exchange student - Brazilian actress Claudia Flores as Janet. Priscilla speaks English so well that she sounds like it could have been her first language. Janet's English isn't quite on the same level.
A fun piece of trivia about There's Nothing Out There is that it had its midwest premiere, with Kanefsky in attendance, at a twenty-four hour theatrical horror marathon in Columbus, Ohio in October of 1991. Other movies being shown at that marathon included Near Dark, Society, Two Evil Eyes, Fright Night, and Carrie. I wasn't at that particular marathon, but years later I had a decade-plus streak of going to theatrical horror marathons in Columbus. At these marathons, I would occasionally pictures from that '91 marathon where There's Nothing Out There was shown, and it always made me think back on my first viewing of the film. It also made me wish I had been at that '91 screening.
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