‘Luther the Geek’ is a home invasion horror picture with the DNA of a slasher firmly wedged inside it. And while I cant say it’s the most ‘involved’ film i’ve ever sat through, it definitely has a lot of personality that it brings to the table on top of a hearty amount of shock imagery…Put it this way, I understand why Troma picked this one up for distribution.

The plot of the film is kind of overly simple really. We open with a brief introduction to the concept of a ‘Geek’ these were people at Carnivals and Fairgrounds who’d quite literally debase themselves for money, booze or a combination of the two…Basically, they’d do whatever it took to earn their keep and generally the centerpiece of a ‘Geek’s’ arsenal was the show stopping finale in which they’d bite the head off a chicken.

The opening sets up in the early 1930’s as a drunk and angry mob swarm a barn thats holding the local Carnivals ‘Geek’ behind bars. they wanna see a show, so they toss a chicken in there and the ‘Geek’ does what he does best. Unfortunatley while the shows going on a small boy called ‘Luther’ gets knocked into by a drunken reveller and ends up smashing his face on the wheel of the cage that the ‘Geek’ is trapped in.

Luther smashes all his teeth out, and after making a sort of ‘knowing’ look to the ‘Geek’ he’s whisked away from the scene. We then flash forward to the present day (1989) and Luther appears to have been in prison for 20 years after a violent string of biting offenses, he’s up for parole and his doctor makes a good enough case that he’s reformed, that he’s let go.

This proves to be a mistake, as pretty much immediatley on leaving, Luther gets razor sharp metal teeth implants, and heads out into the city. He has ZERO filter, so he pretty much does what he wants…and he can only communicate through clucks and wails. After stealing from a restaurant and eating raw eggs in the supermarket while being shouted at. He eventually spots a young woman leaving the store and decides to follow her.

It turns out she owns a house out in the middle of farm country in a very secluded part of town, where her Daughter and her boyfriend are staying while on a break from college.

Aaaaaannd the rest of the movie is just a very surreal home invasion flick, with Luther tying up the mother and stalking the perimeter of the house picking off people who come to visit one by one, all the while the cops have a high alert call to bring Luther back in, but…with them being movie cops…Columbo they aint.

And really? at it’s core. This is just a fairly generic slasher/home invasion pic that happens to have an eccentric flourish in the casting. The scripts decent enough, but it is a little bit on the thin side plot wise, especially once we get to the house and the film locks into ‘luther stalks around, finds someone, kills someone, the family find the corpse, dissassociate, go into hiding, luther stalks around again’ terratory. Which does eat up a big chunk of the latter half of the 2nd act and most of the 3rd…

Also compounding issues, on top of their not being much in the way of actual meaty plot here, the characters are all written circumstantially…They hit every generic ‘wrong thing for a character to do in a slasher picture’ trope going…from running upstairs when they should be running out the front door, to trying to attack someone at arms range with a rifle longer than the persons body. To saying ‘I’ll be right back’ to trying to physically untie someone from a bed, when a pair of scissors would have done the job in seconds. If you can think of the wrong way to do something, the characters in this movie will have tried it as the only option.

This results in LONG periods of intense eye rolling, and by the 3rd act I did end up clockwatching a bit as I felt it’d overstayed its welcome by not developing past the ‘stalking around’ section of its scripting.

It equally isnt a particularly good look to your movie when all the women in your film are either incredibly incompitent for most of the runtime, sex objects, or screaming or crying for men to come and help them do stuff. I wouldnt go as far as to say this film has a mysoginistic streak to it. But (in my opinion) theres definitely some uncomfortable rumblings going on in the background of this thing.

What DOES save this film though is it’s pacing, its a zippy little number in that regard and while it does get repetative towards the end, the gore and fight scenes do help to *just about* keep you watching, even if you’re just starting to drift away.

Equally, all the characters in this, while incompetent. ARE interesting to some degree. Whether its through eccentricity or just being quite endearing characters, I feel they really helped save the film. they’re bright, animate and all of them get at least a couple of strange scenes to work in which really helps pep this thing up a fair bit.

The direction here is nice, crisp and clean, It reminded me stylistically of ‘Mikey’ for a reason I havent yet fully placed, just the way it was put together and looks really put my headspace into that films style…But! its competent, there seems to have been good communication between the director, crew and cast and the end results are a solid work, if not a *tad* generic. I’d have been interested to see a more styalised take, as they seemed to have tried really hard to get a ‘natural’ look to all there scenes, rather than anything outlandish.

The cine too is solid enough, we have a good variety of B-roll, the sequences are well structure, flow nicely and have good breathing space, composition can be a tad spotty here and there, but its way more hits than misses and, while it is a little generic in terms of its looks, its a solid end product that I think succeeds on the brief being asked.

The performances are where this thing really shines and is pretty much the biggest reason to check this out. Edward Terry as ‘Luther’ is a cinematic FORCE. Playing a character thats running on near pure instinct, Edward really gives it his all, delivering some of the grossest and enthralling moments of this picture. He’s animate, aggressive and relentless and I really enjoyed his piece here.

Of course the best unsettling performances need a straight man/woman to play off of in order to maximise the obscenity. and we have Joan Roth as Hilray for that offering, and she’s absolutely perfect for the role, giving a genuinely terrified range that runs from concern to outright terror to a loss into insanity herself. shes equally animated, utilises her set space well and comes across perfectly in this thing. The pair are easily worth the price of admission alone.

I cant say you’ll find something truely *unique* in ‘Luther the Geek’, it’s by the numbers in almost every regard, but those character performances punctuated with some genuinely unpleasent gore scenes and its generally unsettling tone were enough to keep me more or less invested. While it didnt fully win me over, I enjoyed this one, and i’d say it was at least worth checking out once.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/luther-the-geek/