John's Horror Banana-nanza Episode Fifty-Three : There's Nothing Out There

Horror comedy has been done to death. When Wes Craven made "Scream" and it was promptly parodied by "Scary Movie", horror comedy effectively parodied itself. But long before any of these films ate their own crap and crapped out their eaten crap, (yes, it is that disgusting) a young filmmaker created what is essentially the best kind of these movies.

Rolfe Kanefsky's "There's Nothing Out There" takes every convention; slashers, aliens, monsters ; and puts them all together with a main character sure he's seen so many horror movies that everything is obvious to him. The character Mike reminds me of me. He sees a broken down car on the way to a vacation house in the woods, far away from everyone, and warns his friends they need to turn around. Ignoring him, they arrive at the house where he remarks, "Name a horror film, any horror film".

Shortly after, some teens in a van show up and jump into a nearby pond. When they ask Mike,"Isn't this the cabin by the lake?" he answers, "No. This is the house by the pond." So they leave.

There is a monster-alien thing running around, and it kills one of the kids late at night after leaving ooze on the frying pans inside. Mike dresses in sports gear with a bat and goes to kill it, but accidently interrupts his friend having sex and is locked in the basement for the night.

The rest of the movie is pretty predictable, but that's the point. There's a lot of fourth wall breaking, as one of the characters actually uses the boom mic to swing out of the way of the creature, and Mike actually looks at the audience when asked, "So you're saying we're in a movie?"

This is the top of the horror comedies. It's unfortunate that a lot of novices to the horror genre won't get a lot of the jokes, but the humor is specially formulated specifically for that crowd. So if you love horror, but think you've seen everything, this movie is perfect for you.