Cellar Dweller (1988) was an 80's horror classic in my book.

It was good fun, it had an interesting plot and it's short running time meant that it never outstayed it's welcome, i love 80's horrors and this was one of the memorable ones, for it had a really cool monster, and it starred Jeffrey Combs, and thats a big plus indeed!!! If you like cool low budget monster movies then i highly recommend this fun classic from the late 80's, so if you haven't seen it then i suggest you get on ebay and see if there's any copies on there, if so then go for it!!!! I also recommend Monster in the Closet, that was another fun 80's horror with a cool monster.

My score for the Cellar Dweller: 8/10

When I was young, I wanted to be a professional comic artist. I practised and practised into the wee small hours, honing my skills with brush and ink, and I got pretty good, but, even so, I knew deep down that my work still wasn't good enough. I was, however, a damn sight better than Whitney Taylor (Debrah Farentino),the comic artist in Cellar Dweller, whose crappy drawings (and equally bad lettering) leave an awful lot to be desired. The film starts off promisingly enough, with '50s artist Colin Childress (Jeffrey Combs) inking some pretty good horror comic art before being killed by his creation, the Cellar Dweller, which comes to life off the page. But when the action moves to the present day, with Whitney joining an artist colony to resurrect Childress's monster, the standard of work goes way downhill. It's impossible to believe that anyone would give her childish drawings more than a cursory look.

Sadly, the script and direction for this movie are as laughable as Whitney's art, with no scares and zero atmosphere, while director John Carl Buechler wisely keeps his titular monster hidden in the shadows for the most part. The plot makes little sense, Whitney unwittingly controlling the monster at first by drawing it's actions in her comic strips, but, later on, the monster acting of its own free will, the comic pages materialising out of thin air. Whitney is also able to bring dead people back to life by drawing them, but kills them again by burning the pages. And why does she bring Cellar Dweller back to reality, albeit in chains. What purpose does that serve?

About the only good thing about this mess of a monster movie is a juicy decapitation and some munching of victims' body parts. If only Buechler had taken a leaf out of my book and just admitted to himself that he wasn't good enough, he would have saved us from his subsequent crap-fests like Ghoulies Go To College and The Curse of the Forty-Niner.

A mildly amusing title and a cameo appearance from Jeffrey Combs (dressed in his RE-ANIMATOR coat, apparently, and appearing for ten minutes at the beginning before going off to cash his pay cheque) are the best thing about this otherwise appalling movie from Empire - so at least with that company making it, you can't say you were surprised. Once again the director turns out to be John Carl Buechler, who is quickly becoming one of my most hated directors of all time - sure, the man makes good special effects, but must all effects men try directing too? It's obvious he has no talent yet still he churns these movies out.

The plot is a non-existent excuse to throw a few bad actors together and have them get picked off one by one by a huge slimy demon that somehow lives in the cellar due to a comic book - childish isn't the word for it. As usual for the genre, there's plenty of poor humour, false scares and naked women being menaced by big monsters. The demon is actually quite an effective-looking monster so it's a shame that its not appearing in a better movie, and it just gets relegated to lurking around in the cellar, roaring. The violence is surprisingly kept to a minimum, and I think limited to a singular bloody decapitation scene and some severed body parts. Meanwhile, the cast is made up of boring unknowns, aside from the presence of Yvonne De Carlo who enjoys hamming it up as an unpleasant landlady - whatever happened to her career?

The biggest enjoyment I had from watching this movie came when I realised that it only ran for seventy-something minutes and it was nearly over. It's one of those films which you get the feeling was only created in order to make money - neither the cast nor the crew seem to have any interest in it whatsoever, instead going through the motions and picking up their pay cheque at the end of it all. This makes it nigh on impossible for the viewer to be interested in it either. A cheap, pointless, shallow piece of drivel.