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Rudyard Kipling, Mary Shelley and H.G. Wells are dragged into the long line of folks who have their names tarnished thanks to the machinations of Sterling Entertainment and whatever sometimes enjoyable garbage they decide to unleash upon the world. The cheap creature hijinks of the Things series takes its inspiration from well-respected authors and the results are just as charmingly dreary as one would probably expect. Opening credits feature moments of gore, nudity and budget monsters spliced in between footage shot in one of those side rooms filled with actual antiques you find in a secondhand store. Crystal Gazing adapted from The Crystal Egg by Wells is the first up and works as our wraparound segment. An antiques dealer would much rather be writing science fiction stories and his wife is frustrated that she ended up with a gigantic loser. The only reason he’s running the store is because his mother-in-law left it to her daughter. A fresh batch of antiques come in from an estate sale where the family was torn apart by some unknown murderer. The former owner’s mysterious practices are purely conjecture but when the brow-beaten man cames across a postcard of a masked dominatrix in the box of crap, it catches his interest. The box glows green and Winston discovers a large crystal that zaps his bologna sandwich and then shows him an image of an alien world. A man comes in looking for a gift to give to the fiancée he’s just pissed off and buys the fetish card that was in the box (not for her, that old timey smut is for him). This leads us to our second story Cold Feet which is Shelley’s The Transformation dressed up as a cheapjack erotic thriller full of people you have no interest in seeing naked. The groom-to-be becomes obsessed with the masked woman in the photo card he stumbled upon, even fantasizing about her when he goes to bang his future-wife at a seedy motel. We also learn that Eric stood her up at the alter before and the rough sex he tries to initiate ain’t her thing. Eric, my guy, be better. She leaves and Eric heads to a nearby stripclub to get a private lap dance. Jesus. This dude sucks. He confesses to the stripper that if he could just have one night with the kind of woman in the postcard, he’d be able to dedicate himself to one gal. After some sage-like stripper advice, Eric leaves and gets spotted by his future father-in-law. The next day he visits the home of his in-laws. He fantasizes some more about fetish girl and future-dad threatens him to show up at the rehearsal or else and then lets him know that if he fucks up that it’ll be it for him in this town. The argument escalates and Eric has a vision of himself murdering the man and then flashes of the murdered corpses of his lady and her momma. Eric rushes out and encounters a female monster who looks like she’s cosplaying as The Beast from the Linda Hamilton and Ron Perlman show. He takes a header off the top of a parking garage and wakes up in the chamber of that fetish chick. Plenty of artwork involving massive dongs is shown and Eric pays for his transgressions… along with the family he could have had. Good riddance. The antiques dealer keeps feeding his crystal and an alien creature shows up in the crystal, moving around like a kid pretending to be a monkey. He begins cracking and his wife sells the crystal to some New Age woman she knows. The crystal zaps the woman and she vanishes. Crap-film regular Randal Malone shows up as a crime boss looking to collect some protection money and when someone comes in looking for a very important and dangerous piece of jewelry that shouldn’t have been sold in the estate sale, the criminals decide to take it for themselves. The gold wolf’s head ring transforms the obnoxious crime boss into a basement quality werewolf… and that’s Beastiality which is Kipling’s The Mark of the Beast presented as an incredibly unfunny comedy performed by a dinner theater troop comprised of a head trauma ward. Inept but when not being abrasive, it’s the kind of a inept I got a soft spot for. Finally, our wraparound comes to a close when that weird little alien-troll things makes its way out of the crystal. A mostly annoying time with some small bits of trashy charm.
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