Inspired by a recent post in this forum, I would like some help identifying a couple of movies I saw in the past that I can’t remember the name of. Since this seems to be a common request, it would be great if other people uses this thread for the same purpose.
First movie - I really doubt if anyone could get this one as I’m going by very little, but I’d really like to know. I only caught a small portion of this movie but it stuck with me because it had some of the worst acting I’ve ever seen. The movie had to do with people stealing organs for transplants for rich people. It was very low budget and was probably from the 80s or early 90s. One of the characters was a stereotypical cowboy type, I think he was the protagonist but I’m not sure. There was also a big-haired blonde woman. There was a shootout in a parking lot near the end of the movie. My parents rented it on videocasette around the mid-90s. Sorry that I don’t have more than this to go on.
Second movie - This one is from the 70s or early 80s, saw it as a young kid on HBO. There’s a humanoid monster, I think it’s supposed to be an alien, stalking people in the woods. It kills people by throwing organic discs at them that grow tentacles into the persons body after they stick to the target.
And finally, a book or short story. I read this in the early 80s, I believe. I thought it was a book, but it may have been a short story in a collection. It was told from the perspective of a rat (or maybe some other rodent, but I think it was a rat). The rat belonged to a teenaged boy who had a lot of other animals and performed sadistic “experiments” on them. The rat was unusually intelligent, I’m pretty sure it was the only intelligent animal in the story. There are two details I can remember. One is the rat saying that the boy kept trying to get him to mate with a female rat, but he wouldn’t (I think because he knew his progeny would be killed sadistically), and that the narrator rat would instead kill any female put in his cage. The second was one of the “experiments” that the boy performed, where he took several kittens and attached their feet to a cookie sheet, then baked them in an oven to see which would die last. I’ve asked about this book before in other forums, and people keep suggesting a book about rats that lived in a lab, but I know this is not the right one, for one thing all the animals in the suggestion were anthropomorphised, and I know for sure that the experimenter was not a legitimate scientist, but a sadistic child or teenager.
The movie wasn’t “Coma”, but “Doctor Rat” may just be my book, which is weird. Someone had suggested that before, but I read a synopsis and it didn’t seem to fit - I didn’t remember any other anthropomorphic animals, and I was certain that the story did not take place in an actual lab, so I didn’t think this was a match - but in one of the reviews I just found of “Doctor Rat” it mentions the kittens taped to a tray.
It’s looking like I either have seriously mixed up memories about the book (I seem to remember the rat referring to the torturer as “The Boy” and the kitten torture taking place in a kitchen), or I read a story by someone who had read Doctor Rat and who stole the idea of kittens taped to a tray.
Could the first movie be Parts: The Clonus Horror? It was covered by MST3K and effectively remade recently as The Island. The original has Peter Graves in it:
I was just going to suggest Clonus too, although I don’t remember a shoot-out in a parking lot. Of course, that doesn’t mean there wasn’t one. I’ve blocked most of that movie from my memory, thank God.
WIthout Warning (1980) The first victim is a young David Caruso. This is a movie about an alien who comes to earth to hunt Earthlings for game. In one scene, you even see where he is storing his trophies. Sound familiar??? Well, how about this: The same actor who portrayed the “Predator,” Kevin Peter Hall, also portrayed this alien hunter.
ETA: I believe you don’t see a full body shot of this alien hunter until the very end of the movie. Earlier, you just see the disks being flung.
I would also present this list of the most frequently asked about “What is this movie?” suspects: