Main cast: Eva Habermann (Nurse Patricia), George Hardy (Dr Guy), Greg Sestero (Bill), Terri Merritt Bennett (Della), Jason Douglas (Al), Katurah Brown (Tammie), Torren Davis (Clarence), Gene Jones (Eugene Sherman), Francesca Santoro (Carol), and Brianna Anderson (Patient One)
Director: Tyler Russell
Cyst is an anomaly of sorts in that, these days, horror movies tend to fall under one of a few categories—post-apocalyptic zombie films, creepy old house full of jump scares and a kid that sees and interact with ghosts, remakes and reboots of old cult favorites—and this one doesn’t fall under any of these categories. It’s more of a throwback to gross-out horror comedies of the 1980s; think Basket Case and the rest of Frank Henenlotter’s oeuvre.
Unfortunately, this one is neither gory nor funny.
Sure, George Hardy of Troll 2 infamy tried, as his mad doctor archetype Dr Guy is an outright lunatic that lives and breathes over the top, manic antics. He is determined to have his cyst-removal machine, The Get Gone, patented, but his past attempts resulted in disastrous demonstration before the patent officers and a scar on Nurse Patricia’s arm. His latest effort to secure that patent sees him injecting some kind of growth serum on his intern Preston’s back, in response to the patent officers’ mocking complaint that the cyst is too small to be noteworthy, and the machine goes haywire as Patricia predicted.
Preston dies a horrible death, of course, but what no one really could predict is that the cyst on his body becomes a living, sentient, hungry creature that is on the prowl for victims. Ooh.
This movie is one wasted opportunity. First off, it assembles a cast of who’s who when it comes to infamous cult classics, but wastes these actors. Why put Greg Sestero from The Room with a guy from Troll 2, as well as German genre staple Eva Habermann that was also in a troll movie, and just waste poor Mr Sestero just like that? Poor Bill doesn’t do anything here aside from earnestly flirting with Patricia before meeting an embarrassing death!
The whole thing being a missed opportunity extends to the rest of the movie. The “gore” here consists of Dr Guy maliciously causing pus from his patient’s cysts to spray onto Patricia. There are only so many times the movie can repeat this gag before the whole thing becomes an eye-rolling testament of the creative bankruptcy of the screenwriters, one of which being of course the director himself.
The gore isn’t good, either. The cyst monster is far cuter than it has any right to be, and since this is a comedy, cute is fine. However, budget limitations also mean that this one isn’t going to do gory things to its victims. These victims are dragged off-screen to be killed, or they just stand there screaming as the giant pus monster prop is just squeezed against them while fake slime is poured all over the poor actors. The whole thing isn’t scary at all, although these scenes are very likely high class pornographic for certain sections of society that enjoy getting off on scenes of slime-like stuff poured or sprayed all over people.
Most annoying is Patricia. This movie is set in 1961, so perhaps she doesn’t have that many job offers available to her should she quit, but my goodness. This nurse doesn’t just let let Dr Guy mercilessly mock and humiliate her in front of everyone, she actually enables such behavior by constantly allowing him to treat her that way and then crawling back for more. When she thinks she can pressure him by announcing her resignation, he unsurprisingly starts mocking her having her last day in front of everyone they come across. She lets him treat her like crap, and she seems shocked that he can’t wait to be rid of her.
Throughout this movie, she keeps letting him treat her like she is subhuman to him, and she finally “stands up to him” when he tries to pawn her off to the cyst monster for cheap laughs. It’s hard to root for a final girl that is such a pathetic doormat that spends nearly the entire movie enabling her emotional abuser.
At any rate, Cyst is a massive disappointment because it doesn’t know what to do with itself for the most part, and when it thinks it does, the result is far more juvenile than comedic. I’d recommend this to the folks that have a fetish for people getting sluiced and sprayed upon with slimy fluids that resemble… you know, and suggest that everyone else should look for something else to watch.
