THE UNNATURAL

Second medical thriller from Nayes (Gargoyles, 2001): a gross-out horror tale admirable for its detailed medical procedures and conspicuous tweaking of slasher-genre clichés.

A lonely woman who survives a brutally disgusting assault (she’s found covered with yucky stuff from a sewer) in a bad part of Los Angeles emits a genuine “bloodcurdling scream” in a hospital emergency room and drops dead when she relives the incident in her dreams. Then, Vicki Zambisi, who’s undergone several surgical operations to repair her deformed skull, breaks into an old creepy boarded-up hotel in the same lousy neighborhood to retrieve a memento that just might reveal the dark secret about the awful experiments conducted by the brilliant, respected, but oh-so-mad cryogenic research scientist Dr. Wesley Kovacs. Inside the hotel, she barely escapes from the sewage-encrusted slasher. In the same hospital where the slasher’s first victim died, Zambisi meets Dr. Julie Charmaine, a young, quietly competent part-time counselor for assaulted women who’s also a full-time scientist studying dreams. Charmaine has a machine that uses a supercomputer to create visual images of what people are dreaming. Simmering romance (for Charmaine: the identity of the subject of Zambisi’s former affections is a key to the plot) comes from former boxer and now devastatingly handsome Homicide Detective Matt Guardian. More women must suffer inhumanly horrible assaults in and around the creepy old hotel before the trio can retrieve a nightmarish image of the assailant and thus unmask Dr. Kovacs’s insane scheme and discover that the not-quite-human monster is only looking for love.

Despite his gratingly earnest introduction about the value of cautionary tales, Nayes doesn’t so much take on science gone amok as grotesquely revisit classic B-movie shocker scenes.