Starring: Monique Van De Ven, Esmee De La Bretoniere, Kenneth Herdigein

Directed by: Rudolf Van Den Berg     Screenplay by: Leon De Winter based on an original script by Rocco Simonelli from a story by Roy Frumkes

The Story: Sometimes an impulse buy really works out better than one would expect. After all, a movie named "The Johnsons" doesn't sounds as compelling as say "The Night of the Death Demon". I only picked this movie up because the cover art looked kind of creepy and I figured it was going to be some silly movie about a family named Johnson or something like that. I'd never heard of this flick before, but I can tell you now that its pretty darn good.

I can't think of a part of this movie that I found slow or boring and its not like the flick has non-stop action or anything. Even a minor thing like mentioning a strike amongst sanitation workers early in the film has an impact on the plot later on. In Holland (I assume its Holland, this is a Dutch film) Dr. Johnson, a fairly successful man of medicine succeeds in delivering septuplets. The way this part of the movie was filmed made it difficult to know what he was doing at first....you can see he's in an operating room and the doctors there are working diligently, but its not readily apparent on what's going on. It occurred to me after the babies were born that we didn't see the mother of the children during the whole procedure. Dr. Johnson then accepts the accolades of his compatriots for such a successful operation and drives alone to a secluded spot in the woods. There he screams to an unseen force to release him. The water catches fire and the image of the evil god Xangadix, (who looks like a twisted fetus muppet) appears and ends the good doctors life.

21 years later we see Victoria Lucas, a photojournalist covering a speech by the mayor about the sanitation strike. Throughout the movie we'll see the streets of the city are filling up with unpicked up garbage bags. Victoria has a fourteen year old daughter, Emalee. Emalee has awful nightmares almost every night about blood and little bald headed boys. though she frequently wakes up screaming she seems like a normal girl and has a close relationship with her mom. Victoria is asked to take pictures of some rare kind of birds for National Geographic, an assignment that will take her to some swampy forest to accomplish. Not wanting to be home alone for several days, Emalee decides to go with her mother...it'll be a fun camping trip!

Meanwhile, Prof. Keller, all around good guy and scholar, is giving a lecture to his class when his assistant, Angela (or it Denise? Its one of those names. Hilariously, I've forgotten which it was and that's a running gag in the movie. Keller keeps getting her name confused!) tells him that they've found something extraordinary in the basement of the college. Keller hasn't the time to look at it now, he's going to meet his father for dinner. (If his father had a name other than "Dad" I didn't get it, so I'll just refer to him a "Pops" from here on) Its here we find that his father is practiced in the arts of voodoo. Thankfully, its not "movie" voodoo, so he won't be raising the dead or throwing whooshing powder into campfires. Pops is between places right now, so Keller offers to put him up for awhile. On the way home they stop at the college to see what Angela (Denise?) has found. Its a miraculous find! The lost notes and film of Henri Vidal-Naquet's doomed expedition into the dark Amazon jungle. These items were presumed lost, but instead were stored in the school unbeknownst to everybody. Vidal-Naquet's expedition was studying the Maxhitu tribe. The Maxhitu feel that they are guardians of the evil God Xangadix. Their mythology tells that Xangadix's seven sons will rape their sister and she will then give birth to a child of darkness that will plunge the world into eternal evil. They keep the fetus like god in a crystal cocoon. While watching an old film of the expedition Pops goes nuts. He tells Keller that they shouldn't watch it and that everything they've found from the expedition should be destroyed. Pops is from South America, you see and he knows the legends of Xangadix and believes them. Keller pretty much ignores his father's words. The next day however, Pops gets his hands on the trunk containing the items and has them burned to a crisp. Keller is remarkably not pissed at his father.

Keller is on his way to work the following day when he's forced into a van by two strange men. They work for De Graaf, who is some kind of government agent. De Graaf tells Keller that they need his help. He's trying to unravel the mystery of seven lunatics that are so violent they've been kept in a fortress since they were seven. At the age of seven they lived in a "kinderhaus" which I guess mean orphanage in English, but they killed sixteen other children there and painted a weird symbol in blood on the walls. The maniacs are now all 21. Keller is taken to the fortress and sees the maniacs via security cameras. They don't speak and are as he remarks "treated like animals". With good reason, since then De Graaf shows him a recording of what happened to the last poor sucker to get near them without treating them like animals. They tore the guy literally apart with their bare hands....and painted the same symbol again with his blood. Keller suspects though that De Graaf isn't telling him everything. He demands to know the whole story, or at least as much as De Graaf knows if they want his help. the seven maniacs are brothers...septuplets. De Graaf wants to know what the symbol means.

While this is going on, Victoria and Emalee are camping out in the woods to do the assignment for National Geographic. They just happen to be near the fortress. Emalee sees it in the distance and tells her mother that its the same building she sees in her nightmares. Also in her nightmares are seven naked men wearing phallic symbol hats. Victoria is spooked by this, especially when the first night in their tent Emalee has one of the nightmares an wakes up screaming. The next morning though, Emalee has her first period. Kind of a bad place for that if you ask me. In the middle of the [unwrite]ing woods!

Back in his home Keller and Angela (Denise?) study their material and find out that the symbol the maniacs paint in blood is the symbol from the Maxhitu tribe that represents Xangadix! Pops, who is in the room goes berserk again and throws most of Keller's papers into the fireplace. This Xangadix thing really bugs the old man. Keller pays a visit to the old orphanage, now a crumbling abandoned wreck and has a confrontation with De Graaf. He demands to know the truth behind the seven maniacs. The seven fruitcakes were an experiment in artificial fertilization and birth by Dr. Johnson. But the one fetus broke into seven and thus seven boys were born. Right after the monumental birth Johnson died. (we saw that at the start of the movie) And Johnson is the connection...he was the doctor for the Vidal-Naquet expedition. The Maxhitu warned that Xangadix could not be removed from them, but Vidal-Naquet stole it, thinking it would bring him fame and glory. ( Guess he watched too many Indiana Jones movies) Everyone else in the expedition died mysterious deaths days after the expedition left to return home. the ship they were on sunk right off the coast of France, and all of the materials they had with them were considered lost until now. Keller gives De Graaf his opinion....kill the seven maniacs. But the prophecy says they will rape their sister, and there is no sister...or is there? De Graaf explains that Johnson's experiment was government sponsored and the cells used to give birth to the seven maniacs came from unsuspecting and unknowing donors. So whosever DNA was used could have given birth at a later time and there could be a sister! He and Keller then try to locate the records and find out if there is and who it is.

Back in the woods, at night, Emalee wakes up and is compelled to walk to the fortress. As she approaches the walls, indoors the cells magically open themselves freeing the seven maniacs. Victoria wakes up and follows Emalee. After a short "What are you doing out here?/ I don't know" conversation the two women see the maniacs climbing the walls out of the fortress. Emalee, recognizing them from her dreams tells her mother they should run for it. And they do. The maniacs almost catch them, causing Emalee to kill one of them (in a cool ass scene). The two frightened females hop into their rubber raft and get the hell out of dodge. Now a normal person would have gone right to the police, right? not these two chicks. They go home and take a bath! The seven maniacs driven by a mysterious power follow them though.

The old hospital records are kept in a warehouse and De Graaf and Keller have an army of men searching through them to find out who the maniac's biological mother is. Pops arrives to help, in his full Witch Doctor outfit. Keller really must love his old man. I mean, here he is a respected professional, one so noteworthy that the government came to him for help, and his dad shows up dressed like he's in one of those old Three Stooges shorts when the guys were in the jungle. However, Pops says some magic words and alluva sudden one of the workers announces that he's found the file! No prizes for guessing who the mother is...its Victoria Lucas, of course, finally clarifying what we all knew anyway....Emalee is the sister the maniacs want to rape.

Surprisingly, Victoria and Emalee haven't called the police yet. They should have since the maniacs arrive at their apartment and begin their attack. Its a combination of the fact that the seven maniacs don't jump them all at once and that Victoria and Emalee actually try to defend themselves and escape instead of screaming and standing still, that they hold off the men. Keller and De Graaf rush to Victoria's home. Will they get there in time to help?

I've probably told too much already since this movie is pretty good and you should see it for yourself. The dubbing is well done and characters are believable for the most part. The only one that's a little hard to swallow is Keller. He's a cool character, and I liked him, but he seems to be a whiz kid at everything. He also looks kind of like Prince from the Purple Rain movie. The flick doesn't have a lot of gore in it, but that's not a detriment. What kills we do see are done well enough. Particularly funny in a cool way is the method that Keller uses to dispatch one of the maniacs. Watch the movie yourself and tell me that you didn't chuckle a little at it.

Best Lines:  “Thomas, I asked for interpretation of the funeral dance ritual of the Oyana, you gave me some nonsense about rap music and Madonna!” - Prof. Keller tells a student why he gave him a big fat "F" on his paper.

Are you kidding me?

1.) The subtitling in this movie is...well, just say not very good. At least its funny, though. The subtitles say something completely different from the words spoken. For instance, when someone says "This is unbelievable!" the subtitle merely reads "Holy [unwrite]!". Makes me wonder though...when movies made in English show in non-English speaking countries I'll bet the dubbing is just as hilariously bad!

2.) Guys can be real jerks, but ladies, you can be kinda cruel, too. This poor guy calls Victoria up to give her an assignment, and because they've had a date that went south she doesn't want to talk to him. So Emalee pretends Victoria isn't home, but unless this guy is deaf, he should be able to tell that Emalee is talking to Victoria! Hey, lotsa people do that but damn...they could have at least made an effort not to totally trash the guys feelings!

3.) The University must have pretty lax security. The trunk from the ill fated expedition contains irreplaceable artifacts and thus is invaluable. So Keller's father steals it and destroys the contents. How'd he get it? He must have just strolled into the University, right into whatever room they kept the trunk in (unsecured obviously unless Keller's old man is adept at picking locks) walked out carrying this big ass trunk and took it to his favorite restaurant where the cook gleefully burns the contents in the oven. And he'd have had to order a cab, so the cab driver didn't think this was strange. I won't even ask if anyone bothered to lock the trunk.

4.) Is there a doctor in the house? Really, because I want to know if Keller's statement that septuplets are prone to violent acts is an actual fact or one of those "movie facts". Regardless of which it is Keller is a Dutch version of Buckaroo Banzai! He's a professor of ethnology and as he tells De Graaf, he's also the countries leading expert on the occult and exorcisms, and he also seems to have extensive knowledge on medicine and psychology! If he could stretch he'd be Reed Richards!

5.) Those guards are overpaid. There must be at least ten different monitors aimed at the prisoners yet not one of the guards notices anything is amiss, distracted by the allure of an Laurel and Hardy movie. And here I thought I was easily entertained!

6.) Cool! When one of the maniacs is chasing Emalee, Victoria throws an oar at him, but she throws it at his legs tripping him up! It looks cooler than it sounds, and the added bonus to it that Emalee accidentally cuts his head off when the guy falls on to the machete she's carrying!

7.) The "head of security" remark was either a bad attempt at black humor, or the soldier that made it has a poor sense of humor. Either way it was hokey.

8.) Emalee pulls some MacGuyver [unwrite] out of her ass. When she tries to use an electrical carving knife to kill one of the maniacs the cord isn't long enough to reach the bastard while he's strangling her mother. so she quickly does a cut and paste job on the cord so she can reach him. I had to laugh. Aren't there any normal knives in the kitchen? Couldn't she have just opened a drawer and got a regular knife instead of doing a B.A. Baracus on the electric one? And man, whoever made that electrical knife sure wasn't concerned with consumer safety. The freaking thing cut straight through the maniac's head like butter! I can understand a good carving knife slicing up roast beef, or turkey...but human heads?

Nudity and Sex: No nudity, though Emalee has dreams of being raped by guys with dickhead hats on.

Huh?:

Victoria is really an understanding parent. While camping in the marshes Emalee has another nightmare and wakes up screaming her head of. Great timing, Emalee....the middle of the night in a pup tent in a spooky forest. I woke up screaming in a big tent full of guys one night from a nightmare and they wanted to kick my ass for it. (it was a real scary nightmare too, with monsters and flame and [unwrite]....brrrr)

Tampax must have helped fund this movie as much as Emalee and Victoria talk about having a period. Emalee finally has her first period....while they're camping! again, great timing, Emalee! There ain't a 7-11 for miles so I sure hope Victoria paced some extra tampons! (and I can't see why she would unless she's either really super prepared for anything, or expecting her own period!)

When Emalee tells Victoria they shouldn't go back to their tent, Victoria protests saying "There's a lot of valuable equipment in there!". Does Emalee really have to explain it to her mother that it would be foolhardy to go get your camera when there are seven homicidal maniacs after you?

Oh, right. Sure. After escaping the maniacs in the woods, Emalee and her mother return home and take a nice hot bath together. (Do chicks really do that?). Victoria says "We've got to go to the police now.". WHAT?! They haven't been to the cops yet? Hey, I understand the need to clean up, but if seven maniacs chased me through the woods at night and I was covered in horse [unwrite] a bath would still be secondary to going to the friggin' police if I managed to escape! Especially if it was seven maniacs that were planning on gang banging me! (of course it was a gang of female Salma Hayek looking septuplets I might not have escaped.)

Don't Victoria and Emalee have any neighbors? I've lived in an apartment before and I think I'd hear the commotion if six crazed maniacs with mud on their faces were attacking the people next door. Especially with all the damned screaming Emalee is doing.

The Final Judgment: The Inferno's final judgment is that you should either go rent or buy this movie right away! Click the amazon.com link below and order it. Borrow it from a friend. It doesn't matter how you do it, but if you like creepy horror flicks....and don't we all...The Johnsons is a movie you don't want to miss.