Hideous! 1997

In the shadowy world of creature trades and private collectors, a routine discovery spirals into a web of scheming and danger at International Medical Specimens Inc. (IMSI). Martin, Andrew Johnston, a skeptical water sanitation worker, uncovers a strange, fleshy organism lurking in a water treatment tank and reaches out to Belinda Yost, Tracie May, the proprietor who buys and sells oddities of all kinds. Her excitement is contagious, and she quickly orders her incompetent receptionist, Elvina Shaw, Rhonda Griffin, to set up a meeting with Mr. Napoleon Lazar, Mel Johnson Jr., a high‑level corporate executive. However, missteps send the plan twisting in another direction: Elvina instead calls Dr. Emilio Lorca, Michael Citriniti, an equally hungry buyer who is willing to pay a premium for an exclusive “first look” at Yost’s new specimens. Lorca whispers expectations to his assistant, Sheila, Jacqueline Lovell, and together they hatch a scheme to outplay Yost and Lazar’s treachery.

The deal accelerates into a tense exchange. Yost meets Lazar in the cold storage level of IMSI, pays him for the item, and secures a lucrative contract: a $650,000 check and a promise to spend at least $200,000 a year with her for the next decade. But fate twists again when Lorca orchestrates a brutal ambush: Sheila, clad in a miniskirt and a gorilla mask, blinds Lazar with an abrupt assault, handcuffs him to a tree, and grabs the specimen for Lorca. She returns it to Lorca’s castle and places it in a jar of preserving liquid in his study. The jar joins three other oddities already stacked on a shelf, a menagerie of grotesque jars among countless other unsettling收藏. Sheila then destroys the evidence in an acid trapdoor inside the castle, leaving no trace of the theft to what was once a tidy display.

The collection grows stranger. The newly awakened specimen reveals itself as a disturbing organism with an enlarged head, two pairs of eyes, two mouths stacked one above the other, a short torso, and an array of tentacles. The other three jars hold a large, face-sunken blob; a stocky, brutish, hairless ape-like creature; and a gaunt, skeletal being with spines like porcupine hair. As the plot thickens, Lazar, Yost, and Elvina thrust themselves into pursuit, seeking out Detective Leonard Kantor, Jerry O’Donnell, to track the thief. Elvina finally admits that she tipped Lorca off about the sale, and the unlikely trio head to Lorca’s castle to confront the mounting treachery. Lorca, seeking to outdo the others, tries to impress Lazar by parading his bizarre trophies, only to discover that the four jars have been emptied and the creatures vanished, leaving behind tracks that lead to a vent shaft. With the castle secured by a determined security system, Lorca orders the four held in a closet while he investigates.

A chilling, room-wide revelation unfolds. When a quiet tapping on the wall begins, the prisoners communicate with the creatures through a whispered exchange of yes/no cues, coaxing the unknown “tapper” to pry open the locked door. Lorca returns to find the four beings revealed, their presence filling the castle with a palpable, unsettling energy. In a brutal sequence, Yost, eager to reclaim her prize, stumbles and is impaled by a hidden trap. The hairless ape lurches toward Sheila, while the blob wrests control of a firearm and fires on the humans. The group barricades themselves in a bedroom as chaos erupts, and Elvina, awakened by the commotion, finds herself hiding as the hairless ape creeps under her blanket to feed. She wakes in horror, bolts from the room, and plummets from a balcony to her death below.

The showdown intensifies below ground. Lazar and Lorca, each trying to lure the fearsome creatures away, confront one another in a tense duel that moves toward an improvised endgame around an acid bath trap. As the hairless ape simultaneously triggers a trap, both men slip into the caustic liquid and dissolve, their struggle fading into the acrid air. Sheila, wielding a security override keycard, lures the remaining specimens onto a carpet and sweeps them toward the open acid bath. She and Kantor depart in his car, leaving behind the crimson evidence of a night’s horror. The final image lingers on the trunk of Kantor’s car, where the jars’ disturbing occupants can be seen peering through the keyhole, hinting that the nightmare might still be alive, only partially contained, outside the car’s shadowed path.

In this twisting saga of greed, curiosity, and the fearsome unknown, the line between science and barbarism blurs as a handful of ghastly creatures test the limits of human control and human courage.