Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year, they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which works to save the lives of cats and dogs across America, giving pets second chances and providing them with happy homes.

Today’s theme: Tobe Hooper!

Back in 1955, Operation Samson had Brian (Brian Bremer) and Peggy Bell (Stacy Edwards) be exposed to a massive nuclear explosion to see how their immune system would work. Well, it works great, because they survive, become national heroes and have a child, David (who grows up to be Brad Dourif) while his parents go up in flames. Yes, spontaneous human combustion, which always showed up in those Ripley’s Believe It or Not books you bought at the book fair and got grossed out over.

David grows up to be a teacher named Sam Kramer and somehow meets Lisa Wilcox (Cynthia Bain), a woman whose parents went through the same death as his. Is it fate? No, it’s another government experiment, and for now, our hero can shoot fire and electricity out of his body.

Made four years after The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and the same year as I’m Dangerous Tonight, this has me rooting for Tobe, even if I know that this isn’t good. But maybe it could have been. Dourif told Fangoria, “You see me playing my heart out in scenes that are not working, and the reason they’re not working is that the movie doesn’t make sense. It’s almost funny. As a matter of fact, the better my acting was in some of the later scenes, the funnier the film was. I found myself at the mercy of people who didn’t know what they were doing. I probably shouldn’t be saying this, but my feeling is that the producers destroyed it. Tobe could have made three different movies with the material he had, and each one would have worked. But by the time he got it, it had changed from a love story to a suspense thriller about my character’s paranoid fantasy, to a guy goes crazy film about this insane killer who becomes a destructive force that’s going to wipe out mankind. We went back and kind of restructured it as a love story, but it didn’t really help. The beginning of the film was great, and a certain portion of my stuff was fine, but then it became stupid when all the flame stuff started happening.”

At least John Landis gets his head set on fire.

You can watch this on Tubi.