User Reviews

Plot Synopsis: An alien criminal is genetically devolved into human form & banished to Earth. The problem is that the process has made the creature's body extremely fragile to the point that during a fight with some rednecks shortly after arriving on Earth, its head explodes. The alien then wanders through a nearby city, frequently 'borrowing' the heads of various humans to use as a replacement for its own.

Film Review: Three years after making the bleakly disturbing HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER, director John McNaughton followed up on the success of his debut feature by making this moderately budgeted sci-fi / horror flick. The Borrower stars Rae Dawn Chong as a female cop on the hunt for a rapist (Neil Guintoli) as well as genre troopers Antonio Fargas (SHAKEDOWN; HOWLING VI: THE FREAKS) & Tom Towles (FORTRESS; the remake of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD) making appearances.

The film has had the indignity of being shut down after running out of money, the incompleted film being shelved for two years before seeing the light of day. In its current form, the film does not feature any noticeable narrative gaps except for a badly-rushed ending where the alien takes over an ambulance (one of the worst rush-jobs of an ending in recent genre history).

Bad endings aside, the film's main problem is that it has a plot that is more along the line of "stuff happens" than resembling a fully fleshed-out story. The premise – that of an alien convict who goes around, squeezing people's heads off – is very limited in scope. The idea never develops into anything more than that. Sensing this, the screenwriters toss in a secondary plot about a pair of cops tracking down a rapist that, while a reasonably good story on its own, doesn't fit in with the rest of the film. If McNaughton, who has shown that he can make a serial killer story effective, persisted with the rapist angle, he would have had a decent film instead of the hodgepodge film shown here. On the acting front, almost everybody gives a decent performance. Chong & Don Gordon are well cast as the pair of cops. Guintoli, who would later (rather ironically) star in the Henry sequel, is suitably creepy as the rapist – the scene of him walking out of the hospital dressed in the uniform of a female cop that he had overpowered while said cop is lying on the hospital bed naked is the closest the film comes to disturbing the audience. As for the actors taking turns to play the alien, Tom Towles sets the bar high & gets surprisingly good mileage in playing an alien creature who is wandering around the city, mimicking the behaviour of passers-by & spending the night & following morning at a homeless shelter, but the other actors fail to match his performance exactly.

In the film's favour, the dark humour that McNaughton brings into the mix gives us a rather dark sense of irony. In this regard, the alien represents a hapless harbinger of doom – everywhere it goes, people die, not always by its own hand (check out the scene where the alien is sitting in a café drinking coffee while a bloody robbery is taking place right next to it).

The visual effects are wildly patchy – the bug-like alien in the beginning is quite good but the head-ripping effect is not as well made. Not to mention the fact that the continuity is lousy – not much is done to convince the viewer that the alien's body & head are different.

The Borrower starts in deep space as an alien killer (Robert Dryer) has been genetically devolved into a human being as the ultimate punishment as execution is too good for him, the human looking alien is taken to Earth & dumped in a park somewhere in America. Stranded on Earth the alien is found by two men, unfortunately devolution is not a precise science & the aliens human looking head explodes. While looking at the headless body the man Bob Laney (Tom Towles) gets too close & the alien suddenly comes back to life & replaces his own missing head with the ripped-off head of Laney. As the alien walks around the city & sees human society his head keeps exploding which it needs to replace with the nearest bonce it can find, human or animal will do. The news of a serial killer who decapitates his victims quickly spreads & homicide detectives Diana Pierce (Rae Dawn Chong) & her partner Charles Krieger (Don Gordon) are on the case & struggle to make sense of what's going on...

Directed by John McNaughton who had previously made the notorious Henty: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) this sci-fi horror comedy was his second feature film & is certainly something a little different & entertaining enough in it's own strange way. The script mixes sci-fi with social satire as our society is seen through the eyes of an alien, the pitfalls & perils of our society like homelessness & the benefits like when he becomes the doctor & suddenly has lots of material possessions. It's almost like the alien lives an entire life in a few days as he comes into our world with nothing but (almost) ends up with everything he could want, I think it's a neat little examination of our society without ever really being too deep or meaningful, the script is more playful with it's ideas & humour than serious. At just under 90 odd minutes long the pace is pretty good & the story is enough to keep you watching but it does get a little repetitive towards a rather rushed & unfinished feeling climax, none of the subplots or the main story get wrapped up to any great satisfaction. The Borrower has a fun & different central concept about a head stealing alien trying to survive on Earth but the script never really does anything with the premise, the subplot about the cops & some criminal they are after never really goes anywhere, the alien never seems to have any motive or goal or ambition as it wanders around the city doing nothing in particular & while it's entertaining enough I don't think I would want to watch it again.

The Borrower has a very late 80's feel to it, lots of neon lighting & latex gore effects rather than CGI. Speaking of gore it varies, a lot of the gore scenes feel choppy & badly edited like they didn't shoot enough footage & had to make do with what they had, there are a few headless bodies & a bit of blood splatter but not much else. There's a decent looking alien cockroach looking creature at the start but overall the effects vary from good to average. The only real gross-out moment the film has to offer is when the alien in human form eats a dead rat. Rumour has it that The Borrower ran out of money & the production was shut down & wasn't released for a couple of years, while there doesn't seem to be any huge gaps of narrative missing there certainly could have been some more fleshing out of the concept & character's.

Filmed in Illinois in Chicago this looks quite good with decent production values & local scenery, the effects are alright with some being pretty good. The acting is OK but having a fine actor like Tom Towles as the first alien was a bad idea as the other's after him don't compare despite being the 'same' alien but with a different head.

The Borrower is a fun little sci-fi horror comedy with an oddball premise poking fun at our society but it never really goes that deep & the central concept which is all the film has really isn't enough to sustain 90 minutes, entertaining enough for what it is & worth a watch for sure but in my opinion not a classic.

With his stock on the rise due to the slow-building success of the brilliant HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER (1986), someone gave John McNaughton 2 million bucks to make a second feature. Filmed primarily in 1988, THE BORROWER ended up sitting on a shelf for several years until "Henry" finally received a proper (albeit limited) theatrical release in 1990. The delay was likely caused by two favors: 1. It was distributed by Cannon, who were having major financial problems at the time, and 2. so it could piggyback off of "Henry"s excellent reviews and publicity. Long story short, it didn't work. "The Borrower" failed to come anywhere near the critical OR commercial success of the director's previous film. Instead, it quickly faded from view after its initial VHS release. Even now, the film is hardly ever discussed. Most interviewers just skip right over it when questioning McNaughton as if it doesn't even exist. One may assume all of that means this is awful, but that turns out not to be the case at all. If anything, this film is underrated and deserves much better treatment than it has received over the years.

Things open aboard a spaceship where a bug-like alien criminal receives the worst punishment an alien can receive: being "genetically devolved" into a human (ha!) The alien (Robert Dryer) is then banished to Earth, where he'll be forced to live out the rest of his days in the company of primitive Earth scum. Oh yeah, there's one other tiny little problem; because the aliens haven't quite mastered the de-evolution technique, the alien's head will occasionally explode and he'll be forced to acquire new ones every now and then. The banished alien is then dropped off and his head promptly pops. Thankfully a redneck poacher (HENRY co-star Tom Towles) is around to become the first donor. Alien Towles manages to get a ride from a bimbo teenager (Zoe Trilling) after she runs him over and eventually finds himself wandering the streets of downtown Chicago, where he's befriended by a homeless man (Antonio Fargas). Things start to escalate from there. Rae Dawn Chong and Don Gordon play a pair of detectives trying to uncover why decapitated bodies and random heads keep turning up all over the city.

What separates this film from numerous others of its type (aside from a very unusual premise) is McNaughton's ability to find quirky humor in the bleak urban setting. The grimy, seedy downtown Chicago of "Henry" is pretty much the exact same Chicago seen in "The Borrower." Druggies, thugs, hookers and homeless people lurk in the alleyways. People urinate right in the street and drop rats into someone's dinner at a soup kitchen, gang members shoot up diners and - in addition to the alien killer - there's a violent serial rapist (Neil Giuntoli) on the loose. Hell, there's even rampant degeneracy in places you may not expect, like at a hospital where a doctor (Tony Amendola) is so busy screwing a nurse he doesn't seem to care that people are literally dying all around him. Even paying attention to minor details in the background, you'll notice things like posters for child abuse. Everything pretty much is laid out to illustrate that this can be an ugly world we live in, which pretty much just confirms that the alien's punishment was an apt one! While this could have easily ended up being depressing, it's not at all because there's humor, satire and / or social commentary around every turn. Instead of slapping together a routine sci-fi action buddy cop pursuit film, McNaughton is aiming for something a bit different here. When it works, it's great. When it doesn't, you're zipped right along to something else so it hardly even matters.

The film also offers up many odd, hilarious and memorable scenes. My favorite is when a couple are lying in bed watching "The Garbage Pail Kids Movie" (!!) while their son's amateur rock band ("I like the part about killing your parents.") are downstairs being attacked by the alien, who's been reduced to wearing a dog's head! And then there are other bizarre scenes that, quite frankly, I have no idea what exactly they were shooting for, but the set pieces are all entertaining, bizarre and / or humorous.

This film frequently receives two criticisms and both are valid. The first involves the special effects. While Kevin Yagher's gore makeups are really good, there's no explanation behind why the alien's body size and skin color changes with each head swap. The second criticism involves the ending. Well actually, this film really doesn't have an ending. It more kind of just stops and the credits roll. I'm not sure if they ran out of money or time, but concluding things on such an anticlimactic, rushed note leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Regardless, flaws and all, this is conceptually a lot more sophisticated and clever than numerous other ordinary horror and sci-fi films from the 80s and 90s that get a lot more undeserved love and attention than this one does.

After Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, director John McNaughton got tons of horror movie offers until he couldn't hold out any longer. He told The Flashback Files, "When I got the script for The Borrower I was broke. And I got sent bad script after bad script and then came The Borrower, which in some sense was also a bad script, but the conceit that this creature takes the heads off of people and somehow occupies their lives, to me it was like a metaphor for what actors do. That gave me something to take a hold of, other than just the monster that jumps up from behind a tree to scare you and eat you."

So yes, this movie also has a serial killer, but this one is an alien murderer sentenced to our pitiful backworld planet. His transformation from alien to human didn't take, so he must keep borrowing new heads every time the old one explodes, using his crab claws to decapitate folks and start wearing their heads.

Diana Pierce (Rae Dawn Chong) and Charles Krieger (Don Gordon) are the cops that have to track it down. The best known people in the cast are Tom Towles - who was Otis in Henry* - as well as Antonio Fargas and Neil Giuntoli, who played Henry in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Part II.

Originally made for Vestron, this had an X rating and needed cut, then Atlantic Entertainment Group was going to put it out, but then they closed and the film sat for three years before Cannon put it out in 1991.

*Tracy Arnold also is in it, as well as thirteen crew members from Henry: Ken Hale, Dan Haberkorn, Rick Paul, Cory Coken, Frank Coronado, Robert McNaughton, Jim Moore, Ric Coken, Mic Fabus, Bernd Rantscheff, Richard Fire, Steven A. Jones and Elena Maganini.