Lost and Found: There’s Nothing Out There

In which spring breaking college kids—including a bikini babe hall of fame final girl—fight off an alien attack at a remote cabin in the woods.

Many have claimed that Rolfe Kanefsky’s 1991 horror comedy There’s Nothing Out There is the first movie to feature the now-trope of the self-aware horror-watching nerd character. Yes, years before Randy (Jamie Kennedy) in Scream (1996), we had Mike (Craig Peck) in There’s Nothing Out There dropping his exhaustive knowledge of horror movies left and right while his dopey friends get picked off by some sort of alien frog creature at a cabin by the lake where the teens went to partay and roll in the hay, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. I can’t vouch for this claim, but it sure seems possible that it’s true. Mike is definitely a proto-Randy who keeps himself and his friends one step ahead of the monster thanks to his expertise in horror tropes.

There’s Nothing Out There is also notable for several other reasons, including being one helluva fun ride from start to finish. As horror comedies go, it’s a winner. It tells the age-old tale of a group of young, horny friends spending spring break at a cabin in the woods, where an alien monster begins stalking and killing them. Typical stuff. If it happened to me once as a teenager, it happened to me ten times.

Impressively, Kanefsky was only twenty years old when he shot this future cult classic (in 1989) on a shoe-string budget in Rockland County, New York. Befitting the tastes of twenty year old straight males everywhere, Kanefsky loaded the film with gratuitous T&A throughout. In fact, the main female character Stacy (Bonnie Bowers) spends the majority of the film’s second half running around in a tiny string bikini that shows off every glorious inch of her bodacious body. She makes both the camera and the killer-alien extremely thirsty. You see, the alien appears to want to mate with the lovely ladies of the cabin, so Stacy’s always fighting the ugly frog-thing off her crotch. What’s the camera’s excuse, you ask? Well, Bowers is smoking hot and that’s really all the excuse Kanefsky needed to instruct his camera operator to keep that damn lens pointed at her salacious body as often as possible.

Bonnie Bowers didn’t have much of a career onscreen after this, but she is forever immortalized here as Stacy, the bikini babe final girl of our horniest dreams. Seriously, in all the final girl discussions that rage on amongst horror geeks, I never see Stacy included, and that’s a crying shame. Sure, Mike treats her like a bimbo the whole time they’re trying to fight off the alien, but Mike’s kind of a dick. I respect his love of horror, but honestly he’s so insufferably condescending towards his supposed friends that it’s hard to root for the guy sometimes. Stacy doesn’t deserve that sort of treatment, as she kicks all sorts of alien ass in one showdown after another. She’s a tenacious fighter, and she has to be because she’s always trying to keep the alien from getting to her lady-parts!

The cast all handle the mix of comedy and horror well, with special props to Peck for being obnoxious but relatable, Bowers for being game for anything and as hot as Georgia asphalt in July, and Claudia Flores for playing a gorgeous Brazilian bimbo with aplomb. Kanefsky makes great use of POV shots as the alien moves in on its victims and keeps things light and loose even when the bodies start piling up. He has gone on to direct a plethora of B-horror, including another favorite of mine that really deserves its own Lost and Found post, The Hazing (2004). That film shares much in common with There’s Nothing Out There—both are excellent examples of fun, rollicking horror-comedies done right.

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There’s Nothing Out There is currently streaming in several pay services like fuboTV and Apple+. It was on Tubi for free recently, so look for it to pop back up there again, I’m sure.