The rise in kid-friendly horror in the 80s meant that film-makers had to get creative or neuter their efforts entirely. Most film-makers, unsurprisingly maybe, opted to go the neutering route. Tibor Takacs 1987 The Gate is a good example of a film-maker who decided to get creative instead. It’s most iconic monster, the diminutive Minions skirt that scary-cute line that a lot of other PG-13 horror movies did at the time, but as a whole the film is remarkably original as well as a clever, and for the time contemporary, use of classic monster movie techniques.

Most of the film centers on Glen (a disturbingly juvenile Stephen Dorff), a somewhat withdrawn boy obsessed with rockets. His parents leave on a weekend trip, leaving his older sister Al in charge. It’s strongly implied that Glen is growing resentful of his sister becoming more interested in boys and shopping and other teenage activities than hanging out with him, and his only other friend is a geeky heavy-metal fan named Terry, himself coping with the recent death of his mother. After a storm knocks down a tree in Glen’s backyard, the boys discover a large geode, and unwittingly open up a gate to a conveniently non-denominational Hell dimension populated by “ancient demons” of an undisclosed pantheon. Strange events begin to occur, including levitation, dead pets and hallucinogenic imagery, culminating in the invasion of the house by pint-sized monsters. The combination of heavy-metal music and the Bible lead everyone to believe that the threat is over, but no, it’s just been made worse, and soon Terry and Al have been kidnapped by zombies and Glen is left alone to fight the demonic overlord before he takes over the world. Which he does, with a rocket.
You kind of have to see that scene in context to really get it, you know?

In a lot of ways The Gate wears its influences on its sleeves. The “spooky secrets of suburbia” theme was covered before, and arguably better, in Poltergeist, but where that film was all about adult anxiety, The Gate is very much a film about the fears of children. Parents worry about what horrible secrets might depress the value of their home. Kids worry about that rumor of the workman who was walled up inside their basement, alive. Even the monsters owe a lot to previous films. Most of the effects are created using forced perspective or stop-motion. These are fairly basic techniques, and the method in which they’re achieved feels very much like a call-back to the monster movies of the 50s and 60s, particularly the films of Ray Harryhausen. The one notable deficiency with this arrangement, is that, especially with the heavy use of forced perspective shots, there isn’t a lot of interaction between the cast and the effects. People have a tendency to stand around and look at the monsters. Meanwhile, the monsters stand around and stare blankly at a rather arbitrary eye-line as well. There’s a lot of staring at things in place of interaction with things in this movie to be honest.

It’s probably worth noting that the film is very much of its time as well. I don’t just mean the blindingly bright pastel colors every teenage girl in this film wears, though that’s part of it. It’s some of the little details, both good and bad. The kid into heavy-metal, for example, is through and through a nerd. This fits precisely in with my memories of the era, that heavy-metal as a musical genre was mostly listened to by the nerdy kids. Not the dark, brooding, threat to society kids that tv and films always seemed to think listened to heavy-metal. No, it was the geeks. It’s a realistic and under-observed detail. On the flip-side, however, is the very casual way that the word “fag” is tossed around in the film. Kids say it, and it’s treated as an unremarkable thing. It’s actually used the first time in the film as a fully justified (by the film’s logic) retort to a bully. This, sadly, is very typical of films of the 80s, when “fag” was apparently one of the very few insults that heroic characters could use and still be seen as heroic, rather than raging assholes. I also find it interesting that for a film about demons and monsters from the underworld, the monsters themselves are hardly Satanic at all. Or, at least, not created using any of the standard elements of Satanic imagery. Given the wide-spread paranoia over Satanism, particularly in the media, during the decade, I half-wonder if this was a deliberate choice to avoid any unwanted controversy. The creators have left themselves the out that the movie just happens to be about monsters that live in a hellish underground realm, but aren’t technically demons from Hell, and they can hardly be held accountable for your inability to split that hair.

When the PG-13 rating was introduced in the 80s, it was pretty much a God-send to the makers of cheap sci-fi and horror films. They could include suggestive and violent material in their films, and still enjoy the increased revenue from a film that kids and teens could easily get into. That, and the fact that video rental shops pretty much never bothered to enforce ratings on anything other than out and out porn, made a lot of marginal films pretty popular. Especially the ones whose makers were able to successfully exploit the formula that was proving to be popular: gross-cute small creatures doing unspeakable things. Which Stephen Herek’s 1986 Critters did so well it launched a franchise. Well, so did all the other cute monster movies.

The puppet-monster genre seemed to fill a need for audiences, with Gremlins, Ghoulies, Munchies, Hobgoblins, Troll, and a host of even lesser films coming out within the span of a few years. Critters, in that regard, is fairly atypical of the genre, for actually trying to take some steps towards differentiating itself from the massive success that was Gremlins. (Even though Critters, like Ghoulies, actually predated Gremlins going by when work on the film actually began.) Not terribly different, though. Like all the other films, the plot consists of a cute/scary monster attacking humans and acting in a socially irresponsible way, and the film itself blends comedy rather liberally into the monster movie plot. And of course, by taking care to make sure that no matter how scary the film pretends to get, the bulk of the violence either takes place off-screen or doesn’t involve humans directly.

The film opens with a group of aliens escaping from the asteroid that they were imprisoned on, and the warden calling in a pair of shape-shifting bounty hunters to track them down. Meanwhile, the aliens have landed near a small farm in the midwest. Well, I say “meanwhile.” In actual fact, this is an incredibly slow film. It’s thirty minutes before the Critters even really show up in the film at all, and after that about half the film is the bounty hunters running around Generic Small Town causing havoc and otherwise completely failing to live up to their implied reputation as the best bounty hunters around. The rest of the film is Typical Farm Family being menaced by the Critters and running around in the dark. It’s not until the final act that we get any real conflict between the family, the bounty hunters and the Critters, and even then the problem is mostly solved through home-made dynamite. Keeping the film family-friendly appears to have neutered it of even the dark edge of Gremlins.

In the end, Critters occupies that same place that so many 80s cheapies do; primarily of interest for a chance to see a bunch of recognizable actors, either for stuff they did well before or well after this, in a film that’s just good enough that it can hold your interest without being so bad that you get bored with it. It has a very young Billy Zane being “killed” by monsters in a way that is very clearly just him holding onto a ball of fur and rolling around and screaming. That’s something, right?

I knew when I committed myself to looking at schlocky 80s films for my horror movies this year that there would be a very good chance that I would eventually hit one that tested even my patience for crappy horror films. That movie, friends, is Chuck Russell’s 1988 remake of The Blob. At the best of times I’m not a fan of remaking films, especially horror films. But this film manages to get pretty much everything wrong with a remake that you can. The original film was a B movie at best. You’d think it would be ripe for a slick, more contemporary approach to the source material. No. It’s not.

What Russell gives us is a cast of pretty uniformly unlikeable characters. And while, in other circumstances, the film’s “anyone can die” approach would be a welcome change of pace, in this case you find yourself regretting that that some people actually live. The Blob itself changes from the rather aimless amorphous menace of the original film to something that displays a rudimentary intelligence. It can be angry, now. Which, frankly, is just fucking stupid. A certain degree of internal consistency is necessary for “scientific” monsters in horror movies. Yet this new Blob is small enough to sneak up on people, but big enough to engulf people whole. It’s fast enough to eat minor characters effortlessly, but slow enough that the heroes can get away from it. It can crawl up wall and ceilings…unless of course the heroes are climbing up a wall to get away from it. And, of course, it can grow tentacles to pull people through walls. When it wants to.
So basically what we have is a misguided revamp that largely misses the appeal of the original, but does amp up the gore factor considerably. We even get a rehash of the original film’s most iconic sequence, the Blob in the movie theater, transformed from something original into just another bloody killing spree.
Even the not-really-convincing arguments that the original Blob was a communism metaphor are taking horribly literally here, when the film-makers decide to give the Blob an origin. No, we can’t have it just be a menace from “outside” a perfect community. No, it has to be a government experiment to fight Communism gone wrong.
Urgh.

Here, listen to something less aggravatingly annoying Blob-related:

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Though predating the visibility of Halley’s Comet by two years, it’s hard to think of Thom Eberhardt’s 1984 film Night of the Comet without recalling the interest, and hysteria, over comets that seemed to be regular features of the mass-media. Though the 1986 apparition of Halley’s Comet was pretty much a dud, I still remember people talking about it as an omen for the end of the world, and somehow managing to be taken seriously. “But, see, here in Nostradamus where he talks about ‘the ruddy fisherman’s wealth shall outshine that of the the recalcitrant shepherd’s prodigal dowry’ that’s clearly a reference to the comet destroying Earth, and not an obtusely coded criticism of civil and religious figures of the day at all.” Thank goodness the American public is no longer that credulous. In any case though, as silly as fears about a relatively minor astronomical event are in real life, they do make for good fodder for fiction.

Reg is a fairly typical LA girl, working at a crummy job as a movie-theater usherette, and helping her boyfriend pirate copies of rare films instead of partying with her friends in celebration of an unnamed comet’s passage through the Earth’s atmosphere. Meanwhile, her little sister Sam is stuck in the valley with their step-mother, taking advantage of their father’s deployment to South America to throw a party for the neighbors and the man she’s cheating on her husband with. Unfortunately for everyone, the last time this particular comet swung by Earth it was shortly before the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, and the only people to have taken note of this are a group of Galtian scientists who have built an underground bunker somewhere in the California desert.
And everyone dies.
Except Reg and her boyfriend, because they were safe inside the steel walls of the fire-death-trap projection booth, though he does get killed and eaten by a zombie as soon as he steps outside. Because, somehow, if you were indoors when the comet passed you just get turned into a zombie instead of being disintegrated. Or something. The physics of all this aren’t exactly clear. In any case, Reg eventually finds Sam, who was hiding out from their step-mother in the lawn shed, and tries to convince her that everyone on Earth is now dead. Hearing a radio broadcast, they head into downtown Los Angeles and find that the entire spiel for the day was pre-recorded, but meet Hector, a trucker who also survived and headed to the radio station when he heard the broadcast. Sam makes contact with the scientists after playing around with the radio broadcasts, and while Reg and Sam wait for the scientists, Hector goes to San Diego to see if any of his family survived. When the scientists arrive, they take Reg, planning to use her for the same purpose they’ve taken every other survivor they’ve found; kill them and use them as the basis for a serum to combat the zombification, as all the scientists are slowly dying because no one thought to close the air vents before the comet passed through. Reg then has to escape with the other survivors, two children, while Hector and Sam try to get to the base in time to save her. In the end, civilization is restored by Reg and Hector forming a little nuclear family of their own.

So what we’ve got is basically a PG-13 zombie horror film with an attempt at coming up with a sci-fi based semi-plausible explanation for the zombies. It feels like a very conscious decision was made at some point, too, to make sure that the film stayed PG-13; there’s a little bit of sexual innuendo, but no real nudity, only two zombies ever actually really appear, and there’s almost nothing in the way of blood or direct violence. Unlike most attempts at keeping horror kid-friendly, though, Night of the Comet does manage to be pretty creepy. The lack of zombies works in this regard, because it gives us these vast expanses of Los Angeles that are completely devoid of cars or people. There’s a real feeling of dread and isolation that would be lost if you had hordes of shambling dead wandering around. It’s a genuinely effective emotional manipulation of the viewers that is slightly undone by the fact that Sam and Reg become rather accustomed to being two of the few people left in the world awfully quickly. But then, this is just a horror film, and deep heavy emotional drama is a better fit for “serious” films. Sam and Reg’s rapid acclimation to a post-comet world does work to give us some nice character bits, though, such as their decision to go on a clothes “shopping” spree in a deserted mall now that every piece of consumer goods they ever wanted is, essentially, now free.

Another bit in the film that works is the way in which the zombies are downplayed as a threat. There’s only a few of them, and we quickly learn that within a few days of the comet’s passage they’ll crumble away anyway. The more significant threat is in those survivors who are either undergoing zombification or simply looking to exploit the situation. The scientists form the chief antagonists, and their plan to sacrifice children in order to preserve themselves is monstrous in its selfishness. But then, these are people who decided to build an underground bunker instead of alert authorities to the danger that the comet posed to the world. There’s even some pitch-perfect 80s-movie punks who menace the girls in the mall, though the weight of their menace is undercut by the late revelation that, yep, they’re basically just more zombies who haven’t yet fully turned yet. But their villainy is fairly banal in comparison to the desperate self-preservation killings of the “best and brightest” of the surviving humans. I know, it’s surprising, that a zombie film would come to the conclusion that the “real monster” is other humans all along.

It really shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that female nudity…doesn’t really do it for me. I can appreciate it in the abstract, but I’ve never felt the need to watch a movie because it will be in there. But a certain segment of the audience for horror films? They really enjoy their female nudity, and would like as much as possible, please. And so, it’s not really that much of a surprise that the more exploitative a horror film tends to get, the more likely it is that you’re going to see some naked women. Kevin Tenney’s 1988 film Night of the Demons certainly doesn’t disappoint on that score. It’s an utterly absurd mix of pretentious-Goth Satanism, gorey special effects, and naked women.

Thematically, Night of the Demons isn’t particularly original. A group of teenagers, the requisite mix of “good kids” and “bad kids”, go to a party hosted by creepy Goth girl Angela, on Halloween night, at the abandoned Hull House, a funeral home where a horrific murder occurred in the past, which was also built on a spot that was cursed by the Indians. It’s a bunch of horror cliches thrown together, because the people responsible for the film had apparently never heard the phrase “gilding the lily” before. The kids, stupidly, hold a seance, which awakens the evil demons that possess the house, who take over Angela and her pal Suzanne (a jaw dropping performance from horror veteran Linnea Quigley) and then proceed to kill off the rest of the kids one by one when they have the audacity to think it might be a good idea to have sex. Because, honestly, the boobs are meant to be as much of the draw for the audience here as the gore. We’re fairly quickly down to the final two kids, the only “good kids” left of the bunch, before the plot essentially runs out and they manage to escape, presumably next to try to think of a way to explain why there is a mortuary full of the mutilated remains of their friends.

It’s trashy and exploitative, and there’s really no getting around that. The film, to it’s credit, at least seems to understand that it’s exploitative trash. It’s extremely unpretentious in its use of silly horror themes and quite upfront with the female nudity. There are at least two ass shots, one quite lingering, within the first twenty minutes, almost as if the filmmakers are telling the audience “here you go, that’s what you came for, now stay for the story.” Which is a bit silly, because there really isn’t much story. It’s your standard “spam in a cabin” movie; one locale, almost everybody dies. The first half of the film doesn’t even give us anything really in the way of gore or scares. It’s all just mood setting with the kids trying to scare each other and leering at one another and generally just acting like dickish kids. By the time people actually start dying we’re fairly relieved, because at least something interesting is finally happening. That the film isn’t taking itself seriously and is upfront about being pure trash is the saving grace.

That all sounds like a harsh assessment, but the film actually does end up becoming greater than the sum of its part. Angela and Suzanne are memorable horror villains. Suzanne does this…thing…with a lipstick tube that scarred me on a deep level when I saw the film at the drive-in, back in the day. And Angela, camp and silly-Goth as she is, does have the distinction of being one of the very few female franchise horror villains. The film also defies genre expectations by having one of the surviving “good kids” be the black kid, a feat which horror films today still have trouble achieving. And it’s funny. It’s sometimes hard to tell how much of the humor is intentional and how much just arises from the cast and script being what they are, but there are darkly comic moments throughout, and moments that straddle the line between funny and scary. A particularly dark joke is in the scenes that bookend the film; the first a cranky old man who hatches a plot to put razors in apples to punish those terrible modern teens (because the film really hasn’t run into a horror cliche it doesn’t feel okay exploiting), and the second the “punchline” to the old man set-up. The music is also pretty remarkable, starting with a scary/erotic dance by Angela to “Stigmata Martyr” by Bauhaus and continuing on to the aggressively 80s synth-rock soundtrack. Even the opening credits are pretty damn cool, with animation reminiscent of the designs for Disney’s Haunted Mansion, giving the credits a cutely scary appearance that helps set the mood for the film. And it’s hard to deny that Angela has had a lasting impact. Her “look” is memorable, if not quite iconic, and I’ve seen Angela and Suzanne Halloween costumes, on girls and boys, for years. Quite a legacy for a cheap little horror flick filmed in East L.A.

Thomas Dekker’s 1986 sci-fi zombie film Night of the Creeps features a lot of the features that frequently reoccur in 80s horror. For one, it has elements of comedy while still remaining firmly a horror film, possessing neither the self-seriousness of earlier films nor the explicitly parodic or self-aware tone of later films. It also calls back to earlier horror films quite a bit, not only featuring characters named Cronenberg, Romero and Carpenter Hooper, but acknowledging the similarity of its plot to Plan 9 from Outer Space by running scenes from that film within this one. And then there’s the eclectic nature of the film. It’s not just a zombie film. It’s a zombie film with a science-fiction theme that works serial killers and urban legends come true into the mix as well, genre-blending being a common trope of the era as well.

The film starts with aliens running through a space-ship, desperately attempting to keep a dangerous experiment from escaping. They fail, and we cut to a small college town in 1959, complete with sudden black-and-white footage, where we follow a young couple out to a make-out point where they see a shooting star. Investigating, she gets hacked to death by a patient who has escaped from a mental hospital, while he becomes infected with whatever alien life-form has just crashed to Earth. Jump forward again, and it’s 1986 and we’re in the college party scene from every teen sex comedy that came out in the 80s. Chris has fallen in love from afar with sorority girl Cynthia, but only his pal J.C. has the nerve to talk to her. J.C. needs crutches to walk, though the exact nature of his disability is never stated, but it’s an important detail that becomes important later, as well as being a significant character marker. Chris, the handsome able-bodied kid has no nerve, while the crippled kid is the one who isn’t afraid of the world. In any case, Chris decides that the way to impress Cynthia is to join a frat, and he and J.C. are told to steal a corpse from the college medical school by the frat president, who also happens to be Cynthia’s boyfriend. Instead they stumble upon a cryogenics lab preserving the body of the 1959 frat boy, who wakes up due to their fiddling with the cryogenic equipment, scaring them off. Unfrozen frat boy kills a lab attendant and makes his way to his girl-friend’s sorority house, the same sorority that Cynthia is a member of. Hijinx, as they say, ensue, and soon slugs are roaming campus turning people into corpses and Chris and J.C. are being investigated by a police detective, who as a patrolman dated the girl killed in 1959 and killed the escaped maniac in revenge and hid the corpse. Following the resurrection of the maniac axe-murderer and the death and subsequent zombification of Cynthia’s ex-boyfriend and his frat brothers, Chris and Cynthia wind up in a frat boy zombie killing spree involving shotguns and flamethrowers.

At first blush, it’s a pretty typical zombie film, with some boobs and gore thrown in to appeal to the horny teenage boy crowd. But Dekker’s script is actually fairly slick for a horror film. He uses flashbacks and dream sequences in visually interesting ways and to develop characterization without the need of lengthy exposition. And the relationship between Chris and J.C. is quite unusual as well. Early in the film, J.C. becomes infected with the zombifying alien slugs, and leaves a suicide/farewell tape for Chris in which he explains to him what needs to be done to defeat the slugs. It’s a heart-breaking scene, not just for the emotional impact, but for the terrible joy with which J.C. describes being finally able to walk…now that he’s undead. The scene is also notable for its subtle outing of J.C. as a gay character. Yes, it’s a horror film, so of course the gay character had to die, but a sympathetic gay character who receives the closest thing in the film to a heroic death is pretty noteworthy.

There are some problems with the film. The timeline is so contracted that people’s behavior frequently seems incredibly unrealistic. For example, an entire house full of sorority girls making preparations to go to a formal dance the day after their house-mother is brutally axed to death in the sorority house and two days after a naked, headless man shows up on their doorstep. That’s a pretty important dance, to go to it instead of dealing with the aftermath of two traumatic events in as many days. But these lapses into irrational behavior can be overlooked by the sheer glorious lunacy of some of the set-pieces. Such as horny frat boys transformed into zombies, or sorority girls with flamethrowers. Seriously, girls in formal gowns burning zombies to death. You can’t tell me that hearing that doesn’t make you just the slightest bit curious about the film.

Like The Stuff, Larry Cohen’s 1982 film Q has some interesting technical aspects that make it rise above, however slightly, most low-grade horror films, but is equally muddled when it comes to things like “telling a coherent story” or “having characters act in recognizably human ways.” In theory it’s a straight-forward monster movie, but the bulk of the film is focused on the travails of a petty criminal, played by Michael Moriarty, and his attempts to exploit the monster’s existence for his own benefit. Mixing a crime movie with a monster movie is a novel idea, but its an idea that requires more than the occasional glimpse of the monster to really make it a presence in the moive. Cohen is more interested in the small-timer. It makes for a frustrating film, because Moriarty’s character is so whiny and obnoxious that he’s almost impossible to feel any sympathy for, and he continually acts in a way that defies any rational explanation.

Of course, rationality isn’t exactly a strong point in this movie. The bulk of the film that isn’t about Moriarty acting like a weasel focuses on David Carradine as an NYPD detective working with Richard Roundtree to solve a series of ritualistic murders. Carradine somehow goes from murders to people disappearing from rooftops to ancient Aztec god somehow reborn in New York City. It’s an absolutely appalling leap of logic based on absolutely no evidence, but of course it’s precisely and perfectly correct, because otherwise we wouldn’t have a film. It’s the same sort of “read the script” level of deduction that makes The X-Files so frustrating; the hero is right because he is the hero and must be right. And in this particular case, a skeptical character would have worked just as well, because the whole ritual killings thing is never really developed, other than as a way to toss out an explanation as to why there is a giant flying lizard eating New Yorkers. It’s only an explanation for the benefit of those viewers who need an explanation in a monster movie.

Q itself is sort of charming. It’s a stop-motion monster, super-imposed over live footage of actors or New York, very much in the tradition of Ray Harryhausen-style creatures. Should the unthinkable happen, and Q gets remade, the creature would be just another in a long line of forgettable CGI creatures. The physical reality of the stop-motion creature gives it a visual appeal. And, to be fair to Cohen, visually the film is quite interesting. Cohen works the motif of birds or winged creatures into shot after shot after shot. It’s a symbolism overload, frankly, for what’s basically just a monster movie with a little bit of gore and boobs, aimed quite squarely at the teenage horror crowd. And the film is filled with aerial POV shots, giving us a Q-eyed view of the city and its inhabitants. POV shots are a horror staple, but they work quite well here, as the speed and height at which they’re taken make the apparent undetectability of Q more plausible.

Those visual themes play out in the way that Cohen uses New York architecture as well. The steeples of New York’s art deco buildings bear more than a passing resemblance to ancient Mexico’s Aztec temples, though the link is never made explicit by any of the characters. In any case, the stylized nature of the buildings gives them a temple-like appearance, and putting Q into those contexts seems like a natural fit, especially during the climactic battle between Q and the NYPD on top of Q’s lair in the Chrysler building. That link between the supernatural and the unique architecture of New York is explored more directly in Ghostbusters two years later, but Cohen seems to have at least anticipated the idea.

When you think of crappy horror films, the name of Larry Cohen is just about bound to come up. It’s not that he was a bad, or an incompetent film-maker. Not at all. Some of his ideas and the way he executed them are actually quite novel.
It’s just that…he never really quite seems to make that jump from “enjoyable trash” cinema to “genuinely really good” movies.
As far as trash goes, though, he’s really damn good. He gave us some of the best exploitation films of the 70s: Black Ceaser, It’s Alive, and of course God Told Me To, the film that give Andy Kaufman his premiere film role, but also had that brilliant spark of combining a Dirty Harry knock-off “cop on the edge” film with a bunch of Erich Von Daniken hooey.

But we’re talking about the 80s here. And the 80s, frankly, weren’t that kind to Cohen. Witness The Stuff.

Michael Moriarty, in an understated performance by Moriarty’s standards, stars as an industrial saboteur hired by a group of ice-cream industrialists to get to the bottom of what, exactly, is in The Stuff, the desert craze that’s sweeping the nation. It’s sweet, has no calories, and doesn’t even stain! People just can’t get enough of it.
That would be because it’s actually an intelligent bacterial organism that slowly takes over a host the more they ingest of its base matter, which is a sort of marshmallow fluff that bubbles out of the ground. Once a Stuffie is taken over, they move into position to do the bidding of The Stuff, mostly in ways that involve getting more people to eat it. Moriarty teams up with an advertising executive, a cookie company executive, a kid who hates The Stuff and an anti-commie militia commander in order to fight the takeover of the world by a delicious food-stuff.
It all gets a bit kooky, in other words.

It’s pretty clear what Cohen was trying to do. The film starts out with a fairly straight-forward conspiracy/cover-up angle before it gets into crazier territory, and there are plenty of suggestions that Cohen is aiming for a Body Snatchers type of vibe, the same sort of “fifth column” theme that Red Menace-era sci-fi films loved to use. Only with sugary sweet zombies instead of shape-shifting aliens. If Cohen had been able to maintain a consistent tone, he probably would have ended up with a quite respectable entry into that particular horror sub-genre. But as the film progresses, and events get more and more over the top, it gets harder and harder to try and take the film seriously, because it’s not taking itself seriously. Paul Sorvino’s Col. Spears is such a caricatured performance that the film almost becomes an outright comedy by the time he’s an active participant in events. The film also suffers from “too many endings” syndrome, at least three distinct ones by my count, including a narrated voice-over telling us about the events that take place after the conclusion of the film.

There’s also some very broad stabs at consumerism, and some mocking of food concerns, particularly about “benign bacteria” and “live foods” that seem prescient, but neither are exactly followed up in any meaningful ways. There’s a stronger subtext about corruption and bribery in government, but before it goes anywhere significant it gets derailed by the whole sugar zombie thing. Some of the special effects involving The Stuff moving are interesting, almost all of which are practical shots, which means someone had to sit down and work out how to make a white, fluffy liquid burst out of a pillow and drive a human being up a wall. So points for technical innovation, sure, but the rest of the film is just frustrating.

Doctor K is doing a horror movie a day through the month of October.

Andrew is putting a Halloween spin on his usual features, including my personal favorite, Nobody’s Favorite.

Bully is focusing on the uncomfortable truth about Riverdale.

James Rolfe of Cinemassacre is doing a video review of a camp classic a day, starting with The Phantom Creeps.

The 80s were a pretty important period for horror movies. The rise of video rental stores meant that films that used to be seen only in drive-in and dive theaters were suddenly available in every block, and film studios were only too happy to keep making movies to keep those shelves fully stocked. But what that meant was that the auteur-driven horror films of the 70s pretty much fell to the wayside, as did the more interesting gore-shock films that kept people going to drive-ins and dives. What we got in horror was fast, cheap, derivative, and lots and lots of it. Which pretty much means that a lot of the horror films of the 80s are pretty much crap.
But it is glorious, wonderful crap.

Take Douglas Cheek’s 1984 opus C.H.U.D., for example. The monsters are just guys in bad rubber suits with flashlights in the eye-slots of their masks, the only bit of gore is a bite on a leg, nothing even remotely scary happens until the last half-hour of the film, and the film itself is a typically schizophrenic mish-mash of Reagen-era politics. But it does have Daniel Stern, John Heard and, in the bittest of bit parts, John Goodman, all classing up the film far more than it probably deserves.

Heard stars as a photographer, George Cooper, living with his model girl-friend, who has given up taking pictures of models to focus on “relevant” work, such as photo-essays on the plight of the homeless in New York. Only no one seems to be able to find his subjects for a follow-up article. Stern is a petty criminal turned self-styled Reverend, running a soup-kitchen and trying to get the police to do something about the regulars who have disappeared. Between the two of them is Christopher Curry as Captain Bosch, an actual honest-to-God honest cop who has been told to keep the disappearances in his precinct quiet, a task made difficult by the fact that notable people are starting to go missing, including his own wife. Setting this up takes up a good third of the film, with a couple of gratuitous scares thrown in, as well as the obligatory crazy homeless guy who spouts curiously appropriate semi-Biblical ramblings.

Because it just wouldn’t be a horror movie without a crazy guy who knows everything that no one listens to.

After that, we pretty much get to the meat of the story. The Environmental Protection Agency and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission are conducting secret tests in the sewers of New York and won’t tell anyone what is going on. The Reverend and Captain Bosch take a quick trip to the tunnels and find torn haz-mat suits and a geiger counter, which is indicating that something radioactive is moving around in the sewers. Meanwhile Cooper, being tailed by the police because it has been noted that the people in his photos are going missing, is brought into the sewers by one of his contacts, and discovers that the homeless are afraid of something, scavenging weapons, and being attacked by something that takes big bites out of flesh. Eventually enough evidence of something weird going on that Bosch is able to blackmail his superiors into setting up a meeting with the heard of the NRC, Wilson. A meeting that mostly consists of the Fed stonewalling everyone, before happily announcing that, yes, it’s an honest cop, there is a monster in the sewers, a Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dweller, but it’s dead now, so everyone can go back to their normal duties. Except for Reverend, who now has a Secret Service agent following him and eating dimes.

Heroic Hippie vs. Fascist Preppie. Did I mention this was the 80s?

This is the moment when, naturally, Everything Goes Wrong. Turns out that, no, actually there are a lot of CHUDs in the sewers, and all the NRC attempts to flush them out are driving them to the surface. A “brilliant” plan is hatched, in which the sewers will be sealed and pumped full of gas, only now Cooper and Reverend are stuck down there, with proof that C.H.U.D. actually stands for Contamination Hazard Urban Disposal, and that the government has been dumping toxic waste in New York for years, under the presumed theory that no one would notice, which means that they are now running from both mutant cannibals and the deranged Wilson, who is pretty much planning to gas the entire population of New York to death to avoid anyone discovering that he’s fucked up. We actually get some gore and violence at this point, understated though it is. (It is only implied that a small child is eaten by the CHUDs, for example, because that would be less classy somehow than spraying a naked woman with blood.) The CHUDs themselves…well…they’re guys in rubber suits. There’s no getting around that. They’re not even particularly impressive rubber suits, and you can probably pick up something more sophisticated in that Halloween Store at the mall that will be a Calendar Store by mid-November. Most of the budget, in fact, looks like it went to the sewer sets, which is a bit odd, since it really looks like the cast are just running by the same three walls, in different configurations, over and over again, in a budget-saver that would make Doctor Who‘s producers blush at the miserliness.

And then Wilson dies trying to kill the good guys and the film ends, with absolutely no resolution regarding the fact that there is now a race of cannibal mutants with stretchy necks living in New York.

Despite all this, the film has a certain charm. One of my pet theories is that critics and audiences alike need to learn the difference between “good” and “entertaining.” Ideally a film should be both. But a “good” film can be a torturous endurance test to watch, and a “bad” film can be the best time you ever had with your clothes on. C.H.U.D. is by no possible metric a “good” film, but it has a crappy charm all its own. It’s your standard “zombies in all but name” type of film, with a “science gone wrong” angle that harks back to the giant/mutant animal films of the 60s and 70s. What’s really hard to not notice, though, is the weird politics of the film. For one thing, this is quite literally a film in which the homeless are portrayed as actual monsters that are going to rise up and eat the more fortunate. Not in a comsymp “and that’s what the bourgeoisie deserve for exploiting the working class” sort of way, in a “For God’s sake, run! It’s the poor!” sort of way. On the other hand, it is all quite clearly the government’s fault. But not the local government, oh no. The local government is the only place you can find people who are actually decent and honest. No, it’s those damn dirty Feds who are ruining everything. Now, a certain skepticism towards authority isn’t uncommon in horror films. But the combination of that “the Feds are nothing but evil fuck ups” theme with the “the homeless are monsters” bit makes the whole thing feel like we’re maybe getting some unintended background noise from the politics of the era seeping through, particularly in the notion that the government is the root of everyone’s problems in this scenario. It’s a nearly Reaganesque position for a monster movie.