Viking Night: CHUD
By Bruce Hall
June 10, 2014
BoxOfficeProphets.com
I have said many times that step one of putting together a horror movie is to come up with an awesome title, and “C.H.U.D.” definitely makes the grade. It sounds nice and evil and visually, it really pops off a poster, tee shirt or the side of a windowless van. Hell, with a great title like that, the fact that it’s about mutant subterranean cannibals is only natural. So when I decided to revisit C.H.U.D., I gleefully envisioned hordes of flesh-eating freaks spilling out of the sewers and running straight into reams of machine gun fire from row after row of stone-faced cops. I expected rivers of blood, massive explosions and because it was the ‘80s, perhaps a touch of gratuitous partial nudity – tastefully done, of course.
Regrettably, none of these things happened. In fact, it’s hard not to say that the act of logging onto Netflix to watch this movie was more exciting than the movie itself. I avoided this film when it originally came out because none of my friends had anything good to say about it, and because I had not yet perfected my technique for sneaking into rated R movies (thanks, RoboCop!). I remembered very little about C.H.U.D., but before the opening credits were finished it all came back to me. Now I knew why they told me to stay away, and realized what an act of mercy it was. That's because when the very first scene of a film is even more off putting than the words “turn your head and cough,” you are in for a world of suck.
Picture, if you will, a rain-slicked street in a residential area of Manhattan. For some reason, a woman is walking her dog in the middle of the night, right down the center stripe. You know, the way everyone walks their dog. She drops something as she passes a conspicuous looking manhole, because of course she does. Suddenly, what is obviously an actor’s arm inside a rubber glove reaches out of the manhole and yanks her - and her little dog, too - into the sewer. Okay, fine. Our setup is that there’s something living under the streets and it craves not just human flesh, as we were promised, but it digs dog meat as well. That's fantastic - but there’s just something OFF about C.H.U.D., right from the start.
What should have been a functional, if not entirely original opening just feels flat and stupid. Maybe it’s the K-Mart brand rubber prosthetics. Maybe it’s the way nobody would ever walk their dog that way. Maybe it’s the way this and almost every scene in the movie feels like it was shot by three different directors before being lovingly edited at the hands of Stevie Wonder. From shot to shot it's hard to tell whether I’m supposed to laugh, feel scared, or just be confused and angry. It's a baffling experience that actually has a moment or two in the first act, before losing direction entirely and spinning off into space like Vader's TIE fighter.
The main storyline revolves around a photographer named George (David Heard). He’s a former fashion photographer who inexplicably turned his back on the industry and now spends his time sulking and taking pictures of homeless people. Why? Because plot contrivance, that’s why. I guess just making him an actual sewer worker would have been too easy. As it is, when homeless people start disappearing, George seems determined to investigate, but only because the story requires him to. His second obligatory interest is his girlfriend Lauren (Kim Griest), who despite being shaped like a 12-year-old boy is a fashion model. She is much more practical and motivated than George, and shows good-natured impatience with his lack of maturity. George loves her, but grouses about her work because he’s kind of a selfish asshole.
Notice how I haven’t said anything about cannibals in a while? Get used to that, because if there’s one thing C.H.U.D. has a lot of, it’s Not Cannibals.
The B-story involves a detective named Bosch, who also seems preternaturally interested in what’s happening beneath the streets. His superiors want him to stop digging around, but they don’t know what it’s like out there because they’ve been flying a desk for too long. They're not like Bosch, who wants answers so badly he’s willing to enlist the help of a skull-shatteringly insane homeless advocate called The Reverend (Daniel Stern), who's convinced the government is behind the disappearances. Naturally, Uncle Sam is so eager to disprove this that they dispatch a humorless, dead-eyed suits to the scene, with orders to tell everyone absolutely nothing about everything.
Welcome to the world of C.H.U.D., a movie about sewer cannibals that has almost no sewer cannibals IN it. It's clear there’s not much of a budget in play here, so it's tempting to attribute this discrepancy to the director's judicious sense of taste. But that's giving C.H.U.D. more credit than it deserves. I like to imagine that New World Pictures was in trouble with the bank, and one day someone heard Mr. Bankerson was coming by the lot to see how things were going. Desperate to show they were still functioning, the studio quickly cobbled a handful of spec scripts into a full length screenplay and started filming.
One was a heart rending story about a cop learning to deal with loss, the other concerned a couple on the cusp of middle age, learning to love the things they hate about each other. And of course there was the story about blood sucking cannibals from Venus, which had to be pared down to just one guy in a rented rubber fish suit that couldn't appear on camera for more than 10 seconds because the lights would melt it. While it's true that C.H.U.D. made itself a tidy profit, it's also a confusing, frustrating, indifferently constructed train wreck that isn't even successful as self-deprecating irony. If you're looking for quality (or even North Korean knockoff quality) horror, do yourself a favor and avoid it.
And if you can't, do ME a favor and remember that I gave you fair warning.