November 11, 2018
Written by: Parnell Hall, Shepard Abbott
Starring: John Heard, Daniel Stern, Christopher Curry
Budget: $1,250,000
Quote: "Are you kidding? Your guy's got a camera. Mine's got a flamethrower."
Trivia: In 2011, as an April Fool's Day joke, the Criterion Collection, the USA's most prestigious distributor of home video, announced that it was releasing a special-edition DVD and Blu-ray Disc of the film with spine number 573. It was later assigned to The Music Room (1958). C.H.U.D. did however receive a special edition Blu-ray release from Arrow Video in 2016.
I had previously seen C.H.U.D. five or so years ago when I hosted a horror movie night at my apartment and a friend put it on after watching two other movies. Unfortunately, by the time this third movie played I had already been celebrating the entire day with my friend Jim Beam and could not really recall what the movie was about. Now, after a clearheaded second viewing, I can finally say that I love this movie! While it is certainly not an especially well made movie and does deserves a lot of the criticism it gets, it is a subversive film with some endearing qualities. It masquerades as an environmental horror film, among so many other ones that came out in the 1980s, but in actuality it is more of an urban monster movie. James O'Ehley in a blurb on Rotten Tomatoes wrote "If Woody Allen's Manhattan was a cinematic love song to New York, then surely C.H.U.D. is its hate song!" He's not wrong. C.H.U.D. takes a look at a lot of things that were disgusting and vile in the 1980s. Everything that was meant to be swept under the rug in the Reagan Era of the consumeristic suburban eighties. Like the monsters that the film follows, the movie itself is grimy and dirty. Starring John Heard, who would go on to torment Tom Hanks a few years later in Big and Daniel Stern who would give Kevin Arnold an inner monologue on The Wonder Years, this film is a hate song to a world that was trying to ignore its problems (weirdly enough, Heard and Stern would be brought back to the same city eight years later in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York... but by then it had already begun to become a different New York).
The movie is more or less about cannibalistic mutants that live in the New York sewers and are feeding (mainly) on New York's sizable homeless population. However there are three unlikely allies who are teaming up to stop the murders and get to the bottom of the monster mystery. They are George (John Heard) a photographer that is doing a project on photographing the city's homeless, Captain Bosch (Christopher Curry) a police captain who feels the responsibility for the murders in his district, and The Reverend (Daniel Stern) a bleeding heart who runs a local homeless shelter. The characters all at one time or another get trapped in the sewers and eventually discover that a government agency used the New York sewers as a storage place for nuclear waste and that that is the reason people are turning into cannibalistic mutants. To make matters worse, the powers of New York seem to know what is happening and send the smarmy Wilson to protect their secret by any means necessary. The movie climaxes with the killing of Wilson but with the C.H.U.D. problem not solved... making way for a sequel.
The movie is surprisingly good with all its grit and blemishes. It has a quality that resembles John Carpenter's Escape from New York or The Warriors. There is something fascinating about New York in the 1980s that this movie captures beautifully (and disgustingly). Just watching the film, one gets the feeling that he or she needs to take a shower. Would I want to live at that New York? Hell no! But it does have a fascinating mythical quality to it. It's the same way, I imagine, people in the 1950s and '60s watched Westerns and dreamed about what it must've been like to live on the frontier. What was it like to live in the New York of the Ramones and 42nd Grindhouse movie theaters?
My biggest gripe with the movie is that there is not enough of the cannibalistic mutant people. I'm sure this is because of budgetary reasons but it does make for a lot of moments where I'm waiting for something to happen. When the monsters are seen though, they are great! The filmmakers used practical effects with melting gooey skin that results in the monsters barely resembling a human form. While the filmmakers couldn't afford to show a lot of the monsters, they could afford a lot of prosthetic heads. The movie has nearly a half dozen scenes where people stumble upon the severed head of some C.H.U.D. victim.
The movie also does make some political and social stances. The movie, by and large, is a criticism of not just the way New York disregarded its homeless and struggling populations, but America in general. The 1980s were a time when many programs aimed at helping people with mental illness and families living in poverty had their budgets slashed. The rise in homelessness and the general disregard for those less fortunate is a major plot point in the film. There is a certain shame that the film purposely casts upon American movie audiences that is palpable in the film.
Additionally, the movie highlights nuclear fears many Americans were dealing with. Three Mile Island had a partial meltdown just five years earlier, causing countrywide fears of nuclear contamination. Additionally, scientists' inability to solve the question of what to do with nuclear waste only added to American's fears. Two years later that fear would reach a fever pitch with the complete meltdown of the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl in the U.S.S.R. Finally, C.H.U.D. is one more example of America's distrust with the American government. Watergate and the CIA/FBI's clandestine affair's caused many Americans to distrust their own government resulting in films like C.H.U.D. making America's government bureaucracy the villain (The Blob and E.T. to name just a couple).
Damn. Sorry if I get swept up in the social history around movies a bit, history has always fascinated me... One way or another, the movie is great! It's subversive, giving a big middle finger to the American government and the consumerism generation of the 1980s. It's both a hate song to New York and a love song to sleazy horror fans.
...what's your thoughts?
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