C.H.U.D

B-movies. Who doesn’t love them? With their D-list actors delivering solid B characters, and a cheese factor that would make any wine lover drool…. Who cares if the story line is unrealistic and downright ridiculous? I for one don’t; I enjoy the hell out of it!

C.H.U.D., a wonderful lil' gem considered a cult classic from 1984, starts out just almost like every other horror movie of the 70’s and 80’s, offering up a victim within the first five minutes. Here we see a woman walking her puppy through the desolate alleys of Manhattan, New York get pulled into a manhole by some unseen foe and whisked away to the city's underbelly below. And just as quickly as the attack happens, it’s over and the streets are once again seemingly deserted.

The key players we meet are:

• George Cooper (played by the not so unknown John Heard) a fashion photographer who ironically won an award for a photojournalism piece he wrote on the “Mole People” of New York, homeless people that reside in the city’s underground recesses. It seems the chick in the opening abduction was his wife, and now he is investigating her disappearance, as well as others.

• “The Reverend” aka A. J. Sheppard (Daniel Stern) a somewhat hippy-fied fellow who mans a soup kitchen out of his quickly deteriorating row house, where he feeds the Mole People on a regular basis.

• Murphy (J. C. Quinn) a freelance reporter that is starting to suspect “something strange is happening under our city streets.”

Individually these characters are kind of lame. Put them together however and they sort of feed off of each other (for lack of better verbiage) resulting in a pretty entertaining flick. Plus they become “smarter” (and I use that term loosely.)

Now see if you can follow along 'cuz it gets a little "complex" even for a B movie:
Cooper gets called down to the station by a Mole person, to bail her out for trying to steal a gun. It seems she wanted this gun for her brother Victor, who apparently needs the gun for protection against some "Ugly Fuckers." Wanting to talk to Victor about this, Cooper accompanies the sister to her underground paradise, only to find Victor definitely did need protection from the "Ugly Fuckers" when he was shown that a massive chunk of Victor's leg had been gnawed off by those same "ugly fuckers!" Being the professional photographer he was, Cooper wasted no time in taking a series of rather graphic impressive stills as evidence!

So for various reasons I won't divulge, Sheppard steals borrows these photos from Cooper's place and uses them, along with some other damning evidence he found underground, as leverage at a meeting he has arranged with the chief of the NYPD, the commissioner of NYPD, and another fellow by the name of Mr. Wilson from the NRC (the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.) It is at this meeting that he learns of a scandal where the NRC had tried to dispose of toxic waste by transporting it though Manhattan's sewer and subway tunnels. Unfortunately they were shut down by the city halfway through the process, which resulted in the underground being a giant dumping spot for this radioactive filth!

Well needless to say, the chief, the commissioner, and Wilson vehemently deny that this tonnage of filth has anything at all to do with the disappearances of so many homeless, and balk at the concept of the "ugly fuckers." In a snowball chain of events however, we learn of “C.H.U.D.” - a Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dweller, and the cops have just found one!! (Translation: C.H.U.D.'s are bums who have been severely mutated by the toxic filth and the cops just found a dead one! Ugh.)

Now you might be wondering what a C.H.U.D. looks like, and I'd have to tell you - pretty "fucking ugly!" Up close they look like Freddy Kruger would if he were oozing in between all those exposed tendons and veins. Plus they have these really creepy glowing eyes, and they bleed green gelatinous blood. Yuck! But from a distance, they look like some guy in a pretty lame Halloween costume. It's really rather sad how up close the graphics are pretty damned good but from far away, they are so laughable.

So anyway, with the underground running out of food for the C.H.U.D.'s, they begin to hunt above ground. This is a great scene because here we have a very young John Goodman and equally young Jay Thomas playing roles as goofy cops in a diner that end up being the meal instead of getting a meal.

The movie climaxes with a team from the NRC and a couple flame throwing cops, setting out to put a stop to the C.H.U.D.'s once and for all, but they prove to be rather ineffective. What will they do? Can the city be saved from the increasingly multiplying and carnivorous C.H.U.D's? Well... you are just gonna have to watch it to find out.

In true tradition of a classic B-movie, this one is really... well.... stupid. but admitted a classic in the B genre, therefore expected. The relatively no name actors perform remarkably well however, and even though you might find yourself occasionally shaking your head in utter disbelief (versus sheer disbelief) these moments are core criteria for B-films, and you would not be left with the same impression without them.