Tuesday, October 07, 2014

C.H.U.D.

(1984) 



Octopunk raked this one through the coals nine freakin' years ago but it's one of those movies that kept popping up on my radar. "Oh, you've never seen C.H.U.D.?", asked friend of mine recently, as though it were a timeless classic that I had overlooked. "If you like this..." suggested Netflix... "you might want to check out C.H.U.D." Ok, I'm a reasonable guy with not much of a game plan for Horrorthon 2014. Let's do this! 

Aaaaaand - turns out it stands for Crap Happy Unintelligent Drivel. 

Wilson is a powerful, evil man who's covering up some bullcrap. He looks kinda like John Cleese but he's not funny and he's pissed off all the time. I kept expecting him to do a silly walk but instead he's just a 24 hour dick. In the finest moment of his career, Daniel Stern portrays a scrappy soup kitchen volunteer who is concerned about the disappearing homeless people. It should come as no surprise that radioactive waste has mutated people into monsters with glowing eyes who feed on humans. This part I liked. 

Octo griped about the monsters not being given enough screen time. While this is true and the C.H.U.D.s are used sparingly, I think it's also possible that more screen time may have been too much. The best part of the C.H.U.D. experience are those moments when you finally get to see those awesome glowing eyes after being bored for 15 minutes.  The rest is predictable and preachy on autopilot. It moves slowly but it's not good enough to be a slow burner. 

7 comments:

AC said...

Great review of a film I hope to never see.

JPX said...

Funny review! It gets annoying when people are like, "You never saw such and such???" Of course I did just that to AC recently about JAWS. I never saw Raging Bull, wanna fight about it?

I remember seeing C.H.U.D back in the day but I'll be damned if I recall anything about it. It is so bad its good or just so bad?

Trevor said...

So, what does C.H.U.D. really stand for?

Johnny Sweatpants said...

It stands for Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dweller but later it's revealed that it really means Contamination Hazard Urban Disposal.

Catfreeek said...

Ah yes I remember C.H.U.D. well. Excellent review, Daniel Stern was the best part of the film.

Landshark said...

Awesome review. This is one movie that I've never seen but I always really wanted to. For some reason, I recall it being an early entry into the Unrated or NC-17 category, and so my 13 year old mind interpreted that as meaning it was going to be INSANELY scary and violent. And yet according to the internet, it was just a measly old R all this time...shucks.

DKC said...

Great review! I'm definitely not watching it though.

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