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4
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5 |
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10
= Highest Rating |
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Welcome
to Pottsville, Idaho, a sleepy little town nicknamed "the
spud capital of the entire universe" —
where it just so happens a monstrous, toxic waste-spawned mutant
is running amok, slaughtering and digesting citizens at random.
With the mayor (Jose Ferrer) worried more about this year's
potato crop than the rash of bizarre disappearances, it's up
to the town detective (Bill Osco, alias "Rexx Coltrane",
aka "Johnny Commander"*)
and a government scientist (Ed Wood's
Martin Landau) to stop the creature's deadly rampage on their
own.
This meager slice of early '80s drive-in cheese is little more
than a series of Alien-inspired
kill scenes haphazardly strung together with itsy bits of nonsensical,
so-called 'plot' in between. It tries to sex up 1950s sci-fi
monster-on-the-loose clichés by dressing them in then-fashionable
slasher film attire, and almost totally fails. Writer/director
Jackie Kong (Blood Diner) seems
to be making things up as she goes along... How else to explain
why Landau's character, Dr. Jones, starts out as a scientific
quack and political brown-noser but suddenly morphs into the
heroic monster hunter? A narrator opens the movie with ominous
portents of terrible events to come, then the film switches
briefly to internal voice-overs by Detective Lutz during his
scenes; a half-hour into the movie these inner thoughts then
disappear altogether. There's a bizarre dialog exchange involving
the "culture war" politics of massage tables. (Don't
ask. We learn that Det. Lutz is a Libertarian, however.) It's
suggested that the shapeshifting creature burrows beneath the
ground to travel around town (when it's not hiding in the trunks
of cars), but for all intent and purposes it just seems to teleport
about at will. The explanation of the killer mutant's origin
— it's a "genetic freak" born to and kept hidden by
the resident town kook (Dorothy Malone) — is half-baked at best.
At least the oddball casting has some cult
appeal. Landau and Ferrer (future and past Oscar winners, respectively)
are slumming BIG TIME here; you certainly don't see TV comedienne
Ruth Buzzi (Laugh-in) in too many horror films. (Actually,
there's this one and that's it.) Lutz's waitress girlfriend
is played by Marianne Gordon (How To Stuff
a Wild Bikini, Rosemary's Baby),
at the time wife of country music crooner Kenny Rogers. The
Gong Show's "Unknown Comic", Murray Langston,
and musician/mystery novelist/Texas gubernatorial candidate
Kinky Friedman appear briefly as monster chow. As the easygoing
detective hero of the piece, non-actor Osco — husband of the
director and producer of the film — is so laid back he's somnambulistic,
at least until the climax pitting him against the creature in
a fight to the finish. (Up to that point he gives Hugo Stiglitz
a run for his money in the "Human Block of Wood" sweepstakes.)
Cheese flows as copiously as the slime courtesy
of the poor dialog and rubbery special effects — the jiggly-eyed
monster looks a lot more like a bloody, cyclopean Mr. Hankey
on roller skates than anything dreamed up by H.R. Giger. The
scene at the drive-in with the two stoners is genuinely amusing,
but aside from that and some scattered unintentional laughs
there's really not much in The Being
to elevate it above the sum of its considerable clichés.
There's one particularly odd scene which
I simply have to comment on... After a long day's police work,
Det. Lutz goes home to crash and has a weird-ass dream. In his
black-and-white nightmare he and Dr. Jones are flying in a small
single-engine airplane with the monster clinging to the fuselage
outside. The mutant rips off the door on Jones' side and pulls
him out screaming. Jones hangs onto the wing for awhile (!)
but then plunges with the monster to his death. As Lutz tries
to control the aircraft, Ruth Buzzi — with blood dripping down
her face — flies by on a broom and says, "It's all in your
mind."
Okay. So either this is one of the most pointlessly
inane sequences ever plopped in the middle of a monster movie,
or it's a scene that was originally shot for the film's climax
(excepting the Buzzi-on-a-broom bit, that is), scrapped because
it was just too cheesy and ridiculous, and then used anyway
as blatant padding. (Lutz's dream has nothing to do with anything
other than to add three or so minutes to the running time.)
It's definitely the former. But I strongly
suspect the latter as well.
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*
Osco is billed as both "Rexx Coltrane" and
"Johnny Commander" in the credits.
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Shriek
Show's anamorphic widescreen (1.78:1) presentation of The
Being isn't going to win any prizes but for a nearly 25
year-old Z-grade drive-in flick it gets the job done well enough.
It's certainly a major improvement over any previous VHS releases.
The graininess and too-dark scenes I'd chalk up to the way the
film was originally shot. Some passages of dialog sound somewhat
muffled in the 2.0 stereo audio mix (clearer in the alternate
Spanish language dub track) but this, too, is almost certainly
a result of the original materials. I'd wager that the film hasn't
looked or sounded this good since its initial theatrical run.
Light on extras, the DVD comes with a roster
of trailers for other Media Blasters titles (under the Shriek
Show and Fangoria International imprints) in addition to the promo
for The Being. There's also a substantial
image gallery packed with scores of behind-the-scenes production
photos. 10/02/05 |
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