Into the Underground on a Sleepy Sunday Afternoon - "C.H.U.D." (1984

Okay, to the gist of it: Wilson is a government crook tasked with dumping toxic waste somewhere, choosing NYC’s underground sewers as the perfect dumping ground. What that does is “transform” the underground homeless into glow-eyed, slimy, green-skinned, cannibals with shark teeth and sharp talons! Wilson wants to flood the sewers with gas to kill those creatures and somehow continue to keep his cover-up concealed while Captain Bosch, in the precinct where folks keep going missing, means to expose all of them for their efforts to use his city as a toxic waste dumping site. That is a tug of war with other characters getting involved: newspaper reporter, Murphy, looking for a big story, fashion photographer, Cooper, responsible for a big project with the homeless gaining attention, Cooper’s model lover, Lauren Daniels, living with him in a tenement that rests right in the hub of the CHUD (Cannibalistic Human Underground Dweller) activity, homeless cook and “reverend”, AJ Shepherd, having reported his regulars missing (they would come to eat the food he was able to secure for the homeless), and Chief O’Brien, Bosch’s superior, uncomfortably agreeing to Wilson’s orders despite evidence that he’s up to very shady behavior. Eventually, the CHUD start to emerge more and more without Wilson able to contain their existence in secret any longer…such as a diner with cops played by the likes of Jay Thomas and none other than John Goodman! There are lots of familiar faces in this film, and I’m not sure how those who made this were able to cast such names as John Heard and Daniel Stern. They do go in depth on that in the Anchor Bay release audio commentary, led to believe this film was something completely different than what was ultimately presented on screen. I hope to watch this with the audio commentary again in the near future…I hadn’t any plans to watch “C.H.U.D.” (1984) this year, but I was sorting through my DVD collection and noticed it. I always seem to watch this film on late Sunday afternoons for whatever reason; this sort of started when I picked up the Anchor Bay DVD around 2002 at Circuit City (yes, that’s a name from the past, isn’t it?). Yep, I was at Circuit City when I noticed “C.H.U.D.” on the shelf aligning one singular wall of DVDs and had to buy it. Now, I was familiar with “Bud, the CHUD” but never got the chance, oddly enough, to see “C.H.U.D.” The first time I watched it was never in the late 80s or during my VHS rental store days in the 90s, it was 2002 or so on a Sunday evening. Never was I the same. Okay, maybe it wasn’t a quake to my every being, but the major draw to this, besides seeing yet another 80s horror film set in the unflattering, trashy environs of NYC, was watching Heard and Stern in some creature feature with a peculiar title. You could definitely see why CHUD could be the perfect slur for folks…they sure are hideous! I could only think of Stern and Heard’s characters, filthy, huffing the gas Wilson was pumping in the sewers, encountering all that toxic waste…they might have made it out of the sewers thanks to Curry’s Bosch, but the effects of what they breathed and touched had to be a death sentence. Bosch’s wife had been dragged into the sewer with her dog at the beginning of the film in what had to have been surreal for the audience who saw it in theaters at the time. But this is perfect for any Midnight Movie garbage sci-fi fan with a love for rubbery costumed creatures, designed to look as grotesque as possible, leaving behind remains of homeless, half-devoured and mangled. Stern and many of the homeless his “reverend” caters to are covered in filth, sweat, and soot, unwashed and in clothes probably worn for an advanced period of time. But even Heard and Griest, a photographer and model, slum it in a tenement that seems ready to be condemned at any moment. I do like this one scene between Heard and Griest where they discuss having a baby, and they complement each other quite well, but you have to wonder is these talents were, at some point on that shoot, wondering how they got roped into “C.H.U.D.” It has its fans, though, this film. I remember mentioning to many of my genre fan friends how this film was a laughable piece of trash and took exception to it…this meant a lot more to them than me. Heard, to his credit, knew how to show a horrified reaction. When JC Quinn’s Murphy is pulled into a culvert, Heard reacts in abject terror, not believing what he was sitting. And when partnered up with trapped Stern (earning the ire of Wilson who sent a sunglasses thug (John Bedford Lloyd) to padlock a door to a basement so he couldn’t get out because he planned to go to the newspapers about the toxic waste activity), Heard finds the mangled bodies of many homeless he had photographed not too long ago, nearly having a mental breakdown…it was damn good work! This is a definite grossout with Griest in a shower at one point poking into a drain with blood squirting/spraying all over the place, a company of Wilson’s government suits along with Bosch’s cops (with flame throwers) torn apart (found by Heard and Stern, including a severed head with an ear piece and mic), and Griest lopping off the head of a CHUD (that was stretching out its neck, in a deliriously ridiculous moment that even Heard and Stern laugh about on the audio commentary) that bursts into her apartment. This is just perfect company with “Street Trash” and anything low budget shot cheap in the city of the urban 80s. Except this film has the luxury of a cast of really noteworthy names. You see Heard and Stern (and Griest, even, following this up with the magnificent “Brazil”) on a poster, along with the many other faces that will ring a bell if you watch lots of 70s and 80s television in a casting call, and it gets attention...or it did if you were among the many of us who grew up with them. Granted, Heard and Stern pretty much moved on and long past this film as the critics roasted it while B-movie fans happened upon it in the late hours or on a shelf next to some Troma film.