C.H.U.D.: A Surprisingly Relevant B-Movie in 2020

I: On The Town, or "Oh Homer, of course you'll have a bad impression of New York if you only focus on the pimps and the CHUDs.."

So, no joke- I love New York.

Or as the poets call her...New Yaawk...

Not like, as an actual place though. I've never been there. I certainly  have no intention of going there just now.

I have no deep personal ties to it, historically or geographically. To the best of my knowledge my family didn't come here through Ellis Island or something, generations back.

No, I love New York as a character. See, so many of my favorite movies take place there that despite having never been there, I have this sort of familiarity with it as a fictional setting and character in and of itself.

King Kong, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Avengers, Spider-Man, Escape from New York, Superman (Metropolis in the Christopher Reeve movies is just NYC wearing a different name-tag), The Beast from Twenty Thousand Fathoms, Vampire in Brooklyn,  the list of films I love that take place in New York literally goes on and on and on. And New York features in all of them not just as a setting, but occasionally as a character in and of itself. Traits about New York are what make certain narratives unique and special. Would King Kong  have been as memorable if the big ape had climbed up some random building in another port city? A particularly high building in Boston?

Would The Avengers  have looked as cool defending Kansas City from Loki and the Chitauri?  Could it have been as exciting and unique a journey if The Warriors had been trying to get across Orlando to get to Disney World or something?

Hell no. The Warriors have to get to Coney Island, can you dig it? Kong and the Empire State Building are synonymous in my mind. And hell, because Stan Lee was such a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker, the majority of the Marvel Comics universe sprung up whole cloth from the streets of the City That Never Sleeps.

Yeah, New York is quite the character in cinematic canon. But there's only a few movies where one could argue that NYC is the main character.  And my favorite of this much smaller club...is a little movie called C.H.U.D....

Accept no substitutes.

II: The Social Horror Story, and the "New York Feel"

C.H.U.D. begins in a very similar vein to a spiritual cousin Jaws: with a minor character minding their own business, just to get killed in a creepy manner by a largely unseen menace.

The difference between the two is that the shark attack that opens Jaws  builds up slowly and steadily. Not so in our little feature under discussion today. Nope, a woman walking her dog gets killed by a CHUD in a little under 45 seconds,  pulled down into a man-hole by a slimy clawed hand in blink- leaving nothing but a discarded white pump and the awesome title shot I included above that kicks off this experience.

C.H.U.D. is surprisingly complex for a movie with a premise as B-movie as it is: toxic waste under New York is mutating homeless people into flesh-hungry mutants, the Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers, or CHUDs for short. That's it, that's the story in a nutshell.

"We're here. We're gonna eat your face. Deal with it."

But the way it's pulled off is on a really unique and engaging way. Presenting us with an ensemble cast that slowly comes together over the full cut's 96 minutes (there were several snipped and extended cuts for television that floated around for a while before the full film regenerated itself on a later home video release), it presents this B-premise in a smart A-script way that reminds me of the character-driven nature and improvisational feeling of the (also very NYC-centric) horror films of Larry Cohen. Many of the characters are allowed to sort of just be themselves while onscreen in a very unrehearsed and natural feeling way.

It presents the plot through a more socially driven brand of "What If...?": What if an apex predator moved into the urban jungle of New York, and it's preferred prey was human?

The answer to this question is presented through the reaction of New York as an entity to this nightmare scenario at every level of it's society, thus making it into that beast even more rare than a CHUD: the Social Horror story.

• At the lowest level are the CHUDs themselves, a mole-race of entrancingly disgusting mutants that feed on flesh, prowling the shadows of the film, but rarely being seen directly. Many of the scenes with these guys they're kept out of sight, or seen as only clawed, misshapen hands that are moving aside manhole covers or snatching up their unwary victims. In my opinion, this is another piece of DNA this flick shares with that obscure little shark movie I mentioned earlier, and much like with Bruce the shark, the CHUDs being kept largely out of sight works to the films advantage. A guy in makeup and a mask is only so scary. Something lurking in the dark, around the corner, just outside the door, or under your feet... much more effective.

But when they do show up, they're awesome. Seriously, there's no snarky joke here.
I just straight up love their simple but grotesque design and those
glowing yellow eyes haunted my dreams...

• Because the threat emerges from the underground of New York, the first to be affected are the Undergrounders, also sometimes referred to as the "Mole People", the city's subterranean homeless population. They're represented by Mrs. Monroe (a humble bag lady we meet after she's arrested for trying to steal the sidearm of a beat cop), her brother Victor, his best bud Hugo ( a piece of I think deliberate symbolism, as Victor Hugo wrote politically-oriented ensemble stories like Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame), a knife-wielding schizophrenic named Val, and the Reverend A.J. Sheppard, an ex-con who runs a soup kitchen out of a crumbling row-house (played with a manic hippy zeal by Daniel Stern of Home Alone Wet Bandits fame) and is noticing the diminishing numbers of his 'regulars' to an extent he's called the cops about it.
• Next to become aware of the problem is Captain Bosch of the NYPD, who's been trying to clear the case load of the rash of missing persons in his precinct, but getting very little help from higher up, to the point a Captain starts doing a detective's work to figure out what's happening. We find out later the woman in the opening is (was) his wife Flora, in a pretty emotional scene between him and Sheppard. (also Christopher Curry, who plays him, was in Home Alone 3 it turns out. Huh.) He's also having to dodge the badgering of Murphy, a freelance reporter who smells something rotten in the Big Apple with these missing persons too.
• Next up the ladder, some Young Urban Professionals: Cooper, a photographer (and friend of Mrs. Monroe) who recently won some awards with a piece on the Undergrounder homeless population and thus is privy to their plight moreso than most on his social level would be (played with a disaffected cynical sarcasm by John Heard of Home Alo-... Wait, WTF?), and his girlfriend Lauren, a model. They just moved into a new apartment complex... one with a tunnel access in the shared basement storage area...(more on that later) Along with them are various other tenants in the building, and other regular New Yorkers, some of whom simply notice that something is definitely wrong around them, some of them just get devoured.
• And from there we encounter several higher up entities of the political machine of NYC such as the Chief of Police played by Eddie Jones (best known to me as Jon Kent from the Lois and Clark tv series and TO THE BEST OF MY KNOWLEDGE not in any fucking Home Alone movies...), and a representative of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission called Wilson and his assorted cronies, the source of the all the trouble Bosch is having pursuing these disappearances since, like a conspiracy theorists wet dream, they're engaged in a massive cover-up about both the murderous monsters being spawned beneath Manhattan...and the real meaning  of the the movie's titular acronym...

Presented here as a handy diagram of the new food chain in New York.

 And of course, above them all, NYC itself, being a strange, anarchic presence all it's own and giving C.H.U.D. the undeniable "New York feeling" that makes it so unique. This movie is not afraid of how dirty it's subject matter is or how anarchic and strange just a walk down the street in New York can be.

For instance, this shot: Bosch, doing hero shit, solving mysteries.
Homeless guy, playing drums on this mailbox for the whole scene,
and nothing else, in the background without comment.
Shine on, you crazy diamond.

The Undergrounder characters are not glamorously homeless; they're filthy, desperate, and scared, played with the manic, prey-animal intensity of people who are now being literally victimized, after a lifetime of it metaphorically. Sheppard looks like he was born dingy, his patchy beard, dirty neck and sweat-stains showing him as a real person, not a polished picture of humanity. Bosch and Murphy look like average joes, and even on up the chain, very few people are presented as movie-star good-looking (aside from the obvious exception of Lauren the model, but even she is presented in a grounded way, usually dressed in ordinary clothes, and with a level-headedness that serves her well later) and are generally very just...real-looking. And all that grounds New York as a place where not just anything can happen, but THIS crazy shit can happen  too. Which does so much to temper the patent ridiculousness of the movie as presented on paper in black and white.

And speaking of white- My one criticism here is one that is indicative of the time it was made: much like tv shows like Mad About You or Friends set in New York (one of the most culturally diverse single cities on the planet)... it's a bit lacking in representation, and is something that a good remake could remedy really well, I think. It really struck me on my latest viewing that it is an extra level of (likely unintended) social commentary that this only becomes a problem for New York at large when the Chuds start running low on the homeless and come up to eat random white people.

So why do I think a modern remake of C.H.U.D. could be really interesting?

Other than wanting to see this cute widdle pun-um on the big screen?

III: Influences, Influencers, and Influenza

As I mentioned before, there are a few hints here and there that the screenwriter may have wanted to find out what it would look like if Victor Hugo wrote a shitty monster movie. A city on the edge, desperate people from all walks of life, a tragically heroic cop, and the dregs of society banding together against a corrupt government. And flesh-eating mutants.

As such, the script for C.H.U.D. is a lot more progressive and socially conscious than you'd think from my earlier criticism about it being Terribly White.

In fact some of the things that really stood out to me on my most recent viewing was the palpable tension between cops and the public, the overall opinion of governmental authority in a crisis (I'm coming back to this in a minute, by the way), along with a frank and honestly (for 1984?) unheard of discussion of abortion, a woman's bodily autonomy, and how it's a woman's choice and nobody else's what she does with her own body when Lauren finds out she's pregnant and talks to Cooper about it. (Another detail of unvarnished reality in the film, as it really doesn't effect the story,  is just something that is happening to this couple)

Like, he has input sure ( I mean, he helped, right?), but she's initially shocked that he asserts her right to make that choice for herself, taking it as indifference at first, before he explains himself. It's a very raw, real scene of honest communication in a relationship that would feel screamingly out of place in any other horror film that isn't specifically about those kinds of issues, and is just without peer in this particular oeuvre of 'B-grade Cult 80s Horror Movie with Mutant Cannibals'.

And later she also turns out to be pretty handy with a sword.
#feminism

I saw another review of this movie that criticized Lauren's character as a cipher who's there to get threatened by a monster later, and  can't help but feel that reviewer saw one of the edits without this scene (as it's one of the ones added for the tv cut, then only later integrated into the film as a whole) as thinking of her as just a Blonde who gets Menaced by the Monster is terribly minimalist and misogynistic thinking.Even though she does have a rather "derp" moment of accidentally pullng the phone cord out of the wall when trying to get help, but that's more script contrivance than character. There's also a scene that recalls the at-the-time still pretty topical case of Kitty Genovese as we see Lauren screaming for help out her apartment window when the CHUD roaming her apartment building eats the police she called. She screams at the top of her lungs into the echoing canyons of the most populous city in the US for quite a bit... and is answered by silence and has to take care of the problem herself. With furniture, photography chemicals, a saber, and her wits. In short, I love this character and if you have shit to say about her, you can fucking fight me. I'll just borrow her sword first.

Also, before I dive into a bunch of other stuff and forget:
BABY JOHN GOODMAN IS IN THIS MOVIE.
He's a beat cop that gets eaten by some CHUDs that
presumably had to roll themselves out of this diner afterwards.
Maybe they ate him in shifts.
Just sayin' that's one big hoss.

This movie is a little bit of a cult classic, not getting a whole lot of love or attention when it was released and gaining more of an audience slowly over time with tv broadcast and home video, which is how I found it (one of the many horror films I found in the incredible horror section at the Video Update rental store in Valparaiso, now the site of a Dollar Tree, RIP). And not just me, it turns out...

Turns out C.H.U.D. was one of the sources of inspiration for Jordan Peele's sophomore outing as one of my favorite directors of the 21st century, US, going as far as to feature a VHS copy of it in the background of the opening shots of the film, and drawing from it the unseen threat creeping up from the subterranean depths to dismantle you with extreme violence. It's also no coincidence that US and C.H.U.D. are both very socially aware and critical films that have lots to say about the world in which they were released.

And yes, I'm going to get to the films of Jordan Peele on this blog. I love them too much to let it go at just an old Facebook capsule review.

Another film and film-maker that was definitely influenced by this uncut gem is Guillermo Del Toro and his American breakout movie Mimic, which borrows the underground setting and the ensemble approach, swaps out man-size mutant cockroaches for mutant homeless people, and generally delivers a very entertaining and still very very good creature feature. And the last act is lifted almost whole cloth from C.H.U.D. with the sewers being flooded with methane gas to poison and burn out the monstrous threat before it can spread any further (right down to likely not getting them all).

 And I can't help but feel that Del Toro's hairless, pointy-eared vampire mutant strain of the Reapers from Blade II, dressed in rags and lurking in the sewers, bear more than a passing resemblance to the CHUDs with their cavernous, bloody maws and endless hunger. They're even being covered up by the vampire powers-that-be in that movie!

But where the movie comes back around to being surprisingly relevant in the 21st century, outside it's subtle impact on the horror genre itself, is that right now, in the here and now, New York City is being eaten alive. In a preventable and senseless attack from a threat that lots of those in power knew about long before the general public did, and that those powers did very embarrassingly little about until it was prowling around killing white people unchecked, New York is under assault by the Coronavirus right now in a way that mirrors C.H.U.D. in eerily prescient ways.

Look at these assholes, not even social distancing!!!

There's a scene in CHUD where the reporter Murphy is trying to get Cooper on his side to help him investigate what's going on under the city, and he asks him why he did his little piece on the homeless if it wasn't for the awards and the fame. Lauren snaps at him that it wasn't about that for Cooper, that he just wanted "to do something relevant." to which Murphy scoffs, "Ohh, 'relevant'! Yeah, that's a bad word now, went off the Okay Word List years ago..." And he's not wrong. There's plenty of CHUDs out there who will creep out from their holes on the Internet to try and spread hate and ignorance online, and plenty of folks in the government who claim they know what they're doing but are perfectly willing to do the moral equivalent of flooding SoHo with methane and blowing it up if it means the stock market might recover.

The truth of the matter is the folks that want you
 to die so they can live aren't just in the sewers...

 
So, should you watch C.H.U.D.? Yes. It's free on Amazon Prime right now. Go. Do it.

Should you let "relevant" back onto the Okay Word List? Most certainly, and enjoy seeing it from my vantage point if you like, or just as a fun 80s monster flick. Both work.

Is there a conspiracy stretching up to the highest corridors of power  concerning the connection between C.H.U.D. and the Home Alone franchise???

Oh, most definitely....

NEXT TIME: MORE CANNIBALS, AND 100% MORE RANDY QUAID....