C.H.U.D. (

1984

) ½

I talk quite a bit about how shitty New York City and other North American metropolises were in the 1970s and 1980s (and indeed how shitty they will likely be in the future as city governments continue with their policy of anarcho-tyranny) but even I never thought things were so bad that a horror film could be made around the premise that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) could dispose of nuclear and chemical waste beneath the street of Manhattan. Indeed, this is the real meaning of the film's acronym title: Contamination Hazard Urban Disposal with the far sexier Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dweller being merely a red herring. Now, if the prospect of dumping radioactive sludge into NYC's water supply isn't laughably insane enough for you, just remember that this movie is set in the USA. A country that spans the better part of a continent with so many swaths of uninhabited/uninhabitable wasteland that the government was able to detonate an atomic bomb without anyone catching on (well aside from all the Russian spies in the Manhattan Project itself)! Surely, in all that landmass there has to be a better place to dump toxic sludge than in the sewers of the most populated city. You would need a nation-state the size of Singapore to have this premise make any sense at all.

Moreover, CHUD does not seem to be the sort of film that is revealing in the absurdity of its premise. Indeed, quite the opposite as despite a few effective jokes scattered throughout the run-time, it is a mostly serious monster movie film. While the ecological aspect of the horror is absurd the sociological themes are highly relevant both in 1984 and forty years later. Imagine if you will a modern urban landscape that is beset by violent, insane, seemingly subhuman creatures living quite literally in the gutters and sewers. It's not that far-fetched. Tellingly, CHUD begins with a scene that is both depressing and plausible, at least if you swap out the radioactive monster for a more mundane danger. We see a woman out walking her dog late at night, only to pass by a manhole cover that pops open and an unseen but grotesque creature grabs her and drags her down into the sewers. The only evidence that she was ever there is one of her shoes that fell off in the struggle. The next day we see a street sweeper brushing it away, along with all the other refuse populating the street. Nobody notices, nobody cares. Just another day in the rotten apple.

Well, that's not entirely true, as we will shortly find out that the poor lady that got dragged into the sewers was the wife of an NYPD captain by the name of Bosch. Previously he had been happy to either actively cover up or passively ignore the disappearances of numerous hobos in his neighborhood. His wife's disappearance by presumably the same unseen menace left him less inclined to look the other way, even when the pressure starts to come from the Chief of Police and the Mayor's office. Perhaps the most realistic aspect of this wacky movie about radioactive mutants in New York sewers is the fact that the culture of water-carrying corruption in the metropolitan police department is only broken by a random accident that puts a high-ranking police officer's family directly in the line of a corrupt cover-up. You may start to understand why real-world issues go unsolved for decades despite huge amounts of taxpayer funds being lavished on them.

Still, Bosch has no idea what is going on besides the fact that his superiors in the police department and city hall are trying to hide something, so he starts to investigate matters personally. One lead he follows up on comes from a series of missing person reports filed by A.J. Shepherd, a dirty hippie who runs a soup kitchen in the neighborhood. It seems a fair number of his patrons have gone missing. Now, there's nothing too perplexing about that on the surface of things, hobos do tend to move around a lot and it's not like they leave forwarding addresses when they jump a train car or buy a bus ticket. However, the unusual thing is all the ones who have disappeared are underground people, the type that lives in NYC's vast catacombs of sewers and subway tunnels. The guys sleeping under overpasses or in empty lots have not been affected.

Shepherd is no fool, he knows that captains in the NYPD don't personally go spelunking in the sewers to track down a handful of missing vagrants and derelicts. As a dirty hippie (and I do mean that literally, this guy's outfit is positively rancid) he has a healthy suspicion of authority but after learning the truth behind Bosch's motivation, he agrees to help Bosch search the sewers for more information. The pair don't find any monsters right away, but they do turn up some strange equipment scattered around the sewers, including Geiger counters bearing the insignia of the NRC. The evidence is nothing concrete but it is solid enough for Bosch to go upstairs to his superiors in the police department and start demanding some answers about what is going on unless they want to wake up to a salacious headline about nuclear waste in the city's sewer system on the front page of the New York Post.

At the same time, arrogant and lazy photographer George Cooper is beginning to get a sense that something is rotten beneath the streets of New York as well. Cooper had previously done a photo-journalism series about the homeless underground people in New York City and he still retains a few contacts with the underground people. When one of these contacts, a bag woman, is arrested for trying to steal a cop's sidearm George bails her out and starts to get curious. Why the sudden need for a sidearm? Apparently, the underground people think there is some kind of monster lurking in the depths below the city and they want weapons to defend themselves with.

They're right too, eventually, things get so out of control that Wilson, the man from the NRC in charge of covering things up is forced to concede to the police department that monsters are living in the sewers. Bosch is vindicated and promptly orders the NYPD's flame-thrower squadron to clear out the sewers along with the crews from the NRC. This raises the worrying question of why the NYPD had dedicated flame-thrower units, as I struggle to think of many law-enforcement applications for those weapons. Seriously, even Cobra (1986), a cop that regularly packed automatic guns and hand grenades only saw it necessary to set a criminal on fire once! Not that the flame-thrower squadron does much good here as the CHUDs prove damnably difficult to kill. Indeed, it isn't long before they start to surface on the city streets hunting for fresh prey.

The pacing of CHUD does it few favors. This should be a briskly-plotted 1980s horror movie filled with sleaze, violence, and maybe a bit of less-than-tasteful nudity. However, while it does deliver a bit of bloodshed eventually, the pacing of the film is more akin to your average 1950s monster movie. The audience will be spending an awfully long time getting acquainted with the relatively large cast of characters while they wait for the cannibals to turn up. There are attempts to speed things up here and there. For instance, a pair of very long conversation scenes around the film's midway point are spliced together. This is certainly a good call as by themselves they would be both rather dull and back to back they would have been downright snore-inducing. However, since the film opts to jump back and forth between the conversations neither scene outstays its welcome. Still, you're probably going to be waiting a long time for the monsters to turn up for anything more than a fleeting glimpse here or there.

For a film with a (relatively) meager New World Pictures budget, CHUD boasts some memorable and technically impressive monster costumes. The CHUDs look dark and slimy, not unlike the protagonist' monster form in The Oily Maniac (1976), but with glowing yellow eyes added to the mucky ensemble. In one scene we see the creature's neck extend, though this is the only instance of any flesh malleability we see from the CHUDs. Presumably, it's just to make the neat decapitation scene (complete with florescent green blood dripping from the neck stump) easier to film. However, for my money, the film is missing an opportunity here to make the CHUDs semi-liquid creatures that can melt to seep under doors and re-solidify on the other side. Obviously, this was beyond the film's budget, so audiences would have to wait another half decade to see a melting monster in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991).

As a metaphor for urban life in America, CHUD works rather well. We have a group of unelected bureaucrats turning an otherwise pleasant city into an uninhabitable hellhole through the unintended consequences of their policies. When confronted with the possibility that they may have done something wrong, they first deny there is a problem, then insist that they have already solved the problem, and finally commit to a policy seemingly intended to create the maximum amount of collateral damage. The only thing that feels off is that Wilson and his cronies from the NRC seem to be motivated by greed and cruelty, whereas in real life their counterparts would almost certainly be moral busy-bodies confident that the CHUDs will make NYC a more vibrant, dynamic place; after all radioactive cannibals are just “part and parcel of living in a big city.” Indeed, it would have been far more amusing, and far truer to life, if Wilson's initial explanation for the chemical waste being stuck in the city because of a new law banning the transportation of toxic waste through population centers passed just as the waste reached Grand Central Station. It would have been a well-intended reform, aimed at protecting vulnerable populations which accidentally put them in more danger; not unlike the way bleeding heart reformers shut down state mental hospitals and inadvertently flooded city streets with a perpetual underclass of violent lunatics.

The CHUDs themselves serve as an excellent metaphor for urban decay. The problem begins at the bottom, with only the most vulnerable and marginal people even aware that anything has gone wrong at all. Since these people are, as mentioned above, a perpetual underclass of lunatics and drug addicts, the authorities are not particularly concerned about their plight if they are even aware of it at all. Vagrants disappearing in the middle of the night is not unusual, nor is the sudden death of a drug addict any cause for particular alarm. The stories of monsters lurking in the sewers and subway system are just as easy to ignore when you consider that the person relaying the tale will almost certainly be insane. The authorities are content to pretend the problem doesn't exist until it becomes a big enough clusterfuck that it starts to affect people who can hold down jobs and pay taxes, and by that point, it has spiraled completely out of control.

It's no accident that it is vagrants and bums that are the ones being turned into CHUDs either, as the permanent underclass created by well-meaning but incompetent high officials is the natural metaphor for the film's CHUDs. Indeed, even in the film before the un-housed ruffians are transformed into atomic abominations there is still plenty of reason to fear them. The homeless we see are often unhinged and on the cusp of violence. One threatens Captain Bosch with a knife after the captain calmly asks him a few questions, and another nearly attacks George Cooper when he first ventures down into the sewers, even though the bum dimly remembers George as the nice man who took his photo.

Amusingly the term CHUD has taken on new life as an insult in recent years. Originally just used to refer to ugly people (fair enough the CHUDs of the film aren't going to win any beauty pageants) it now is used as a political insult. Amusingly, it refers to exactly the sort of people most likely to oppose the real-world policies that created the real-world CHUDs languishing in squalor in every major city in America. I won't pretend to have any special theological knowledge, but it's quite obvious that God has a sense of humor.