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Even though the movie basically features all of the ingredients needed for me to enjoy a silly B-horror movie, "C.H.U.D." just didn't do it for me.
It has a good concept, at least as good as it can get for some silly B-monster movie trash but the movie does very little interesting with its potentially good concept. The first halve of the movie can be basically seen as a build up. Not much is happening in its first halve but also from the moment one when the cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers show up the movie doesn't really know to become exciting. The movie still succeeded in gaining a cult-status over the years. Who knows, perhaps if the movie featured some more gore and it would had been a better and also more entertaining one to watch.
The movie has a quite ridicules story that also isn't being made exactly believable by its storytelling. Douglas Cheek's directing is lacking and the movie also makes a mistake to feature several very different characters, of which the movie looses its focus on from time to time. The one moment the movie is about the Daniel Stern character, while the other it's about the John Heard and the other its about good old Captain Bosch. The movie really lacks on good clear main hero and instead the movie focuses just a bit on each of them, with as a result that we as the viewers also just don't really ever start to care about any of the characters. The movie also isn't helped by it's bad editing and the movie features a couple of moments that make you wonder what it was what you were just watching there.
The movie just doesn't always flow well, especially toward its ending.
Perhaps the most amazing thing about this movie is its cast. John Heard and Daniel Stern are both respected actors, though they are mostly active within the comedy genre. It makes it all the more weird to see them both in a movie such as this one. The movie also features John Goodman in one of his earliest movie roles. It's just an 15 seconds part though but it was fun to see how his career started of for him. Playing a fat cop who gets eaten in a diner by cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers of course always looks nice on your résumé.
Amazingly enough the movie in 1989 even got a sequel, though I doubt that this was because of the big box-office successes of this movie. It did made a profit but with a $ 1,250,000 this of course isn't very hard to achieve. Its budget really shows on screen although I must say that the cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers are not bad looking. I just wished they were in more sequences and could have added some more tension and horror to the movie.
It has some redeeming qualities but overall it remains nothing more than a bad, silly, '80's B-monster flick.
4/10
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