Going to college in Richmond Virginia, I had many run-ins with homeless people. Most people will tell you that the homeless are the helpless victims of an unsympathetic capitalist system, but I have mixed feelings in regards to them. I do want to help them out, really, but they also smell bad and are sometimes hard to talk to because of intoxication or insanity. This movie teaches us, in addition to having poor hygiene and yelling at people at the bus-stop, that the homeless might one day mutate into Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers. John Heard and Daniel Stern star as photographer George Cooper and “The Reverend” A.J. Shepherd respectively, long before they both appeared in Home Alone. George lives in New York City with his wife Lauren (Kim Greist) and has become disillusioned with fashion photography and has started taking pictures of, and befriending, Manhattan’s street people. He learns from them that many of the homeless that live in the tunnels of New York, called “Undergrounders,” are acting very strange. Local police Captain Bosch (Christopher Curry) starts searching for his wife, who went missing recently, and goes to his old friend A.J. for a possible lead. A.J. informs Bosch that many of the undergrounders he normally sees in his soup kitchen have gone missing. The movie pads itself out for a long while Bosch and A.J. investigate the tunnels under the city, finding equipment from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and hearing scary roars, and George mostly talks to his wife. We eventually find out that homeless people are turning into what the NRC and EPA have dubbed CHUD (the government loves acronyms) due to some dumped nuclear materials. After all of this set-up, the movie finally kicks into gear around the 70 minute mark, when the CHUD are getting gassed out of their subterranean dwelling and attack New York in force, killing John Goodman.
This movie is what experts would call a camp classic. It’s pretty obvious that the CHUD themselves are just guys in rubber masks, but their glowing eyes and melty faces do have a certain slimey appeal. The monsters don’t ever do much aside from pull people off screen and roar. The acting gets pretty over-the-top at times too, but is generally passable, even from the incidental characters. This film had the potential to be massively entertaining for 100% of its running time, but falls flat due to its mishandled pacing and lackluster music. The whole score was done with synthesizers, and usually consists of sparse musical stings and annoying three-second loops repeated ad nauseam. The 70 minutes leading up to the third act of this film try to maintain the interest of the audience by peppering the time with a few CHUD attacks and layering on a confusing mystery about the government’s involvement, but all of the victims we see are never characterized, so we don’t care about them at all. They’re just random pedestrians. This does very little to build tension, and the film shots itself in the foot even more by cutting from gruesome attacks to an extended, soothing scenes, like 6 minutes of George and his wife jogging through Central Park to calming music. This happens all the time, even when George and AJ are running away from CHUD trying to escape the tunnels near the end, and it really holds the film back from being a true classic horror movie.
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