C.H.U.D.

“A recent article in a New York newspaper reported that there were large colonies of people living under the city. The paper was incorrect. What is living under the city is not human. C.H.U.D. is under the city."

Great tagline…great movie!

C.H.U.D. (Douglas Cheek, 1984) is a classic of the 1980s. It’s gooey and gory and goofy. But beyond that, like any horror movie worth its salt, it’s got some interesting things to say about what life during the Reagan years was doing to the people who lived then…above and below the streets of our larger cities.

C.H.U.D.: come for the slime, stay for the subtext!

Let’s take a closer look...

It’s 1984. It’s America. Ronnie Raygun has been guest-starring as “The President of the United States” for the past four years. And Noo Yawk, Noo Yawk has yet to be Disneyfied. The buildings are still decrepit, the streets are still mean, and the people are still decrepit and mean. The American urban landscape has never seemed closer to the debauched environs surrounding Castle Dracula.

As our film opens, a woman walks her dog down the rain-soaked streets of the city…although seeing this is NYC in the 80s, they could easily be blood-, urine-, or semen-soaked, as well. Not being the sharpest knife in the drawer, our dog-walker stops her excursion next to a steaming manhole cover. In an extreme example of New York City’s “Keep Our Streets Clean” campaign, an animal-like arm shoots out from the manhole, grabs ahold of a fashionably clad foot, and pulls the damsel and her doggie into the netherworld.

Self-cleaning streets! Maybe Mayor Ed Koch wasn’t as big a knucklehead as he seemed?

The next day we are introduced to photographer George Copper (John Heard). George is a man caught between two worlds: the lucrative world of fashion and commercial photography and the artistic world of documentary photography. George’s lady friend, Lauren Daniels (Kim Greist), is a model who is counting on him to work with her on her next shoot. George, however, has plans of his own.

George had been working an exposé for a magazine highlighting the lives of the scores of homeless people who live beneath the streets of the city. The article’s deadline is fast approaching, and George’s editor, Derrick, wants his pictures. George is an artiste and will serve no wine until its time, as it were. He is holding back the photos he has in order to find the perfect shot. Unfortunately, enough time has passed that George is unaware of where his original subjects have gotten off to. As luck (or convenient screenwriting) would have it, one of his photographic subjects soon gets in touch with George…people are allowed one phone call when they are arrested for trying to lift a cop’s gun, after all. Relieved to have an excuse to leave, George hightails it from Lauren’s fashion shoot to bail the poor woman out.

Meanwhile, the police are having quite a rash of “missing persons” cases lately. Captain Bosch (Christopher Curry) has been keeping a lid on these cases in the Lafayette neighborhood for Police Chief O’Brien (Eddie Jones) long enough. Fed up with the bureaucracy, Bosch takes things into his own hands.

He visits a local soup kitchen run by the “Reverend” A.J. Shepherd (Daniel Stern). The Rev and Bosch have a history together — and it ain’t necessarily the kind that breeds love and trust. The Rev has reported that a lot of the homeless people that visit his shelter have gone missing. And not just the “regular” street people, either. It is specifically the “undergrounders” who have disappeared. Bosch discloses that other people have gone missing, too, including his wife (the woman out walking her dog at the beginning of the movie). Soon, the Rev and the Captain join forces with George Cooper to investigate not only the missing homeless folks, but the reasons for a so-called “routine” inspection of the sewers of NYC by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Nuclear Regulatory Committee.

A movie like C.H.U.D. walks a dangerous line. At any moment it could cross into the utterly absurd and become more humorous and ridiculous than it needs be. Thankfully, the acting in this flick is very good. Each of the leads is your typical New York school character actor, and each delivers his/her lines with utter believability. The early scenes with Bosch and the Rev are especially juicy, and they lend credences to the history these characters have together, as well as the grudging respect that grows between them.

But let’s face it: we ain’t watching C.H.U.D. for the acting — no matter how good it may be. This is a monster movie, after all, so bring on the latex, the fake blood, and the glowing goo! The Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers are kept in the background for most of the film. Their presentation in the first half of the movie is made up of off-screen growls and shadows. This reluctance to show the monster isn’t like Steven Spielberg’s choice to hold back the shark’s introduction in Jaws (1975) because the SFX didn’t work. Au contraire! Holding back only makes their eventual appearance more shocking. The CHUDs look creepy and great. A combination of full latex body appliances with some animatronics and puppets thrown in for the really outré stuff (stretchy neck CHUD, fer instance!), the monsters add a high degree of grotesquery and believability to the proceedings. Like any good monster, you’ll want to cover your eyes and look at the same time.

All of the above — the acting and the SFX — are used to good effect to comment on a world in which government on every level is more concerned with covering its ass over the disposal of nuclear waste in a major metropolitan area than with the effects said waste has on the under- and un-privileged homeless. Laugh all you want, but C.H.U.D. is an excellent example of the ways that the genre films of the 1970s and 1980s were better adapted than their more upscale brethren for dealing with the horrors of modern life. Life during the time of the Vietnam War, Watergate, Love Canal, Three Mile Island, the Moral Majority, and the rise of the New Right had to be understood as being a complete fantasy — albeit the darkest and most nightmarish of fantasies. Movies like John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist (1982), and, yes, C.H.U.D. are horror films on one level and political allegories / critiques on another. Understanding the monster in the closet or under the bed is the only way of understanding the monster behind the pulpit or in the Oval Office.

C.H.U.D. was one of those movies that I knew more from pictures in Fangoria magazine than from actually seeing it. Looking obsessively at the film stills and behind-the-scene photos of the monsters in the movie creeped me the hell out as a little kid. The greenish color in all of the photos gave a patina of sordidness to the flick. Thanks to HBO (and parents who let me stay up all hours watching whatever dreck I wanted), I saw the movie about a year after reading about it. At the time, I was more than happy to enjoy it as a straight-up gory monster movie. Time has been kinder to C.H.U.D. than it has to other movies of the time period. Now when I watch it, I see it as the end product of a society searching for a mythology that will help it deal with horrors. Not of the silver screen variety, mind you, but of the all-too-real kind they saw on the evening news.