Delayed Reaction: C.H.U.D.

Premise: A sewer creature starts killing people.

 

I have a hard time defining what a B-movie is. I tend to take the "I know it when I see it" approach. B-movie doesn't quite mean "bad movie" or "cheap movie". Like, I don't think Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2 is a B-movie, but someone could probably convince me that it counts. Other than the genre, can you really explain to me how the Hallmark movies aren't B-movies? No, B-movies tend to refer to genre movies. That has a lot to do with perception.

 

You see, technically there's aren't B-movie anymore. That term stems from the old Hollywood practice of pairing films for distribution. The first film was a big-budget, star-driven feature. The second movie would be shorter, cheaper, and normally just plain worse. Movies aren't really paired anymore, but the idea of B-movies never went away. It has come to mean cheap movies that aren't arthouse movies. "Arthouse" is the key word there. If you make a cheap drama/comedy/dramedy/romance like Once or Tangerine, even if they have some of the same characteristics of a B-movie - cheap, experimental, boundary pushing, formally inventive - they'll be considered "arthouse" movies, since they are a "respectable" genre. The genres that people normally dismiss as frivolous like horror, action, sci-fi, westerns, etc. get labelled as B-movies when they fit the same description.

 

I'm not a big B-movie person and I consider that a personal failing. There's a lot of passion in B-movies. They often come from filmmakers who are fans first. They aren't burdened by the same rules that a studio enforces. Often, the first step in making a topic acceptable in film is being featured in B-movies. There's something cutting edge about B-movies. Then again, there are a lot of B-movies. The vast majority of them are bad. Most are a strong argument for why craft matters more than passion in filmmaking. Personally, I just don't want to spend all the time sifting through the bad B-movies to find the good ones.

 

Still, it's fun to watch a good B-movie from time to time. I don't really remember how C.H.U.D. ended up on my watchlist. It's certainly not the best movie I've seen lately. What it is though is only 88 minutes and decently fun. With John Heard and Daniel Stern, it has more star power than I expected. The story is reasonably engaging. The monsters are creepy enough. The costuming and effects somewhat veer into comedy, which I'm not sure was the intent at the time. Keeping the creatures under the sewer was a nice trick to not have to show them much. I like when horror takes advantage of the idea that what you can't see is often scarier than what you can. This was some nice, empty-calories viewing, even though, yeah, it's not technically a great movie.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend