The Being USA,
R, 82 m, 1983
The
Being is set in Pottsville, Idaho, a little town so quiet that at night
“you can hear the mosquitoes singing the National Anthem.” The inhabitants
of this Rockwellian settlement are determined to keep smut out of their neck of
the woods, so when rumors surface that a massage parlor might be opening up on
Main Street, a movement to keep the area family-friendly is spearheaded by the
mayor’s missus (played by Ruth Buzzi, believe it or not). During
Pottsville’s annual Easter parade (featuring a marching band and baton
twirlers), there’s an anti-porn demonstration with picketers symbolically
brushing off the sidewalks. The local news station is on hand to document the
whole affair, and the local yokels are given a choice to sound off into a
reporter’s mic. But this all might be a ruse (it’s hard to tell; the script
is a bit wooly in spots) to stifle the controversy surrounding a nearby nuclear
waste site that many believe is contaminating the town’s water supply. The
state’s chemical safety engineer, Garson Jones (the great Martin Landau
slumming), assures the good folks of Pottsville that there is no threat by
sipping a glass of local tap water during a televised interview. But the movie
encourages us to consider that Jones might be in bed with Mayor Gordon Lane (José
Ferrer sounding a lot like Donald Sutherland), an avaricious old fart who will
do anything to keep moving the state’s chief export: taters. Meanwhile, something possibly even more sinister than Mayor Lane is lurking about town: a cyclopic monster that leaves green slime in its tracks. Shaped by toxic refuse, this under man with very bad skin has no interest in playing pat-a-cake with the denizens of Pottsville; its sole objective is to keep the M.E. scratching his head. Despite having the coordination of a drunkard with cerebral palsy, “the being” acquires an impressive rap sheet: it twists off a car thief’s head, disembowels a randy couple at a drive-in, rips apart a half-baked toker, yanks out the heart of a Barney Fife-ish deputy, and spooks a toddler at an Easter egg hunt. The hideous mutant soon has the town paralyzed with fear, so Detective Mortimer Lutz sets out to find the creature and put an end to its killing spree. The neatly bearded and maddeningly disengaged Bill Osco (billed here as Rexx Coltrane) plays Lutz, though all of his lines appear to have been looped—quite clumsily—by another actor. (Osco is a member of the family that owns the very profitable chain of Osco drugstores. He was also married to the director, Jackie Kong, which probably explains how an actor of his one-note caliber landed the gig.) The editing by Karin Nowarra is just as clumsy; you can’t make out what’s going on half of the time. But the most pathetic feature of this very bad picture is the monster itself, which is such a howler of dime-store shoddiness that we’re allowed only glimpses of its eye, its claws, its Alien-inspired choppers—but never its full body. (I doubt a complete costume was even made.) Worse, we can’t figure out how the stupid thing moves. Does it run? Hop? Skip? Jump? Roller skate? The brute’s design makes no sense: it has long muscular hydrostats that are whipped out now and again to strangle some poor Pottsvillian, but the floppy things look about as dangerous as the octopus arms Bela Lugosi wrestled with in Bride of the Monster. Too bad they weren't functional enough to choke off Kong’s drive to make movies; she went on to helm such wretched items as Night Patrol, The Underachievers and Blood Diner. Dear god, even Ed Wood’s résumé didn’t look that bad. February 17, 2008 “The Being” Review. © Copyright 2008 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.
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