God Monster of Indian Flats
directed by Fredric Hobbs
starring Christopher Brooks, Stuart Lancaster, E. Kerrigan Prescott
AGFA
This is by no means a great movie, but it’s not THAT bad for its time. A young sheep rancher Eddie (Richard Marion) wins $500 playing the slots in Reno. He ends up pick-pocketed in Silver City, NV and in the heart of a low-grade land grab. Oh, yeah, he also has a mutant sheep embryo in his truck. His money is gone but the local mad scientist Prof Clements (Prescott) wants to hatch the mutant embryo. As the mutant grows a black guy Barnstable (Brook) with a fist full of dollars arrives in town, looking to buy up mining claims to the played-out silver fields. The local thugs frame him for shooting the mayor’s dog, try to lynch him. He does get shot but survives to the final credits. Naturally the mutant escapes, terror ensues, and then Deus Ex Machina: the bad guys get whupped, and everything turns out OK, at least by Mutant Sheep Horror Film standards.
So, the plot is a Campbell’s soup pot boiler, but there are some fun things in this oddball indie film. The highlight here is the Silver City Pioneer Days show with locals staging a gun fights and stunt falling onto crappy mattresses. The doggy funeral is touching, the hookers have hearts of gold, there are scenes shot in actual mine shafts, and there are enough goofy plot twists to keep me engaged for 90 minutes. The monster isn’t really that scary, it looks like a guy in a giant armadillo suit with poor visibility. Naturally, no women can out-walk its blindingly slow speed which almost but not quite gives an element of suspense-like movie viewing.
But wait. There’s more on this great AGFA disk. There’s a half hour long Ufology documentary complete with stilted narration, a lot of gee-whiz science like double talk, and many a “We really don’t know…” arguments. High point here is the little girl who looks completely miserable on film. School Bus Fires is just that: it’s an old safety video for school bus drivers showing all the ways their darling little charges can set the bus on fire. Then there’s White Gorilla. This snorer takes us back to the glorious B&W Tarzan rip off era; this plot is so slow and arbitrary nearly put me to sleep. Then there’s the last special, The Legend of Bigfoot. This weirded-out “nature” documentary replaces drama with the sort of conspiracy theories they your grandpa spouted in his last days. Somehow, I’m still not convinced. This disk is an all oldie-goldie dip into low budget schlock, but the title feature redeems any flaws in the “special” feature. Some cheap beer and few friends would perk up those features, but down deep, this is a classic example of bad cinema made good through the magic of hipster irony.
