The Being

The Being (1983)

Dir. and written by Jackie Kong

Starring Bill Osco, Martin Landau, Marianne Gordon, José Ferrer, Dorothy Malone

Ah, finally, something genuinely exotic: a horror movie set in Idaho! That may not seem exotic to some, but I don’t know much about Idaho. This is partially my own ignorance, but I protest that I am not exclusively at fault here; the culture doesn’t provide a casual viewer of media with much information about Idaho. Certainly I have learned less about Idaho (a state which Wikipedia informs me is home to over 1,700,000 people and a 64 billion dollar economy) through general culture osmosis than I have about the fucking Kardashians, a topic which I will go far out of my way to avoid.* Pretty much the only thing I know is that Idaho produces potatoes. I thought it was that state that keeps electing that crazy racist guy, but it turns out that’s Iowa.** Sorry Idaho, I never should have doubted you or believed I knew two things about you. A relevant anecdote: one time I was in the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC, and saw an enormous piece entitled Electronic Superhighway: Continental US, Alaska, Hawaii by artist Nam June Paik. It’s basically a giant map of the United States, with each state highlighted in neon and filled with TV screens that depict videos associated with that state. You know, there’s footage from THE WIZARD OF OZ in Kansas, stock car racing in Indiana, lobsters in Maine. There’s usually a couple clips for each one, highlighting the rich tapestry of Americana which gives each place its unique character. Except Idaho. That one’s just fucking footage of potatoes.

Consequently, I was excited to get this gritty, man-on-the-streets tour of Idaho, specifically Pottsville Idaho, which does appear to be a real place. Unfortunately, either Idaho really is exactly as stuck on potatoes as I’d lazily stereotyped it, or THE BEING doesn’t know much more about it than I do, because the movie leans pretty heavily on potatoes, too. About the only thing it adds to my working knowledge of the state is the minor fact that it’s plagued with pesky radioactive monsters.  Which I guess is good to know, but still. It’s basically a JAWS setup, where the responsible local sheriff (Bill Osco, billed alternately as “Rexx Coltrane” and “Johnny Commander” – more about him later) begins to suspect there is a land-shark type monster menacing the local populace, possibly probably certainly due to the huge quantity of toxic waste that’s been squirreled away around town, despite the assurances of slick city guy Garcon Jones (Academy-award winner Martin Landau, NORTH BY NORTHWEST, THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD; also, A TOWN CALLED BASTARD, TRIAL BY TERROR, ALONE IN THE DARK) that radioactive waste is totally safe and only a bunch of superstitious sissies would complain about having it dumped into their water source. At one point he drinks a glass of tap water on camera to prove it’s safe, like that one time Obama did the same thing in Flint Michigan during one of the cringiest lowlights of his whole presidency. But sheriff Lutz knows better. He knows that the only responsible thing to do is to close the potato fields. Wouldn’t you know it, though, the town’s greedy Mayor (Academy-award winner José Ferrer, CYRANO DE BERGERAC, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA; also, DRACULA’S DOG and THE SWARM) is all, “I’m only trying to say that Pottsville, Idaho is a potato town. We need potato dollars. If people can’t get potatoes here, they’ll be glad to get potatoes from the fields in Idaho Falls, Nampa, or Merdian,” and, “Look, we depend on the potato people here for our very lives, and if you close those potato fields, we’re finished.” Fuckin bean-counters, man.

Alas, while Jones is, to all appearances, apparently correct about the safety and perhaps even benefits of ingesting small amounts of radioactive waste (I mean, nobody seems sick or complains about a skyrocketing cancer rate, like you might expect them to) he did overlook the dangerous possibility of that darn radiation mutating the local potatoes into pissed off claw-handed cyclopean dinosaurs. Or at least, I had assumed it was potatoes. There is a character named Marge Smith (Academy award-winner Dorothy Malone, WRITTEN IN THE WIND; that’s right, this movie has three Oscar winners in the cast, two of them with award already in hand!) who has this weird subplot where she’s looking for her missing son, and multiple online sources suggest this son is, in fact, the mutant! If that’s true, boy, I did not pick that up from the movie at all. I just assumed her whole story was totally pointless and arbitrary, which would be totally in line with the movie’s overall quality.  

Yes, to no one’s surprise, really, THE BEING is terrible. It starts out with a promising beheading, but what follows, unfortunately, is a whole, whole lot of nothing, mostly consisting of various probably-improvised little domestic vignettes about the intolerable townsfolk, with very, very little actual mutant anywhere on-screen. I mean, there’s this whole thing with the mayor’s uptight wife (Golden Globe winner and five-time Emmy nominee Ruth Ann Buzzi, Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In) running an anti-pornography campaign, and it just goes nowhere at all and I can’t imagine why it’s in the movie. The performances are mostly broad enough that it seems like maybe they’re going for laughs, but shouldn’t there be some, you know, jokes in there, then?

The BEING in question -assuming the title refers to the monster; I guess it could just as easily refer to any of the human characters—likes to hide in confusing places, like the trunk of cars, and then cover its crime scenes in inexplicable mutant slime. Which is fine as far as it goes; the movie doesn’t really 100% commit to the idea that it’s sort of a T-2000 style liquid monster that can assume solid form when it wants, but you could read that as an explanation for why it can turn up such inexplicable places. Uncertain about that, the movie also suggests, hey, maybe it can tunnel? And you can damn well bet it’s one of those monsters that is really into tossing people around with its big rubber hands. One thing it does not like to do, regrettably, is appear on camera. There’s a high enough body count here, but just shots of its claw-like hands slowly approaching victims, or monster-vision sequences of people screaming into the camera, are not gonna cut it in a creature feature. This is especially inexplicable because when we finally get a look at it at the very end, it’s a delightful critter, with a big grin full of pointy teeth and one intense, wiggly eyeball right on the front of his big dinosaur nose. Note to director Jackie Kong: this ain’t a fuckin’ Val Lewton production where the real terror comes from our own imagination. We came for a goddam BEING, don’t hold out on us til the very end of the movie, by which time we’re already too annoyed at having our time wasted to enjoy the experience.

The filmmaking is pretty incompetent, with your expected shots that linger an awkward second after everyone is done talking, storylines that wander off into an amnesic stupor and peter out, scenes lit or mic’d so poorly that even in a pretty crisp DVD copy they’re unintelligible. In that respect, anyway, the movie at least mirrors its protagonist, because despite being correct about closing the potato fields, ol’ Sheriff Lutz is one of the most spectacularly incompetent heroes I’ve ever seen in a movie. He completely fails to convince the mayor to do anything, runs away in terror every time he gets near the creature, and even forgets that he’s been narrating the movie after a single scene. Most egregiously, at one point he demands that Laurie (Academy-Award watcher*** Marianne Gordon, long-time Hee Haw cast member, “Girl Drinking Pepsi at party” in THE LEGEND OF BLOOD MOUNTAIN; also ROSEMARY’S BABY and then-wife of Kenny Rogers!), a local waitresses,**** wait for him after her shift at the diner is over at 7 PM, because he’s worried about her getting home safe, what with the monster attacks and all (not that he’s so far shown any ability to protect anyone). But somehow he manages to spectacularly fail even at the simple task of escorting a pretty blonde from her workplace to her home! Instead, he falls asleep (presumably before 7 PM!) and has a weird dream about getting stuck with Martin Landau in an out-of-control airplane!*****

But wait, there’s more! When he’s awoken by a desperate phone call from the very Martin Landau he just dreamed about, who now claims to have vital, time-sensitive information about the monster, he suddenly remembers his little walking date, and instead of just calling the diner and telling her something important came up and she should just take a cab, he cruises out to the diner where he said he’d pick her up, and finds that she’s just leaving. “Why the hell didn’t you wait for me?” he says, accusingly. “I waited till 11:45, I thought you’d forgotten!” she says, apologetically, despite the fact that she waited for four and a half fucking hours. “I didn’t forget,” he says, sternly. “I got hung up!” By naptime. If Martin Landau hadn’t awoken sleeping beauty with that time-sensitive phone call, the poor girl would probably still be waiting there at sunrise. And oh yeah, about that phone call: also not as big a priority as you might think. Rather than dropping her off at home and hurrying over to address this pressing danger, Mr. Lutz instead embarks on a lengthy adventure with Laurie which includes waiting for the mayor to drive out to a diner where he claims to have caught a mutant (which doesn’t turn out to be there, making his whole “close the potato fields” argument even weaker), and then locking Laurie --the only person so in the movie so far to have done anything proactive about the mutant situation-- in a prison cell “for her protection” (i.e. so she won’t come to the big finale and show him up). Only then does he remember that Martin Landau called in him a panic with vital information, which by this point must be hours ago.

In the big finale, after getting his ass handed to him by the BEING, he tries to escape by climbing a rope up to the ceiling. But then it’s too hard and he just falls back down. Jesus Christ, Lutz, you can’t even run away like a coward successfully.

Despite his flashy dual nom de guerres, Osco provides Lutz with very little in the way of personality (let alone charisma), possibly because his previous experience with cinema seems to have been almost entirely in the porn industry. He was apparently involved in some capacity (his IMDB says “producer – uncredited,” which would fit, since it looks like the whole cast and crew went uncredited) with the X-rated MONA THE VIRGIN NYMPH in 1970 (apparently only the second sexually expli.. --why mince words, we mean porno—film to receive a general theatrical release in the US, after Warhol’s BLUE MOVIE). He followed that up with 15 films in the next five years, including the venerable FLESH GORDON and ALICE IN WONDERLAND: AN X-RATED MUSICAL FANTASY. This apparently made him sufficiently rich to hand Jackie Kong (NIGHT PATROL), his then-wife --a recent college graduate with no professional film experience of any kind-- a check for a couple million dollars to direct a movie starring multiple Oscar-winners.****** Needless to say, this did not prove to be a very artistically productive arrangement; Osco’s acting and Kong’s directing are about equivalently dire, though, so I guess I get the attraction. Kong’s writing and directing does make THE BEING a rare schlocky horror flick from the 80’s which was directed by a woman, though. Not that you’d know that just from watching. Despite starring the director’s husband, there’s no “female gaze” to speak of (with the little bit of nudity going exclusively to women), and there’s plenty of blatant sexism, including poor Laurie getting shut out of the climax “for her protection,” and a lengthy subplot about how much of a intolerable harpy the mayor’s wife is. In fact, there’s so much sexism that I even wondered if it might be intentional parody, but something tells me that kind of subtlety is outside THE BEING’s wheelhouse. The only thing that struck me as a possible intentional joke for the ladies is that the creature ends up being a literal one-eyed-monster!

The movie features a rare Easter setting and was reportedly originally going to be called “EASTER SUNDAY” – always a good idea to name your movie after a holiday and hope it catches on as a seasonal classic. That didn’t pan out for whatever reason, and the holiday setting contributes nothing except a scene where kids on an Easter-egg hunt are unknowingly menaced by THE BEING. Still, the movie does have a theme of redemption: for one thing, mean ol’ Mr. Jones turns out to be a real nice guy after realizing, apparently for the first time, that radioactive waste really might be dangerous to just leave sitting around in rusty barrels in Idaho. More importantly, though, the film concludes with an AMERICAN GRAFFITI style epilogue chronicling the subsequent fates of the characters in white text. I mention it only because even if anyone had grown so attached to these characters that they longed to know what they got up to later on in life, this would still be the lamest and most random possible version. “Virginia Lane was never found,” it tells us, which makes sense because we know she was eaten by a monster. "Marge Smith was last seen looking for [her missing son] in Modesto, California," which, sure, why not? The saddest is Laurie, whose entire subsequent life is summarized as “now waitressing in Akron, Ohio.”

Oh well, at least she got out of Idaho.

* There’s MY OWN PRIAVTE IDAHO, I guess. But doesn’t that take place mostly in Oregon? And then I think they go to Italy, too? If there’s any actual Idaho in there, I only vaguely remember it, and think it may be metaphorical or something.

** A state best known for that verse in Afroman’s immortal jam Colt 45 that goes, “Fucked this hooker in Iowa / I fucked her on credit, so I-owe-huh”

*** Probably.

**** Some websites refer to her as his girlfriend, though he seems more like some sort of controlling stalker than someone she knows and loves.

***** This sequence is elaborate enough that I assume it was originally mean to be, you know, part of the actual plot instead of just a meaningless dream we get to enjoy for the first and only time in the movie. My guess is that it was meant to be the climax, and then the end got rewritten without a plane ride after they’d already shot some of it, and they didn’t want to waste the footage and just stuck it in somewhere and called it a dream.

****** Or so they claim; if this movie actually cost 4.5 million bucks as reported, they must have build the entire town of Pottsville, Idaho, from scratch. That makes me wonder if the entire movie is just an elaborate tax shelter which mistakenly happened to hire Martin Landau and Jose Ferrer and then things got out of hand.

I do want to point out that they did this running-just-in-front-of-a-train bit for real, and it looks dangerous as fuck.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2019 CHECKLIST!

For Richer or Horror

TAGLINE	The Ultimate Terror Has Taken Form. Sadly, it’s a form we’ll only see for about 10 seconds.
TITLE ACCURACY	I mean, it has both human beings and some sort of mutant-being in it, so sure. But that would also be an accurate title for anything from PATTON to GROUNDHOG DAY.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	None.
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Creature Feature
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	Martin Landau, who went through a period around this time where I think his agent must have had big gambling debts or something. José Ferrerwas not at the pinnacle of his career, but you’d still think he could have done better than this. Dorothy Malone, alas, probably could not have done better by this point; her next feature film was a Spanish horror flick called REST IN PIECES. But! She ended her career on a high note with BASIC INSTINCT in 1992!
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None. Well, does Martin Landau count?
NUDITY?	A tiny bit, I believe
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	No
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	None
POSSESSION?	None
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	None
MADNESS?	None
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	No
VOYEURISM?	Quite a bit of monster-vision.
MORAL OF THE STORY	Potatoes and radioactive waste are a dangerous combination.