Hooptober 11: Your Vice is a Locked Room in an Old Dark House and Only I Have the Chainsaw
#1: 3 films from New World Pictures (1), 8 decades (1)
Prime 

Let’s fuckin gooooooo!! Yeah I’m starting my Hooptober watching extra early again. I had a hankerin’ for a gloopy beast so I picked THE BEING to kick things off. 

Things got off to a less than stellar start. THE BEING is only available to stream on Amazon Prime. Like a lot of older films, Prime’s version looks terrible, because it’s only standard def. For some reason this movie is only available to rent on Prime. I saw there was an HD stream available for rental for $2.99. I figured OK, maybe you pay 3 bucks and you get to see it in crystal clear HD. WRONG. Once I paid, it took me back to the same shitty SD version. There was no HD stream of it. I literally paid $2.99 just to watch what I was already watching. Not a great business practice, guys. 

Instead of watching this movie, I spent the next hour or so chatting with Amazon customer service to get reimbursed for this bullshit. After all that, I ended up just watching the grainy SD version on Prime. I moved the party to our screened in porch where we have a little TV, so it didn’t look quite as bad. And it’s finally cool enough at night that I can comfortably hang out on the back porch.

As for THE BEING itself: I dug it! It’s a fun, gory creature feature with lots of gloop and slime, fun kills and a creepy monster. Plus we got Martin Landau, Ruth Buzzi and Jose Ferrer (Emperor Shaddam IV from Lynch’s DUNE) chewing up the scenery. Porn producer Bill Osco produces and plays the lead, billed as “Rexx Coltrane” (hell yeah).

This takes place in a small town in Idaho which is a major potato producer. It’s also a dumping site for nuclear waste — hence the creature. Landau plays a government stooge who goes on the news to tell viewers that dumping nuclear waste in the town’s drinking water is perfectly safe. Jesus Christ, usually the bad guys are trying to hide the nuclear waste dumping in these films but in a sadly prophetic move, instead of covering up the nuclear waste contamination they’re claiming drinking water with nuclear waste in it is totally fine and healthy, then attacking the media for questioning it in a very Trumpian twist. 

There are lots of references to storms, specifically tornadoes that happened before the movie. I’m not sure if this is enough to qualify for the weather requirement in this Hooptober list, but characters explain away the missing townspeople as likely tornado victims instead of monster victims. So you could argue the weather makes things worse indirectly. 

The creature is very cool looking, very gloopy and he leaves a trail of slime everywhere. We need more slimy gloopy monsters. The creature rips a kid’s head off while the kid’s driving. It also rips through the driver’s seat and pulls a cop’s heart out. And it pulls a guy out of his car and kills him at a drive-in movie theater. Actually most of these kills take place in and around cars. They try to kill the creature by getting it to jump on a car, then bailing out and shooting the gas tank to make it explode. I guess he’s just really into cars? It’s important to have hobbies. 

There are a few subplots that add some flavor but don’t really go anywhere. The townspeople are obsessed with fighting “pornography” so they’re picketing in front of a proposed massage parlor. Since Osco was a porn producer maybe this is him gettin a shot at the Reaganites, I don’t know. There’s also a subplot about a woman whose son has gone missing, so she’s out wandering every night calling for him. But when the female lead walked her home she found that there were trails of slime all over her house and she seemed to know the monster. But nothing came of this. I wonder if I was watching an edited cut, because they were definitely hinting at this woman housing the monster but it just got dropped.