THE BEING
Ooh, run! A potato monster!
This movie starts out with a voice-over that pretty much tells us what's going to happen for the first half of the movie, while we follow some unseen beast chase some unlucky bastard through the dark. The intro easily have served as its trailer.
What this one's basically about is your standard radiation-spawned-monster-on-the-loose-in-a-small-town thing, except it's got Martin Landau as a safety engineer who insists that dumping radioactive waste in the town aquifer won't have any effect on the drinking water.
It takes place in Pottsville, Idaho, which claims to be the potato capital of the world. What makes a town an anything-capital of the world? Who verifies this? Calgary claims to be the hot air balloon capital of the world. Why us, and not, uh, Emerald City? (okay, that's another world)
The Alien-cloneism is the most shameless I've seen since Scared To Death. The elongated head, close-ups on slavering jaws, even silly bastards rooting through a dark storage room looking for a cat.
There's more slime than gore, although the scene where Landau gets it has great grue, with limbs and entrails all over the place. And I admit, it's kind of fun to see a guy named Mortimer get whacked around, constantly flying ass over heels every time he gets a backhand from this thing.
The movie ends with a summary of what eventually happened to each surviving main character (like how one "became the first potato farmer in the White House"). I can't tell if my leg's being pulled or not.
Not that I can be brought to care too much. This is pretty formulaic and routine for the most part, except for a really, really weird dream sequence about halfway through. It might be worth a look if your alternative is something with those Olsen twins in it, but otherwise, skip it.
Also known as Freak, Easter Sunday, and The Pottsville Horror. It unsurprisingly sat around for about three years after being filmed before it saw a release. If I'd made it, I wouldn't want it shown to people either.