Jason F.C. Clarke

NOTE: I forgot to take screencaps of Leviathan before returning it to Netflix. You’ll just have to do without. My bad.

One of my greatest pleasures growing up was catching a stupid monster movie on a lazy weekend afternoon. As a wee tyke, Boston’s WLVI 56 filled that need with the famous Creature Double Feature block. But that was long gone by the time I was in high school; and besides, contrary to popular belief, I did have a social life in high school and had better things to do on a Saturday afternoon than watch old Godzilla flicks. Sundays, however, were a different story; and I spent many a Sunday in my room, watching a monster flick on TV while drawing (or, on more than one occasion, working on homework).

When I say monster movie, I don’t mean slasher flicks like the Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th series. I was never into those; psycho-murderers are kind of boring and I don’t like gratuitous gore (though I did enjoy Jason vs. Freddy, by which point both characters had more or less become hammy supernatural monsters). In general, though, give me something with tentacles or gross bug eyes or claws. Give me a bug monster or a sea monster or an alien hellbeast. I always considered C.H.U.D. to be the archetypal Lazy Sunday Monster Flick (partly because it’s the only one I specifically remember watching).
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Ah, C.H.U.D.. C.H.U.D. (1984) is the archetypal Lazy Sunday Movie. I vaguely remember watching it (probably on WLVI 56, maybe Fox 25) in my room in Carver during early high school.

I rewatched C.H.U.D. for the purposes of this review. I was mildly surprised to find that I remembered virtually nothing about it except: 1.) “C.H.U.D.” stands for “Cannibalistic Human Underground Dweller,” and 2.) chuds have glowing yellow eyes.

That’s not Leonardo. Or Michaelango. Or Donatello. Or even Jackson Pollock. Trust me.

I certainly didn’t remember that the cast included Daniel Stern (of Home Alone, The Wonder Years and Leviathan fame) and a very young-looking John Goodman, not to mention Kim Greist, who I saw a few weeks ago for the first time in Brazil, her second film—right after C.H.U.D.!
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An American Werewolf in London is one of those cult movies I always meant to see but never did (much like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which I’ll review later in the month). I knew it by reputation as a darkly comic horror film, perhaps similar to Evil Dead II or Dead Alive.

Not a werewolf

One of the reasons it took me a while to see it was that it was a werewolf movie. I’m not a big fan of werewolves. I understand the appeal of vampires; Frankenstein’s monster is cool; demons, sea monsters, zombies I like. But werewolves seem boring to me. They’re big dogs, essentially. And their gimmick strains even the most flexible imagination: the victim only turns into a werewolf at each full moon? Why? Are werewolves affected by gravitational forces, like the tides? And then there’s the problem of mass conversion. Whether the victim turns into a giant wolf-man or a pure wolf, the weight ratios are going to be different, and that just bugs me; where does the extra mass come from (or go to)?
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