Directors: John ‘Bud’ Cardos, Mark Rosman (uncredited)
Writers: Michael Jones, John C. Kruize
Stars: Wings Hauser, Bo Hopkins, Jody Medford
Run Time: 1 Hour, 39 Minutes
Link: https://amzn.to/2YAirji
Synopsis
A guy wanders in the dark and is killed by a steaming-hot mutant. I think. It’s pretty dark.
Two brothers, Josh and Mike, are traveling down south, and they laugh at the hick locals, who don’t like them for some reason. Maybe cause they’re making fun of the country boys all the time. Something happens to their car, and they et picked up by Mel, a crazy-talking man who explains that people keep disappearing in the area. He warns them to get off the road before dark.
They finally make it to town, and it’s just a little one-horse town. They hear the scream of the town drunk being killed by the mutant. Mike goes off to see what the noise was, and they find the man’s body. Instead of getting help, they start a bar fight with a whole bunch of angry locals. The sheriff intervenes, but when they tell him about the dead man, they can’t find him.
They find a boarding house where they can spend the night. The lady at the house is the only nice person they’ve run into so far, so we have to immediately suspect her of something. The monster under the bed eats Mike during the night.
Dr. Myra Tate notices that business has been really slow lately, but she’s expecting an upturn in business soon. Someone breaks in to her office and steals blood.
Josh visits the high school and meets Holly, a teacher, and then they go down into the boiler room when they hear something roaring down there. He finds a dead child and Albert, the guy who attacked him in the bar and ran his car off the road. The sheriff shows up, and he has to dead with the dead girl’s body all by himself.
Myra cares for her ailing Uncle Jack. There’s a lot of talk as Josh and Holly start bonding with each other. Josh has some kind of attack, so Holly takes him to see Myra. er assistant has gone full Mutant and attacks her, but we don’t really known why.
We are told about New Era, a chemical company in town. Could they be up to no good? Josh goes to investigate, and sure enough, they’re dumping toxic waste into a hole in the ground. He gets caught, but Holly comes to the rescue, dumping a few of the company men in the toxic slop.
Meanwhile, Uncle Jack has become a full mutant, with a bubbling, pulsing forehead and blue skin. The sheriff goes looking for Myra, but all they find is a recording of her being killed. A mutant then attacks the sheriff, and now he knows what’s up. Pretty soon, everyone is battling mutant zombies in the dark. Most of the town has been altered in some way. There’s lots of screaming and running around in the dark, but you can’t actually see anything because it’s all filmed in the dark.
Eventually, Josh has a showdown with Albert, and that doesn’t end well for Albert, who gets torn apart. Soon after, the police show up to save the day. We hear over the radio that New Era has big plans for international expansion.
Commentary
It’s dated, sexist, Northernist, anti-small-townist, and I’d say it was racist too, but there wasn’t a single non-white person in the film– oh wait, that is racist too. I say it was dated, but I really doubt that was good even when it was new. The zombie makeup is pretty good, but otherwise, this is just about as “80s” as a low-budget film can get.
Josh is such a jackass in the first few scenes that I never did like him enough to get invested in his character. Wings Hauser was in dozens of genre films in the 80s, and I can’t say that any of them were memorable or particularly good. He’s just one of those people who kept getting work for some unknown reason.
The creatures are basically zombies that seem to burn things they touch or make smoke for some reason.