Mutants and Monsters Double Feature: Uninvited/Mutant

Schlock. Grade-Z cinematic silliness. Cheese. Bad movies get lots of unfortunate names, (especially when discussing the frightmare aspect of crap creativity) and with good reason. For anyone who fancies themselves a devotee of dung, a purveyor of the putrid, a fan of the full blown fear factor flop, the worse a supposedly scary film is, the better for the unlikely entertainment bottom line. Individuals love to champion the “so lame their loveable” school of shocks, but the truth remains that no matter the guilty pleasures present, a terrible attempt at motion picture macabre will always be nothing more than joyful junk.

Want proof? Look no further than the mind-bending DVD double feature from Liberation Entertainment, Mutants and Monsters: Uninvited/Mutant. Digging up two flailing fossils from the direct to video era of terror – the early 1980s – and serving them up sans anything remote supplementary – we are thrown into a world of weak premises, poor execution, bad acting, shaky special effects, underwhelming ambitions, questionable direction, and in the end, spotty, shoddy shivers. Indeed, the only thing frightening about either one of these dreadful dog and pony shows is that someone thought they had any viable commercial potential in the first place.

Uninvited starts off in a high rise laboratory, where a group of scientists are doing unethical things to cute little pussy cats. One of these fudged with felines escapes and quickly kills several security guards. Apparently, the beast has been outfitted with an inner demon, a murderous mutated kitten that comes crawling out of its host – Alien style – to snack on whoever is in claw-striking distance. Through a series of coincidences, it winds up on the yacht of corrupt stock trader Walter Graham. On his way to the Cayman Islands to pick up his ill gotten gains, a group of late ’20s college kids in tow, he hopes to avoid prosecution by the SEC. When the passengers come face to face with the gangrenous Garfield however, getting pinched by the Feds is the least of their worries.

Mutant, on the other hand, finds brothers Josh and Mike Cameron traveling to the Deep South for a long delayed sibling getaway. A run-in with a few fed-up rednecks and the boys are stranded in the seemingly abandoned town of Goodland. The local law is a drunken city cop whose boozing it up to escape the past. The town doc is a female nosy-body who senses something is amiss with the citizenry. Almost everyone is sick with some kind of mystery flu, and there’s a disgusting yellow ooze on everything. When Mike goes missing, Josh turns detective. It’s not long before he’s hooked up with the town’s only pseudo-sexpot and together they unearth the horrific truth. A multinational chemical concern has been dumping toxic waste in the water supply, turning the entire populace into ravenous zombies!

In the realm of overripe ideas and underdeveloped delivery, Uninvited and Mutant take the proverbial urinal cake. With monsters made out of Tom Savini’s trash bin trimmings and performances so shaky they make Madonna look like Meryl Streep, both films easily fulfill the mandates of psychotronic stupidity. For his killer kitten compost, writer/director Greydon Clark (a true maverick of the mediocre, responsible for such ‘classics’ as Satan’s Cheerleaders, Angel’s Brigade, and the Joe Don joke Final Justice) convolutes his narrative way past the breaking point. Eventually, we get so tired of the criminal cat and mouse between Graham and his spunky Spring Breakers that we just want the feral feline to murder them all. Mutant, on the other hand, sees stuntman turned replacement lenser John “Bud” Cardos bet it all on the appearance of the undead at the end of his otherwise slowwitted wonder. Until then, he discovers as many ways as possible to turn terror into tedium.

Acting is crucial to making any horror movie work. If we don’t believe in the reactions of the victims, if we question their motivation (or in some instances, their similarity to actual living breathing human beings), we are instantly taken out of the moment. In Uninvited, seasoned vets like Clu Gulager, Alex Cord and George Kennedy try to compete with the incompetence of newcomers like a blond Rob Estes or an always bikinied Shari Shattuck. But the real rotten tomato in this wilted, worn out salad is Toni Hudson. She plays Rachel, the boat captain hampered by a saggy subplot involving her dad, his once thriving charter business, and Graham’s destruction of same. Her line readings are so one-note, her onscreen demeanor so slight, she is often upstaged by passing seagulls.

Oddly enough, the same thing happens in Mutant. Bo Hopkins and Wings Hauser are their usual b-movie best, bringing the slightest sense of scenery chewing to an otherwise laid back affair. Former child star Lee Montgomery is also very good, though director Cardos’ decision to constantly focus his shirtless well-toned torso on us becomes an issue for another think piece entirely. No, where things start to fall apart in the performance department is with the arrival of small town teacher and part-time barmaid Holly Pierce. Played with all the passion of a dead perch, obvious ‘friend of the producer’ Jody Medford treats us to blank stares, asexual allure, and a hairdo that suggests Farah Fawcett gone bumpkin. Just like Ms. Hudson in Uninvited, this lumbering love interest for Wings works against anything the film has to offer.

Still, there are elements of enjoyment to be found in each offering. You can’t deny the devious fun to be had watching a hack job hand puppet, meant to represent an irradiated feline, slowly picking off the droning dim bulbs on the yacht’s passenger list, and Mutant actually delivers an army of the undead…just in time to have the cops show up for a massive firefight. There’s some minor gore in Uninvited, while nothing is better than a bunch of zombie children stalking and smelting another under-aged victim (in a boy’s lavatory no less). Yet even with the schlock factor stinking to high heaven and a desire to turn these former denizens of your Mom and Pop video store into some manner of cult concern, these two films just can’t cut the cheese. Some many find the Mutants and Monsters Double Feature to be a genial camp kitsch novelty. Others will merely be nauseous