Bad Movie Club: C.H.U.D. II: Bud the Chud

1989 horror comedy

Bad Movie Rating: 2/5 (Josh: 1/5 [with a hearty "Fuck you, C.H.U.D. 2!"]; Lisa: 3/5)

Rating: 5/20

Plot: Some teens are forced to steal a corpse to replace their science teacher's corpse that they lost. Unfortunately, they steal a military top-secret weaponized corpse. "Bud the Chud" begins biting every person and poodle he can get his teeth in, possibly bringing the world to its end with a Chud-ified apocalypse.

It doesn't seem like this has much to do with the first C.H.U.D. movie though this one is likely more entertaining. It did get a legitimate laugh from me with one of Robert Vaughn's lines about "the god-damnednest ugliest barber" he's ever seen. Vaughn actually has a few moments and is clearly having fun even though he's seen better roles in better movies. Norman Fell is also in this movie for a few minutes.

For the most part, the humor doesn't work at all. There's a lot of physical comedy with Bud played by Gerrit Graham. Graham, I'm excited to see, played Dr. Norman Pankow on Parker Lewis Can't Lose and Beef in Phantom of the Paradise. He was also in two other movies we watched for Bad Movie Club--Chopping Mall and Terrorvision!, the second bad movie we watched. I'm not sure why I think anybody would give a crap about any of this. Anyway, Graham's given a ton of screen time to bump into walls, walk funny, say "Rawr!" and scare himself with his own reflection. He's not exactly the most gifted physical comedian I've ever seen. Combine the zombie slapstick with non sequiturs about penguins and the screenwriter's stab at typical 80's comedy one-liners, and you've got a movie that strikes a tone far too juvenile for this to even have a chance at cult-classic status.

This is written by Ed Naha, the guy who wrote Troll and all the Honey, I Did Something to the Kids or Ourselves movies.

The horror stuff fails here, too. The zombies are slightly grayed, but the characters who aren't zombies can't even tell that there's anything wrong with the Chud-ified beings. That almost works as comedy, some clumsy dramatic irony maybe, but I'm pretty sure it was just to cover up the fact that the make-up and effects were almost nonexistent. There's a climactic scene that takes place in a pool where I'm assuming the producers shot almost their entire budget. That scene had the potential for some macabre visuals, and maybe a more gifted director than David Irving would have given us those. Or one who gave a shit.

We don't usually do anything intentionally comedic for our Bad Movie Club, and if it wasn't for Robert Vaughn's work here, it might have been a complete waste of time. There is no C.H.U.D. III, but I don't think I'd want to watch it anyway.