C.H.U.D. 1984. USA. Directed by Douglas Cheek. With John Heard, Daniel Stern, Christopher Curry. Screenplay by Parnell Hall, Shepard Abbott. 35mm. 88 min.
Let’s call it the “toxploitation” era: in the early-to-mid 1980s, toxic sludge and neon-green atomic waste were having a cultural moment, spurred by the twin threats of Cold War nuclear annihilation and the Reagan administration’s widespread environmental deregulation. The cycle reached its apparent apex in 1984, which saw, among others, the birth of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the screen debut of the Toxic Avenger, an alien-irradiated Chevy Malibu in Alex Cox’s Repo Man, and this ooze-covered curio, in which discarded nuclear waste in New York City’s subway tunnels (“Contamination Hazard Urban Disposal”) mutates unhoused people into “Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers.” Though C.H.U.D. owes an obvious debt to the atomic mutations of 1950s sci-fi flicks, the anxieties it captures are, like, totally ’80s to the max.