There’s something living under the streets of New York City.

That’s the basic idea behind 1984’s C.H.U.D., a film that opens with an upper class woman and her little dog being dragged into the sewers by a creature the reaches out of a manhole.  People are disappearing all over the city but the authorities obviously aren’t revealing everything that they know.  Even after the wife of NYPD Captain Bosch (Christopher Curry) disappears, the city government doesn’t seem to be too eager to dig into what exactly is happening.

Instead, it falls to two activists.  Photographer George Cooper (John Heard) specializes in taking picture of the homeless, especially the one who live underground in the New York subways.  He’s like a well-groomed version of Larry Clark, I guess.  Social activist A.J. “The Reverend” Shepherd (Daniel Stern) runs a homeless shelter and is convinced that something is preying on the most vulnerable citizens of New York.  When the police won’t do their job, George and the Reverend step up!

So, what’s living in the sewers?  Could it be that there actually are cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers out there?  Everyone in New York City has heard the legends but, much like stories of the alligators in the Chicago sewers, most people chose not to believe them.  Or could the disappearance have something to do with the cannisters labeled Contamination Hazard Urban Disposal that are being left in the sewers by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission?  Wilson (George Martin) of the NRC says that they would never purposefully mutate the people living underground but Wilson works for the government so who in their right mind is going to trust him?

C.H.U.D. is a horror film with a social conscience.  It’s very much an 80s films because, while you have Shepherd running around and attacking everyone for not taking care of the most vulnerable members of society, the true villain is ultimately revealed to be the members of a regulatory agency.  Instead of finding a safe way to get rid of their nuclear waste, they just found a sneaky way to abandon it all in New York and obviously, they assumed no one would care because …. well, it’s New York.  Everyone in the country knows that New York City isn’t safe so who is going to notice a few underground monsters, right?

The idea behind C.H.U.D. has a lot of potential but the execution is a bit lackluster.  For every good C.H.U.D. kill, there’s long passages where the story drags.  Considering that Heard spent most of his career typecast as the type of authority figure who would dump nuclear waste under New York City, it’s actually kind of interesting to see him playing a sympathetic role here.  Daniel Stern, on the other hand, is miscast and rather hyperactive as Shepherd.  You really do want someone to tell him to calm down for a few minutes.  Watching C.H.U.D., one gets the feeling that it’s a film with an identity crisis.  Is it a horror film, an action flick, a work of social commentary, or a dark comedy?  There’s no reason why it can’t be all four but C.H.U.D. just never really comes together.  It ultimately feels more like a mix of several different films instead of being a film made with one clear and coherent vision.

In the end, Death Line remains the film to see about underground cannibals.