Hallie Foote | Through the Shattered Lens

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.

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Mondays, I will be reviewing Miami Vice, which ran on NBC from 1984 to 1989. The entire show can be purchased on Prime!

This week, the Vice Squad investigates a baby broker!

Episode 3.9 “Baby Blues”

(Dir by Danial Attias, originally aired on November 21st, 1986)

In honor Miami Vice‘s violent nature (and in recognition of the fact that it’s the holidays and I’ve got a lot of things that I need to do), I’m going to review this week’s episode bullet-point style!

The episode starts in Colombia. Babies are being kidnapped from local villages. In some cases, they’re literally snatched from the arms of their mothers. The babies are taken to Miami where a sleazy lawyer named Howard Famiglia (Tommy Koenig) essentially sells them to wealthy families.
Maria Escobar (Patrice Martinez) illegally crosses the border to search for her son in Miami. She nearly dies in the attempt. When she and a planeload of babies are discovered on a Miami runway, law enforcement gets involved.
Castillo doesn’t think that the case is one that Vice should be investigating. Gina and Trudy set him straight.
It doesn’t take long for the Vice Squad to discover that Famiglia is a baby broker. One of his customers is played by a young Stanley Tucci. The customer is willing to testify against Famiglia.
Famiglia sends his henchmen out to intimidate and kill all of the witnesses.
Famiglia also kills his main hitman and then booby traps his apartment. When Crockett and Tubbs jump out of the exploding apartment, it looked like Tubbs leg caught on fire. “Wow,” I said, “that really looked real!”
It turns that it was real. Philip Michael Thomas’s stunt double was severely burned as a result.
Eventually, the Vice Squad is able to trick Famiglia into believing that Maria is being kept at a local hospital. Famiglia sets up a meeting for women looking to adopt. While the women watch an educational film, Famiglia crawls through a ventilation shaft and tries to enter Maria’s room.
SURPRISE! That’s not Maria in that hospital bed …. it’s Gina! The Vice Squad shoots Famglia dead, leaving his corpse awkwardly hanging out of the hospital room wall. For some reason, that sight really disturbed me.
Maria is reunited with her son but, upon realizing that he now has a life and a family in America, she decides to let him stay with his new parents. She is then deported back to Colombia, where she will probably be killed by the same people who stole her baby in the first place.
Overall, this episode suffered because the villain was miscast. Looking at the imdb, the majority of Tommy Koenig’s credits appear to have been comedic. He’s an actor who looks like he should be on a sketch comedy show and not a gritty crime drama. Even when Famiglia is crawling through an air duct with a gun, he just looks goofy. Plus, considering that he had a people working for him who were willing to murder, would Famiglia really have gone to the hospital himself?
Stanley Tucci and Tommy Koenig should have switched roles.
This episode gave Trudy, Gina, Switek, and Zito more to do than usual. That was good. This show often underused its supporting cast.
Miami Vice was often a cop show with a political subtext. In this case (and I’m just pointing it out, I’m not necessarily agreeing or disagreeing), the subtext was that America’s immigration system sucked, as Maria only had a limited amount of time to find her son before being deported. But then she decided to leave him in America rather than take him back to Colombia. Miami Vice was not just political. It was also usually kind of depressing.