Looking for a new movie accompaniment to Halloween, I recently unearthed a $10 second-hand VHS of Godmonster Of Indian Flats. It's an ultra-obscurity, made in 1973 in Nevada, and putatively about a mutant killer sheep. I'd caught a clip about a year ago, and I thought if I liked the actual movie well enough I might sling a couple of old car-seat covers over me and be the Godmonster this Halloween. Easy -- and he's proven at freaking out the kids.
At first, the creaky B-movie appears to follow the genre formula. Well, in its own fashion: We get devoted sheephand Eddie partying in Reno, stumbling into Virginia City, where he stirs up the locals, before he winds up drunk back in his barn where he's dazzled by golden lights and close-up footage of yellow-hued sheep. In the morning, witnessed by a local mad scientist and his comely hippie assistant, Eddie awakes with a blood drenched mutant hybrid sheep embryo of unknown provenance. They take it back to the Prof's lab on Indian Flats to nurse it into an eight-foot-tall shaggy mutant in a glass box.
Usually, B-creature features give us the set-up -- the town politics, big business shenanigans, the scientist's revolutionary research, etc -- as first-act filler leading up to the moment the movie becomes about the beast breaking loose. But more than half of Godmonster isn't about Eddie and his mutant sheep at all. Instead, the story focus switches to Barnstable, the African-American emissary of a shadowy billionaire who wants to buy up all the townfolk's leases to exploit the gold and silver still left in the mines beneath Virginia City. Thing is, town overlord Mayor Silverdale, who has turned the town into a wild west theme park where everyone dresses in 1860s fashions, is having none of it.
When our woolly wobbler does gets loose, this sad-assed creature roars pitiably, appears to be blind, has bald patches on its fur, moves at about a mile an hour and has one uselessly extended foreleg. The single kill it manages is pretty much by accident.
Godmonster's odd charm is that it's a movie that switches tones and genres and even protagonists with a devil-may-care fluidity. It's a narrative promiscuity that forestalls boredom and eventually leads to a kind of wonder. One minute, sub-villain Phillip is acting like a drunk Old West gunfighter and the next he's inviting Barnstable back to his '70s bachelor pad where he admits missing the action of swinging (and possible bi-curious) New York City. Ostensibly a principled environmentalist, Silverdale heads a secret society of vigilantes, is happy to sanction an old-fashioned negro lynching, has nefarious back-channel dealings with Barnsdale's boss and has ordered the singlet-wearing Sheriff to install a total surveillance program over Virginia City's citizenry. It's this evil Mayor who at first wants his army of cowboy minions to kill the "damaged mongoloid beast", then changes tack and decides it's the "eighth wonder of the world" that'll bring extra tourist revenue to his fiefdom.
In addition to the white supremacist-business-conspiracy angle, there's a weirdo spiritual dimension to these ruminant ruminations. Professor Clemens says all the usual B-movie science things about this "hybrid organism" providing proof of his theory of "cellular realignment" which will reveal the "mystery of creation itself!". But his hippie-girl assistant, Mariposa, sees in the Godmonster's barn-birth evidence it might actually the Sheepchrist. "I think something wonderful is happening," she tells similarly awestruck Eddie.
As a dozen yee-haarrring cowboys lasso our sad beast, the riddle of the title dawns. In this weird reinterpretation of King Kong, the freaky sheep isn't a god or a monster. While its strange satire and hip black cowboy in a fake western town oddly anticipates Blazing Saddles, the real key is how it presages the up-from-the-Earth evil of Chinatown. No kidding: The godmonster here is Silverdale. And there he is, presiding over the finale, a schlock Noah Cross -- laughing maniacally as the townsfolk erupt into violent insanity, causing our heroes to flee, beaten, while the sheep suffers for our sins. Blood of the lamb, and all that. "We are custodians of an era!" Silverstone roars before his ultimate totalitarian-capitalist-populist victory. It's a far from typical monster-movie wrap up.
Bizarre doesn't quite cover it. Writer-director-producer Fredric Hobbs' artistic credentials are impressive enough for us to assume that Godmonster's non sequiturs and surrealism were at least as often intended as they were the by-product of limited filmmaking skills and a small budget. Yes, there are terrible day-for-night driving scenes, with attention drawn to the not-sky by a hooker saying "With my lights off, I think we can make it in the dark!" Cowboy vigilantes galloping off to meet "the beast... out there in the canyon" could be from a 1940s serial. But what to make of the full-church funeral service for a dog that isn't even dead? Or Mariposa trying to hypnotize the sheep with a flower power dance? The line, "Events have a certain logic, rolling down the hill like an avalanche," perfectly sums up how Godmonster Of Indian Flats seems to make no sense before culminating with a catastrophe that has its own internal logic. And it happens in an avalanche of garbage, no less.
Hobbs would follow up with Alabama's Ghost that same year. If anything, this magic/vampire/voodoo/Nazi/musical blaxploitation tale makes Godmonster look tame and sane. But that's a psych-out we'll save for another installment of Bad Movies We Love.
Michael Adams is the author of the upcoming comic memoir Showgirls, Teen Wolves, And Astro Zombies: A Film Critic's Year-Long Quest To Find And Watch The Worst Movie Ever Made (HarperCollins)