C.H.U.D. and Deschutes Obsidian Stout

Tonight’s movie is one I’ve never seen before.  I picked it up at FYE in the bargain bin (we currently have a truce now that I have The Mad) for just $3.  As the cashier, a dark haired and overweight teen with bad acne, rang me out he started laughing at my purchase.  And without me prompting him he went into why he was laughing (I don’t care).  He said “Man I’ve been waiting for someone to buy this movie.  I knew someone would!”  His excitement sickened me.  Without acknowledging his comment I grabbed my DVD and left.  I had a sinking feeling of doom as I left the store.  Had I just been duked in a horrible purchase?  We shall see acne boy!

Before talking about the beer or the movie plot I would like to talk about something I found out while on the C.H.U.D IMDB page.  It’s something I like to call three degrees of  Macaulay Culkin.  More specifically home alone.  Go ahead and try it.  Run through the actors in C.H.U.D. and you will see what I mean.  Just watch.

John Heard

George Cooper (C.H.U.D.)

Peter McCallister (Home Alone 1 &2)

Daniel Stern

The Reverend (C.H.U.D.)

   Marv Merchants (Home Alone 1&2)

And though I can’t find pictures of him from home alone, Christopher Curry is credited in both films.  He's Captain Bosch (C.H.U.D.) and Agent Stuckey (Home Alone 3).

This is unusual isn’t it?  Perhaps it’s something worth looking into.  At the very least it makes me want to have a beer.  Just thinking that people went through the effort to make 3 Home Alone movies drives me to the bottle.  And today’s bottle is Deschutes Obsidian Stout.  Black as my heart and richer than premium gasoline this beer is the best widely distributed stout you can buy.  Deschutes is famous for its Black Butte Porter but the real gem is the Obsidian Stout.  It pours black and slightly viscous with a full, fluffy dark brown head.  This is the best head on any stout…period.  It’s like a mini chocolate Duvel.  This beer oozes aroma that kicks your ass like the slime from Ghostbusters 2.  It’s thick with roasted malt, burnt toast, and warm oats.  It has a raw husky aroma that is pungent enough to cut through any meal.   For example I paired it with the hot wings I had for dinner and it was the perfect contrast to the hot and acidy buffalo.  It has a full and almost milky mouth feel that’s incredibly smooth.  There is a rich malty sweetness buried under the roasted and charred malt.  This beer lays brick upon brick of full roasted flavor.  Originally a Stout was called a Stout Porter.  This beer exemplifies the STOUT part.  It finishes clean and long and leaves a slightly oily luster on your tongue that comes back strong with each sip.  All this from a $8 six pack.  Money well spent.

 The movie on the other hand is not money well spent.  The lead in is a woman walking down the street with her dog when…..oh no!!!!!!!!!! Something reaches out from underneath a manhole cover and grabs her.  This thing can be assumed to be the C.H.U.D.  What is a CHUD you ask?  It’s a Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dweller.  I’ll run through the entire movie in a couple of sentences.  A photographer (John Heard) familiar with the homeless (undergrounders), a grief stricken cop (Captain Bosch whose wife you might remember from the beginning manhole cover scene), and the homeless Barack Obama (Daniel Stern).  There’s some talk about toxic waste being disposed of underneath NYC and for some reason instead of the police having jurisdiction the head of the company has it.  And there’s this big power struggle as the company tries to cover it up.  Something something, flamethrowers…..mutant homeless people…..fill the sewers with gas…….explosion…..revenge…..poop poop poop.  Then it ends!

So there’s the film.  There were a couple of cool parts.  Did anyone else notice that the CHUDs looks just like The Creature from the Black Lagoon?  So the acting in this movie was absolutely atrocious.  In fact I had to rewind one scene and watch it again because I didn’t believe that directors and editors would allow that type of performance to leech into a final product.  I’m talking about the scene where the Reverend goes into a meeting with the heads of the company dumped the waste and he’s trying to convince them there are creatures in the sewer.  They don’t even bother to clean him up.  And he’s not just homeless, he’s 80’s homeless, which is way dirtier than any other homeless.  I mean these guys look like they just climbed out of a coal mine.  And in the 80s the most homeless of the homeless were in New York City.  It was like a giant homeless Mecca.  So Marv…I’m sorry wrong movie…the Reverend starts interrogating the company head demanding answers so that he can help.  When the company refuses to give answers to the homeless guy (a reasonable decision) he freaks out.  Did he think he was the homeless superman that could wipe out the mutated homeless population single handedly?  I’m not sure but it did make for a very comical scene.

A woman cuts one of the CHUDs heads off.  Green slime oozed from the neck…..awesome.  This picture isn't the CHUD head, it's just another severed head i thought was cool.  It's the cop's wife and when he saw the head it was more funny than sad.

Blood exploded out of the bathtub drain.  Never explained why.

I don’t buy that these were zombies.  They were cannibalistic as said in the title but that would imply that they are human.  It never specified the undeadness of them?  They were more mutants than zombies.

This movie was okay.  I’m glad I had a good beer to contrast with the shittiness of the film.  Oh and one last bash about the 80s.  Why is the goon always wearing a polo shirt and glasses?  The asshole boyfriend in Night of the Comet, C.H.U.D. and countless other movies all portray the tough guy as these funny preppy jocks.  The guy walks after the reverend, clicks the receiver (thus returning the quarter), then he fishes it out and eats it.  All without saying a word.  It was poetry for the steroid using, short shorts wearing, 80s good.  Why on why!!!!!!!!!!

Oh and i almost forgot.  Our hero George Cooper is talking to his girlfriend and she announces she's pregnant.  He thinks it's pretty cool but he's not really feeling it one way or the other.  In fact he asks her "so are you going to get rid of it?" in the same way someone would say "so are you going to finish you're pizza crust?"  She giggles..."no no i don't think I'm going to get an abortion.....oh my that is unless you want me to".  He replies with something like "naaa it's cool.  We'll just have it.  Whatever."  Amazing depth in the script writing. 

The Beer:

Aroma – 11/12

Appearance – 3/3

Taste – 18/20

Palate – 5/5 

   Overall – 8/10

Total = 45/50

  

The Movie:

Production – 3/5

Plot – 3/5

Gore – 2/5

 Zombies – 2/5

  Overall – 2.5/5

Cemetery Man and Deschutes Hop in The Dark

When it comes to Italian zombie movies I'm left feeling less than impressed.  Zombi 2 was okay at best, even in the context of being made in the 79'.  As you start moving further and further down the Zombi line things get worse.  Zombi 5: Killing Birds.....really?  How are you coming up with more money for these movies?  Despite the sea of super weird and at times wildly inappropriate Italian zombie movies there are a few gems.  You just need to give them a chance to shine.  Corny, i know.  But hear me out.  I saw Cemetery Man (AKA Dellamorte Dellamore) on the AskMen.com top 10 zombie movie list (clickey the link).  I thought it looked dumb.  I watched the trailer and decided that there were much bigger fish to get in the boat before I would start keeping guppies like that.  As fate would have it I found my self in FYE with a gift certificate and a $4.99 Cemetery Man DVD in my hand.  With a chip on my shoulder I brought it home and popped it in.  What i experienced was magic.  The incomparable thrill of being proved wrong from an underestimated enemy.

As for the beer.  I should have named this blog post "Deschutes Brewery: We make beer better than you do anything that you do."  If you live west of the Mississippi and haven't indulged in some of their special beers then you need to go by your local beer store and pick up Black Butte XXIII, The Abyss, Jubel, and a Hop Henge.  Now that you've spent $50 on beer go home and down all four while watching zombie movies.  I'm drinking Hop In The Dark which is a Cascadian Dark Ale.  It's a cool mix of IPA and Stout.  Before i start the movie I open the beer.  It's dark black with a tan head that leaves sweet ass lacing for the whole glass.  It's not as thick as i expected.  I checked the bottle and it's only 6.9% abv.  Warming but not the thick beast that i expected.  There is a full hoppy nose, dripping in citrus and pine, grapefruit and...well...pine!  It's everything I hoped it would be.  There is also a rich caramel and dark roasted malt character that mellows the hops and adds complexity.  The first sip is strikingly bitter with hops punching you right in the face.  But there is also layer after layer of rich malty complexity driven by the roasted malt.  This beer is much more roasted and balanced than i expected.  I thought it would be an IPA but black, instead it's a Russian Imperial Stout that moonlights as a Double IPA.  This beer reminds me of Stone's Sublimely Self Righteous Ale.  Another feather in the Deschutes cap.  Well done friends!

The first scene sets the entire movie.  A tall dark haired man (Francesco Dellemorte) answers the phone still dripping wet from his shower.  During the phone call he tells the caller to "hold on a sec" in order to answer the door, shoot a zombie in the head, and go back to his conversation.  It is with that nonchalance that Francesco and his sidekick, the mute Gnahgi, kill all the zombies.  They are more of an inconvenience than a horror.  Life is pretty bleak in the cemetery until one day a mysterious woman (the beautiful Anna Falchi) comes to the cemetery for the funeral of her much older husband.  Anna Falchi is the Italian Angelina Jolie.  Seriously, they look identical.  Francesco falls in love immediately and is able to seduce her in the cemetery's ossuary where she loses control of herself.  She's a little creepy.  For all you strange sex people this movie has a bunch of it.  Making out in an ossuary, sex on her dead husband's grave, nude zombies, it's all there.

If you watch this movie and don't immediately see the striking similarities between this movie and Dead Alive then you need to watch them again.  Yes the premise is different but the way each movie was shot and the blending of humor with gory goodness is the same.  Things get weirder and weirder.  It turns out having sex on your dead husband's grave is bad for business.  He comes back and......chomp....revenge!  Francesco is forced to kill her (when she comes back to life duuuuhhhhh).  Then a motorcycle accident kills over a dozen people, including one kid who was so badly mangled in the crash that he got buried still stuck to the motorcycle.  The kid comes back half motorcycle half zombie!  That's a first.  I appreciate the originality.  Then the love interest of Gnahgi comes back as just a head.  They are in love and he keeps her with him.  Then Anna comes back (look out now!) and bites Francesco.  I'm sorry but that's rule #1.  Don't sleep with zombies.......ever.  I guess i just don't understand men.  The bite doesn't turn Francesco into a zombie though......don't quite understand why.

Every time i watch this movie i pick up on some new weird shit.  Take this for example.  Francesco gets really cross with Gnahgi for burning the phone books which are his favorite reading.  Strange.  Then the grim reaper shows up in out of the ashes of the phone book and tells Francesco to stop killing the dead and that if he wants the dead to stay dead he needs to kill the living.  Now things get psychedelic with parallel realities and a groundhog day like feel.  So Anna just won't take no for an answer.  She comes back as different people.  Francesco starts going crazy and is killing everyone indiscriminately including a doctor and a nun.  A NUN!!! That's edgy.  He's walking out of the hospital where he just killed three people holding the gun and the cop yells to him "Francesco there's a murderer in the building...oh good you have a gun!"

I'm going to give it all away.  The beer is gone, leaving nothing but sweet lacing and the memory of the beer that was.  Francesco pulls Gnahgi into his car and goes steaming away only to find out that there is no rest of the world.  It's just a broken road to nowhere.  And to make matters worse they're living inside of a snow globe.  Isn't that the way it always is.  This movie rocks like few others in my collection.  Cemetery Man i would like to apologize for ever doubting you.  You are a symbol of what every one of us should strive to be every day.  Thank you.

The Beer:

Aroma – 10/12

Appearance – 3/3

Taste – 18/20

Palate – 4/5 

   Overall – 8/10

Total = 43/50

The Movie:

Production – 4/5

Plot – 5/5

Gore – 5/5

Zombies – 4/5

  Overall – 4.5/5