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

Dead Snow and Lagunitas Cappuccino Stout (First Post)

Welcome to my blog.  If you’re here you share the same passion about these hobbies that I do.  I do take requests for reviews of beer and movies.  I hope you all get inspired and have your own drunken zombie movie nights.  First a little about myself.

The night I turned 21 I set out on a journey or sorts.  I stood at the bar looking over a spread of taps all offering beverages I’ve never heard of except by their general term, “beer”.  There were so many options and possibilities it was hard to choose.  So I did what any new beer drinker would do…I chose based on the name.  The Rusty Griswold was to be my first legal drink.  It was ironically named after the son from the National Lampoon’s film who when sharing his first beer with his father drinks the entire thing.  I hope I didn’t ruin the movie for anyone.  The beer may have been a fizzy pilsner but it wasn’t a bad one by the style’s standards.  It just didn’t make sense to me to drink one mass produced beer when there were so many thousands beers in dozens of styles.  Within a year I decided to brew my own beer.  The hobby soon became an addiction.  At home I found the that I could blend science and art to create something unique and wonderful.

That was around the same I discovered my love for zombie movies.  I had heard of zombies before.  Zombies were a goofy Halloween joke.  Zack Snyder in 2004 changed all that.  The remake of Dawn of the Dead was the first movie to truly scare me.  It was the movie that left me sleepless as an adult and had me question my plans for the future.  If zombies were real then what was the point of saving money or going on a diet.  They symbolized the end.  I began to amass a collection of every zombie movie I could find.  The result was a melding of melding of hobbies that borders on obsession.  I need to drink every beer brewed and watch every zombie movie filmed.  Here is where I share those things with you.

Night one of my blog begins with a plan.  Four friends are going to sit down and watch Dead Snow with a couple 22 oz bombers of some fine Imperial Stout.  Lagunitas Cappuccino Stout weighs in at a hefty 9,2% abv (don't believe the above lable).  And with snow still on the ground here in Alaska it’s still a welcome warmer.  The movie is blue ray and boasted as the finest Norwegian zombie film of all time (pun intended).  I crack open the first bottle and pour it into my Great Divide tulip glass (a souvenir from last year’s Telluride Blues and Brews festival).  It’s dark but not opaque and thick but not too viscous.  It foamed in the glass with a grey brown fizzle that shook me with excitement.  I had been almost 18 months since I saw my last bottle of this beautiful beverage.  The wait has made this moment even more exciting.

The playful banter of med school students on a skiing spring break vacation at some secluded cabin draws me in.  The all too familiar foreshadowing of no cell phone signal, and creepy World War 2 horror stories starts this movie in the common teeny horror movie fashion.  The movie progresses at the speed of smell with the only eye lifting moment being the outhouse sex scene.  That was a first.  I take my first sip of the sweet black liquid.  It’s more carbonated than I expected for a high alcohol stout.  The coffee flavor is strong but not overly astringent like some coffee stouts are.  It’s much more drinkable than I expected from this big of a beer.  There is a definite roasted character, deep and chocolaty with loads of malt.  It’s a big stout that doesn’t fill like an imperial stout.  I think that’s good.  It makes it easy to put away 2 bombers before half of the characters are killed off.

These Nazi Zombies are not my type of zombies.  They are fast and calculated instead of my preferred slow and thoughtless ones.  The zombies don’t eat flesh and at one point the leader actually calls other zombies to rise from the earth.  The frustration I felt at the director for breaking the zombie mold was held at bay by the extreme gore and surprisingly good special effects.   In this movie a girl is pulled into an outhouse but manages to climb out covered in poop.  There were a lot of firsts in this film.

There were numerous nods to zombie movies of the past.  The Brain Dead t shirt being the most obvious, the Evil Dead cut your own hand off with a chainsaw reference being my favorite.  In the end if you’re looking for Dawn of the Dead you will be disappointed but if you’re in the mood for a movie in the style of Black Sheep (not the Chris Farley one), well then you might like this one. 

The Beer:

Aroma – 7/10

Appearance – 4/5

Taste – 8/10

Palate – 3/5

Overall – 15/20

Total = 37/50

Ratebeer.com gives it a score of 96 overall and 95 in style.  After this tasting I give it a 90.  This is a great beer and for $4 a bomber I’ll fill my fridge guilt free.  But it’s not in my desert island cooler.

The Movie:

Production – 4/5

Plot – 3.5/5

Gore – 4.5/5

Zombies – 3/5

Overall – 4/5

Rottentomatoes.com gave this movie a 67 on the tomatometer but I would put it at an 85.  Respectable.

Best Scene:  My favorite scene was when the one fat colege kid gets too close to a window (rookie mistake).  He is grabbed by the head, a few seconds of struggling....BOOM....head ripped apart.  The scene was complete with brains falling out onto the floor.

Worste Scene:  One guy who had set off by himself to find his missing girlfriend found himself having to perform first aid on himself for wounds inflicted by zombies.  Watching him do self stiching with a fish hook while blood squirts out everywhere is turning my stomach just typing it.

It was a great night and i would recommend both the beer and the movie to you!