Godmonster of Indian Flats

GODMONSTER OF INDIAN FLATS is a monster sheep movie, but that's only a portion of this nonsensical mishmash. Some of it plays like a weird western, occurring in modern times. Imagine if Ed Wood and Al Adamson got together, and directed BLAZING SADDLES, and it all comes clear.

Complete with humans "bleating" over sheep footage, mad science, a secret cowboy cult, and a deformed sheep fetus, this movie weaves its tale of sheer idiocy. Duller than glass smeared with sheep-dip, 99% of the "action" has nothing to do with monster sheep.

The title creature -resembling a pulsating ham- is kept in an incubator for most of its limited screen time. By the time it does fully emerge, most sane viewers will have slipped into a death-like state.

Yes! A woman dances with a giant mutant sheep! Yes! It ruins a child's party! Yes! It blows up a gas station! All in the final 10-15 minutes!

In short, someone was at these tourist trap locations, and said, "Hey! Let's come up with a story, so we can run around these local landmarks!". Alas, this isn't the best way to make a movie.

The lone star is for the woolly behemoth's scant appearances, and the movie's apocalyptic, Shakespearean, cowboy denouement at the city dump!...

Apparently unseen since its initial theatrical sweep in the early 70s(presuming it actually received distribution at all), this long-forgotten little coprolite was excavated from some lost-film boneyard during the late 90s, and has since laid claim to its rightful spot on the roll-call of the weirdest movies ever made.

GODMONSTER weaves an ambling configuration concerning a sheep fetus being exposed to a strange chemical vapor. Taken to a lab by scientists, it matures into a bald-headed, lopsided hirsute beast with a parched lolling tongue and a gimp arm. Naturally, the upright-walking miscreation escapes and hobbles over the arid desert terrain, scaring a few kids and wreaking general minor havoc. This course of events gives rise to a climactic stage so heteroclite...SO IMPOSSIBLY RANDOM...that it literally defies description.

All the elemental constituents of this film are surprisingly solid, and performances from the key players are moreless on-the-beam. It even has sharply defined characters and a developed, articulate subplot touching on sensitive sociopolitical issues. In taking note of these niceties, the burning question arises...how in hell could the folks involved with GODMONSTER have justified applying their erudite capacities to such a fly-ball project? Could a concept as utterly 'non-compos-mentis' as this have possibly seemed like a felicitous undertaking at the drawing-board stage? The mind boggles.

We can't lose this film again, or future generations will dismiss the lore as either a collective hallucination or an elaborate hoax. 10/10? 1/10? ...how does one possibly rate something like this?

No, folks, this is NOT a no-budget horror flick from the seventies. Look again - it's well-shot, well-staged, and, if anything, it's wildly overpopulated with enthusiastic minor characters and extras.

Godmonster isn't like anything else you've ever seen, heard, read, smelled, or tasted, with the possible exception of a Thomas Pynchon novel. Like Pynchon, Hobbs keeps piling on plot until you think the plate in your head is going to shatter. And then you realize that it's only the first thirty minutes. And it keeps coming at you and it WON'T STOP.

I've seen them all, from Acid Eaters to Zombie Nightmare. I've laughed at Begotten, wept over Forbidden Zone, sat amazed at semi-legal prints of White Dog with Dutch subtitles and Addio Uncle Tom with Greek subtitles.

I've got Killer Klowns in Spanish.

But Godmonster is the last stop on the line. I wish this WERE a crappy rubber-suit monster movie. It'd be vastly less disturbing.

For the first, say, 85 minutes, I couldn't make heads or tails out of this film. It appears to be a lost episode of the Brady Bunch where they wake up and discover themselves in a lost episode of Gunsmoke where they all wake up and find themselves in a lost episode of Night Gallery. I get why the hookers wear Victorian get-ups, but why does the visiting financier wear a Wild, Wild West outfit while trying to close a business deal? Most realistic dump ever. Coolest movie monster ever. It looks like a huge plushie that got caught in a fan and half skinned. And sheepy got back! Somehow, the last five minutes of this extraordinarily aimless film turned it into an existentialist allegory and it all seemed perfectly sensible. Except maybe the white plastic casket at the dog's funeral and, of course, the pie eating contest.

An parable for all conscientious sheep farmers : you can like your sheep, just don't love them; the result could well be an 10 foot sheep/man monster that your mother may have qualms about taking down to the local shops in a baby buggy.

I particularly liked the picnic scene where some children gaily enjoy their outdoor feast, ignoring the farmyard monstrosity clumsily approaching with lopsided gait until it is about 6 inches away from them; upon which they rapidly disperse with all the gritty realism of extras being cued to look surprised. Lack of peripheral vision must have been a genetic defect amongst the inhabitants of this mid-western town.

Definitely worth seeing, if only for the fact that no-one else you know will have seen it and you will be newly respected for discovering a potential cult gem. Whilst everyone else will be talking about pods and aliens and men turning into flies, you will receive awed silence as you describe the exploits of an enormous wobbly upright mutant sheep.