Plutonium Baby

Danny is a bit unusual, due to his having been exposed to radiation as a baby. After his grandfather is killed, Danny's mum, who happens to also be a mutant, sets out to exact her vengeance.

Ten years pass, and Danny's all grown up. What started out as a very bad movie, doesn't improve one iota.

PLUTONIUM BABY is a sub-sludge -"Budget? What's a budget?"- horror movie, complete with the requisite non-acting "actors", acting as though they might be in a movie of some sort.

All of its trashiness aside, this movie's greatest sin is its extreme dullness. Even the nudity is boring! Sitting through to the end is like trying to keep a handful of angry bees in your mouth for an hour and a half!...

Yes, I've finally reached the depths of 80s horror that I am watching stuff called PLUTONIUM BABY. Some kids go camping in the woods and run into an old man and his grandson, Danny. Seems the kid's mom was working for some nuclear folks and got contaminated, so this kid glows in the dark (according to on screen text, we never see it happen). Goons come into the woods to kill him, but they are killed with the leader being placed in a toxic waste drum. Ten years later, the grown Danny (Ciaran Sheehan) is a construction worker in NYC and life is normal until the guy bursts from the drum with revenge on his mind. If that sounds a bit disjointed, there is a reason. According to the IMDb, the original director (William Szarka) left halfway into a 10-day shoot and the producer took over. Whomever is responsible for the final product deserves a lashing. Never before has a director feared such things as close ups, camera movement, or editing. A majority of the dialogue scenes involve two people standing in the frame and getting it all out in one burst. If the film has anything going for it, there are some interesting FX by Scott Coulter. After that, it is slim pickings.

Here's a first: a movie so unbelievably awful even I was unable to watch it all the way through.

From the title, I was expecting some kind of "It's Alive!" slimy puppet show... Instead I get the lamest "four teenagers enter the woods..." story ever scripted. The title character isn't a baby at all, he's a poorly socialized 14-year-old named Danny, and not particularly mutated at all. As far as special effects, there's a radioactive bunny sock-puppet that's amusing for a few minutes, and a couple of well-done corpses, including one whose small intestines are inexplicably tied in a bow, but by 20 minutes into the film, it's clear they've used up all their good ideas. A quarter-hour after that, the plot finally expires altogether, and the movie does something I've never seen before -- it launches straight into its own sequel: "Plutonium Baby II: Danny Takes Manhattan".

In this phase of the film, it's ten years later, and Plutonium Baby is now Plutonium Man, with a girlfriend (from whom he must hide his Terrible Secret, of course) and a festering leg wound. He's being stalked through the streets of New York by the now horribly deformed scientist whose radiation experiments caused his plutonious state. The tension *really* fails to build here, as by now you've lost interest in the survival of any of the characters, and the chances you're going to see somebody attacked by a radioactive squirrel or pigeon or something appear to be slim. Apparently the whole thing builds up to some kind of Highlander-esque final showdown, with creator facing creation in a battle royale, but I just couldn't take any more. I still haven't returned the video, so maybe I'll find out how it ends sometime this week, but I'm not sure I have the strength...

I thought Halloween 3 was bad! Then I saw Plutonium baby. First of all, the tagline just doesn't work. He'll tell his mommy? HE HAS NO MOMMY TO TELL!! Secondly, the baby isn't even a baby - he's about eleven years old. The stupid teenagers that enter the scene serve the proper horror movie purpose - they're complete idiots. The cinematography is laughable. The kids are seemingly lost in the middle of the woods, but if you look carefully you can see a car go by them in the background. Are you kidding me? "We're lost!" "Vvvrrroooom." "What was that?" Absolutely terrible. Next, the pathetic storyline drags on for hours - literally. Just when you think the nauseating plot has finally finshed, it flashes forward ten years to start the - (I'm running out of fitting words) - grotesquely stupid story all over again with the "baby" as a grown-up. There's a dull sex scene that's probably the longest scene in the whole movie - next in line for longest is the aerobics scene, that's right, there's an aerobics scene. That's about all you need to know, except the worst script line I've ever heard: "don't mind the nuclear warning sign, put your beer in there anyway." The fact that whoever wrote this film actually thought they'd make a profit from it is the best part - it's just too much!! It's beyond those bad movies that are fun to laugh at, like Bloodfeast for example. No it's just plain bad. Not funny in a "this is supposed to scare us?" sort of way, but bad in a "they should use this video for torture" sort of way. Avoid this movie like you would avoid the Black Plague.

To call 'Plutonium Baby' a stinker would be the understatement of the year. This is the second worst film I have ever seen. Don't get me wrong; I love bad horror - the worse the better. But what I simply cannot abide is the subgenre I like to refer to as Boring Horror. And 'Plutonium Baby' is excruciatingly, mind-numbingly dull - ten minutes into this Thanksgiving dinner of a movie, I was praying for it to end. It has a duration of only eighty-five minutes but it feels like forever. Couple this with low-rent special effects and dreck actors, and you have a thoroughly awful affair.

The only positive thing I can say about 'Plutonium Baby' is that it is marginally better than Troma's dire 'Igor and the Lunatics', which is the worst film I have ever viddied, and which was voted by 'Entertainment Tonight' as the 'Worst Film Ever Made'. Like 'Plutonium', 'Igor' is a crushing bore.

Other Boring Horror titles to be carefully avoided are 'Demon Wind' starring George Kennedy, and 'A Name for Evil' (or, as I prefer to call it, 'A Name for Tedium'!) starring Robert Culp and Samantha Eggar. Don't get burned!