The Being (1983)

Filmed as Easter Sunday, The Being was Jackie Kong’s addition to that cycle of 70s and 80s films in which small towns are menaced by monsters created by the careless disposal of toxic waste and/or other forms of pollution (The Milpitas Monster (1976), Spawn of the Slithis (1978), Humanoids from the Deep (1980), Prophecy (1979) et al). They were mostly a pretty poor crop and The Being is one of the very worst. It was Kong’s first attempt at a film and her lack of experience is evident throughout.

Mortimer Lutz (“Rexx Coltrane”, a pseudonym for producer Bill Osco – he’s credited as “Johnny Commander” in the end credits), a detective in the small town of Pottsville, Idaho is baffled by a series of mysterious disappearances, the only clue at the crime scenes being copious amounts of green slime. As the town’s mayor (Jose Ferrer) struggles to keep a cap on the disappearances so as not to cause panic, Blocked at every turn by a shady scientist (Martin Landau), Lutz eventually discovers that the perpetrator is a a young boy who has been mutated by waster products from a nearby nuclear dump site.

The film was shot in 1980 when Kong was just 24 years old (she was hailed at the time as the youngest female director of a”mainstream” feature film) and was funded by Osco, her then-husband, to the tune of just $4,5 million, but sat on the shelf for three years before being released to damning reviews and indifferent box office. Osco, who proves to be a terrible actor, had an interesting career as a producer, making Mona in 1970, one of the earliest American hardcore porn films to get a reasonably wide release, before overseeing Flesh Gordon in 1974 and the porno musical fantasy Alice in Wonderland two years later. Osco continued producing and directing low budget genre and erotic films into the 1990s. He worked with Kong again on the comedy Night Patrol (1984) and the gore epic Blood Diner (1987), sold as an unofficial sequel to Herschell Gordon Lewis’ Blood Feast (1963). Neither of them any good but they’re head and shoulders above the hopeless The Being.

The most interesting aspect of the film is the smattering once fairly big names who seem to have fallen on hard times. Landau was a long way from his days on hit TV shows Mission: Impossible (1966-1973) and Space: 1999 (1975-1977) while Dorothy Malone must have been looking at that Academy Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Written on the Wind (1956) and wondering where it all went wrong. Ferrer was used to this sort of thing of course, at this stage of his career happily jumping around from Woody Allen films (A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982)) to low budget horror (Bloody Birthday 1981)) and big budget science fiction (Dune (1984)) to more episodic TV than you could shake a stick at. Together, they manage to give the film more class than it really deserves. Elsewhere, composer Kinky Friedman makes one of his infrequent acting appearances and comedian Ruth Buzzi is on hand as the mayor’s pornography obsessed, do-gooding wife.

And therein lies the film’s biggest problem – it’s uncertainty of tone. One minute it’s inviting you to laugh at the absurdity of it all, the next it wants to be taken seriously and Kong never quite manages to strike the right tone. The bit in a drive-in, wherein the slime monster attacks several patrons who are watching a film in which a topless woman is attacked by a giant maggot, is fun but odd diversions like a black and white nightmare sequence are out of place and distracting. Choosing a course and sticking to it probably wouldn’t have made The Being a better film but it might at least have made it less of a chore. Were not even rewarded for our patience by a memorable or even well-designed monster, surely the cardinal sin for this sort of thing.

Sluggish, dull and derivative (you don’t have to listen to hard to head echoes of Jaws (1975), Alien (1979) and any number of 50s monster-on-the-loose tales), The Being only really engages the interest of those wondering just what it was that Osco and Kong did to attract the likes of Landau and Malone to the project. Talking to the Los Angeles Herald Examiner in 1983, Kong suggested that she lured in Landau by pretending to be a potential student at his theatre workshop. It was the best thing she did for the film – his scenes are the only moments in which this otherwise pedestrian and forgettable shocker spark with any kind of energy.

Incidentally, although shot as Easter Sunday, the Easter holiday itself seems entirely incidental to the plot. There’s a scene in which a toddler discovers the creatures burrow during an Easter egg hunt and a few oblique references to the occasion but other than that the film could have been set on any other day of the year for all the holiday impacts on the plot.