GODMONSTER OF INDIAN FLATS

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND IMBECILES

In a development that will surely surprise either absolutely everybody or absolutely no-one, a 1973 zero-budget junk horror movie starring no-one you've ever heard of plus some poor sod in a giant mutant sheep costume turns out to be utter crap to the power of bloody awful. Who'd have thought it? Eye-wateringly abysmal even by the standards of Z-film drive-in garbage, it's a festival of shrieking idiocy with not one scintilla of artistic merit or entertainment value from unexciting start to even less exciting finish.

The Godmonster Of Indian Flats is a mutant sheep created by phosgene gases escaping from an abandoned silver mine onto a small sheep farm in the Nevada mountains. For most of the time he (it?) is merely an embryo looked after by the local doctor, until he finally gets loose and goes on the inevitable rampage. Instead, pretty much the first hour we're stuck in an old-timey hick town in which everyone is a yeehawing simpleton (the film might as well have been called When Cousins Marry) trying to get rid of a mining company representative called Barnstaple who wants to buy all the land leases. Barnstaple is the film's only black character, so it's hardly surprising when the whooping rednecks try to lynch him for no reason beyond apparently roleplaying 1870.

Much of this is punishingly dull and even the long overdue appearance of Sheepzilla is bloodless and ineffective, mainly because it's clearly a bloke stumbling blindly about in a cheap, unwieldy and poorly designed costume (it looks as though one of the front legs has fallen off), failing to kill off the bad guys and barely managing to stay upright. That's probably why he gets so little screen time in what is nominally his own movie: someone must have realised the utter shoddiness of it and put the focus on the local nutters instead. It didn't work: small-town corruption and machinations over mining rights are hardly interesting enough on their own, and less so in a film about a giant mutant hybrid sheep monster on the loose. I wonder if anyone has the remake rights?

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