I was a kid when the trailer for this film started to appear, and to me it looked like a total creep-fest. I never managed to get a hold of it during the video age, but it was one of the first DVDs I ever bought (for about a pound) and I've got to say that Mutant, although not a creep-fest, is a fine chunk of eighties horror cheese.

I've heard (or read, rather) complaints that the film is too talky, but to be honest I don't think it hurts the film at all. For some reason director John 'Bud' Carlos sees fit to have his hero be a big goofy jerk, and if there's one guy who excels at playing goofball jerks, it's Wings Hauser. Right from the get go it's clear that it's his brother who is the smart one, as Wings incurs the wrath of the locals by driving like a nutter, gets into a car chase with some rednecks, and ends up crashing their car into a river, stranding them in the middle of nowhere. His brother is well annoyed, but Wings still manages to yuck it up as they head into a hick town, given a lift there by a crazy looking yokel who's not what he seems.

Once they get into town they discover a dead body and head into a bar for help, only to run into the rednecks again and get into a bar fight, broken up by local alcoholic sheriff Bo Hopkins, a washed up city cop who's lost his bottle, and is an ex-lover with the local doctor. He is led by the brothers to where the dead body should be, but instead finds the town drunk sleeping, and a puddle of strange fluid. After dropping Wings and his brother at a boarding house, he drops the sample off at the doctor's place, and things begin to get weird.

The town is strangely absent of people, and that night Wing's brother is dragged under his bed by some creature with smoking hands. Now properly stranded in the town, Wings looks for his brother with the help of a local teacher (and of course he finds time to woo her),finds a dead child, runs into the redneck again (and has a pipe fight with him) while Bo Hopkins finds more corpses and gets ignored by his boss, who thinks he's just a washed up drunk. Meanwhile, more and more citizens of the town start disappearing, at least during the day. It all builds up to loads of mutant versus the survivors, and an investigation into where exactly the source of this epidemic is coming from.

This film reminded me a lot of Salem's Lot. There's the outsider staying at the boarding house, the townsfolk disappearing, hostile locals and the protagonists trying to get the bottom of things while their numbers dwindle. That said, the film kicks into high gear when the mutants start attacking on mass, and that's where the cheese factor kicks in too. Who can forget the mutant kids attacking the teacher in the school (not to mention poor kid Billy, who, after being told he need never feel scared again, is attacked and killed by the mutants!),or the doctor describing the symptoms of the disease while her assistant transforms in the background. I was chuckling away at Wings booting a child in the head while trying to escape from a toilet. Good stuff.

There's also some huge errors on hand, from the 'acid hand' gag that's truly atrocious (a fake hand held by another hand – and they do it twice!),boom mike shadows, recurring stunt men etc, but it all adds to the charm. Wings is forced to emote a couple of times too which is a sight to behold (although the man can act, see "The Wind" for instance). This has long been a favourite of mine and was kind of remade as "Nightmare at Noon" with the same premise and same actors (both Wings and Hopkins in roughly the same roles) – I recommend that one too!

If anyone out there wondered what a gore-eschewing, spooky atmosphere emphasizing, modestly produced, yet still capably acted and directed backwater Hickville, USA-set cross between "Macon County Line" and "Night of the Living Dead" would be like, this surprisingly sound lethal toxic mutants running murderously amok downhome horror feature will answer your questions quite nicely. All the staple Southern-fried drive-in movie ingredients are present and accounted for: two clean-cut young Northerner brothers are treated with utmost inhospitality by the belligerent local yokel residents of a tiny armpit stick burg they're just innocently passing through on a cross country road trip, some nefarious cost-cutting company surreptitiously dumps illegal radioactive gunk in the forest which in turn causes a few townies to transform into blue-faced nocturnal zombies with rapidly diminishing blood who kill hapless folks for their precious life fluids, a skeptical recovering alcoholic sheriff (an excellent Bo Hopkins in his umpteenth redneck lawman role) refuses to believe in any of it until it's too late, only a token sweet, sympathetic odd gal out barmaid/school teacher nice lady (the quite fetching and appealing Jody Medford) sides with the boys, and things eventually get distressfully out of hand, leading to a rousing last reel appearance by the National Guard to save the day in the nick of time.

Yeah, nothing about this particular flick manages to be really surprising or original as far as the story is concerned. However, sometimes the story alone doesn't make a film good; the performances and execution matter a lot, too. Luckily, said execution, specifically Al Adamson protégé John "Bud" Cardos' punchy, right'n'tight proficient direction (Cardos also gave us the superior 70's killer animal winner "Kingdom of the Spiders" and the not half bad sci-fi/horror offering "The Dark") and tireless, ever-reliable B-movie composer Richard ("Parasite," "The House on Sorority Row") Band's eerie, understated score, run on all cylinders with bang-up effectiveness. The performances are all on the money as well: the always intense and compelling Wings Hauser and the affable Lee Montgomery are strong and personable as our luckless sibling outsider protagonists, burly Marc Clement makes for a fabulously hateful villain as a bellicose hillbilly bully, and both Jennifer Warren as a smart, perceptive doctor and Cary Guffey (the little tyke who gets abducted by the aliens in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind") as an ill-fated teenager who in the single most nail-biting moment gets attacked by the mutants in an abandoned high school bathroom contribute fine support. And, most unusual in an 80's horror picture with this premise, the expected graphic splatter gets refreshingly downplayed in favor of an at first sinisterly ambiguous and quietly unnerving flesh-crawling creepy tone which later thrillingly gives way to several stirring, zestfully staged shock scenes and action set pieces.

After seeing plenty of Italian films made to cash in in the wake of George Romero's DAWN OF THE DEAD, I was surprised to find this other rip-off, which is American for a change. Although the monsters in the film are called mutants and not zombies (as they're supposedly still alive),the influence of Romero's creations is obvious and these monsters are zombies in all but name. Who are they kidding? With the pale blue skin and the contorted features, plus the oozing yellow slime, these guys look like an unfortunate mixture of the demons from THE EVIL DEAD and the zombies from DAWN OF THE DEAD, except a touch more amateurish in nature. If you're not convinced of DAWN's influence, then check out two scenes where a zombie emerges slowly from under some bedclothes and where we see a waist-height view of clutching zombies, which are almost identical to shots Romero uses in his film.

If you've seen THE DARK, also by John "Bud" Cardos, then you'll know what to expect from this creepy little B-movie as both items have exactly the same kind of dark, grimy atmosphere about them. The main problem with this film is, just like THE DARK, it's overlong and, for the first hour, many scenes become boring because they just run too long. I mean, there are scenes of people talking to each other which seem to go on for ages and don't really further the plot in any way - what's up with that? It's amazing when a 95 minute movie can feel like a three hour one.

This film has a number of different sub plots which have to be tied up neatly at the end. At first, the main threat to our heroes are the redneck gang who terrorise them at every opportunity, and there are a couple of bar fights and car chases which puts it into action territory. Then it becomes a murder mystery, with the introduction of the dead bodies, and then science fiction with the oozing mysterious slime. Finally the last half hour is all-out zombie horror. Gore fans might as well forget this relatively bloodless film, although there are some cool prosthetic effects of people's heads and hands bulging.

The acting is pretty typical for a low budget B-movie such as this, which is to say, it isn't up to much. Wings Hauser and Bo Hopkins are the only two guys in the film who put in good performances, although it's fair to say that the other characters are largely underwritten (which seems surprising when considering the amount of talking they all do). I hadn't seen Hauser in a film before and his appearance surprised me, especially in that he looked like a teenager. His brother's character is built up but he is killed right near the start so that's pretty pointless anyway. You can just guess that the manly Hauser will discover his brother's body later on and emote over it, but does he have to touch and hug the contaminated corpse? I mean, if I saw a body which I knew had been contaminated with toxic waste and was extremely poisonous, making close contact with it would be the last thing I wanted.

As for the other roles...the chief redneck's role is so over the top that he's a caricature. I was confused when the romantic interest was introduced, as she looked just like a tomboy - except when moments later she removed her hat and became just another screaming blonde bimbo. Thankfully, the reliable Bo Hopkins is around to elicit some sympathy as a drunk sheriff. Jennifer Warren plays her doctor role with such icy aloofness that her death fails to be shocking in any way. One minor character who I did feel sorry for would be the little boy at the school, who gets rescued only for seconds later to get shredded by the zombies... now that's just cruel! The last half hour of this film is packed with action and moves at a fair old pace. The scenes of our heroes surrounded by zombies manage to be quite frightening too, especially as they keep getting cornered with seemingly no way out, although you always know in the back of your mind that they're going to be rescued at the last minute in some unforeseen way. It's just a shame that the plot seems so inconsistent and implausible to me. Toxic waste is being pumped into the ground and infects people, right? In that case, surely it would work by getting into the water system and infecting their drinking water. Why then, do they bleed toxic waste from their hands when they die? Where does it come from? Does their body produce it, and if so, how? Why is this never explained? How come some people come back from the dead when others don't? (don't give me that immune nonsense either, nobody could be immune to these deadly chemicals). What the heck happened to that doctor who had flu at one moment, and became a zombie the next? Plot holes aside, MUTANT is a surprisingly well made and enjoyable zombie movie effort in Romero's best tradition which succeeds in creating a fair few chills and shocks as it goes along, which is why I whole-heartedly recommend it as a good example of what a low budget B movie has to offer.