Pottsville, Idaho has some problems. A massage parlor is coming to town and the local conservatives are going insane battling it. And oh yeah - children are disappearing and people are being horribly murdered. Oh boy, 1983 was a magical time to be alive, because this movie may have seemed stupid to critics when it came out way back when, but I loved every single minute of this.

Much like Jaws, the authorities - including Mayor Lane (José Ferrer, The Sentinel) are covering everything up so that they don't damage the town's potato crop. That said, he hired chemical safety engineer Garcon Jones (what an amazing sentence that was to write),who is played by the always dependable Martin Landau. Detective Lutz is also on the case, played by Rexx Coltrane, who is in fact exploitation producer Bill Osco. Osco produced this film, as well as plenty of more adult titles like Flesh Gordon and Alice in Wonderland: An X-Rated Musical Fantasy. He also worked with Jackie Kong, who directed The Being, to bring Night Patrol to the screen.

Toss in Kenny Rogers' wife (at the time) as a love interest and a mutant who is totally influenced by Alien and we've got ourselves a movie. This also curiously takes place during Easter, which has nothing to do with anything at all, other than inspiring its original title, Easter Sunday.

It turns out that the mutant has been exposed to radioactive materials in one of the town's dumps. And luckily, the mutant is light sensitive, so it only attacks at night. Will Martin Landau and the film's producer be able to stop it in time? Also, don't you want to see this even more when I tell you that Ruth Buzzi is in it? Or that in addition to Ferrer, this film has another Oscar winner in the cast, Dorothy Malone? What if I told you that Murray Langston, the Unknown Comic himself, was in it? Or that at the end of the movie, we get to learn what happened to every character after the film with title cards and then get to see every major character with a super of who played them (and anyone who has died, we get to see them die all over again)? For these reasons and so many more - like a creature that has one eye and hundreds of teeth, this movie is a must see.

"The Being" is must viewing for those fright film fans who delight in the cheap and the cruddy. As Leonard Maltins' paperback guide to movies has always succinctly put it, this is not just a B movie but a Z movie. It's got a few distinguished thespians slumming badly, crude direction by cult favourite Jackie Kong ("Blood Diner", "Night Patrol"),a routine and silly script, and enough hilarity to keep bad movie enthusiasts chortling for 82 minutes.

Kongs' then-husband Bill Osco, the producer of this thing, also co-stars under the name Rexx Coltrane, as small town detective Mortimer Lutz, trying to solve the cases of missing people in his small town of Pottsville in Idaho. The culprit is a monster spawned by improperly "disposed" toxic waste, and it leaves gallons of slime wherever it goes. The perpetually cranky mayor (Jose Ferrer) doesn't want anything to hurt local business, while Garson Jones (Martin Landau),a scientist who is a fairly slimy one himself, does some snooping around.

One is certain to smile watching the ineptitude play out as "The Being" tells its tale. One of the highlights is when two stoners watching a movie at a drive-in spot the creature and one of them utters an obscenity at it. Prompting the thing, of course, to devour him. The finale is great stuff, as Lutz goes through a hilarious amount of punishment while fighting the Being; this is one protracted battle. The effects are abysmal and audience members are certain to bust a gut when we finally get a good look at our antagonist. It's pretty suggestive looking, for one thing.

One could savour the casting mix here: also among the people wasting their time here are Marianne Gordon (wife of Kenny Rogers at the time),Dorothy Malone as a woman desperately searching for her son, Ruth Buzzi as the mayors' annoying wife, comedians Murray Langston & Johnny Dark and author / actor Kinky Friedman as a trio of cannon fodder, Jerry Maren as the Being, and Kent Perkins (Buzzis' husband) as dopey Officer Dudley. The adorable tyke who gets too close to the Being at one point is played by Roxanne Cybelle, the daughter of Kong and Osco.

Originally filmed in 1980 under the title "Easter Sunday", when capitalizing on the concept of holidays in horror was in vogue.

This is a special kind of bad; my corresponding rating applies not to quality, obviously, but simple entertainment value.

Seven out of 10.

There are certain stinky movies whose very fetid, noxious, nostril hair-curling putridness takes on a so-unbelievably-shoddy-it's-weirdly-sublime glow. This exceptionally awful atrocity is one such appealing abomination. The first surefire sign of superior shabbiness stems from the rambling and unfocused plodding'n'poky plot: a murderous one-eyed, flay-skinned, slime-dripping upright biped humanoid beast created by the illegal dumping of toxic waste (WARNING: Beware of heavy-handed subtext concerning the dire consequences beget by man's thoughtless disposal of hazardous radioactive chemicals) brutally slays the wholly deserving idiot inhabitants of the sleepy stick central hamlet of Pottsville, Idaho.

A second testament to the picture's pathetic, yet oddly irresistible sub-par allure is the slumming and suitably embarrassed Hall of Shame Faded Name cast: a dour Martin Landau as a shady, spineless, untrustworthy scientist, a cranky Jose Ferror as the gloomy mayor, a highly annoying Ruth Buzzi as Hizzoner's nagging shrew wife, a haggard Dorothy Malone as the harried mother of a missing little boy (said tyke may just be the monster, but thanks to the murky script this particular plot point dangles unresolved throughout the film),the eternally goofy Murray "The Unknown Comic" Langston and saturnine country-and-western satirist Kinky Friedman as ill-fated local yokels, former porn filmmaker turned lousy thespian Bill Osco as the charmless good ol' boy sheriff, and Kenny Roger's hot babe "can't act for spit" wife Marianne Gordon as the constantly shrieking heroine. Toss in Jackie Kong's fumbling (mis)direction, witless attempts at broad humor (two stoner guys are attacked by the monster while watching a cheesy fright feature at a drive-in theater),fake-looking gore, dimly lit cinematography, across-the-board cruddy production values, a meandering pace, a hilariously hokey and unconvincing titular creature, and one of those always irritating "it ain't over yet!" sequel set-up non-endings. The net result of all these endearingly dreadful ingredients is a wonderfully wretched stiff of a highly entertaining Grade Z turkey.