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!
