Plutonium Baby

Yes, I've finally reached the depths of 80s horror that I am watching stuff called PLUTONIUM BABY. Some kids go camping in the woods and run into an old man and his grandson, Danny. Seems the kid's mom was working for some nuclear folks and got contaminated, so this kid glows in the dark (according to on screen text, we never see it happen). Goons come into the woods to kill him, but they are killed with the leader being placed in a toxic waste drum. Ten years later, the grown Danny (Ciaran Sheehan) is a construction worker in NYC and life is normal until the guy bursts from the drum with revenge on his mind. If that sounds a bit disjointed, there is a reason. According to the IMDb, the original director (William Szarka) left halfway into a 10-day shoot and the producer took over. Whomever is responsible for the final product deserves a lashing. Never before has a director feared such things as close ups, camera movement, or editing. A majority of the dialogue scenes involve two people standing in the frame and getting it all out in one burst. If the film has anything going for it, there are some interesting FX by Scott Coulter. After that, it is slim pickings.

There aren't enough derogatory expletives in the dictionary to hurl at this brimming bucket of fetid pond scum...PLUTONIUM BABY is swerve-driving, disorderly chicken-scratch which denotes a backwoods codger fostering his grandson when illegally dumped toxic waste turns the boy's mother into a mutant. Following the murder of both his mutated mom and grand-dad by some shady government suits, the orphaned boy is swept off to Manhattan. Years later, he is stalked with vengeful contempt by one of the killers, now a toxic mutant himself.

There's far more nonsense going on in the story than I have bothered to mention, but the matter is too trivial to justify callousing my fingertips on the keypad with further annotation.

A wriggling pinworm in the ass of horror cinema. Avoid. 2/10

To grasp the concept of eternity, you don't need to know about mountains of diamond and tiny birds pecking at them till they wear down to a nubbin. All you need to do is sit down with Plutonium Baby, a pot of coffee, and a fresh package of $1.29 oatmeal cookies, and, trust me, you'll experience eternity. The coffee will be nothing but a stain in your cup, the oatmeal cookies will be nothing but crumbs, and Plutonium Baby will STILL be slowly, patiently, remorselessly unreeling on your screen.

Characters wander onto the set, they wander off, things happen, a whole new movie starts about two-thirds of the way into the tape; yes, there's a radioactive Muppet Baby, yes, there's people preserved in drums of radioactive waste for a decade, yes, some doof decides he just has to use a drum of radioactive waste for a beer cooler, yes, at one point there's three unrelated parties of armed men wandering around in the Jersey woods looking for the Nuclear Kid. But you just don't care. You can't make yourself care.

I'm told there's a bet that you can't lose, no matter how drunk the individuals involved are: simply bet a guy any amount of money he can't eat a pound of butter in an hour, and keep it all down. In the same vein, I'd almost be willing to bet that a sane person could not sit, unrestrained, in a metal folding chair in front of Plutonium Baby and watch the whole thing straight through without falling asleep or getting up to purge.

I'd like to watch it again and see if I could isolate the elements that make this hog so completely unwatchable, but no force on earth could make me go through this a second time.

Danny is a bit unusual, due to his having been exposed to radiation as a baby. After his grandfather is killed, Danny's mum, who happens to also be a mutant, sets out to exact her vengeance.

Ten years pass, and Danny's all grown up. What started out as a very bad movie, doesn't improve one iota.

PLUTONIUM BABY is a sub-sludge -"Budget? What's a budget?"- horror movie, complete with the requisite non-acting "actors", acting as though they might be in a movie of some sort.

All of its trashiness aside, this movie's greatest sin is its extreme dullness. Even the nudity is boring! Sitting through to the end is like trying to keep a handful of angry bees in your mouth for an hour and a half!...

To call 'Plutonium Baby' a stinker would be the understatement of the year. This is the second worst film I have ever seen. Don't get me wrong; I love bad horror - the worse the better. But what I simply cannot abide is the subgenre I like to refer to as Boring Horror. And 'Plutonium Baby' is excruciatingly, mind-numbingly dull - ten minutes into this Thanksgiving dinner of a movie, I was praying for it to end. It has a duration of only eighty-five minutes but it feels like forever. Couple this with low-rent special effects and dreck actors, and you have a thoroughly awful affair.

The only positive thing I can say about 'Plutonium Baby' is that it is marginally better than Troma's dire 'Igor and the Lunatics', which is the worst film I have ever viddied, and which was voted by 'Entertainment Tonight' as the 'Worst Film Ever Made'. Like 'Plutonium', 'Igor' is a crushing bore.

Other Boring Horror titles to be carefully avoided are 'Demon Wind' starring George Kennedy, and 'A Name for Evil' (or, as I prefer to call it, 'A Name for Tedium'!) starring Robert Culp and Samantha Eggar. Don't get burned!