Plutonium Baby

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

Here's a first: a movie so unbelievably awful even I was unable to watch it all the way through.

From the title, I was expecting some kind of "It's Alive!" slimy puppet show... Instead I get the lamest "four teenagers enter the woods..." story ever scripted. The title character isn't a baby at all, he's a poorly socialized 14-year-old named Danny, and not particularly mutated at all. As far as special effects, there's a radioactive bunny sock-puppet that's amusing for a few minutes, and a couple of well-done corpses, including one whose small intestines are inexplicably tied in a bow, but by 20 minutes into the film, it's clear they've used up all their good ideas. A quarter-hour after that, the plot finally expires altogether, and the movie does something I've never seen before -- it launches straight into its own sequel: "Plutonium Baby II: Danny Takes Manhattan".

In this phase of the film, it's ten years later, and Plutonium Baby is now Plutonium Man, with a girlfriend (from whom he must hide his Terrible Secret, of course) and a festering leg wound. He's being stalked through the streets of New York by the now horribly deformed scientist whose radiation experiments caused his plutonious state. The tension *really* fails to build here, as by now you've lost interest in the survival of any of the characters, and the chances you're going to see somebody attacked by a radioactive squirrel or pigeon or something appear to be slim. Apparently the whole thing builds up to some kind of Highlander-esque final showdown, with creator facing creation in a battle royale, but I just couldn't take any more. I still haven't returned the video, so maybe I'll find out how it ends sometime this week, but I'm not sure I have the strength...

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!