31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 1: C.H.U.D. II: Bud the Chud

Do you feel that in the air? That feeling can be only one thing: SPOOKY. We have reached the season of fear, October. Change into your SPINE-TINGELEST clothing and watch some movies with me. HAHAHAHA!!

Welcome, to the second annual 31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews. This is a tradition I started last year where I watched a horror (or horror-adjacent) movie a day every day through the month of October. Most of that got posted on my twitter and, weirdly enough, in the Reddit NFL Free Talk threads. This year I figured I should doll up the process a bit more and place it officially here, next to all my other writing.

Our theme this year is going to be SEQUELS. Not every movie I review will be a sequel, but more than half should be. I am trying to focus particularly on sequels to movies I covered last year. I saw American Psycho in 2019, that means I might have to watch American Psycho 2 this year. I am not looking forward to every movie, needless to say. Reviews will be longer or shorter, depending on how interesting the movie is.

Anyway, let us start out with a movie with a name as fun to type as it is to say: C.H.U.D. II: Bud the Chud.

C.H.U.D. was worst movie I saw during last year's Halloween festivities. Hopefully C.H.U.D. II: Bud the Chud is the worst movie I see this year. Both these movies are horrible. The first one is a really mediocre monster movie that inexplicably stars a lot of actors who would go on to be in Home Alone. The second one has nothing to do with C.H.U.D. 1. Yup, C.H.U.D. II: Bud the Chud is basically the Troll 2 of the Chud Cinematic Universe (The C.H.U.D.C.U.).

C.H.U.D. II: Bud the Chud trades the dirty streets of Manhattan of the original for sunny Southern California. Instead of actual Chud monsters, it has zombies who are somehow connected to the original group of sewer creatures. Therefore, C.H.U.D. II has no Chuds. It does have a Bud, played by Gerrit Graham, best known for the role of Beef in Phantom of the Paradise. Bud is our zombie hero. He mostly stumbles through the movie doing bad physical comedy. C.H.U.D. II is sadly a comedy more than a horror movie, and a miserably unfunny one at that. The rest of the human cast are SoCal teenagers, none of whom are funny or likable. Bud does get an attraction to Katie (Tricia Leigh Fisher), in the one vaguely interesting turn on anything in this movie. Bud the Chud tries to be Bud the Stud, and gives her his heart, literally, at the end. It is is a weirdly sweet gesture and a decent gore gag. Katie looks good in a very revealing bikini.

Katie's bikini and Bud's heart are the only good parts of this thing. The rest of this movie fucking sucks. C.H.U.D II is only 84 minutes but feels three times longer.

I would call the kind of humor in C.H.U.D. II "newspaper comic"-y. And not a good newspaper comic like Calvin & Hobbes or something, this is lame Family Circus shit. A zombie dog attacks a mailman. A crowd of zombies visits a burger stand and orders the fry cook. Bud has troubles with a toilet flushing. These gags are all so fucking obvious and had to be tired even in 1989. At least Robert Vaughn as Colonel Masters is doing a Colonel Trautman impression and chewing a lot of scenery. He's not funny but he has energy.

C.H.U.D. II is too tame for a zombie movie and also too tame for an Eighties comedy. There's no gore other than Bud's heart. Nothing is scary. There's no nudity. There's no edge of any kind. It extra hurts to watch this movie knowing that I could have turned on Dan O'Bannon's 1985 masterpiece, The Return of the Living Dead instead, which has tits, gore, scares, laughs, and plenty of edge.

Thankfully they never made a C.H.U.D. III. 

Next time: 2018's The First Purge.