The long forgotten world of the video renter was a tumultuous and risky one. With walls and walls of movies to choose from, you were never quite sure of what you’d wind up taking home. One sure bet was to avoid the oversized, massive clamshell cases that stood out garishly on the video shelf. Many times the artwork completely oversold the movie, when it even had anything at all to do with the actual movie enclosed within. When trying to find something new, something exotic or just something downright nasty there was really no other course but to trust the video cover. That is where I was first lured into a false sense of security by the VHS cover of The Being. The movie sure looked exciting and ominous. Years of watching “Let’s Make a Deal” had taught me that when something looks too good to be true it usually is, especially when wrapped in a tidy neat bow.

The Being is a prime example of a low budget movie, no matter how hard it tries to rise above, ending up as a horrible exercise in filmmaking and an endurance test in self-punishment for the viewer. The small potato-producing Idaho town of Pottsville, that just so happens to have its very own toxic waste dump, is plagued by attacks from a radioactive mutant (Go figure!) that may or may not be the missing child of the neighborhood loony. The world’s most unlikely hero, Detective Mortimer Lutz (producer Rexx Coltrane aka Bill Osco) must find a way to track down and destroy the creature with either the help or interference of a government scientist played by Martin Landau. Landau’s character is extremely uneven, sometimes trying to help Lutz and sometimes flipping on his Secret Agent Man mode and trekking out on secret nighttime search and destroy missions. The film also features a slumming Jose Ferrer as the town’s mayor and “Laugh-In’s” very own Ruth Buzzi, whose face disturbs me more than any elaborate special effect could ever do, as the mayor’s pornography-protesting wife. Plot-wise, the movie is very simplistic with the creature stalking Lutz nonstop, killing various bit players and trying to communicate with its mother.
 

The film is a dark and muddy mess, with either incredibly horrible day for night shooting or just abysmal continuity. Coltrane has about as much charisma as one of Pottsville’s potatoes and Martin Landau is embarrassingly over the top and hammy with his liver-lipped face never quite getting over the shock he must have felt when he realized he went from portraying Rollin Hand in “Mission: Impossible” to this. But then again…Landau was in “The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island”…

Directed almost with a porn-like fetish( focusing on spurting blood and slimy oozing secretions) by Jackie Kong who would later go on to make the marginally better “Blood Diner”, The Being is filmed with an eye toward quirky humor, especially toward small town bumpkins and their oh so wacky ways. It’s unfortunate, mainly for the viewer, that apparently the ultimate goal was to put the least amount of laughs into the supposed comic scenes.