Customer Reviews
low budget gem - By: Mr. K. Arts, 23 Jun 2005 
This is one of those low budget oddities that surfaced on home video in the eighties & developed a cult following among horror fans as well as people curious to see early performances from Daniel Stern & John Goodman. Mutant tramps living under new-york city are beggining to venture to the surface to find fresh meat, speading panic amongst the city's homeless population, a cop, a soup-kitchen worker & a professional photographer begin to investigate the mystery. Anchor bay's disc is great, with the best transfer I have seen yet & the film itself has been re-edited & presented as the director intended. The commentary track is both fun & informative & the disc also includes a superb easter egg. At the prices i've seen this go for on amazon this is an essential purchase for horror fans.
Good for a lazy afternoon/morning... - By: T. Carne, 26 Feb 2005 CHUD is a solid, fun movie, with a lot of things to recommend it. In terms of how the movie feels, although it's generallly known as a horror movie there's very little scary about it so it fallls into the 'sci-fi thriller' category along with Independence Day, Jurassic Park, Predator & the like. While those films are suitable for kids, aside from Predator anyhoo, CHUD is definitely not (of course the R rating & the fact that CHUD stands for Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers probably tipped you off) & the admittedly few & far between instances of violence or gore are quite grim, so keep this one out of reach of the littlies, but otherwise this is a fun B Movie thriller that everyone will enjoy. The acting is solid throughout, & it's surprising given the time the movie was made (during the 80s slasher boom when most of the characters in movies got bumped off before they had a chance to speak let alone develop) but the writers have taken genuine pains to create characters who you actuallly care about & believe in. This movie reminded me of the kind of daft Sci-Fi I used to watch back in the 80s when I was a kid, so it instantly got accepted into my heart just for that, & it reallly is the kind of movie anybody should be able to watch, horror fan or not. The only things that stopped CHUD from getting 5 stars were that it seemed to end abruptly, & at times the movie didn't seem to know whether it was trying to be funny or frightening. Also the sound transfer on the DVD is a little haphazard, resulting in some of the script getting lost in the hubbub. Mind you, this is an old movie & one that's only just been reissued so the print had probably deteriorated a fair bit.
If you like CHUD & feel you'd want to check out similar stuff, try these: Return of the Living Dead(1 & 2, not 3), Repo Man, Humanoids from the Deep.
