The Being

It's a wonder Jackie Kong hasn’t made more movies. The Being was our introduction to her small cannon, and though it's not as off the wall as Blood Diner, it's still pretty fun all the way through.

The plot unfolds something like this: A blood lust has been awakened in a being of unknown origin, and it's wreaking havoc on a sleepy Idaho town. This all might have something to do with the power plant openly dumping radiation into the water supply. Then again, Martin Landau insists that those radiation levels are so low it's totally safe to drink. (And he will aggressively insist this stance for anyone with a TV camera.) Never the less, a being has gone on a killing rampage and Martin Landau and the local sheriff have teamed up to put a stop to it before the whole town ends up dead.

The narrators: There are some strange narration choices in this flick. First we're introduced to some classic local-radio-announcer-will-talk-us-through-this-movie narration, almost immediately followed by some local-sheriff’s-inner-monologue-will-talk-us-through-this-movie narration. They both pop up intermittently in the first half of the film, only to be almost abandon during the second half and adds a layer of unintentional fun to the whole thing.

Yup, that's: Martin Landau

That scene reminds us of something: When Martin Landau's character goes on the local news to illustrate how safe radiation is to drink, we were reminded of this interview with a Monsanto Lobbyist who explicitly says their chemicals are safe enough to drink but ends up backpedaling right out of the interview when offered a glass of said chemicals to drink himself. It's quite a thing of beauty.



Epic stunt where someone likely almost died: While the local sheriff is running away from the creature, he finds himself in the perfect position to ditch the creature by jumping the tracks in front of a moving train. We watched that stunt a good 5 times and we can not see how it could have been a camera trick or a composite, it's just a dude, on foot, jumping the tracks in front of a fairly fast moving train. It's grand no one died, but for real, someone could have easily died.

What we learned: Never trust Martin Landau, no matter how much water he drinks.