Godmonster of Indian Flats (1973)

Watching misbegotten horror movies can be a confusing experience, because encountering the juxtaposition of incompatible narrative elements begs the question of how and/or why the elements were combined in the first place. In the execrable Godmonster of Indian Flats, for instance, the basic DNA of a monster movie is grafted onto meaningless melodrama involving residents and visitors in a small town known for elaborate re-enactments of Old West shootouts. As such, the movie contains scenes of a mad doctor experimenting on a giant mutant fetus that came out of a sheep, scenes of two men fighting over the accidental shooting of a friendly German Shepherd (complete with an ornate funeral for the canine), and scenes of a fur-vest-wearing ranch hand tripping out following his exposure to radioactive materials. There’s also a pie-throwing contest. And a pointless vignette featuring grifters who get the ranch hand drunk after he wins a bundle of cash in Reno, and then rip him off by using a sexy pickpocket as bait. Especially because the acting is consistently terrible, none of this is interesting to watch. Worse, writer-director Fredric Hobbs periodically forgets that he’s making a movie with “monster” in the title. For long stretches of screen time, the only horror elements onscreen are repetitive cutaways to the titular creature sitting in a lab with smoke emanating from its body. However, that’s just as well, because once the creature escapes captivity to begin its inevitable rampage—which doesn’t happen until the last 30 minutes of the picture—the design of the beastie is revealed as ridiculous. The “godmonster” looks like a giant sheep with a face made out of dripping yogurt, prowling around on its hind legs while two inert little arms dangle from its torso. For emphasis, the “godmonster” growls like an irritated Rottweiler. Lots of this growling occurs during the scene in which a group of cowboys lasso the mutant sheep as if the thing were a runaway cow.

Godmonster of Indian Flats: SQUARE