See also:

Blood Freak
Nutriaman

by Portrait in Flesh

I’m about to admit something I’m not particularly proud of. Call it a folly of youth.

Suffice it to say that one night, when I was 20, I found myself in a field in England with a group of former Boy Scouts. It was probably around 2 in the morning. And… and… oh, it would break my Mother’s heart to know this… you see, we had only gone out for a bit of fun and… oh God, there were sheep there… and… somebody suggested that we go sheeptipping and… oh God, the shame.

Actually, we only got within maybe 50 feet of the beasts. That’s as close as I ever want to be again to those horrid creatures. Little wooly spring lambs my ass.

So I know a thing or two about Ovine Evil.

Thus you can imagine my terror when I viewed Godmonster of Indian Flats. I had been able to withstand everything the turkey monster from Blood Freak could throw at me. But the sheep monster from Godmonster… well, let’s just say some scars don’t heal.

Our tale of terror begins with Shepherd Eddie, who decides to go into Reno for an afternoon’s worth of vice. Eddie wins a whopping $600 from a slot machine, and some questionable party people invite Eddie up to Virginia City for a sarsaparilla. (I’ve been to Virginia City, oh, about 20 years ago and I enjoyed that drink there myself. My Mother’s touristy ways also allowed for a brief trip to the nearby Ponderosa Ranch for all our Bonanza needs, but we didn’t have time to enjoy a Hoss Burger with Hoss Bear; alas, such is the story of my life’s lost opportunities.) Virginia City is owned by Silverdale (Stuart Lancaster, the only actor I recognized in this movie, and only because I’ve seen him in a few Russ Meyer vehicles), who is really big on preserving local history and culture, which translates into having everybody dress up as if it’s the Wild West Days when the Comstock Lode was boomin’.

A mutant romance and a funeral for a dog.

A local can-can dancing hoochie steals Eddie’s money as he tips back a tall, warm one whilst the local banjo band plays on. When Eddie confronts her, the other bar patrons rough him up, since they don’t cotton to strangers besmirching the good name of their whores.

Eddie is given a lift back to his sheep ranch by Professor Clemens (E. Kerrigan Prescott), the local mad scientist who has set up his lab near Virginia City so he can study the fumes in the abandoned mines (and, yes, he apparently had a grant for this, as well as a hippie chick-cum-assistant named Mariposa). Clemens lets Eddie off and tells him he’ll be back to check on him the next morning as Eddie stumbles drunkenly into his sheep pen.

What follows can only be described as an Ultimate Sheep Freakout™. Eddie hears bleating (and what I swear sounds like some really badly dubbed-in “baas”), sees sheep floating above him in yellow puffs of cloudy gas, and somehow blood enters the picture before Eddie screams like a little bitch and faints.

The next morning Clemens and Mariposa show up and find a barely coherent Eddie ranting in the sheep pen. They pull him up, exposing some hunk of flesh which Clemens claims is an embryo, the miraculous result of “chromosomal breakdown and cross-fertilization.” Now this gave me reason to pause for thought. I was hoping against hope that this embryo wasn’t the product of Eddie’s special form of animal husbandry. It took a while for the movie to allay my concerns.

At any rate, Clemens insists that the embryo be brought back to his lab so that he can study it for SCIENCE. He convinces Eddie to come along, so that they can keep the existence of the embryo super duper secret.

Most good screenwriters of horror and the like know that they must break the tension of scenes of extreme terror in order to keep the audience from fleeing their seats. So a second plot is introduced in the form of Barnstable (Christopher Brooks), a Yankee who has come to Virginia City to buy up the town for the Eastern Mining Mogul he represents. He meets with Silverdale, who tells him in no uncertain terms that the town isn’t for sale because everybody there is dedicated to historical preservation. Silverdale’s contempt for tourism drips from his mouth, but for some reason Virginia City’s annual Big Tourist Week is just about to start, so he invites Barnstable to stay and enjoy the festivities.

And the bulk of the remainder of the movie revolves around the convoluted plot to make the townspeople dislike Barnstable so they won’t sell their property to him.

Tossed in there is a little more about Clemens’s fetish for fumes in the abandoned mines. It turns out that the mines periodically release great gusts of yellow phosphorous from their bowels, and these funky gases not only caused a breakout of mass hysteria in Virginia City a hundred years ago but they also just so happened to vent out in Eddie’s sheep pen. Thus the embryo (which has by this time grown to a roughly 8-foot tall sheep, with the bulk of its wool around its haunches, that Clemens keeps in a cage in his lab) was the result of its mother’s snorting vast amounts of yellow phosphorous.

How the west was won.

Poor Godmonster was born addicted. It never had a chance.

There’s also a tepid romantic subplot between Eddie and Mariposa, but it’s all overshadowed by Mariposa’s love for the Godmonster.

Well, since we’re dealing with a Godmonster it has to eventually get around to terrorizing the locals. It does this by escaping its cage during Silverdale’s attempt to recapture Barnstable, who had just escaped from the local pokey with the help of the local Madame with a Heart of Gold after being framed by Silverdale’s lackey for a crime he didn’t commit. The Godmonster lumbers out, and Silverdale and Clemens join forces to bring the beast back alive.

Mariposa, on the other hand, has her own plans for the Godmonster. She rushes off as the men beat their chests in anticipation of a Great Hunt and finds it wandering on the hillside and, well, there’s no way to put this lightly. She dances with the Godmonster. And the Godmonster frugs along with her. Eddie shows up and interrupts the Godmonster’s bump and grind by tossing a rock at its head. The Godmonster is miffed and races off.

The Godmonster gets so pissed that it interrupts a little girls’ picnic (totally stomping on their chips and hot dogs) and he spooks a man with a butane torch at a gas station (you get a cookie if you can guess what happens at the gas station).

The Godmonster is eventually captured by a bunch of cowboys hired by Silverdale, who lasso the Godmonster as they yell yee-haw. See, some stereotypes are true.

The movie trots to a close with an incredible twist ending as Silverdale shares an intimate secret with Barnstable as he escorts him to the county line. I won’t give away the ending… and, no, it’s not because I didn’t understand what happened.

To admit such a thing would make me feel sheepish. 

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