There are bad horror movies, and then there are horror movies that feel like a prank the cast is playing on the audience. The Being (1983), Jackie Kong’s directorial debut, is firmly in the second category. It’s not so much a movie as it is a dare: How long can you watch before you start rooting for the radioactive mutant to finish everyone off so you can go home?
This is a film that opens with a child disappearing in Idaho, then spends the next ninety minutes reminding you that Idaho’s biggest industry is potatoes. Potatoes, radioactive waste, and green slime. If that sounds like the pitch meeting for this thing, you’re probably right.
Pottsville, Idaho: Come for the Potatoes, Stay for the Slime
The story, such as it is, takes place in the small town of Pottsville. People are vanishing, their remains leaving behind puddles of green goo. That’s it. That’s the movie.
The mayor, played by José Ferrer, is less concerned with the mounting death toll than he is with the reputation of Idaho spuds. That’s right—the mutant may be ripping heads off teenagers, but what about the potato festival, dammit? If this weren’t played with a straight face, it would be satire. Instead, it feels like the kind of B-movie where the cast is being paid in free hash browns.
Martin Landau and the Paycheck Ghost
Enter Martin Landau as Garson Jones, the chemical safety engineer hired to investigate. Landau is a serious actor. He did North by Northwest, he would go on to win an Oscar for Ed Wood. So what is he doing here, lecturing about nuclear dump sites while ankle-deep in Nickelodeon slime? The answer is obvious: rent money. Watching him in The Being is like watching your favorite uncle put on a clown wig and juggle potatoes for cash. You don’t laugh—you just feel sad.
Bill Osco, the exploitation producer-turned-actor, plays Detective Mortimer Lutz. He’s billed under two different names—“Rexx Coltrane” in the opening credits and “Johnny Commander” in the closing credits—because even he didn’t want to be associated with this thing.
A Monster in Search of a Movie
The creature itself is supposed to be Michael, the missing boy transformed by radioactive waste. But don’t expect The Flylevels of tragic mutation. What you get is a lumpy, rubber-suited monster with all the menace of a melted parade float. The film tries to build suspense by keeping it offscreen, but when it finally lumbers into view, you almost feel sorry for it. This isn’t a being—it’s a “barely functioning prop.”
At one point, the monster gets locked in a freezer and somehow disappears. Houdini would be proud. Later, it shrugs off poison gas like it’s Febreze, before being dispatched by an axe to the face. Watching this final showdown is like watching a man try to kill a beanbag chair.
And then, just when you think it’s over, the ground burps up another “mutation.” Translation: the producers were already thinking sequel. Mercifully, it never happened.
Supporting Cast: The Ghosts of Careers Past
The supporting cast reads like a Hollywood flea market:
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Dorothy Malone, once an Oscar winner, reduced here to the role of a worried mother with about five lines.
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Ruth Buzzi, beloved for Laugh-In, shows up for comic relief that isn’t funny.
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José Ferrer, who once played Cyrano de Bergerac, now plays a man worried about tubers.
It’s like someone raided the retirement home for forgotten stars, waved a $500 check in front of them, and pointed toward Idaho.
Direction Without Direction
Jackie Kong deserves some credit: it takes guts to step out of film school and wrangle a $4.5 million budget for your debut. Unfortunately, what she delivers looks like the world’s most expensive student film. The pacing is a disaster, the scares are nonexistent, and the editing feels like it was done with a potato peeler.
Scenes just… happen. A man is decapitated while running through a field. Why? Because it looks cool, maybe. A drive-in massacre unfolds, but it’s shot so poorly you can’t tell who’s being killed or why. Every attack scene is slathered in green slime, the movie’s answer to duct tape: when in doubt, cover it in goo.
The Green Slime Problem
Let’s talk about the slime. It’s everywhere: on corpses, on door handles, on floors. By the halfway mark, you start to think maybe this isn’t a horror movie at all but an avant-garde commercial for Nickelodeon Gak. It’s supposed to signal the monster’s presence, but it really just signals the special effects department’s inability to create anything scarier than Play-Doh.
Dark Humor in All the Wrong Places
The funniest part of The Being is how seriously it takes itself. You can’t parody this movie—it’s already parodying itself without realizing it. When the mayor insists on downplaying the murders to protect the potato business, you laugh. When Landau lectures about nuclear dump sites as if he’s in a Senate hearing instead of a slime factory, you laugh harder. When the monster staggers into frame looking like a garbage bag full of wet laundry, you howl.
The dark humor comes from the sheer absurdity of talented actors reduced to this sludge. Ferrer defending potatoes. Malone begging for her missing son. Landau, mid-disembowelment, probably wondering if it was too late to call his agent.
Why It Fails
Horror succeeds when it either scares you, unsettles you, or entertains you with its audacity. The Being does none of these. It’s too cheap to scare, too sloppy to unsettle, and too dull to entertain. Even its gore is underwhelming. For a movie about a radioactive mutant decapitating townsfolk, you’d expect more, well, decapitations. Instead, you get lots of green goo and endless shots of people looking confused.
It wants to be The Blob, but it doesn’t have the charm. It wants to be Alien, but it doesn’t have the suspense. What it ends up being is the cinematic equivalent of a rotting potato: soft, unappetizing, and faintly stinking of missed opportunity.
Closing Thoughts
In the annals of 1980s horror, The Being is a footnote, a radioactive spud that rolled off the back of the truck and was left to rot on the roadside. It’s notable only because Martin Landau and José Ferrer somehow wandered into it, like lost tourists in a haunted corn maze.
If you’re a connoisseur of bad horror, there’s some joy to be had here. The bad acting, the goo, the inexplicable decisions—it’s all part of the carnival of incompetence. But if you’re looking for scares, suspense, or even coherent storytelling, you’d be better off watching an actual potato grow mold. At least that has tension.
