Mutant (aka, Night Shadow /1984) is another one ’o those ’80s schlocky cult favs, given cheesy charm by David Hasselhoff look-alike, Wings Hauser. Also starring are chemically-altered ghouls with light blue skin, heavy Goth eye makeup, and banana-colored pudding blood. Bananas are good for you.
Two city brothers out hitchhiking like it was legal, end up in a small, southern redneck town where their kind ain’t welcome. Run off the road by a truckload of articulate inbreds, the brothers later find themselves in bar brawl knife fight – with the same guys. They also find a body with open sores on his/her face. (Hard to tell if it was a dude or a chick with all that goo leaking out.)
Staying the night in a bed & breakfast, the younger brother is grabbed by something with smoking hands, and subsequently extinguished. In his quest to locate his brother, the older one goes around town, finds himself a girlfriend, and gets into more fights with the rednecks, or “Texas Welcoming Committee.”
While this is going on, the locals are being converted into pasty-face ghouls with a taste for living lasagna. (One zombie dude runs around while still wearing his glasses. As in life, as in death.) Wings (the older brother), has zombie resistant hair. (I wonder what kind of product he uses?) And his girlfriend looks like Jessica Simpson, but with six or seven additional teeth.
The mutated ghouls are somewhat entertaining, turning blue with skin bubbling like hot soup under rotting skin. For some reason not related to lack of toothbrush use, their teeth become black and they claw at the air like a cat pawing an invisible scratch post. Guns will take ’em down, as will flame, so like, boom and burn time. The light hurts their zombie’d eyes, though. (Since they’re undead, they probably forgot about using sunglasses.)
The ghouls corner the survivors over and over again – in a school bathroom, a doctor’s office, a gas station… Persistence beats resistance. Help arrives, but are they in time? Will the ghouls mess up Wings’ hair? Will his younger beefcake brother ever button his shirt? Will the rednecks get a lesson in city etiquette? I don’t care – I just wanted to watch mutant ghoul zombies eat people. And to comb my mop top to look just like Wings’ ’80s crown.
Drinkin' & Drive-in 