MUTANT aka NIGHT SHADOWS (1984)

THIS MOVIE IS MORE OF A CLONE THAN A 'MUTANT'

SACRAMENTO BEE - March 5, 1984

Author: George Williams

MUTANT IS a well-made but almost completely unoriginal sci-fi horror flick, starring Wings Hauser and Bo Hopkins.

When all these dead people come back to life and seem hellbent on getting you to join them in the cycle, you start to feel the claustrophobia and the paranoia. But all this was done before and so much better by George Romero in Night of the Living Dead and Don Siegel in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

When Wings Hauser stops on his travels in Goodland, he runs across the same mysterious goings-on faced by the outsiders in Siegel's Santa Mira and Romero's suburban Pittsburgh and in so many lesser movies copied from those two classics.

There is even the young woman locked in the car and left alone by her male friend. We all know what's going to happen next, just as we're ahead of almost every plot development in Mutant.

There are some attempts to update things, such as that chemical plant on the edge of town that might be pouring substances into the stream that supplies the town's drinking water. Or when Hauser says to his companion: Wait here. Now, it's not just because you're a woman. It's because I'm stronger than you and can run faster.

Hauser is a good actor. He's the former star of the television soap opera The Young and the Restless and has made two pretty good movies: Vice Squad and Deadly Force. He's probably made the right decision to stay active, even it means making potboilers like Mutant. He's really better than this movie deserves.

Bo Hopkins slouches through another production, playing the sheriff, muttering lines like: Get this over to the county medical examiner, and I mean right away. His one-note performances are getting tiresome.

Mutant has some genuinely scary scenes, so you're not completely short-changed. But the price of admission ought to entitle you to some originality. This is a rare commodity in Hollywood nowadays.

MUTANT From Film Ventures International. Executive producers: Edward L. Montoro and Henry Fownes. Producer: Igo Kantor. Director: John Bud Cardos. Screenplay: Peter Z. Orton, Michael Jones and John C. Kruize, from a story by Jones and Kruize. Photography: Al Taylor. Music: Richard Band. Cast: Wings Hauser, Bo Hopkins, Jennifer Warren, Lee Montgomery, Jody Medford. (R) Sacramento Inn, Cinedome, State, and Forty Niner and Sacramento drive-ins