Even if you love Halloween themed horror movies, if you are not a fan of micro-budget films that look like a bunch of friends got together with a camcorder and made a movie in their hometown, then you’ll probably want to give Chubbies a pass.
Personally, I was psyched for Chubbies after seeing the trailer. It looked liked Bad Milo and Stephen King’s shit weasels came together for a Halloween party. Thing is, the movie makes a fantastic mock trailer and may have even made a great short film…say fifteen minutes long. It’s the hour and a half running time that kills it.
Way too much of that time is taken by sequences about the inhabitants of a sexless planet called Snerd, whose actions lead to the Chubbies coming to Earth. These scenes are painfully unfunny, cheap and amateur even by amateur filmmaking standards, and clash badly with the tone of the rest of the movie. They also take away from the simple plot of these Ghoulies-looking critters landing on Earth on Halloween night and attempting to get into the assholes of a bunch of kids partying at the local bowling alley. Even Lloyd Kaufman has a scene with the Snerds, in which he plays Ronald Regan, his dialogue predominantly satirizing Regan’s hatred of gays and love of AIDS.
Aside from ass monsters on Halloween night and the movie’s title, another reason I wanted to love Chubbies is because it takes place in the 1980s.
We even get faux 80s music, videotapes, and Ms. Pac Man and Galaga video games. Plus, the Halloween spirit is high, complete with plenty of real footage of houses decorated for the holiday.
Despite expecting no-budget trash, I was pretty disappointed. There are definitely some highlights, including funny gross out segments, spot on adolescent ass and sex jokes, and nasty bad anal effect scenes, but there just wasn’t enough energy from the cast, save for the guy who plays the bowling alley boss.
He just totally goes for the absurdity of it all, playing a psycho grump who likes to terrorize kids at Halloween with disgusting pranks involving bodily waste. His role is also clearly defined; the rest of the cast is forced to meander through loosely glued together scenes and there doesn’t seem to be one main character to carry the plot. One cute guy appears to be meant for that role, but late in the game the film decides that isn’t going to be the case.
I just wish there was more of what this movie should be all about—the over-the-top assploitation! The anal entry scenes are yucky good, a guy getting a disgusting ass shower that never seems to end is a hoot from the poop shoot, we see (barely enough) nice ta-tas, and the movie even dares to give us a no-holes-barred camera view of a guy’s ass descending on a toilet bowl.
Plus, I thought it was awesome how the victims of the Chubbies turn into purple zombies. There just wasn’t enough focus on this core concept of this Halloween horror movie.
And finally, while I’m always flattered to be personally mentioned in a horror movie, the excessive, pointless name-dropping of “faggot” becomes seriously annoying in Chubbies. There are indie filmmakers of oddly homo-centric horror (Sodomaniac, Father’s Day, Dude Bro Party Massacre III) who understand the gay implications of their films and take campy advantage of it, smartly playing to a gay horror audience at the same time as playing to a straight one. Chubbies comes across as being self-loathing about its own anal obsession.
Anyway, watch the awesome trailer for the film:
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