Indescribeable, and a must see for so bad it's good movie connoisseurs. Even without the ridiculous looking sheep, "Godmonster of Indian Flats" is terrible. It comes across as three or four separate scripts that somehow the audience is supposed to believe are related. One highlight is a dog's funeral, complete with church service and white doggy size casket. An attempted lynching of the black man who supposedly killed the dog is another stunning moment. Then there is the scientist's sincere belief that the phosphorous belching beast "could unlock the mysteries of creation". In fact, the film actually seems to be drawing a parallel between the birth of the mutant sheep, and the birth of a divine being. The whacked out story concludes on a mountain of trash, which seems like an appropriate ending for the "Godmonster" - MERK
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emm28 April 1999You aren't gonna find a movie like GODMONSTER OF INDIAN FLATS at your local Blockbuster! If you have briefly seen clips of this one on the TV program REEL WILD CINEMA, then you've already had a fair idea of how weird this turned out to be. For those who have never seen this one before, let me explain further. It's another no-budget creation that is by far remaining to be extremely unusual to this day. Our late-night creature feature concerns an embryo that later becomes a giant eight-foot killer SHEEP monster ready to attack a small Nevada country town. (That's right, I said "sheep"!) Just as THE MIGHTY GORGA did with horrible costume design, so does this obscure film, having another ridiculous outfit in the history of cinema! It appears similar to another goofy costume on a kooky Kroft kiddie show! Notice that one arm is over twice as long as the other! And watch how this monster walks, too!
There has to be more to this utterly unknown artifact. I can honestly tell you that this is the second film I've watched containing the name Frederic Hobbs, another "lost & found" director who must have made the silliest movies ever printed on a negative. Unfortunately, he did only three films; the more familiar one is ALABAMA'S GHOST. He also designed (yes!) the ugly sheep costume that is present in this film. Did his career backfire or something? There's no telling!
An interesting fact according to a description written by BASKET CASE director Frank Henenlotter: the movie was played theatrically in 1973 until patrons suffered from massive seizures that later cut short of the film's circulation. This was due to the flashing colors of red that occured in scenes where the sheep was held in captivity during an experiment. The effect looks far better than the costume. At least this one accomplished a few good visuals such as the creeping red-orange smoke. The only thing that looks better is the silly script that contains scenes from a messed-up episode of "GUNSMOKE", which has NOTHING to do with the movie! It also has what may very well be the looniest, dumbest ending ever recorded on film!
I find this title interesting. Completely interesting! Interesting for its rare view of the drive-in theater that once ran a bunch of one-shot sleepers! Not a classic (and why should it be one?), but an entertaining staple to fill up those night owl minutes. It's a sure sign of how many more strange, lost, and forgotten movies are waiting to be recovered! -
squeezebox14 June 2006I don't even know what sort of number rating to give this off-the-wall low budget freakshow. It doesn't seem like it's supposed to be a parody, it doesn't seem like it's trying intentionally to be bad or bizarre. It really, more than anything, seems like something Ed Wood would have made. It takes itself very seriously, and that, mixed with the over-the-top performances, bewildering screenplay and outlandishly hilarious attempts at surrealism, makes for one truly unique cinematic experience.
A radioactive gas leak in a town outside of Reno, Nevada causes a sheep farmer to have hallucinations that his sheep are floating around, but in reality, the gas causes one of his sheep to turn into a giant monster that looks like a walking shag carpet with a bad papier mache sheep head. For some reason, the local mad scienstist seems to have expected something like this to happen, and has his lab all set to start experimenting on the thing.
Meanwhile, the megalomaniac town historian (played with psychotic earnestness by B-movie vet Stuart Lancaster) is thwarting the attempts of a real estate developer (Christopher Brooks) to buy out the town. He eventually convinces members of a secret town preservation society to frame Brooks and lynch him (!), but their plans fall to pieces when the monster escapes from the lab and starts rampaging across the countryside, getting into such mischief as dancing around with a local hippie, ransacking some picnicking kids' supply of hot dogs and blowing up a gas station.
Of course, Lancaster sees dollar signs in the display of the creature, a la Robert Armstrong in KING KONG, and suddenly stringing up Brooks seems like small potatoes. He attempts to sell the town on his idea, but they turn against him. They try to kill the beast, but it suddenly explodes before they have a chance. Lancaster orders his men to trample the citizens of the town with their horses as he screams incoherently at Brooks, who high tails it out of town.
Meanwhile, another gas leak in the sheep pen threatens to start the horror all over again...
I have absolutely no clue what the makers of this move were thinking (or smoking) when they wrote and produced it. It is not your average bad movie. There is something unique and distinctly oddball about it. As I said, it has the same feel to it as such Ed Wood classics as PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE and GLEN OR GLENDA, as though the filmmakers were trying to make some sort of intellectual, socially relevant horror movie, but had no idea how to go about doing it.
The result is a movie that is unbelievably bad, but also so thoroughly bizarre you simply can't take your eyes off it. A must see. -
No, folks, this is NOT a no-budget horror flick from the seventies. Look again - it's well-shot, well-staged, and, if anything, it's wildly overpopulated with enthusiastic minor characters and extras.
Godmonster isn't like anything else you've ever seen, heard, read, smelled, or tasted, with the possible exception of a Thomas Pynchon novel. Like Pynchon, Hobbs keeps piling on plot until you think the plate in your head is going to shatter. And then you realize that it's only the first thirty minutes. And it keeps coming at you and it WON'T STOP.
I've seen them all, from Acid Eaters to Zombie Nightmare. I've laughed at Begotten, wept over Forbidden Zone, sat amazed at semi-legal prints of White Dog with Dutch subtitles and Addio Uncle Tom with Greek subtitles.
I've got Killer Klowns in Spanish.
But Godmonster is the last stop on the line. I wish this WERE a crappy rubber-suit monster movie. It'd be vastly less disturbing. -
lastliberal-853-2537089 February 2013I have seen every sort of monster: birds, cats, piranhas, crocs, bats, ants, grizzles, sharks; but killer sheep is a new one. I looked forward to seeing a flokati attack humans.
Yes, the acting is baad, the story line is baad, sometimes downright silly, the special effects were criminally baad, and the monster really looks baad. One flighty character (Mariposa) even tries to communicate with the creature with some kind of new age arm waving.
Just because a movie takes place in the West, doesn't make it a western, and just because you have a mutant sheep, you can't call it a horror movie unless there is some actual horror. -
PaJRJ9 July 2011This turd doesn't deserve so many medium reviews. This is an awful movie that takes itself way to seriously, which catapults itself into the realm of should be so bad it's funny, but it's not.
I'll skip the obvious crap pointed out by others.
I've done a bit of research on Frederic Hobbs. All four of his movies have a common theme. I dropped some acid, by some strange means came upon a camera, got his friends together since he didn't have to pay them and made a "movie".
If you're going to have a part of your plot revolve around yellow phosphoruos creating a lame man in a suit costume, please have the smoke be yellow instead of red.
If you're going to have an unconscious enbryo being nutured, please don't have it grunt in pain.
If you're going to tie in multiple story lines, get some continuity.
If you are going to have someone jump up from their seat in a jeep make sure the jeep has enough space to hide the person.
In the opening one of our plucky main characters walks into an empty casino, puts in a single coin and wins what looks like $200 and apparently everything is right with the world as the casino is magically filled.
I could go on and on. And I can't believe I watched this a second time. -
altair4200226 April 2013I just finished watching Godmonster and I'm still not sure I have any idea what it's about.
Some guy finds a mutant (or hybrid) sheep fetus in a farm yard. For some reason he calls a (typically) insane professor who insists on trying to keep the thing alive.
I'm not going to try and cover the rest of it because there are so many different story lines going on.
All I can say is if you love really REALLY cheap movie monsters you can't do much worse (or would it be better). The only monster I can think of that might be worse is the one in "sting of death". -
charlenelv10 December 2005You just can't rate it as "awful" because it is even labeled on the DVD as "Something Weird Video". Now about those extras...the one about the controlling of rat population on farms is perhaps the most bizarre thing I have EVER watched. YUCK! But you know, somehow you just, or I did anyway, keep on watchin'. There are over 70 minutes of extra films, some of which show nudity! I never thought I'd see Bigfoot "raping" a woman, of course, it did look like ol' Bigfoot may have had shoes on, couldn't quite tell. Then when the girl's boyfriend tried to pick her up and almost dropped her...well, that alone was worth the price of the DVD.
I must admit, I haven't laughed out loud at many movies, even comedies. But the entire DVD of Godmonster.. was just a hoot! Now come on, how many folks have watched a featurette entitled "You Cannot Fart Around With Love"?? And most of it is in the nude! They even call it an "oddball" short subject. These great old 70s drive-in movies are a classic! I can't wait to show, well part of it anyway, to my grandkids! They'll never believe with today's special effects, the sheep monster, which looks about as much as a sheep as I do. Sometimes a good laugh at a truly bad movie is well worth it, as long as you're just paying a few bucks for a DVD. -
Poe-1729 October 2008A nearly impossible to describe film. Start with the premise; an eight foot mutant sheep. That's the Godmonster. Or is it? This was, in 1973, an eco-movie. Just like the monsters created from nuclear discards in the 50's, this one is - somewhere - about the consequences of the neglect of ecological responsibility. Kinda. Sorta. Yeah.
What it is, today, is one of those "you've got to be kidding me" films that any true aficionado of distant horror and related cinema just has to have in their inventory. It will rest alongside of "Blood Freak", the other discarded horror-whatever film made a year earlier.
You've got to see the "Godmonster" to believe it. The "creativity" of the special effects department (probably numbering one or less)is unbelievable.
The "town" may be the only thing more weird and crazy than the Godmonster.
I write a lot and I tried to imagine being a writer on this project and ... went simple giddy.
"Make them all pay!!!".
It lost its political message, lost its punch and failed to make its point but it coughed up a hell of a title and carved an obscure niche in cinematic history.
Kudos to anything called "The Godmonster of Indian Flats".
Plus ... "Something Weird Video" always does all that cool "other" stuff as extras.
Ever been raped by a Sasquatch? Need to control flies? What about an escaped carnival Geek chasing a stripper? It's all here; from a mutant eight foot sheep to nasty rats.
This is lowbrow entertainment, folks, of the very best sort.
Smile. -
JoeB1314 August 2012This film was a monster movie where the monster doesn't actually do anything until the end of the movie, and you think most of the movie is about this black dude trying to make a mining deal with someone. Most of the movie is filler of scenes shot in some Frontier Days festival.
It's almost like there are two movies going on here. One with the weirdos growing the giant mutant sheep and the other with the rich guy trying to sell out the town, and it all ends up at the end with a scene at a garbage dump where they had a riot.
The monster looks like it was put together in a bad art class, and I think the directors were trying to be edgy because everyone was edgy in the 1970's.... or on drugs. One or the other. Not sure which to credit this cinema abortion too.
Funniest scene is when the sheep farmer comes home drunk and hops into the middle of the sheep corral. The sheep all scatter in fear. Yeah, they know what's up! -
I have often wondered about the effect of hazardous waste and nuclear radiation on our farm animals. Most of my questions were answered with "Prophecy" and the incredible melting grizzly bear but I wondered how all this would affect say, oh I don't know, our sheep population. If you have every awaken in the middle of the night wondering if there were any films out there with blood-thirsty killer sheep in them, you can sleep soundly now. You'll stare at your TV with mouth agape with the pure horror of a seven foot killer sheep, I don't even think it's a ram so there goes my whole testosterone driven killing spree theory. It wanders around the country-side, with it's legs of many lengths, and eats people. I was not fully prepared for the walking on hind legs, fun fur with the mange looking monster. Don't let anyone fool you, there is no way to adequately describe this movie. Rent it, gather the family together and gaze deeply into they mind numbing terror of the seven foot killer sheep. I give this a thumbs up!
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Coventry30 July 2023Another movie that sounds like a fun & trashy exploitation hoot on paper, but in reality is a nearly unendurable and mind-bogglingly awful piece of zero-budgeted rubbish. The synopsis promises: "a mutant sheep monster on the prowl in a little town in the West". Well, yes, but this only happens during the final ten minutes, and I wouldn't exactly call it a prowl. And during the 80 minutes before that, the mutant sheep is locked in a cage in a miserable laboratory, and the boring script only deals with bizarre real-estate deals, whiny villagers, and a fancy funeral for a dog that isn't even dead. Mutant sheep monster? Pure false advertising, says I. This isn't a must-see or a collector's item for cult fanatics; - it's dull and imbecilic nonsense that belongs in oblivion.
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Apparently unseen since its initial theatrical sweep in the early 70s(presuming it actually received distribution at all), this long-forgotten little coprolite was excavated from some lost-film boneyard during the late 90s, and has since laid claim to its rightful spot on the roll-call of the weirdest movies ever made.
GODMONSTER weaves an ambling configuration concerning a sheep fetus being exposed to a strange chemical vapor. Taken to a lab by scientists, it matures into a bald-headed, lopsided hirsute beast with a parched lolling tongue and a gimp arm. Naturally, the upright-walking miscreation escapes and hobbles over the arid desert terrain, scaring a few kids and wreaking general minor havoc. This course of events gives rise to a climactic stage so heteroclite...SO IMPOSSIBLY RANDOM...that it literally defies description.
All the elemental constituents of this film are surprisingly solid, and performances from the key players are moreless on-the-beam. It even has sharply defined characters and a developed, articulate subplot touching on sensitive sociopolitical issues. In taking note of these niceties, the burning question arises...how in hell could the folks involved with GODMONSTER have justified applying their erudite capacities to such a fly-ball project? Could a concept as utterly 'non-compos-mentis' as this have possibly seemed like a felicitous undertaking at the drawing-board stage? The mind boggles.
We can't lose this film again, or future generations will dismiss the lore as either a collective hallucination or an elaborate hoax. 10/10? 1/10? ...how does one possibly rate something like this? -
Maciste_Brother11 June 2003GODMONSTER OF INDIAN FLATS is a passable grade z movie that's more interesting as a time capsule than a "it's so bad it's good" movie. Some scenes are unintentionally hilarious, like when the sheep monster sneaks up behind the kids who are picnicking, or when the guy from the garage runs away in terror, with the monster tip-toeing "menacingly" towards him. And the ending as to be seen to be believed (did they lose the script?) but the production values are better than most grade z movies and in the end, the movie is not that wretched or trashy enough to be entertaining. Fans of bad movies should check it out but it's more of a rental than something you buy. You should buy the GODMONSTER OF INDIAN FLATS DVD for the second feature on it, called THE GIRL AND THE GEEK (or PASSION IN THE SUN). Now that's an amazingly bad and hilarious movie.
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mmthos22 November 2020Business and racial conflicts overlap when an eastern investment firm sends black rep Barnstable (Christopher Brooks) out west to see the local Big Daddy about buying his gold and silver mines. Mayor Charles Silverdale (Stuart Lancaster) is absolute monarch of a considerable fiefdom, his little bit pf heaven that he rules with an iron hand, avoiding all intrusions from the outside. When Barnstable suggests "We all must change with the times," Mr. Mayor makes it clear he'll have no further dealings with him, and when he sees him later, enjoying some time on his company's dime at the local street fair, the mayor bluntly tells the black man "A civilized man would have left town by now." But, of course, Barnstable won't be threatened and doesn't leave, so they ready a hangman's noose, organize a vigilante lynch mob and go after him.
Meanwhile, at the local research lab, they've been experimenting on the sorriest stand-in for Godzilla ever seen, the Godmonster, that escapes, interrupting the hanging party's plans and forcing then to settle for just beating Barnstable to a pulp and leaving him to die as they've now got bigger fish, rather, a monster to fry.
The score and script are written like an olde-tyme radio drama, and line deliveries sound like it too, with only awkward attempts at natural visual acting possibilities afforded them by motion pictures. Lots of free extra work done by the good people of Virginia City, NV, at their town fair. Fortunately, Brooks, Lancaster, and Steven Kent Browne as the mayor's infinitely more ruthless henchman all do serviceable jobs, but the lab staff, who shall remain nameless are all completely hopeless as actors, as is this whole mess in general, an over-ambitious undertaking that with a premise, budget and talent like this was obviously doomed from the start -
TokyoGyaru9 March 2021I don't know how it's rated even as highly as it is, but this film is so awful I couldn't even get halfway through it with Rifftrax. It fails on every level: story, editing, direction, lighting, acting, costuming, music, etc. This film makes movies like The Guy From Harlem and Miami Connection seem like triumphs of cinema by comparison because at least they're entertaining even on their own.
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kinetica9 June 2003Well this movie has a title that belies this film. Truly scizophrenic, The sub-plot is actually a decent movie, and well acted. Villians, scams, a semi-hero (Just an ordinary business man, really). Very slow moving. The apocolypse or revelations inspired "monster" doesn't even threaten anyone really. It only serves for the end message... but the good part of this movie is indeed the sub-plot. A small town operated outside the law, and attracted the attention of a larger business.... That part is worth a 7 actually. It is not that bad, BUT the monster part is so nearly non-existant that that part earns a 1.
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Leofwine_draca22 December 2017GODMONSTER OF INDIAN FLATS is one of those last-ditch monster flicks made during the 1970s which were throwbacks to the genre circa 1955. There were a few of these rural oddities made during the decade, with flicks like NIGHT OF THE LEPUS and CREATURE FROM BLACK LAKE failing to build up much in the way of a head of steam as it seemed they were made and released some twenty years too late. I do have a soft spot for them despite their shortcomings, and GODMONSTER has plenty of shortcomings. It's a film chock full of po-faced seriousness yet which has a ridiculously storyline about a mutant sheep roaming the countryside and butchering innocent townsfolk. The production values are rock bottom but the effect is one of mild amusement rather than outright boredom.
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Before he made his first movie - Troika - in 1969, Frederic Hobbs was an artist who went from the traditional to a whole way of presenting art, creating parade sculptures that took art from the museum to the people. That's when he figured it out - to get the people to see something as art, you should hide it in a film. He also created the films Roseland and Alabama's Ghost before this one. And honestly, nothing can prepare you for this.
Imagine if David Lynch made a 1950's nuclear warning monster film. But before you go see it, you get in a car crash and suffer a really bad concussion. Cool. Then, someone spikes your Icee with a dose of LSD that would cripple Owsley "Bear" Stanley. You now have a very, very small idea of just how crazy things are about to get.
There are two stories happening here: a scientist is trying to crack the code on a mysterious sheep-like creature while a conservative landowner fights being bought out by prospectors. All in Virginia City, Nevada, which was once the richest city in America after the silver and gold rush. The mines went dry, the people went away and the only people left are tourists staring at a dead husk.
I have to tell you, you've never quite seen a creature quite like the Godmonster. At once it appears to be the most real and yet fakest creature ever seen on the silver screen. It very well could be one of Lovecraft's ancient ones for all I know, as it saunters and stumbles and falters across the frame, scaring children at birthday parties and blowing up gas stations.
There's also a subplot with a fake dog funeral. Don't ask me how any of this ties together, because all of it has blown my mind sky high, like a Jigsaw song from 1975.
Imagine a movie where the creature doesn't do a single thing until more than one hour into the run time of a movie under ninety minutes, all while the nonprofessional actors can't act and the professional ones chew scenery like they're the godmonsters of the fringe festival.
I get real down sometimes when I think the world could be a better place than it is. The Godmonster of Indian Flats proves to me that somewhere out there, at some time, in some corner of the cosmos - let's say a drive-in that smells like skunk weed and MD40 - some brave souls had no idea what they were getting into when it started playing. That fact makes me happy, imagining people driving away before the movie even ends, telling their friends and family that they suffered their way through a movie where a lamb emitted smoke and gave his life so that an entire town could die. There aren't enough stars in the galaxy and every reality ever to properly review this movie. I'll have to go back to college to invent some kind of formula so that my fragile mind can try and quantify it. -
I was not sure what to expect when I started watching this film and now I am not sure what I have seen play out before my eyes. A movie that seems like it is almost similar to that Chuck Norris film, Breaker, Breaker as it plays like a small town that needs to meet its comeuppance. Throw in a very lanky and slow moving monster to the mix and you have your film. However, do not even think this monster is going to pay the citizens of a town that may be racist and takes advantage of tourists back for all the wrongs they have committed...no, we do not even get that satisfaction sadly.
The story has a dude raising sheep go to Reno with some money and he promptly hits the jackpot and stupidly lets himself get taken to Virginia City where he is robbed and everyone blames him. He ends up getting a ride home by some doctor and has a strange interlude and ends up with a strange embryo. Not sure if he had sex with the sheep to create this abomination, but the doctor is interested in it. Well forget the monster for the time being as then we watch a guy try to buy land and get framed for a dog's murder and get framed for attempted murder as he for some reason stays when I would have left long ago. The monster comes into play a bit, but the thing is so weak and slow if you get killed by it, it's your own fault!
The movie seems to be two different movies. Like they were making a movie about injustice, but then another movie company came along that was making a monster film and the makers of the film about the corrupt town said, "Cool! Let's pull our resources!" and this was the result! A horrific abomination, much like the strange mutant sheep monster.
So not a good film, would have been better if that monster had gotten to kill nearly everybody in that town, but no, was not going to happen with this monster. I mean, they hinted that more of these things may be made at the end, but there could be hundreds of these things and the world would not have too much problem taking them down. The actual end to this one comes suddenly and is completely bonkers as the mayor of the town just starts directing his guys to kill the townspeople who are trying to kill the monster while Eddie, the guy who you think is the lead at the beginning but just kind of hangs back tends to his girlfriend named Mariposa. The film is just strange and worth a look see just to see the craziness of it all. -
ace-1506 July 2008For the first, say, 85 minutes, I couldn't make heads or tails out of this film. It appears to be a lost episode of the Brady Bunch where they wake up and discover themselves in a lost episode of Gunsmoke where they all wake up and find themselves in a lost episode of Night Gallery. I get why the hookers wear Victorian get-ups, but why does the visiting financier wear a Wild, Wild West outfit while trying to close a business deal? Most realistic dump ever. Coolest movie monster ever. It looks like a huge plushie that got caught in a fan and half skinned. And sheepy got back! Somehow, the last five minutes of this extraordinarily aimless film turned it into an existentialist allegory and it all seemed perfectly sensible. Except maybe the white plastic casket at the dog's funeral and, of course, the pie eating contest.
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griffindouglas27 November 2004I had the displeasure of actually spending money to buy the DVD from a website based solely on the description of the film. This is a film that revels in it's own crappiness, and just keeps on piling more and more random plot devices upon the viewer until the last bizarre scene. This is one cinematic suppository that even the guys at MST3K wouldn't lower themselves to doing, if the show were still on air.
This offense to my cinematic senses is an attempt to bring ecological disasters into the monster movie genre, or something like that. It has something to do with a mining community and some vague legends about some creature that had something to do with causing the mines to close some time earlier. well, the monster comes back and it all goes to pot from there.
When I say that this is a bad movie, I mean it, I've seen many a low, or no budget film, and am considered by some to be a "king of cheese" as far as films go. I do mean cheese, I own all of the Godzilla films,and some other obscure titles such as the Navy vs. the Night Monsters, Jungle Heat, and Demon of Paradise. compared to these films Godmonster is by far at the bottom of the heap.