Godmonster of Indian Flats

Godmonster of Indian Flats
1973 – United States
Director – Frederic Hobbs
Something Weird Video, 2001, DVD

Tracked this one down based on an encouraging review in an old issue of Cinema Sewer magazine, and if it’s released by Something Weird, it’s guaranteed to be either, creative, informative or sexy on some level. Godmonster promises a lot and my expectations are appropriately ratcheted up for the type of absurd z-grade monsterama I’ve come to love from the creative and DIY 1970’s.

At a casino in Reno Nevada, loudmouth cocksure jerk Elbow Johnson offers to take the whole gang of drunken strangers clustered around his generous wallet-hole up to a nearby historical old-west town called Silverdale for a night of drinkination and banjo mania. On the way they pass through the hills of crude early exposition and foreshadowing where some abandoned phosphorus mines lie waiting for their important upcoming role in the plot.

Elbow’s main drinking pal is Eddie a shitfaced shepherd who gets his face smashed in by Silverdale’s ignorant masses before even tasting the rim of his glass. Pitched bleeding out into the street, he is driven home by local Bourgeoisie Intellectual Anthropology Professor. In a sloppy drunken catatonia, Eddie goes into hallucinatory convulsive fits and the next morning Athroprof and his Assistant find him in his barn caressing a giant blood covered wooly meat-bolus which they whisk into the laboratory where Anthroprof fills Eddies simple peasant brain with crazy secret communistical ideas organized around his revolutionary mutant sheep creature.

Later at the cemetery, Eddie seduces the innocent impressionable Assistant with a groping hand and tales of his idyllic agrarian life close to the earth, and extra close to his animals. She returns to the lab filled with romanticized visions of a simple worker run society which her mentor Anthroprof fosters with his revolutionary sheep experiment talk. Invigorated with thoughts of their utopia they head to the mines to conjure up some flimsy support for class struggle where they discover noxious Phosphorous fumes.

The godless red conspiracy (which makes you wonder why it's a "God"monster), with our comrade in it's holding tank.

During “Bonanza Days”, Silverdale’s annual celebration of capitalist progress, the normally tranquil white community is kept distracted from the looming threat of the Red Sheep by violent social upheaval caused by the appearance of a black person. In order to keep the facade of equal opportunity so important to Capitalist Imperialism, the white citizens of Silverdale stage a dog assassination for which the black man is framed and sent to jail. Just as he’s about to be executed, he escapes and the village lynch mob gives chase, following his flight to the laboratory where their hollering and gunfire awaken the Red Sheep Menace which smashes it’s stiff top-heavy way out of the lab and attacks them.

After fleeing persecution by an unreceptive middle class Red Sheep flees to the hills, where it meets our enthralled Assistant eager to shed the stuffy traditionalism of her parents generation. They dance together in a touching scene of solidarity, fickle corruptible youth embracing the leftist revolutionary Comrade Red Sheep. Just wait until she has to get a job and pay her own rent.


Showing up just in time with a far superior weapons stockpile, the Capitalist lynch mob wrangles the beast and places it in a rickety cage like a museum piece in the gallery of defunct ideologies (or will it rear it’s head again somewhere?). The mayor it turns out has sold the commonwealth out from under the village anyway and in a paroxysm of misguided rage the population of Silverdale showers the beast with stones, nevertheless leaving the exploiter in power and babbling more hollow rhetoric from his flimsy lectern.

The atmosphere of Godmonster reminded me a various times of Russ Meyer’s Wild Gals of the Naked West, without the copious chest flesh. In fact it does deliver -albeit with less vigor than I had hoped- the homemade monster action I was looking for, and the Cold War metaphor only heightens the level of z-grade enjoyment.