Godmonster of Indian Flats

Now here’s a movie that has it all: small town politics, racial tensions, drunken barroom brawls, environmental consciousness, singing, dancing, explosions, hookers, kids on a picnic, science, history, hippies, but most of all, AN EIGHT FOOT TALL POISON GAS SPEWING MUTANT SHEEP. Yeah!

I’ve been waiting a long time to see this movie since first being made aware of it’s existence. I have a certain weakness for any movie involving giant killer mutant animals (Night of the Lepus, anyone?), so you can see the appeal. What I got was so much more. The majority of the plot revolves around the attempted acquisition of an old mine shaft in Virginia City, Nevada, by a representative of a major mining conglomerate. The rep happens to be black, and the mayor of the town happens to be a redneck with some issues of his own - he and most of the townsfolk seem to take their wild west tourist town roles a bit seriously (and if you’ve ever been to Virginia City, you’d be forgiven for seeing that as believable). The kind people of the town (most of the actors, remarkably, were actual residents) set about trying to sabotage the mining rep’s plans, at the behest of the mayor.
This is all intercut with the story of a hapless ranch hand who, after bedding down with his flock after a bad night on the town (don’t think it. Just don’t), has a rather sheep-heavy hallucination, and is awoken the next morning by a friendly scientist and his hippie lab assistant, the extravagantly named Mariposa DeQuill. Next to him slumbers a “half formed embryo, alive and breathing.”
Next comes a staggering amount of explanation from Professor Clemens, where we ascertain that the embryo (which is now growing quite rapidly in an incubator and pumped full of sedatives) was formed when one of the flock ate grass tainted with yellow phosphorus that had seeped up from an underground mine in which there had been an explosion in the 1870s, which was the result of a similar incident involving a mutated critter of some sort, which was destroyed in the ensuing fire, leaving no evidence but a scattering of bones, which the professor somehow knew exactly how to find. Hence, his brilliant deduction about the sheep. Are we all following this?

All of the pseudoscience and environmental and social issues so prominently on display here can be explained by the fact that the director, Fredric Hobbs was, save for a brief span between 1968 and 1973, not a film director at all, but a prominent and fairly respected sculptor and environmental activist. The reasons for his sudden excursion into film are unclear. He probably just needed money. It really doesn’t matter. The result, I think, speaks for itself.

But I’m getting off track. We all know why we’re here. Back to the sheep!
Surprisingly, the sheep rampage scene constitutes only about 10 minutes of the film, after more labyrinthine plotting involving the jailing, attempted lynching, and manhunt by the vigilance committee for the mining rep. Oh, and he sings, too.
The ten minutes that do involve the sheep, however, are well worth the price of the movie. After escaping from the lab during a shootout, our mutant pal promptly throws a member of the vigilance committee off a cliff, at which point Mariposa, inspired by the creature’s untarnished beauty, runs off half clothed into the desert after it, and does a nice little loose limbed, flailing dance for it. the creature follows suit, jerking about awkwardly and making lascivious grunting noises, until the ranch hand (jealous, perhaps?) shoots at it, scaring it off into the countryside. The beast doesn’t waste any time, lumbering into a park and disrupting a group of children having a wholesome, all-American picnic, and then chasing a gas station attendant (very slowly) around the building, at which point, for reasons that remain unclear, the attendant drops a blowtorch (seriously, why was it even in his hand? He was listening to the radio and sitting on his ass just moments before) into a puddle of gas, blowing up the entire station.
Alas, that’s the end of our ten minutes of wooly terror. The creature is captured, and put on display for the town to see. The matter of the ownership of the old mine is neatly resolved. Everything seems to be coming to a nice, peaceful conclusion. Then something extraordinary happens.
I can’t tell you exactly what, but I can leave you with two simple, beautiful words:

Exploding Sheep.
Amen.