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Some­thing sin­is­ter lives among the sheep in this 70s wild west mon­ster movie

18 Apr 2022

Words by Anton Bitel

A man wearing a fur-trimmed coat and hat stands behind a row of slot machines in a casino.
A man wearing a fur-trimmed coat and hat stands behind a row of slot machines in a casino.
Fredric Hobbs’ sur­re­al 1973 film sees a giant mutant sheep ter­rorise the res­i­dents of a sleepy town in rur­al Nevada.

Right from its title, there is some­thing weird going on in Fredric Hobbs’ God­mon­ster of Indi­an Flats. It is that word, god­mon­ster. If it were just god, or just mon­ster, the title might be more read­i­ly digestible – but the ungain­ly com­bi­na­tion is hard­er to pin down. So is the crea­ture to which they refer. The sheep ranch­er Eddie (Richard Mar­i­on) who, drunk late at night in his barn, first dis­cov­ers its arrival, describes the expe­ri­ence in reli­gious terms (“I looked up, and the sky was on fire – oh it was beau­ti­ful, like in the Bible – and then this lit­tle thing was born, scream­ing before my eyes, lit up so bright it blind­ed me to look at him”), like the celes­tial mir­a­cle of Jesus’ birth in the manger, only with Mary replaced by one of his ewes.

The sci­en­tist Dr Clemens (E. Ker­ri­g­an Prescott) prefers to ratio­nalise the crea­ture as a hybrid pro­duced when a preg­nant sheep inhaled organ­ic gas issu­ing from beneath the earth. Towns­folk regard it as the min­ing mon­ster’ of local leg­end. And the may­or Charles Sil­verdale (Stu­art Lan­cast­er) just sees it as anoth­er indige­nous asset, no less exploitable than the gold and sil­ver deposits in the ground, and able to be cap­tured and dis­played as a freak exhib­it (“the eighth won­der of the world”) for the much sought-after tourist’s (or viewer’s) dollar.

At first half-seen in its embry­on­ic form, and then revealed as an ovine behe­moth with a mis­shapen front leg, the god­mon­ster also serves as a vibrant metaphor for Hobbs’ film itself, which is an equal­ly hybrid genre mix of crea­ture fea­ture, revi­sion­ist west­ern, and state-of-the-nation alle­go­ry, all sutured togeth­er in such a way that edi­tor Richard Ser­ly Brummer’s odd match cuts and dis­ori­ent­ing visu­al segues forge provoca­tive con­nec­tions between oth­er­wise dis­parate scenes. This cre­ates the impres­sion, pos­si­bly illu­so­ry, of a broad­er coher­ence link­ing all these ill-fit­ting sto­ry­lines, and a method behind the madness.

Cer­tain­ly it is dif­fi­cult, at least at first, to syn­the­sise the two very dif­fer­ent seem­ing sce­nar­ios unfold­ing in par­al­lel to engen­der God­mon­ster of Indi­an Flats. In the first, the anthro­pol­o­gist Dr Clemens strug­gles to keep the deformed embryo alive in his out-of-town lab­o­ra­to­ry while research­ing its ori­gins in under­ground ecol­o­gy and pre­his­toric fau­na. Clemens is not quite a mad sci­en­tist, but cer­tain­ly hubris­tic, pur­su­ing the fame that he imag­ines his world-chang­ing dis­cov­ery will bring, while his assis­tant Mari­posa (Karen Ingen­thron) and Eddie are too in love with each oth­er to care about much else.

In the sec­ond, out­sider Mr. Chris Barn­sta­ble (Christo­pher Brooks) comes to town look­ing to buy up everyone’s lease­holds so that his employ­er, the multi­na­tion­al CEO Reich, can reopen the mines – but May­or Sil­verdale, his slip­pery right-hand man Philip Mal­dove (Steven Kent Browne) and Sher­iff Gor­don (Robert Hirschfeld) have a dif­fer­ent vision for the town, and will wage a vicious cam­paign of dirty tricks against Barnstable.

A large, furry creature in a desert landscape, walking away from the camera.

As the film’s title implies, what uni­fies these sto­ries is place – although that too will prove a hybrid mix of fact and fic­tion. Most of God­mon­ster of Indi­an Flats is both shot and set in and around Vir­ginia City, a very real (and express­ly named) for­mer sil­ver-min­ing boom­town turned old west’ tourist des­ti­na­tion (the town’s real mot­to: Step back in time”) in Storey Coun­ty, Neva­da, and locat­ed by Sug­ar­loaf Moun­tain and the Com­stock Lode (also duly namechecked in the film). May­or Sil­verdale speaks of restor­ing the his­toric train line – and indeed a project to begin rebuild­ing it was indeed announced in 1972.

Dr Clemens appears to have been named for Vir­ginia City’s most famous some­time res­i­dent, Samuel Lang­horne Clemens, who adopt­ed his bet­ter-known pen name Mark Twain while work­ing as a reporter at the town’s news­pa­per in 1863. Yet even if at one point Eddie and Mari­posa express­ly vis­it the grave of Cap­tain Edward Far­ris Storey, after whom Storey Coun­ty was named, char­ac­ters refer to the place as the fic­ti­tious Sil­verdale Coun­ty instead, which is here reimag­ined as the mayor’s per­son­al fiefdom.

There’s peo­ple liv­ing in the Com­stock nowa­days kin­da wish they could go back,” says Elbow John­son (Ter­ry Wills) near the film’s begin­ning, Y’know, liv­ing in the past ain’t so bad, when you think about it.” Indeed respect­ed his­to­ri­an’ May­or Sil­verdale, whose mon­ey has restored over half the town, is a sort-of MAGA pro­po­nent avant la let­tre, obsessed with recre­at­ing Vir­ginia City as it was in the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, com­plete with saloons, broth­els, staged gun­fights – and his own horse-rid­ing vig­i­lance com­mit­tee’ as pri­vate mus­cle. Yet even as Sil­verdale and his friends cos­play their cow­boy fan­tasies, his back­ward-look­ing ways do not stop him from hav­ing mod­ern CCTV sur­veil­lance installed all over a town that he is sur­rep­ti­tious­ly turn­ing into a police state.

As Sil­verdale recre­ates a par­tial his­to­ry to match his own designs, Clemens digs even deep­er and fur­ther back in the mines on a quest for the truth. For God­mon­ster of Indi­an Flats expos­es not just the past as Sil­verdale ide­alis­es it, but also its dark­er side, hid­den in the caves or buried in the garbage heap (loca­tions which sly­ly mark the film’s under­ground’ and trash’ sta­tus). For as the title states, this mon­ster emerges from an Indi­an’ site, much as this area has a rich (if sup­pressed) Native his­to­ry. Mari­posa reveals that Cap­tain Storey was killed in an attack on Chief Winnemucca’s Paiute nation, after the Civ­il War end­ed” – and Eddie, relay­ing to Mari­posa what he has heard from the broth­el madame/​clairvoyant Alta (Peg­gy Browne), tells of an ancient ori­gin myth, as root­ed in hybrid­i­ty as the film itself, accord­ing to which local Indi­ans emerged from the mar­riage of a white wolf and a princess.”

Yet the Native-Amer­i­can pop­u­la­tion has been entire­ly expunged from Silverdale’s mod­el town, but for a sin­gle life-sized stat­ue form­ing part of the tar­get at an out­door shoot­ing range. Vir­ginia City is an all-white com­mu­ni­ty, unwel­com­ing to oth­er­ness – and although nobody ever refers explic­it­ly to the black skin that makes African-Amer­i­can Barn­sta­ble stand out as an alien pres­ence, there are obvi­ous, uncom­fort­able res­o­nances in the trumped-up charges, bay­ing mobs and hood­ed, hang­ing-hap­py poss­es that he must face. For, built over mines that, as Elbow John­son puts it, helped the Union pay for the War against South”, Sil­ver City con­tin­ues to be both an are­na for racial con­flict, and a micro­cosm of Amer­i­can his­to­ry in all its pub­lic glo­ry and con­cealed shame. Born part­ly of the earth, the God­mon­ster comes to sym­bol­ise an ugly, fright­en­ing return of the repressed, and of a more ancient brand of his­to­ry that will not stay buried forever.

For a time, writer/​director Hobbs was the own­er of the real Vir­ginia City’s Sil­ver Dol­lar Hotel – and, five years after the release of God­mon­ster of Indi­an Flats, he co-wrote (with War­ren Hinck­le) and illus­trat­ed The Rich­est Place on Earth: The Sto­ry of Vir­ginia City, and the Hey­day of the Com­stock Lode (1978). In oth­er words, for Hobbs, this film was hit­ting close to home. Yet he was also a well-regard­ed fine artist with an inter­est in ecol­o­gy, and here all these pre­oc­cu­pa­tions inter­sect in a pecu­liar reimag­in­ing of liv­ing, local his­to­ry as a para­ble for the vio­lent val­ues of the nation. Time”, as Sil­verdale says more than once, is the eter­nal judge of events” – and although Cobbs’ fea­ture got very lit­tle the­atri­cal play in its own day, time has proved very kind to it. Indeed, viewed now, its depic­tion of an Amer­i­ca obsessed with nos­tal­gic ret­ro­gres­sion, and ever open to exploita­tion in all its forms, seems entire­ly pre­scient. It is also, in keep­ing with that title, one tru­ly weird curio.

God­mon­ster of Indi­an Flats is released on Blu-ray 18 April, 2022 by 101 Films.

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