Tubi Terror: Godmonster of Indian Flats

A couple of hours ago, I had a thought that sounded like a fun challenge. Every weekend, I’ll watch a horror movie I’ve never seen (or heard of, in some cases) on the free streaming service Tubi and do a little write-up of it for my blog. The more ridiculous the movie, the better it would be to write about—you know, for entertainment purposes. I spent thirty minutes of my life perusing the impressive horror catalog in search of the perfect movie to kick off this series with, and I eventually settled on something called Godmonster of Indian Flats. 

The title alone earned an automatic ‘hell yes’ from me, but the synopsis was even better. “This creative horror film centers on an eight-foot-tall toxic sheep monster that terrorizes the wild west and destroys anything in its path.” I cannot stress to you enough how quickly I pressed play (and then pressed it again because the batteries in my Roku remote are on the brink of death). There might not be a description of any film in existence that is more suited to my personal taste than that. Unfortunately, it turned out to be pretty misleading.

See, there is a large toxic sheep in this movie, but it remains in captivity until the last few minutes of the film. And even after it escapes, it’s not really terrorizing the town in the sense that it’s going on a murder spree, which is the film I thought I was signing up for. In fact, it doesn’t even seem to have baa baad intentions for anyone—it just happens to be an ugly son of a bitch that people are afraid of. Chaos ensues and people die (at least one person does, anyway), but that’s just because people are—for lack of a better word—stupid. 

What Godmonster of Indian Flats is really about remained a bonafide goddamn mystery to me until the movie ended and I looked it up on Wikipedia. Whoever edited the plot section for the film deserves a medal for laying it out in a way that makes so much sense. I mean that wholeheartedly. I truly didn’t have the slightest idea what I was watching. I might as well have been reading Chinese through a pinhole in a blindfold or studying the brain of Albert Einstein. I didn’t know who anyone was, what anyone was doing, or how their individual plots connected to the story at large—if there even was one. The biggest mystery of all, though, was who in the hell thought using a dark blue filter to signify it being night time was a good idea. There are at least three scenes in the movie that I didn’t have a chance to even try and decipher because I couldn’t see what the hell was happening.

I was so disconnected from Godmonster that a dull pain formed at the base of my skull and worked its way up my giant dome like a crack in the earth. I try my best not to look at my phone while I’m watching a movie, but I must confess that I was so disengaged that I found myself scrolling Facebook during the Tubi ad breaks.

While scrolling, I saw a picture that my local coffee shop posted on their page today, and I just so happened to be sitting in the background of the photo, enjoying my dirty chai latte with an extra shot of espresso. It’s the best and those people are the best—but what’s decidedly not the best is the glaring bald spot on the top and back of my head and the realization that hundreds of people would see said bald spot and I would become the laughing stock of town.

Everywhere I go from now on, people will recognize my head and point at me like a shamed celebrity. They’ll approach me for photographs or to offer their condolences. They’ll ask me why I don’t just wear a cool hat and I’ll have to explain that I would LOVE to wear a cool hat but each and every one of them looks so goddamn stupid when it’s sitting on my head. They’ll bring me wigs, bring me razors, bring me paper bags with misshapen eye holes cut out of them to wear over my face. They might even scream and run away from me like I was the Godmonster of Indian Flats itself.

And you know what?

None of it will hurt half as bad as the betrayal I felt from the synopsis of this film.