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The main storyline revolves around a photographer named George (David Heard). He’s a former fashion photographer who inexplicably turned his back on the industry and now spends his time sulking and taking pictures of homeless people. Why? Because plot contrivance, that’s why. I guess just making him an actual sewer worker would have been too easy. As it is, when homeless people start disappearing, George seems determined to investigate, but only because the story requires him to. His second obligatory interest is his girlfriend Lauren (Kim Griest), who despite being shaped like a 12-year-old boy is a fashion model. She is much more practical and motivated than George, and shows good-natured impatience with his lack of maturity. George loves her, but grouses about her work because he’s kind of a selfish asshole.

Notice how I haven’t said anything about cannibals in a while? Get used to that, because if there’s one thing C.H.U.D. has a lot of, it’s Not Cannibals.

The B-story involves a detective named Bosch, who also seems preternaturally interested in what’s happening beneath the streets. His superiors want him to stop digging around, but they don’t know what it’s like out there because they’ve been flying a desk for too long. They're not like Bosch, who wants answers so badly he’s willing to enlist the help of a skull-shatteringly insane homeless advocate called The Reverend (Daniel Stern), who's convinced the government is behind the disappearances. Naturally, Uncle Sam is so eager to disprove this that they dispatch a humorless, dead-eyed suits to the scene, with orders to tell everyone absolutely nothing about everything.

Welcome to the world of C.H.U.D., a movie about sewer cannibals that has almost no sewer cannibals IN it. It's clear there’s not much of a budget in play here, so it's tempting to attribute this discrepancy to the director's judicious sense of taste. But that's giving C.H.U.D. more credit than it deserves. I like to imagine that New World Pictures was in trouble with the bank, and one day someone heard Mr. Bankerson was coming by the lot to see how things were going. Desperate to show they were still functioning, the studio quickly cobbled a handful of spec scripts into a full length screenplay and started filming.

One was a heart rending story about a cop learning to deal with loss, the other concerned a couple on the cusp of middle age, learning to love the things they hate about each other. And of course there was the story about blood sucking cannibals from Venus, which had to be pared down to just one guy in a rented rubber fish suit that couldn't appear on camera for more than 10 seconds because the lights would melt it. While it's true that C.H.U.D. made itself a tidy profit, it's also a confusing, frustrating, indifferently constructed train wreck that isn't even successful as self-deprecating irony. If you're looking for quality (or even North Korean knockoff quality) horror, do yourself a favor and avoid it.

And if you can't, do ME a favor and remember that I gave you fair warning.

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