Shane Watches a Bad Movie on Facebook with Friends: Abar, the First Black Superman

1977 Blaxploitation sorta-superhero movie

Rating: 4/20 (Fred: 4/20; Josh: 3/20; Ryan: 5/20; Libby: Was not able to finish because she had to explain racism to her 8-year-old son)

Plot: A black doctor experimenting with rabbits moves into a white neighborhood with his family. The white folk don't like it so much and respond like any normal racist would--killing their new neighbors' pet and hanging it at the front door, shouting racist things, attempting to steal their Frisbees, attempted murder. The titular local civil rights leader begins to defend them. Eventually, the doctor perfects his potion and turns Abar into a superhero.

I love movies that are in English but still dubbed. The dubbing makes the guy playing the doctor--J. Walter Smith, who also co-wrote this and then did nothing else at all in the movie biz--seem like an even worse actor than he is, something that I imagine was very difficult to pull off. Tobar Mayo plays the superhero, and I don't know if it's his build or his bald head, but I thought he could have pulled off action star in movies with bigger budgets. He was in Killer of Sheep which is a movie much different than this one although it tries to accomplish some of the same things. And he was "Third Indian" in Escape from New York. This is really inept filmmaking and storytelling. The first hour of the movie focuses, sometimes uncomfortably, on the racism. Director Frank Packard (his only directing credit) plays the Martin Luther King Jr. card early and often, hammering you over the head with the message. Then, the movie shifts gears dramatically, the doctor starts shooting rabbits to show that he's perfected the formula to make rabbits bulletproof, and we get more of the sci-fi superhero nonsense that my Bad Movie cohorts and I wanted for this week's selection. And it is nonsense! Sure, this titular superman can fight, but he's also got these telepathic abilities to turn prostitutes and drug dealers into college graduates, liquor into milk, and purse snatchers into quality citizens. He can also cause giant snakes to materialize. Superman can't do that! It's so goofy, and I think at this stage, the movie's message gets a little muddy. After all, this movie was really focused on the clash between hateful whites and black people minding their own business, not on the problems with black urban youth. The last half hour isn't enough to salvage this and make it an enjoyable bad movie although there is a twist at the end with Frisbee woman that has to be seen to be believed. And there is a misshapen pimp who made me laugh. Tony Rumford plays Dr. Kincade's son, and he's the worst child actor I've seen in a while. This was also his only role. His is a performance that stands out, and trust me, that's difficult in a movie like this. This is an interesting little socially-critical document, but it's not anywhere near a good movie and probably not a very good bad movie either.

Shane Watches a Bad Movie with Friends on Facebook: Gor

1987 fantasy movie

Rating: 4/20 (Fred: 7/20; Libby: 14/20; Carrie: 5/20; Ozzy: fell asleep, though he was saying that he didn't think this was a bad movie)

Plot: After his girlfriend breaks up with him, a college professor uses a magic ring to transport to the titular planet where he teams up with some villagers who just had their ugly pink crystal stolen by an evil dictator.

Despite this being a rather titillating PG movie with more than its fair share of taint (Libby's observation) and haunch action, this is a pretty dull movie. I think it might have more walking-per-square-inch than a Hobbit movie, and that, friends, is a great deal of walking. It's really a movie about walking, interrupted with some of the most poorly choreographed swordfights you'll ever see and some scantily-clad women wrestling around. Those fight scenes make it seem like everybody's afraid of hurting each other. Oh, and there's some dancing, and although it's choreographed slightly better than the fight scenes, it really just takes up time. This barely has a plot at all, and the most important things that happen would probably take up about seven minutes of movie time. I didn't really like the main characters very much. I had trouble getting past the main character's name: Tarl. The gal traveling with him on Gor is shapely enough and has big 80's hair just like I like. Fitting right in with that decade is the hair of another member of the posse whom my friends and I just called Mullet. And there's an old guy. Oh, and a little fellow named Hup pokes into the thing about midway through. I figured I'd see his name in the credits playing little fellows in other 80's fantasy classics, but he's only in this movie and the sequel. Apparently, Hup didn't want to mess around with anything that wasn't Gor.  Usually, when I don't like the good guys, I can root for the bad guy, but this one is awful. His dialogue is unintelligible (seriously, I watched with the subtitles, and it frequently said [unintelligible dialogue]) and he alternates between whispering and growling. The best thing about the bad guys is their hat variety. In fact, I'm fairly positive that 3/4 of the film's budget was spent on hats. The variety, I'm guessing, is because they wanted to sell more Gor action figures. It's the same reason, I suppose, that there were so many different Ewoks. My favorite thing about this is that Jack Palance is listed third in the credits but is barely in this at all. At first, it even seems like they're just using Jack Palance stock footage or stealing shots from anther movie. He's in this for about two minutes and really only to set up the sequel which was apparently filmed at the same time as this first movie. I can't wait to see the follow-up!

Shane Watches a Bad Movie on Facebook with Friends: The Beast with 1,000,000 Eyes

1955 sci-fi horror movie

Rating: 4/20 (Libby: 4/20; Fred: 6/20; Josh: 7/20)

Plot: A really dysfunctional family of three living on ranch with a mute ranch-hand have their unhappy lives disrupted by an alien.

The most interesting thing about this movie for me was Chester Conklin who plays Ben, an elderly neighbor. His performance stood out in a mostly boring movie because he acts like he's only seen silent films with every expression and gesture exaggerated. I was entertained and looked him up. Turns out he was in over 300 movies from 1913 to 1966 including a role in The Great Dictator where he's shaved by Chaplin to Brahms' Hungarian Dance. This movie hammers home the family-sticking-together theme, hammers so hard that it's painful. For the first half of the movie, they really are as dysfunctional as a family can be, so much that it's actually a little uncomfortable. The mother, played by Lorna Thayer, is an especially abrasive character. Paul Birch plays the dad, stoically. He can't make his ranch work, probably because he spends all day driving around, but he sure becomes an expert on this alien invasion really quickly. I think the makers of this--director David Kramarsky was allowed to direct nothing else while screenwriter Tom Filer only had one other movie [The Space Children] to his name--decided that they were running out of time and had to rush things along at the end. Something like that must have happened with the title of this thing, too.

MGM executives: Hey, guys. We need a title for that science fiction movie. We need to start advertising that sucker.
Kramarsky: Hmm. What should we call this thing?
Filer: Don't look at me! This is the only thing I've ever written.
MGM executives: Hurry, fellas, or we're not going to let you make anymore movies.
Filer: Umm. Uhh. The Beast! Call it The Beast!
Kramarsky: Yeah, that's good. It's got three eyes, too. Let's go with The Beast with Three Eyes!
MGM executives: The Beast with Three Eyes? That ain't gonna sell. We need more eyes!
Filer: How about a hundred?
MGM executives: Ehh.
Kramarsky: A thousand?
MGM executives: Hmm. That's better.
Filer and Kramarsky: A million! The Beast with a Million Eyes!
MGM executives: Fellas, we've got a hit on our hands!

They make you wait for that titular beast. Wait, wait, and wait some more. When you finally get to see the thing, you're disappointed that it's a monster with two eyes with one eye superimposed over it. They show it for about thirty seconds, presumably because it's too ridiculous to show for longer. The best effect, by far, is during a couple bird attack scenes when fake birds (I hope) are thrown at a car by somebody off camera. The monster or the brainwashed birds (or dog or cow--those are the "eyes," I guess) aren't nearly as creepy as the mute who doesn't have a name until they decide to give him one at the end of the movie along with a back story. This is a movie that manages to make very little sense but still seems derivative, and that combination is no easy feat. And this is a strong contender for worst dialogue to end a film ever [Spoiler Alert!]:

[Characters see and almost shoot an eagle.]
Wife: Allan, wait. Have you ever seen an eagle around here before.
Husband: No, what's that have to do with it?
Wife: Let it go. Don't kill it, Allan. I wonder where it came from. And, Allan, there's something else. What killed the creature in the ship?
Husband: Where did the eagle come from? Why do men have souls?
Wife: If I could answer that, I'd be more than human. I'd be. . .
Husband: Yes.
[End of movie]

What?

Oasis of the Zombies

1982 zombie movie

Rating: 4/20

Plot: Nazi zombies try to prevent treasure hunters from getting their riches.

Also known as The Treasure of the Living Dead, but you really could call it anything you want. It wouldn't magically transform the movie into anything that anybody would want to watch. The poster's way misleading. That's a movie you'd definitely want to watch. Leggy blonds in skimpy denim cut-offs being groped by Nazi zombies emerging from the sands? That would probably be something. To be completely honest, that might have happened in this movie. I was put in a daze early on and watched the majority of this in a boredom-induced trance. I did see zombies though. They were cheaply grotesque. The action's dopey, the plot's almost nonexistent, and the direction feels disinterested.

I probably should have picked a different Jesus Franco movie to end my trilogy tribute with.

Mars Needs Women

1967 sci-fi nonsense

Rating: 4/20

Plot: See title.

I took notes while watching this movie, but I can't read any of them:

"a short otter to cheetah"
"Martian flashlights--gnarly"
"mok lather then scientific centuries"
"hop nature/pot hypnotic states"
"That's a long chance!" "Time is short--we have to take long chances."

Ok, so I can read that last one. I'm just not sure why I wrote it down. I must have liked it. This is a film from my main man Larry Buchanan, maker of this and this and this and that. The latter is a Manos Award winner, and one of those is called Attack of the the Eye Creatures according to the title screen. This one's rated a 4/20 which makes it the best movie of his that I've ever seen. Nondescript Martians [By the way--Isn't 1967 a little late to have "Martian" movies? I'm not an expert on the history of astronomy or anything, but this is well after we knew that Mars didn't have anything living on it, right?] body snatch some women for their snatches, and nondescript heroes have to stop them. The acting conists of reading lines although Yvonne Craig is in there. So is troubled Disney actor Tommy Kirk who called this "undoubtedly one of the stupidest motion pictures ever made," apparently before he was involved with Buchanan's It's Alive. The most inspired performance is from "Bubbles" Cash who plays a stripper and one of the Martians' abductees. Blue-tinted stock footage stretches this into a feature length, as do a whole lot of scenes where people just kind of stand around and wait. My favorite bit is when the Martians have a conversation about neckties, a "male vanity" with "no practice purpose" that Martians gave up a long time ago. This movie isn't as obviously inept as Buchanan's other movies, but with silly Martian costumes, special effects that barely pass as special effects, and bad actors reading bad writing, it's worth the time for fans of crappy movies. And the extended screen time that "Bubbles" Cash gets definitely helps.

Disco Godfather

1979 disco anti-drug movie

Rating: 4/20

Plot: The titular hero, a platter-spinning cat at a discotheque, declares his own personal war on PCP after his nephew runs into trouble.

This is Rudy Ray Moore but not with his Dolemite character. It does have plenty of tackiness, 70's jumpsuit sequin action, and a few terrible kung-fu scenes though. Oh, and a Rudy Ray Moore sex scene, of course. The best of those fight scenes (and by best, I'm really meaning the worst) are a pair with some telephone repairmen, the second of those accompanied by this "One Way Ticket to Hell--Shermanizin'" song that made me want to get my own jumpsuit, preferably a crotchless one. Interesting that this has such a strong anti-drug message since I assume the only people who would really like this movie would have to be on some sort of drug. Maybe Angel Dust. PCP must be a hell of a drug, apparently one capable of transforming a disco into Night of the Living African American Dead and turn Rudy Ray Moore into a skeleton. This whole thing starts with a ton of disco dancing mayhem with a great entrance by Moore in this blue outfit and a whole lot of cries to "Put some weight on it!" whatever the hell that means. Moore apparently thought that little catch phrase would be huge because the credits point out that he did copyright it. Things really get interesting when this turns into a 1970's black version of Reefer Madness. Moore's performance is something to behold--the early delivery of a "Where is Bucky and what has he had?" line, the mispronunciation of the word clandestine, and a scream at about the hour and twenty-nine minute mark that might be the best acting I've ever seen. My favorite moment might be during one of Rudy Ray's curse-filled ramblings about PCP that ends with a reporter asking, "Can I quote you on that?" The most exciting moments are during the PCP freakouts, scenes that almost reminded me of an urbanized Coffin Joe or something. And when animation is added to the freakouts, it was suddenly like outsider art or something.

Notable moments: An awesome performance by John Casino--Kurt Russell's stuntman for the last 25 years--as a cowboy. His death scene is one of the more ludicrous things you'll ever seen.

Best line that isn't "Put some weight on it!": "She claimed the ham was crying and didn't want the ham ruining her party."

Simon Says

2006 crapfest

Rating: 4/20

Plot: Some college kids go camping in a remote location and are terrorized by two Crispin Glovers armed with pickaxes.

That's right, Crispin Glover fans. You get to double your pleasure with this one. And his dad, former Torgo award winner Bruce Glover, is in this, too. He stinks it up in a limited role, but not as much as his children, twins played by actual twins Chad and Chris Cunningham. It's got to be the worst acting by twins ever which isn't right because they're playing young versions of the greatest actor of all time. And speaking of Crispin, just imagine this for a moment: Crispin Glover playing a mentally-challenged character and his twin, both with accents that convince you they're both supposed to be mentally-challenged. Sometimes, especially when he's called a retard or crazy, he gets mad. His character stomps on a dog and then exclaims, "Puppy sleepy!" He delivers some of the worst puns you'll ever hear--"How about a hand sandwich?!"--and gets lines like "I like this game. Make you special present for my dream. Everybody want to play this game. Oh, I like this game" that make you wonder if it was all written that badly or if Glover was just butchering his lines and everybody went along with it because he was the only famous person in the movie. Oh, wait a second. On some covers of the dvd of this movie, it has Blake Lively's name right up there. This was before she was famous for whatever she's famous for, and she's really only in this movie for about 3 1/2 minutes. Still she's Blake Lively, somebody I've heard of! There are three other Livelys in this movie, too (possibly a Lively record) so one can only assume that somebody in the Lively family produced this.  But back to Crispin because he carries this kids-in-the-woods-with-a-killer cliche on his shoulders and turns it into a comic masterpiece. In fact, a conversation one of his characters has that ends with him yelling, "Sorry! I'm just a little tense here!" might be the most comical thing I've seen all year. Or maybe it's his prayer--"Oh, God. [Moaning] [More Moaning] Let's eat." Or his explanation of "the devil's cry." Or maybe the line "Now that's what I call a fatty!" which I can't believe hasn't become an Internet meme. Aside from Glover's decision to make this an uproarious comedy, this movie is a complete disaster. The dialogue's inane ("How a one-armed man counts his chain" might be the most pointless thing I've ever seen), the story and its characters have all the cliches that The Cabin in the Woods poked fun at, and the special effects are awful. There are flying pickaxes, an effect that not only looked completely stupid but didn't make any sense at all. That's almost topped a little later on by some fire effects. There's plenty of gruesome violence if that gets you off. And I was really confused with the twin thing. You ever watch a movie where there seems to be a twist, but you catch on so quickly that you wonder if there was even supposed to be a twist? That's kind of what happened there. I lost track of what was going on with the pair of twin Glovers, and at one point, I convinced myself there was a twist within a twist within another twist.

A well-timed Wilhelm scream makes me wonder if this whole thing is nothing but a joke. I wouldn't put it past William Dear, the director of Harry and the Hendersons.

Heartbeeps

1981 science fiction rom-com

Rating: 4/20

Plot: A pair of robots escape the robot factory or wherever the hell they live. They make a baby robot and try to escape their pursuers, including a ruthless cop robot.

I'm not sure there's another movie this boring. With Andy Kaufman and Bernadette Peters as the pair of lovestruck robots and Randy Quaid playing himself, I know that might be hard to believe, but it's true. Painfully boring. This starts with the robots falling for each other and then goes absolutely nowhere. The robots just plod through about eighty minutes and do almost nothing. John Williams provides some ambient tinkering. There's a comedian robot with a cigar who provides such gems as the one about how his uncle was killed by a weasel. ("He was sitting on the railroad track, and a train came along, and he didn't hear the weasel.") That just pissed me off. So did the title, but it wasn't enough to stop me from watching this. Heartbeeps? It had Kaufman in it, so I was intrigued enough to give it a spin. If you, dear reader, ever told me that you were going to watch this, I would probably murder you to save you from the experience. I'm not a violent person or anything, but it would just seem like the human thing to do.

Shane trivia: This is the only movie I can remember apologizing to. I kept dozing off while watching this. At one point, a robot says, "What are you--an audience or an oil painting?" I was awake enough to hear that, figured the movie was talking about me, apologized, and even gave the thing a weak pity laugh.

Oprah Movie Club Pick for September: Showgirls

1995 stripper movie

Rating: 4/20

Plot: Nomi, a long-legged gal with a troubled past, hitches a ride to Las Vegas in order to become a showgirl. She makes some friends and pushes her way to the top, similarly to those ballerinas in that Black Swan movie.

I was a Saved by the Bell fan just like everybody else. Wait a second. Was? I was, am, and will always be a Saved by the Bell fan, or a Bell Head as we call ourselves. And like all the other teenage male Bell Heads, I wanted to everybody on the show naked, probably in this order: Jesse, Kelly, Mr. Belding, Lisa, Screech, everybody else. So this was a dream come true, an answer to our perverted prayers. You get to see every inch of Jesse in this movie. But you know what? It's too much. I almost can't believe I'm saying this, but this movie has almost too much nudity. After a while, she'd start to strip and I'd sigh and say, "Great. Elizabeth Berkley is stripping again." It probably doesn't help that she appears to have been made out of plastic in this movie. And either she's a terrible actor or this was just the wrong part for her or, most likely, a combination of those. I'm really not even sure if she can dance. She certainly moves around fast, especially during the scene where she's dancing with the black guy in the club and looks like she's having an epileptic fit. She spends as much of this movie angry as she does naked (sometimes she's naked and angry), and she really doesn't play angry very well, probably because she's just so polished. And I really never fully understand her motivation or why she's so angry and why she loses her temper so quickly and easily. I was probably distracted by all the nipples though. I'm just never able to buy "tough girl" with her. However, all the bad with her character and Berkley's performance is erased when you see her eat a hamburger at around the 45 minute mark. It's magical. "Thanks for the hamburger!" Right at the hour and thirty-four minute mark, there's some hamburger parallelism, and you can try your hardest to unravel the symbolic layers of that pair of hamburgers but you'll eventually give up and concentrate on where Henrietta Bazoom's boob-poppin'-out-of-dress-wardrobe-malfunction-complete-with-honking-sound-effect trick would fall in a list of Best Movie Moments Ever.

This movie isn't just bad; it's classically bad. At times, it nearly seems intentional, the kind of bad that can't happen accidentally. There's the guy in the truck who bookends Nomi's story, a character whose driving is almost as bad as his acting. I love how he says, "It was a bad idea!" Early in the movie, there's one of those big movie moments when Jesse runs across a street and nearly gets hit by several cars. It was right after some puking, puking that I think must have been inspired by the movie's score. Those kinds of moments usually happen at the ends of the movies. This one was at the five minute and forty second mark. Oh, and then again at six minutes and ten seconds. There's naked volcano dancing, a show that lasts about two minutes, after which the crowd--probably disappointed that they spent so much money to see a two-minute naked volcano dance--asked for an encore. There's a scene with a ring pop. There's the "I wanna see your ass" guy. There's a character who actually says, "You want a knuckle sandwich?" There's the red-headed Patrick Bristow who played the Wig Master in a Seinfeld episode who at first I thought was named Gay in this but who turned out to be Marty instead. His "THRUST IT! THRUST IT! THRUST IT! THRUST IT!" was award-worthy. There are monkeys, and then more monkeys, and then a sweet catfight in the vicinity of the monkeys. There's a doggy chow conversation and a tender moment involving cheese. Oh, and some great child acting."Can we see the  monkeys?" "Mommy, she said the f-word!" And, of course, a whole lot of nudity. And Kyle MacLachlan.

The best thing about it, for me at least, is that it seems to have been written by somebody not quite as talented as the folks who penned all those Saved by the Bell episodes. These lines are golden:

--"If it happens again, to anybody, you're going to jump to your conclusion. Without your golden parachute."
--"It must be weird not having anybody cum on you."
--Almost everything Henrietta Bazoom says. Her character might have broken a record for saying the word "twat" in one movie, by the way.
--Almost every conversation Jesse and her friend have but especially the one they have about chips and fingernails.
--"She wants to smile her snatch. She probably cut [the g-string] herself." There's no way I wrote that down right. Or did I?
--"Look at these tits. What are they--watermelons? This is a stage, not a patch."
--I want my nipples to press but I don't want them to look like they're levitatin'."

I'm sorry that this isn't more coherent, but the movie isn't all that coherent either. It is sleazy though. It's the type of movie you wouldn't want to eat off of. It's a ball of sleaze covered in three more layers of sleaze. But if nothing else, it does teach you an important lesson--you gotta gamble if you're gonna win. Not that it worked well for Elizabeth Berkley's career.

Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter

1966 Western Horror hybrid

Rating: 5/20

Plot: The titular outlaw and his burly sidekick Hank Tracy are on the run and hide out in a castle where the titular daughter of Dr. Frankenstein's daughter and some other guy are experimenting with the regeneration of humans.

First, I had to penalize this a point for having an inaccurate title. Frankenstein's daughter isn't even in this movie; it's his granddaughter. This movie is more boring than a movie called Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter should be. The famous outlaw is played by John Lupton who I know exactly one thing about--he's the most boring actor to ever live. This also has Rayford Barnes playing Lonny Curry, a twerpy backstabber and member of the Wild Bunch gang in this movie. I noticed that he somehow found his way in Pekinpah's The Wild Bunch, and as far as I know, twerps weren't allowed in that movie. His performance is also boring. Roger Creed plays the generic Wild Bunch gang leader and puts the accent on the wrong syllable in the word decoy, but it's expected because most of his work in film was as a stuntman. He probably hit his head a few times. Cal Bolder's got too much muscle for the Old West. He's an imposing enough figure, but his voice doesn't match his body. I did like in one scene how he punches a guy who falls back into a horse with enough force to knock off the horse's rider. I'm not sure why Bolder, after he's Frankenstein-monstered, is named Igor by the granddaughter. Didn't writer Carl K. Hittleman, who also did some writing for The Buster Keaton Show and wrote Billy the Kid vs. Dracula, read Mary Shelley's novel? (Note: I typed that with the knowledge that there is no Igor in Frankenstein.) I really can't think of any reason why anybody would want to see this. My favorite thing about it was the shot of a Wild West town with the creepy mansion overlooking it from a hill in the background. I also kind of liked these goofy red, yellow, and black helmets with antennas that one of the scientists and the soon-to-be-resurrected people wore. I'm not even sure two of the colors on that helmet existed in the 19th Century, and I'm not sure what those helmets were supposed to do. Either the subject on the table gets a helmet or everybody in the room gets a helmet, right? Did this movie not have enough of a budget to get a third helmet? I was confused by the whole thing and have had trouble sleeping since watching this. This movie also lost a full point for having what might be the most irritating sound effect in the world.

My favorite thing about this is a note before the movie about how the company releasing this on dvd is dedicated to preserving film history. Really? This movie?

Period Piece

2006 thing

Rating: 4/20

Plot: None.

I guess we'll put this in the mondo film or shockumentary genre although it's not a documentary. It's not exactly scripted either though, and it doesn't make a lot of sense. I'm not sure who I should blame for this--Johnny Knoxville, Pink Flamingos, Tom Green, Harmony Korine? All of them. Maybe I should just blame Giuseppe Andrews, the "film's" "director" who, in a brief introduction to this, said, "Well, it's a hard film to synopsis." He also referred to it as a "grenade of wild images, dialogue, and sound" when he could have saved a lot of words and just said described it as "inane garbage." I probably should have heeded the warning at the beginning of the film--"Warning: This film contains senior citizen nudity and dead pigs." Or maybe the appearance of the guy on the cover four-and-a-half minutes into the movie, completely naked and simulating a sex act with an invisible woman should have had me reaching for my remote. This movie feels like somebody flinging feces at you, just shocking scene after shocking scene. It's got a very middle-schoolish "look at what I can say on your television" kind of humor. Or, more accurately, "Look at what I can get old people to say." You get people shooting up in a car wash; all kinds of scenes with people, including a guy in a coon skin cap, having sex with a teddy bear; clowns on stick horses; plays with stop-motion animated tater tots which, of course, evolve into tater tot pornography; smoking pigs; a puppet; a guy eating his own armpit hair; characters pantomiming the cutting and eating of flatulence with a plastic knife and fork. I don't mind experimental movies, and shocking things don't bother me. This is just 80 minutes of pointless nonsense, and 80 minutes which, by the way, seems a little longer than Gone with the Wind. I can't think of any reason why anybody reading this should see this movie. Well, unless you're into tater tots or naked old people. Or stuffed animal snuff films.

I do wonder if Campbells appreciated the (I assume) free product placement in a scene where a can of clam chowder was used to sodomize a teddy bear.

The Wizard of Gore

1970 horror movie

Rating: 4/20

Plot: The titular magician has a gratuitously violent stage show in which he dismembers, decapitates, and disembowels female volunteers from the audience before magically putting them together again. It's really stupid. Later that night, the volunteer's wounds reappear which is even stupider. And the fact that nobody can put the pieces together and figure out what's going on? That would be stupidest. A writer--a female one, of course--is intrigued enough to investigate.

If Herschell Gordon Lewis was more well known (read: more infamous) outside B-movie/gore circles, this is the movie that would have given him his nickname. He could have gone down in cinematic history as the Wizard of (Cheap and Gratuitous) Gore. It's easy to see that Lewis had absolutely no budget at all to work, and all the funds he did have (fifty bucks?) was used to purchase meat and tomato juice. The stage show violence is so over the top that it crosses the border between Scaryland and the Continent of Goofy and then continues all the way around the world like a squelchy perverse Magellan so that it can scoot over the border another time. The goofiest thing about these scenes is that they're shown multiple times. So you'll see the saw going through a woman's abdomen, then a shot of the audience looking rather bored, then Montag digging around in the woman's viscera, then another shot of the audience, then a shot of the woman's abdomen without any injury at all, then a shot of Montag's face, then a shot of her being sawed again. It's awkwardly edited. It's the same with the spike-in-the-noggin scene and a scene featuring a guillotine. Movies with guillotines, by the way? Automatically more awesome. Orson Welles wishes he had some guillotine action in Citizen Kane, and according to an unauthorized biography I imagined and then pretended to read, that was his biggest regret. Montag is played by Ray Sager, a guy with an arguably respectable career. Here, he's predictably terrible, but straight from the get-go, it's almost like he's lost his faith in the words he's been given. It's hard to say, "And you were expecting a mere handsaw!" in a way that makes you look like a real person. At one point, he mispronounces his own name. He's such a talky magician, going on and on and on about. . .well, magic, I guess. The audience doesn't know how to act during these scenes, so they just randomly gesture. I didn't take the time to verify, but I'm willing to bet the same extras were used for the audience members. Sager's bad, but the auxiliary actors might be worse. There's one guy who discovers his wife dead in bed and shows off what might be the worst acting ability ever. And the delivery of the line "Craig, Craig! Look at your hand! Your hand is bleeding!" is pure classic B-movie bliss, a line that I would have quoted endlessly with my brother if we had seen this as kids right along with "Give me back my hand!" or "Oh no! A bimbo with a gun!" Screenwriter Allen Kahn, whose only other writing credit is the Lewis-directed The Year of the Yahoo, throws a Shamalamadingdong-esque twist into the climax which, on the surface at least, seemed kind of cool until I thought about it a little more and realized I didn't even understand what happened. And maybe that's my fault, but I'm just not ready to take the blame.

Two more notes: 1) I really liked how there was plastic on the floor of a restaurant where the sawed-in-two lady falls apart. "Yes, you can use our restaurant for your stupid movie, but we're putting plastic on the floor so that you don't mess up our carpet." 2) "The guy's no magician. He's just a hell of a technician." It's 1970, and some white dude invents rap music in The Wizard of Gore. Little known piece of trivia there.

Viva Knievel!

1977 movie

Rating: 4/20

Plot: After breaking into an orphanage, healing one of them, and flirting with a nun, Evel Knievel nearly dies in a motorcycle stunt while attempting to jump over cages full of circus animals. Well, he breaks his arm anyway. He impulsively retires. He's lured to Mexico and back into the jumpin'-over-things game because. . .well, I think it has to do with money. Leslie Nielson, however, wants him dead so that he can use his trucks to transport drugs into the United States. Meanwhile, Knievel tries to bag a newspaper reporter.

I had an Evel Knievel lunchbox as a kid. Actually, I don't know if I had one or not, but I'm going to go ahead and say that I did for the blog. The stuntman intrigued me, and this is without even getting a chance to see him in this movie or knowing that he had healing powers. That's right. It only takes about five minutes of movie before you get one of the most heartwarming and beautiful scenes in motorcycle stunt movie history when an orphan tosses away his crutches and says (I shit you not), "You're the reason I'm walkin', Evel. You're the reason I'm walkin'!" Brought a tear to my eye anyway. Evel Knievel isn't all heroic in this. In fact, a lot of the movie makes him look greedy and surly. He's mean to Gene Kelly. Poor Gene Kelly, by the way. What did he do to deserve this? He does deliver a powerful anti-drug speech while standing next to a nodding Frank Gifford in which he references Indianapolis and says, "Narcotics will make you blow all to hell!" I was convinced. Leslie Nielson plays the bad guy, cardboardily, and Lauren Hutton is the love interest/newspaper reporter. Also, Marjoe Gortner and his curly hair are in this. Marjoe plays a rival stuntman, and he's about the most interesting character in this thing, probably because not much of what he does makes sense. Of course, I was probably just distracted by that hair and his creepy eyes. Frank Gifford plays himself a lot more naturally than Evel Knievel who at times looked like he knew he was making a terrible mistake but that it would be worth it because a hell of a lot of lunchboxes were about to be sold. For those of you into motorcycle/car chases, the one that makes up the finale of this stunt-and-drama-filled extravaganza seems like it's at least forty-five minutes long. The most thrilling stunt, to me at least, was a spill from a wheelchair though. That might have been the only stunt that Evel Knievel, really not in his prime here, actually had anything to do with. I also laughed outloud when a child fell off a motorcycle. Note: I'm still trying to figure out if this is a real movie.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go not take narcotics.

Frogs

1972 enviro-horror

Rating: 4/20

Plot: All this wheelchair-bound rich old guy wants to do is throw a party. The wildlife on his island is sick of people, however, and decides to get rid of them. Several people croak.

This is far from the movie about mutant frogs killing people that I thought it would be. No, this is more like just-regular frogs standing around watching other animals kill people. Would I lose all credibility as a movie blogger if I told you that I kind of expected this to be a hidden gem? I mean, it's got Sam Elliott in it, and surely he wouldn't be in a crappy movie called Frogs that isn't really even about frogs, right? The cast in this is terrible, almost bad enough to make it seem like they're all competing for some kind of Worst Actor of the Year award. Adam Roarke, as "Clint" (that's a name I almost always put in quotes unless I'm talking about Eastwood), doesn't even try, especially any time his character is on a boat. When he asked Sam Elliott near the beginning of the movie, "How are you at badminton?" I could have sworn he was high. But his performance might be topped by Ray Milland, a guy who's acting like he wants everybody to know that he's a master Thespian (note the capital T) even though he's in a movie about killer frogs. Want thrills? You're not finding them here. This one's about as suspenseful and/or horrifying as a trip through your average zoo's reptile room. Les Baxter's knob twiddling synth score doesn't help at all. The makers of Frogs didn't really need a famous name like Les Baxter to do the music for this. A baby or a drunk chimp could have handled the score for this one. Or a frog! The death scenes are really silly. In a preview of this movie, it shows a lady in quicksand, but the scene wasn't in the movie. I investigated and found out that they cut the quicksand scene because they deemed it too silly. That was too silly? The scene were the guy Plaxico-Burresses himself in the leg isn't too silly? The woman with the butterfly net turning blue seconds after a snake attack isn't too silly? The superimposed birds that are only slightly better than the special effects from Birdemic: Shock and Terror aren't too silly? The death by turtle and crab isn't too silly? I still don't know how a slow-moving turtle manages to kill a woman actually. I will say this: the last five minutes featuring a character and (finally!) a bunch of frogs is actually really good. Shots of stuffed animal heads, a frog-filled library, some amphibian record scratching. It's good, and so are the credits, silent except for a bunch of ominous croaking. Of course, croaking was omnipresent throughout the story.

If you're in the mood for a lame horror movie with an environmental message from the 70s, I'd recommend Day of the Animals before this one. That one's got Leslie Nielson's nipples in it.

Deathsport

1978 futuristic action masterpiece

Rating: 4/20 (Mark: 4/20)

Plot: Some evil people kidnap a couple "guides" and prep them for. . .wait for it. . .the titular Deatsport! That's an arena-style competition involving glass swords, motorcycles, and inexplicable explosions.

Corman needed another "death" movie and this is what happened. David Carradine is the Carradine in this one, and I'm willing to bet it's the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to him. Not that he would remember a thing since he was apparently stoned throughout the filming. This movie isn't good for the right reasons, but it does have just the right ineptitude to provide a few laughs. The action scenes are repetitive, and my brother and I speculated that this might have the record for most things exploding in one movie. Most of those are random explosions, by the way, as these motorcycle death machines (destructocycles, natch) seem to blow up at the slightest touch. A climactic sword fight scene is also repetitive and dull with choreography that doesn't even show the swords, presumably because they are made out of glass and would shatter if they actually connected. Richard Lynch is a lame bad guy with an even lamer script, and he's got something wrong with his neck that perhaps distracted me from discovering the smaller bits of genius hidden within Deathsport. You also get some bug-eyed cannibals that look like they waltzed straight out of Killers from Space. My favorite scene, by far, was one with a naked Claudia Jennings in a disco torture chamber. I could just imagine this conversation taking place between the directors:

Director 1: Hey, I was watching what we shot yesterday.
Director 2: Yeah? What did you think?
Director 1: I hate to tell you this, but Deathsport is really going to suck.
Director 2: Oh, man. That's a shame because we've already shot fourteen hours of motorcycles with silver cardboard boxes taped to them driving around the desert. And this is really going to hurt David Carradine because he's really putting his soul into this performance.
Director 1: What are we going to do now?
Director 2: Well, I do have some Christmas lights.
Director 1: You do? Fantastic! Let's go see if Claudia Jennings will take off her clothes!
Director 2: Bingo! You took the words right from my mouth, Director 1!

To continue the thread of decapitation, this movie does have a rather exciting one. And the lovely Claudia Jennings, it seems, was also decapitated in an automobile accident. Apparently, it ended her acting career.

Also recommended for fans of The Help.

Hercules in New York

1969 action comedy

Rating: 4/20

Plot: The titular demigod is bored with life in Olympus, so his father Zeus lightning-bolts him to New York City to teach him a lesson. While in the Big Apple, he becomes a successful wrestler and competitive weightlifter with the help of a nerdy streetwise guy named Pretzie and gets himself a girlfriend. Meanwhile, Zeus sends Mercury and Nemesis to retrieve him.

This is worth watching for fans of Arnold Strong as this is his first film appearance. Or Arnold Stang fans, I guess, if there are any of them out there. I liked him in The Man with the Golden Arm enough. But back to Schwarzenegger, the real star of this show. With the screen presence this guy has in this movie, I'm really surprised he didn't have more of a career in movies. Seems like he could have had a nice career as an action hero or something even though the acting he does in this is embarrassing. He's worse in Kindergarten Cop actually. Here, he doesn't have to do much acting. He just has to be big and strong, and he does a fine job of doing that. Now, the version I watched has Arnold Strong dubbed, allegedly because he was unintelligible when delivering the wonderful dialogue that was written for him. The voice used is odd since we all know what Schwarzenegger sounds like. I watched some bits and pieces of the non-dubbed version for comparison purposes, and Arnold's heavily-accented voice would have been pretty brutal for the duration of this one. Honestly, I think this is kind of a cute idea for a movie, and writer Aubrey Wisberg got a lot of the mythology right. This, by the way, was her last writing credit. The writing's bad, but it's the inept direction that really makes this one special. The poster brags about this being filmed almost entirely in New York. Well, they really should have located a more isolated location for the Olympus scenes since you can hear traffic in the background while Zeus and Juno are bickering. The pacing of the story's awkward. Even more awkward is the amount of screen time devoted to Arnold Strong just standing around flexing. The most awkward of those is when he spots a movie poster as he's walking down the street with his lady friend and starts griping that the actor doesn't even look like him. Of course, he takes off his shirt and starts flexing in order to prove it to her. But the scene that makes this movie? Arnold Schwarzenegger fighting a guy in a bear suit! I had to rewind and watch that epic battle twice just to make sure I really saw it.

Side note: I wish Arnold Schwarzenegger would have stuck with Arnold Strong. It's a lot easier to spell.

Dragon Wars: D-War

2007 fightin' dragon movie

Rating: 4/20

Plot: A reporter who coincidentally happens to be the reincarnation of a wizard's nipple investigates some dragon business. He has to locate Sarah, the reincarnation of some dragon princess or something, in order to save Los Angeles from dragon fury. D-War!

It looks as if South Korea spent a ton to make this movie which possibly makes them some of the dumbest people on earth. Here's how the pitch probably went:

Guys with idea for a dragon movie: OK, so we need approximately a zillion dollars.
Studio executive: A zillion dollars? (taps pen on desk) That seems like an awful lot of money.
Guys with idea for a dragon movie: Well, we've got a golden idea!
Studio executive: Fine, let's here what you've got.
Guys with zillion dollar dragon movie idea: OK, so it's called Dragon Wars and the whole thing's about these. . .
Studio executive: (breaking pen in half with excited fingers) Hold on right there! Did you say Dragon Wars? We're in!

Because who needs a story, right? You've got fucking dragons fighting in Los Angeles! All you need are some big special effects, some loud noises, and an audience dumb enough to pay for movie tickets. This certainly is a big, loud movie. And you know what? I'm just going to say it. People who enjoy this movie are probably really dumb. I don't even care if I just offended any of my 4 1/2 readers. I don't feel like wasting time typing coherent thoughts, so here's a list of this movie's offenses in no particular order:

--Two narrators within the first three minutes--that's two narrators too many!
--At 6:45, we get a flashback. At 11:20, we get a flashback for the character who is having a flashback. Then, a little later, there's a flashback within a flashback within a flashback. Come on! I can't keep up with all that!
--Imoogi. Enough said. The thing's called Imoogi.
--Quick edits during the action scenes made me dizzy and sick to my stomach.
--The bad guy makes me laugh everything that I see him. He's taking his bad-guy-ness way too seriously and should not be walking around Los Angeles dressed like that. And his magic sword thing? I really got sick of seeing that one.
--Terrible acting that doesn't mesh with the big, big effects. You'll have a giant dragon bursting through a building, and then, not exactly with good timing, a very staged reaction. It's almost like there wasn't even a real giant dragon!
--A kissing scene on the beach? Sure, why not?
--The special effects are ugly and unnatural. The dragon slithering through streets left blurs of damage, but it didn't look good at all. The dragon stuff looked fine. The setting detail around the dragons? Not so much.
--There's a fucking dragon wrecking Los Angeles and nobody seems to know about it? What the hell? The characters say, "There was a rumor that a dragon knocked down an entire hospital but we can't verify it." That doesn't make any sense!

At one point, one of the characters says, "None of this makes sense." I agreed completely. I never thought I'd find a movie that made me wish I was watching one of the Transformers, but this one did. This movie made me angry, and I don't think I'll be seeing a Korean monster movie for a very long time after this trio of crappy movies.

The Gore Gore Girls

1972 trashy murder mystery

Rating: 4/20

Plot: Somebody's mutilating strippers, and a suave private dick and a sexy newspaper reporter team up to try and crack the case.

Some Herschell Gordon Lewis gory funk, something I think I might have watched instead of going to church. First off, what a cool detective. He's got a cane and makes all kinds of inappropriate and cold puns about the murder victims. What's not to love about this hero? Well, except the acting of Frank Kress. I checked his filmography, and it's another example of a one-and-done, a performance that the guy knew he'd never topped so he never even bothered. The sickest thing about these proceedings is the comedic flavor which instead of giving this a healthy injection of very dark comedy only manage to make this seem like it's made by somebody who's slightly sick in the noggin. Look no further than the scene in which a throat-slitting isn't fatal but apparently a vicious spanking with a meat tenderizer is. Afterwards, the killer adds spices which in the hands of somebody a little more capable than Lewis's could possibly be funny. Here, after the extended shots of the bloody rump after other extended shots of mutilated thises and thats, it just seems sick, the wrong kind of twisted. Add relentless go-go music and prolonged scenes of nearly-attractive dancers disrobing rhythmically, and the experience of watching the movie just makes you want to take a long shower afterward. You know what you're getting into when popping in a Herschell Gordon Lewis flick though.

Bad Ronald

1974 weird kid movie

Rating: 4/20

Plot: The titular high school outcast accidentally kills a girl. His protective mother decides that his best bet is to hide in a secret room in the center of the house. Unfortunately, mother dies, leaving Ronald to take care of himself. Oh, snap! It's just like The Diary of Anne Frank except with more psychotic behavior and a funny old lady with a funny old hat instead of the Gestapo.

There's a fatal flaw in this movie. Well, probably a few fatal flaws. Ronald is hiding out in a bathroom turned into a secret hiding room. Ostensibly, he uses the toilet. Wouldn't flushing the toilet give him away? And how do these people not know that the layout of this house just doesn't make sense? Seems like they'd know there was a big bunch of wasted space right in the middle. The Brady family must be the dumbest people on earth.

This is a fairly entertaining bad made-for-television movie that apparently a lot of people have fond memories of. There's an awful child actress (Angela Hoffman) who we get to see murdered. There's also an awful old lady actress who might have given my favorite performance of the year, an almost entirely silent role as a nosy neighbor with an audacious hat. It takes a special talent to act this badly without getting any lines. Linda Watkins is her name, and this was her last acting job before she passed away a couple years later, possibly of shame. I should also mention the real estate guy who reminded me of that high-talker on that Seinfeld episode. Or maybe Winnie the Pooh. The guy playing the title character, the great Scott Jacoby, actually did play Peter in a version of The Diary of Anne Frank. His performance is bad, but even Henry Winkler would look like a terrible actor when given lines like this gem after he kills the little girl: "My God! Why aren't you fooling?" I'm pretty sure Jacoby performed his own stunts in this movie, and the bicycle accident that eventually leads to manslaughter might be the best stunt I've ever seen. There's also a great scene where Jacoby eats an apple using only the side of his mouth. I've never seen an apple being eaten that way before, but I'll never not eat an apple like that again. Seriously, it's pretty awesome. You know what else is pretty awesome? The mother buying Ronald a tool kit for his birthday. Of course, the plot requires a tool kit later on, but this kid just doesn't look like the type who would have any idea what to do with a tool kit. Something else I love about this movie: Several times, the soundtrack is nothing more than a person whistling. Badly. It's faint and bad enough that I wondered if it was accidental, like the sound guy was cleaning up and didn't realize that he was recording himself or something. I did think the scene where Ronald's hiding spot is discovered was really well done. The rest of the movie? Not so well done. It's still a bit of fun though.

Not to be confused with Bad Boy Bubby.

Urine Couch AM Movie Club: Psycho

1998 remake

Rating: 4/20 (Sam: 10/20)

Plot: Same as the first Psycho. But you should actually just do yourself a favor, Anne Heche, and see the original Psycho instead.

First off, I need somebody to explain to me why this exists. A shot-for-shot color (TV movie color) remake of a classic with an inferior cast? Who asked for this? Was it an experiment to see how you could put the same story and even identical imagery into the hands of a director who isn't nearly as good and end up with crap?

Had to watch it though, mostly because of the added fun of watching in there on the Urine Couch of the motel. Same reason I'd watch a Gus Van Sant remake of Vertigo if I had a job in a belfry, a Gus Van Sant remake of Lifeboat if I happened to be stranded on a raft with a Nazi, or a Gus Van Sant remake of Strangers on a Train if I operated a carousel at a cheap and filthy carnival. They're opportunities that you just can't pass up. Sam hung round for the duration, and Siskel got all pissy because he was in his seat.

The shot-for-shot remake idea is silly enough, but good ol' Gus didn't want to seem lazy and did add a few of his own personal touches, all extraneous and distracting. I did appreciate that the funky-looking falling-down-the-stairs-backwards scene was replicated with William H. Macy because that's just awesome Somebody should fall down the stairs like that in every movie. But the neon pink blood taking the place of Hitchcock's chocolate syrup? What's with that? The surreal random shots of naked people and sheep during Macy's death scene? Don't get me wrong--I can almost always be counted on the "pro" side when it comes to adding sheep to a movie, but I'm missing some symbolism or something here.

Here's some confusing trivia for you: Anne Heche, the Marion for this updated version, had never seen the original Psycho. OK, I can believe that. But the cinematographer, Christopher Doyle? I'm sorry, and maybe I'm being too hard on Mr. Doyle, but that just doesn't seem right. Think about it: a cinematographer who has never seen Hitchcock's Psycho? Isn't that something like being a roofer without ever having seen a roof or a baker without ever having tasted a cake? You don't have to answer that. It's a hypothetical question, and I'm right anyway.

Vince Vaughn? The only thing I can think of is that Vince Vaughn's uncle helped finance this movie.

You know what Gus Van Sant should do next? A shot-for-shot remake (in black and white) of The Cat in the Hat. Vince Vaughn can be in that. So can Anne Heche's nipples.

Seriously, didn't everybody involved in this have something better to do with his or her time? Gus could have made himself another gay movie. Anne Heche could have been doing some serious lesbianing. Vince Vaughn could have been training for a job as a roofer or a master baker. William H. Macy could have really been falling down a flight of stairs. Any project they decided to take on would have ended up being better than this--one of the most worthless motion pictures of all time.

Uncle Alfred does not approve one bit: