Oprah Movie Club Pick: Gamera vs. Guiron

1969 turtle superhero movie

Rating: 5/20

Plot: As rumors of unidentified sort-of hovering objects swirl, a Japanese kid and Beaver Cleaver stumble upon an abandoned space craft constructed from cheap cardboard and what appears to be pieces of discarded stoplights. The ship takes off with the lads inside, leaving a whiny homely girl behind. While she tries to convince Mom that the boys did indeed fly off in a spaceship, the boys have landed on the tenth planet in our solar system (sorry, I didn't catch the name) where they watch some goofy monsters fight and are forced to endure the annoying voices of the planet's only inhabitants--two gals wearing capes. But these girls have a plan for the boys, and Gamera (a friend to children apparently) is needed to save the day.

Kent picked a classic for our first Oprah Movie Club pick of the year. There's one other Gamera movie on the blog, the superior but not nearly as much goofy or fun Gamera the Invincible. This one begins with some gross effects that look like they could serve as the backdrop for a really cheap Pink Floyd cover band, probably one called The Vegetable Men, and then makes us wait a while before we see any monster-on-monster action. The worst dubbing I think I've ever heard is enough to keep things entertaining though. It's not just the poorly-chosen voices for the characters either. No, there's something terribly wrong with the pacing in the delivery of the lines, almost like that guy from the "Hooked on Phonics" commercial who could barely get through a story about a train is reading everything. The child actors are irritating, but there's an adult actor who actually makes them look like master thespians in some early scenes where they're together. His name is Kon Ohmura, and I'm not sure how he Konned his way onto a movie set, but he's in another Gamera movie and a few other things. His character here (Goonjob? Coonja?) is there for comic relief, just like the rest of the movie, and Ohmura's wonderfully Torgorific as he's threatening to shave the children's heads [Spoiler Alert: That's foreshadowing!] or even just standing around. That's right. Ohmura's the type of actor who can't just stand there during a scene without being a complete distraction. That's talent, folks.

Finally, we get a Gamera sighting when the kids leave the earth's atmosphere. A nearly endless Gamera/spaceship race brings the action hard. You also get a close-up of the inside of Gamera's mouth (Do you ever get to see a close-up of the inside of Godzilla's mouth?) as he, I'm pretty sure, attempts to make out with the ship. But the best action sequence is the superbly realistic scene on that tenth planet between a metallic birdy thing and what I thought was a monster with three-fourths of a dolphin for a head but what actually turned out to be a monster with a knife for a head. Didn't find out until later that the latter was the menacing titular bad monster in this movie. It's not much of a fight. Guiron repels a cheap-looking yellow beam and dismembers the metallic birdy before doing a Jabba the Hutt impression. It's pretty badass and kind-of gruesome for a monster movie intended for children. But honestly, Guiron is so dumb looking that it's hard to take any of it seriously. He could have been raping my grandmother, and it wouldn't have seemed all that bad.

When our hero gets to the planet (because he's a friend of children, and there are children who need savin'), he gets beat up pretty good by the villain. He even bleeds some green stuff. He recovers later on, of course, probably because the producers of Gamera vs. Guiron weren't finished demonstrating their complete disregard for all things logical. First, the heroic turtle is on his back at the bottom of a lake and can't get up no matter how much the boys yell his name or how much he struggles. But then a giant rock hits him in the chin, a development that inexplicably gives him strength. The two battle again (hence the "vs." in the title), Gamera repeatedly racking himself and nearly teabagging Guiron before doing some gymnastics and, as one of the boys explains, "dancing go-go." I love it when Japanese monsters dance. The good guy wins, there's an improbable spaceship repair and some of the worst blue screen work you're likely to see this week, and we eventually get to a happy ending. It's really only happy because we get to see Goobjohn again.

I enjoyed the cheapo set design of the alien planet. It looked like a muted sci-fi train set. The interiors were probably borrowed from another cheap Japanese science fiction movie, and I'm sure the only requirement the casting director was looking for with the child actors was that they were well behaved enough to not run around and accidentally knock down a cardboard wall or two, an act that would have likely cost the studio tens of dollars. As Guiron tries to get to the children and destroys the building their in, large rocks fall all around and even on the children. They don't seem to harm the boys though thankfully, and that makes just as much sense as rocks falling from the ceiling of a building that looks to be made entirely of metal.

It all ends with a nice message about how the world could be a nice place without traffic accidents, the same thing Al Gore's been preaching for years. He probably saw this one actually. I don't know about you, but I was slightly aroused because of the squeaky-voiced alien chicks, even when they were threatening to "eat their brains raw." And you've got to dig the cutesy music. What is it with Japanese children's movies and irritating and inane sing-a-longs?

Monster A Go Go

1965 travesty

Rating: 1/20

Plot: An astronaut is sent into space to do something. When he returns, his vessel crashes into a field and he somehow (blame radiation, I guess) transforms into a ten-foot tall monster. He go-goes around the field killing people.

I had a mass media class in high school, and one of our assignments was to make a movie. I storyboarded a clumsy avant-retard quasi-satirical story, gathered a few friends together, and made my masterpiece. Ok, I'm not bragging or anything, but I did get an A after turning in something that I believe is a slightly better movie than Monster A Go Go. Monster A Go Go might be the worst movie I have ever seen, and I can't believe it was made in the 1960s. It actually looks like it could have been made in the 1860s. It also looks like it might have been made by people who have never seen a movie before and aren't quite sure what they look like. The level of ineptitude reaches, heck maybe even surpasses, Manos: The Hands of Fate or The Beast of Yucca Flats levels. It's hard to see, it's hard to hear, and it's hard to even stay awake enough to figure out what the heck is going on. With a title like Monster A Go Go, I expected this to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek and corny, but it's about the stiffest, dullest thing I've ever seen. There's a ton of talking in this movie, from the boring conversations the scientists are having to the narrator who sounds like an old-timey newscaster, another thing it has in common with Yucca Flats. The monster is on the screen for less than a minute, and his mutilatin' is described after the fact by the narrator instead of being seen. That sure manages to suck any chance for drama or tension right out of this thing. The monster sort of looks like a ten-foot tall James Taylor at the beginning and a bald, flaky thing at the end. One thing it has in common with the movie I made in high school--Halfway through my production, every single member of my cast left or refused to participate any longer. I was forced to shoot the rest of the movie on my own without any actors. It wasn't easy. It seems that the same thing happened to the makers of Monster A Go Go as main characters either look completely different or drop entirely out of the movie altogether. The music was also terrible. If I had had a Casio in high school, I might have thought about scoring my movie despite not knowing anything about music. Well, I'm pretty sure that's what they did for this movie, too. It sounds like a chicken playing instruments at times. This doesn't have any of the magic of Manos: The Hands of Fate, so I can't recommend it. The best thing about the movie is its title, and when that title is Monster A Go Go, you know know you're in trouble.

Future War

1997 movie that Claude Van Daame apparently turned down

Rating: 3/20

Plot: Evil beings borrow a few dinosaurs from earth's past and a few humans from earth's future to use as "trackers" and slaves. One of the slaves manages to escape and somehow ends up in 1990's America. As dinosaur heads and cyborgs chase him, he gets help from a nun. No kidding.

Another day, another terrible movie. The best part of this one is an (unintentional?) pun. The evil alien things are referred to as "handlers" several times during the movie, but the reason they have to kidnap earthlings to use as slaves is because they lack hands. Handlers lacking hands? Oh, the irony! That does bring up a question though. How did they build spaceships or time machines or whatever to come to earth for dinosaurs and people? And the cyborgs who chase him have hands. When were they created? That might be a plot hole. Regardless, if the best thing about your movie is a pun, you know you're in trouble. The first twenty minutes of so of Future Wars is the characters slowly walking through what I believe is the director's basement. It's a long, slow build-up to what can only be described as a special effects extravaganza--dinosaur PUPPETS! That's right--PUPPETS! They're intimidating puppets though, puppets that might scare the average three year old. Unfortunately, it limits what the dinosaurs can do in the movie. They can open their mouths and growl. They can lunge toward the camera. They can be held really close to the camera with the actors in the background so that they appear much larger than they actually are. Ummm. . .I guess that's about all they can do. Another effect used shows dinosaur and cyborg perspectives, an infrared deal for the former and this ugly robot visual thing for the latter. It's pretty distracting. The star is Daniel Bernhardt who, as the box above proudly proclaims, went on to do bigger and better things. I don't know who Agent Johnson even is from the Matrix sequels. Maybe Daniel Bernhardt is the reason why the last two Matrix movies sucked so much. Was he responsible for bringing down the franchise? He certainly doesn't help Future Wars very much. Here, he's a sort of Van Daame light. He roundhouse kicks frequently, screams at bums, runs in a way that would make Jimmy Stewart call him awkward, and has this stumbling way of talking (ostensibly because he doesn't know English although he picks it up in a couple hours) that makes the awful dialogue seem awfuller. Another thing I noticed: Following the 20 or so minutes of wandering around the director's basement, it flashes back to the runaway fleeing through a labyrinth of empty cardboard boxes as a dinosaur and a cyborg chase him. The cardboard boxes aren't supposed to be anything else. It's just a maze of empty cardboard boxes. It's shockingly cheap looking. But then there's a second fight scene in a maze of cardboard boxes and a third scene where cardboard boxes feature prominently. It really makes you start to wonder. I'm not sure what I started to wonder, but I wondered something.

Laserblast

1978 junk drawer science fiction

Rating: 4/20

Plot: Space turtles battle some guy on earth. They kill him and fly off to their turtle planet, but they leave his death ray (aka Laserblaster) behind. Enter Billy Duncan, a guy with a van. Billy's been bullied, has been told by his girlfriend's dad to stay away, and has the police harrassing him. He stumbles upon the alien weapon while strolling in the desert, and laserblasting ensues. However, the crystal that makes this weapon function unfortunately also starts to mutate him into a fanged, twitching zombie mutant. And the turtles are coming back for their gun! Oh, snap!

First, the good: the space turtles are stop-animated with these squiggly little baby voices, and they're pretty cool. The rest of this movie is bad and ugly. There's some miscasting. The lead isn't the bullied type, and one of the bullies is your typical nerd which makes that whole subplot completely implausible. Billy's girlfriend's dad is crazy in a very strange, almost intense way that seems unnatural. Roddy McDowall is also in this. He must have lost a bet as he looks completely out of place as a doctor. His name is also mispelled in the closing credits. The movie is so clumsily paced with some scenes finishing and then lingering for a few seconds, almost as if the director had yelled, "Cut!" and nobody could figure out how to turn off the camera. Aside from the aliens, the special effects are laughable. Most of the film's budget must have been spent on explosions. Lots of things, mostly cars, explode in this movie, and each explosion is shown from four camera angles. The filmmakers sure were proud of their explosions! There's a lot of dopeyness in Laserblast that makes it worth the time. Watching the protagonist twitch around as he looks for things to blow up is fun. Actually, the most glorious part of the entire movie might be when he finds the gun and runs around the desert pretending to shoot it while making "Pow pow pow" sounds like he's six years old. Great stuff. At one point, he blows up a pinball machine and a mailbox for no reason, and later he shoots at a billboard that says nothing but "Star Wars." A guy named Michael Bryar plays a hippie guy who picks Billy up. Wasted, he also twitches around, sort of like a cross between Torgo and Michael J. Fox. I hoped I could see other Michael Bryar movies, but this is his only one. It's almost like he said to himself, "You know. I pretty much hit perfection with my role as 'Hippie Guy Who Picks Up Hitchhiker,' and I want to go out on top!" and then retired a legend. Good for him, but the world was robbed. Another note: This is one of those B-movies without any extras at all. Every person on the screen is an actual character which makes it look like they live in a town with six people. It's weird.

Hobgoblins

1988 pile of Gremlin crap

Rating: 2/20

Plot: An old man houses mischievous and deadly space hobgoblins in an (unlocked) vault behind two (unlocked) gates on a studio backlot. Kevin, a new security guard, accidentally unleashes them into the night. This is apparently a problem as they enjoy killing people by either distracting them by making their fantasies come true and killing them or by jumping into their hands and allowing themselves to be shaken violently. Kevin and his idiotic friends have to stop them!

I was hoping this would be a sequel to Troll 2, but while it sucks in a similarily delightful way, it's an entirely different story with entirely different monsters. And oh, those monsters! Perpetually grinning, sneaky little Gremlin-esque bastards! There are four of them used in the movie although it seems like a lot more than that die. I think two of them are puppets because their mouths can move up and down. The others are just stuffed things that are thrown at the actors. Their features are static and their appendages don't move at all. It's not so much a special effect as it is a special ed. effect. When this movie attempts horror, it fails miserably. When this movie goes for laughs, it fails even worse. Unless, of course, the whole thing is meant to be a comedy; then, it's a laugh goldmine! It's actually too bad not to be tongue-in-cheek, I suspect, or at least the type of thing where they started out making a legitimate horror movie but decided later they'd better try something else. The most amazing thing I can say about the actors in this is that they don't giggle uncontrollably while being attacked by stuffed animals. The characters, all brazenly promiscuous teenagers, look like the 1980s threw up on them, and nothing they do makes any sense. And I'm not just talking about when the hobgoblins have taken over their minds and forced them to hook up with phone sex operators or strip tease at a place called Club Scum. Average activities don't in any way resemble the average activities of any teenager who has ever lived. Seems like somebody involved with the production of Hobgoblins should have been smart enough to say, "Wait a second, Rick Sloane. Teenagers don't really dance in their living rooms like this. Especially for this long." One of the most awkward scenes involves a macho fight with garden tools. The fight goes on just long enough to, for whatever reason, make me feel uncomfortable. "Wait a second, Rick Sloane. Teenagers don't fight with hoes and rakes in their front yard. Especially for this long." Then, Kevin's girlfriend yells at him for being such a wimp while the winner of the duel and his girlfriend have intercourse in a van parked in the background. It's more a work of art than a movie scene. The image that will stick with me forever, however, is the first appearance of the title creatures after they have stolen a golf cart and are driving away. It's right up there with other iconic movie images--King Kong atop the Empire State Building, those two idiots standing on bow of Titanic with outstretched arms, E.T. and that dumb kid jumping over the moon on the bicycle, The Shining's "Here's Johnny" scene. The end of this movie is particularily bewildering as wimpy Kevin, who you suspect all along will do something heroic, ends up doing nothing at all. The shocking twists don't even end there. There's also a character who pops back into the movie despite being completely engulfed in flames with no hope of being saved at Club Scum. The resolution to the Hobgoblin problem appears to be the result of the screenwriter getting bored with his own script and just deciding to end the thing. Lots of laughs in this one.

First Spaceship on Venus

1960 science fiction movie

Rating: 14/20

Plot: Some space taffy is found at an excavation site, and following examination, it's decided that the space taffy actually contains a message from the planet Venus. A rocket ship with an international crew is sent to figure out what the Venusians want. On the way, the crew discovers that the message is actually all about plans to invade our planet.

I really sort of liked this movie. Sure, it's choppy and has terrible acting. Sure, it is overly verbose, and, to make that verbosity worse, has really poorly written dialogue. But there's an artistic quality to this cheap science fiction movie that makes it all worth it. There's great imaginative set design with some odd special effects that give this some charm. Popcorn meteor showers, great moogy sound effects, superimposed drifting fog, syrupy lava flows, hopping spidery Venus inhabitants. Venus has a really nice texture, gnarled and weather-beaten and kinda Seussian, and the designs for the space vehicles are pretty good. There are some space craft details that push this ahead of the typical flat B-movie science fiction ships. There's also a funky little chess-playing robot that rolls around like a tank and occasionally mumbles something about the weather. I even liked the bizarre wardrobe choices--uniforms with seemingly random letters on them, odd spacesuits that looked almost like chipmunk costumes, rubbery planet-exploration suits. And even though it's a little too talky, there are some nice themes about persevering through tragedy and fear and possibly even about the importance of Earthlings uniting in order to overcome the problems we face. Good 50's sci-fi drama!

Werewolf

1996 movie

Rating: 3/20

Plot: Some archaeologists digging around in the desert sands of Arizona discover an odd half-man/half-something-else skeleton. Immediately, they start brawling. One of the men scrapes his leg on the skull of their discovery, and while recuperating in the hospital, he transforms into a werewolf. Later, other characters who already sort of look like werewolves being to show signs of lycanthropy. An evil archaeologist might be responsible.


False advertising! I was so ready to watch Joe Estevez in another award-worthy performance, but he only a minor character in the first quarter of the movie. Oh well. This still qualifies as a really good bad movie. I was really confused by the nationalities of some of these people. What I initially thought was just extremely awkward, stilted acting turned out to be the result of casting the inhabitants of some unidentifiable foreign land, most likely a land where emoting or facial expressions have been outlawed. The woman archaeologist seems either bored out of her mind or confused throughout the movie, and, like Jimmy Stewart or Vincent Price, the simplest tasks seem difficult for her to pull off in a way that makes her look like a normal person. The evil archaeologist not only has a thick accent but also has this strange intensity that makes nearly everything he says laughable. My favorite character is a Santa Claus militia man who gets all the best lines and nearly steals the movie. The wolfman special effects range from mildly humorous to uproariously abysmal. The wolves sometimes look like tiny Sasquatch, sometimes like bears, and sometimes like dollar store Halloween masks fashioned into a kind of filthy puppet. There's also a really weird soundtrack, odd cello music that never really seems to fit right. It's all awfully silly stuff. Just don't watch it expecting to see a lot of Joe Estevez.

The Mad Monster

1942 mad scientist/monster movie

Rating: 5/20

Plot: A wacky scientist, ticked off at the rest of the scientific community for scoffing at his ideas, finds a way to turn a mild-mannered, extremely dopey handyman into a bloodthirsty, sort of dopey wolf man.

I was thinking that George Zucco made a pretty good mad scientist, so I looked him up. He acted in 98 movies from '31 to '51. In 20 of those movies, he played a character named Dr. _____, an average of one doctor role per year. In a handful of others, he played a professor. He played 8 different doctors from 1941-43. That's almost three doctors a year! Anyway, his acting in The Mad Monster wasn't any good, but it was still probably the best thing about the movie. This is a frequently dull B-movie with a derivative plot and goofy dialogue. If you pay attention and generally enjoy this sort of thing, you might be entertained by some really poor lighting and some repetitious set use. The monster's inconsistent coiffure is also pretty fun. The monster itself is actually less entertaining than the dopey gardener alter-ego who is just unbelievably dumb. I mean, I can suspend disbelief and accept that a guy's been turned into a wolf man unleashed to do an evil mad scientist's bidding, but I couldn't believe a person could be as dumb as this gardener. Too bad Universal's The Wolf Man came out in 1941; otherwise, this could have been the definitive wolf man movie.

Final Justice

1985 action-packed crime drama

Rating: 4/20

Plot: Geronimo is a Texas lawman who runs into a pair of brothers involved with the Italian mafia. After they shoot down his partner, he chases them over the border into Mexico, shoots one, and arrests the other. Then, while escorting the brother back to Italy, he loses him in Malta and breaks all kinds of rules to capture him again.

This embarrassing Dirty Harry clone is, according to user ratings on imdb.com, the 19th worst movie ever made. It's probably not that bad. Joe Don Baker plays the cool, anti-heroic Geronimo, completing his Clint impression with some squinting and his own repeated "Do you feel lucky?" catchphrase--"You think you can take me? Go ahead on. It's your move." I was surprised to find out that this movie was only a pointlessly repetitious hour an a half because it seemed to be at least a pointlessly repetitious three hours. Geronimo is a very unlikable hero, and Joe Don Baker has absolutely no charisma. Not much to latch onto there. The villains aren't even interesting. By the middle of this movie, you really don't care who wins the struggle although you probably secretly wish they will all somehow die to prevent a sequel from being made. Really awful, but there are some moments that are dumb enough to make you laugh.

Killers from Space

1954 B-movie

Rating: 3/20

Plot: Scientist Martin is killed in an airplane accident while surveying a nuclear testing site. Shockingly, he arrives back at the base completely unharmed except for an L-shaped scar on his chest. He's given a lie detector test and tells a story about bug-eyed aliens who never blink and mutant insects and lizards that the killers from space will use to take over the world. Nobody believes him.

1950's B-movie. Aliens. Radiation. Giants. Typical stuff. This one's got a great title though! Laughably goofy no-budget stuff here with Peter Graves apparently under the impression that he's playing a statue. The aliens are really cool, all black with those gigantic eyes. A scene where Graves tries to escape from a cave and keeps running into the giant lizards, a scene which seems to last for fifteen minutes, is also great in one of those ways where you're thinking, "These special effects are terrible," followed by, "My God! This scene's been going on for fifteen minutes! What the hell? Didn't they already show that lizard twice?" followed by, "This is the greatest thing I've ever seen!" Those lizards and goo-goo-googily-eyed extra terrestrials are only in the movie for a brief middle portion of the movie; the rest of the film does drag a bit. Lame dialogue, mumbo-jumbo B-movie science, and terrible cinematography where parts are too dark to even tell what's going on and actor's faces are shown in disturbing close-ups for no apparent reason. This was a Mystery Science deal which I like because it tricks me into thinking I have friends to watch the movie with.