Hillbillys in a Haunted House

1967 horror comedy country western musical

Rating: 3/20

Plot: The titular hillbillys [sic] have car problems on the way to something called a jamboree and have to stay the night in the titular haunted house. Songs are performed. Spies and a gorilla harsh their mellow.

So in the first shot, they're traveling in Boss Hogg's car with slightly more ornamentation, and they're singing a song about being "on [our] way to Nashville, Tennessee." I should have taken it as a warning, ejected the dvd, and hurled it at a chicken. If you like bland old-timey country and western music, you're in for a treat. There's really about 30 minutes of movie here, and the rest of it consists of musical performances. In fact, the final 20 minutes of the movie is the jamboree, so it's just a series of songs that have nothing to do with the haunted house. You get to hear Ferlin Husky, the guy who plays Woody, sing "Livin' in a Trance," a song which sounds like it was recorded in a cave or something but is at least more awkward than it is terrible. Some random people then show up to tell the hillbillys [sic] that they never come near the house even though they are standing inside the house while saying that, and they perform a couple impromptu songs because the movie's plot wasn't quite ready to get started. They do "The Cat Came Back" which features two gitfiddles, a couple guys just standing around, invisible drums, and a guy hitting a small shovel with a brush before complying with the woman's request for a love song, a song that has her twitching in a way that made me wonder if she was reaching orgasm. That gal--Boots, played by a very fetching Joi Lansing--gets her own random song later during a fantasy dream sequence. "Gowns, Gowns, Beautiful Gowns" might be the most pointless things I've ever seen. Later, a character watches television, and Merle Haggard gets a song. There are probably over 15 songs in this motherfucker! And if you don't like country and western music or don't enjoy laughing at terrible film-making, there's nothing for you to see here. I've seen this on a couple "Worst Movie Ever" lists, and it probably deserves to be in consideration. It's very poorly written. I believe this chunk of dialogue is supposed to be humorous:

Woody: Where are we?
Gas station guy: Sleepy Junction.
Woody: Sleepy Junction.
Boots: Where are we?
Woody: Sleepy Junction.
Boots: Oh.
Jeepers: Hey, Woody, we're in Sleepy Junction.

Jeepers is an actual name of a hillbilly, and he's played by Don Bowman who was the host of some country music countdown show. His only other acting credit is the movie this is apparently a sequel for--The Las Vegas Hillbillys. He plays "Don Bowman" in that though, and not Jeepers. As Jeepers, he gives a performance that manages to still seem like one of the worst performances ever even though the movie is a complete disaster anyway. That first shot with the hillbillys [sic] singing in the car? He isn't singing, merely sitting in the back in what seems to be an illegal way. And he can't even get "just sitting there" right! He looks bored. That's actually the best he gets in this movie, too. Most of the time, he looks like he's got ADD or is some kind of tweaker. He spends most of the movie twitching and squinting, but he does get a moment to shine when he starts yelping about seeing a "weirdwolf" in the closet. Oh, and he does get his own song during the jamboree--"Wrong House Last Night" and it is a thing of beauty, one of those things that has to be heard to be believed. Bowman can't even sit still during a fifteen or so minute scene where he just needs to watch television. That, by the way, is one of those "What the hell?" moments as the country music he's watching is interrupted by the faces of Carradine, Chaney Jr., Rathbone, and Ho--the four bad guys. Why their faces start appearing on the television screen to stare at Jeepers is beyond me. Speaking of those guys. You would probably never expect Lon Chaney Jr. to be any good, and he isn't. Neither is Basil Rathbone, though he's the best of the bunch. John Carradine might be the worst of them all, but somebody named Linda Ho isn't far behind. Her acting consists of reading lines phonetically. I did like this conversation:

Woody: We're entertainers.
Ho: What kind of entertaining do you do?
Woody: I sing and pick a guitar.
Ho: How nice. (With this absolutely disgusted look on her face that I'm not sure was supposed to be there.)

The best performance is by George Barrows as Aniatole the monkey. John Carradine's character really hated that gorilla. It was never actually explained why these spies traveled with a gorilla, but I've never been a spy and don't know much about how these people operate. I guess having a gorilla around would make perfect sense. Anyway, George Barrows is the guy who plays one of my favorite movie monsters of all time--Ro-Man in The Robot Monster. Ro-Man is a gorilla suit from the next down and a deep sea diver's helmet for a head. Barrows has one of those acting careers I love looking at. He acted in 108 titles, and he played 16 gorillas. At least! Some of his roles were just names, and those might be gorillas, too. He also played Monstro in a movie and Slouchy McGoo in the Adventures of Superman television series. And he played "henchman" a lot. Barrows and his suit (I'm going to go ahead and assume he owned his own gorilla suit) are actually the best special effect in the movie. Some wobbling skeletons, bats on strings, and the "weirdwolf" mask are nothing short of embarrassing. There are also some lightning effects in a night sky when the action is clearly taking place in daylight and a couple visible boom mics, but if you have problems with that, you're nitpicking. I almost feel bad criticizing something that I'm sure was made by very nice people for very nice families to sit around and enjoy, but it's one of those works of art where everything just came together so imperfectly to make something so magical and deserves to be seen by connoisseurs of crappy movies, even those who don't like gorillas or country and western music.

True Legend

2010 martial arts movie

Rating: 13/20

Plot: A war hero retires to start a family. His pissy adopted brother disrupts that, kills their father, and steals his son. With the help of a pair of jovial but mean gods, Su has to train to meet his brother again and save his family.

The line "You killed my father!" isn't in this, but it might as well be. I wish I would have started keeping track a long time ago of kung-fu movies where somebody gets mad at somebody else for killing his father.

I have trouble deciding whether I like this new martial arts movies. On the one hand, this is directed by Woo-ping Yuen, so you might guess (correctly) that the fight choreography is stunning. The story and a lot of the special effects have some issues, however. You almost have to look at this in three parts. The first part is standard stuff and suffers a bit from a whole bunch of those big swoopy majestic CGI effect moves complete with those impressive whoosh sounds to show sweeping landscapes or allow the camera to fly over the top of a giant battle. What was the first movie to use these because I'd like to have a word with it. There are a lot of effects in this first battle scene; still, it's a thrill, magically fast and bloody. And you get to see a guy with horns on his hat kill a pot of water. We skip ahead to the family drama and a brother with armor sewn into his skin who can make his veins turn a dark gray color. The movie's main conflict begins, and our protagonist and wife are thrown into some raging rapids where they disappear in a very weird way with some of the fakest CGI you'll ever see. Maybe it suffered from high-definition, but the effects just looked strange to me. And there was an over-dependence on them. CGI-birds? Why? Anyway, the bulk of this movie is what I'm calling the second part, where we meet some mystical characters who are either hallucinations or deities. The second sighting of those two guys, almost a wacky circus balancing act, is deliriously awesome, and the training sequences where the hero is throwing down with them are pretty great. And it builds to the big showdown where the movie should have probably ended. However, there's tragedy, and a new ending is required so we have a third part featuring wrestlers and David Carradine. I'm not going to complain about David Carradine ever, but this stuff with his wrestling thugs seems anticlimactic after the brother-on-brother action has completed. And one of the wrestlers, a guy with an eyepatch, has a distracting giant hole in the crotch of his pants. I assume that was not a CGI-hole, but it might have been. There's also a scene where David Carradine Barry-Bonds one of his wrestlers which is just dopey. This third part does showcase the drunken boxing beautifully and has an exhilarating sequence in a bar where a fight between a pair of inebriated guys transforms into a breakdance showdown that would put Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo to shame. But since our main story is done, it's all superfluous, isn't it? I liked Wenzhuo Zhao as the lead, especially when he's bearded and disheveled. He doesn't have a ton of charisma, but he was playing a badly beaten character for most of this and charisma probably wouldn't have been appropriate. I'd like to see more of him though. And the God of Wushu character was played by Jay Chou who is Kato in whatever green superhero movie has Kato in it. Either that or he's Kato in an O.J. Simpson biopic.

Kent recommended this. I wanted to like it better.

Revenge of the Nerds

1984 comedy

Rating: 12/20

Plot: Some nerds go to college. They're thrown out of their dorm room when the jocks burn their fraternity house down and team together to form their own fraternity. The jocks pick on them.

Not only did I start watching this movie--I finished it. Afterward, I felt more depressed than I've ever felt before. My will-to-live was at an all-time low. I made a mental list of well over one-thousand things that I could have done with the time it took me to watch Revenge of the Nerds. I wept uncontrollably for another ninety minutes.

For me, this is the typical 80's comedy, and that is not a good thing. I did catch the insult "douchebag" in there somewhere. I'd questioned its use in Wet Hot American Summer which was supposed to take place in '81. I wonder if Nerds is the first movie with a "douchebag" reference. It should be noted that the character (Booger, of course) did not call another character a douchebag; he just used it in an insult. The only chuckle this got from me was the following conversation:

"See that man over there? We arrested him for mopery."
"What's mopery?"
"Mopery is exposing yourself to a blind person."

And thinking about how that made me chuckle has depressed me again. So does thinking about the musical number where Poindexter plays an electric violin. I can't decide if that's the greatest thing I've ever seen or the worst thing I've ever seen.

Trivia: Booger has a real name in the movie--Dudley Dawson. Curtis Armstrong is one of the most underrated actors of all time, by the way.

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.

Thieves Like Us

1974 crime movie

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Bowie, Chicamaw, and T-Dub escape from prison and team up to become a bank-robbing team. While hiding out in a gas station, young Bowie falls for the owner's daughter who may or may not be Popeye's girlfriend. I'll have to check the timeline to verify that one. The life of crime puts a strain on their relationship.

In the last week, I've seen both Keith and David Carradine without shirts, both at the height of their pectoral powers. With a little research, I can probably see Robert Carradine's nipples, too, and complete what might be the first ever Carradine Nipple Trifecta. It'll be a first for this blog anyway.

Also, I got the opportunity to see Shelley Duvall naked. If I remember correctly (this could just be a delusion or fantasy on my part), she's also naked in Altman's 3 Women. I told my brother, a guy who I remember describing Shelley Duvall as "hot," and he emailed, "What was it like?" It's actually exactly like you'd imagine it to be.

This is one of those less-busy Altman movies with a focus on a lot less characters. Really, it's a focus on two naive souls and this impossible little romance that develops in the middle of this bank-robbing crime spree. It's a quiet, reflective movie, and the cinematography perfectly captures this long-gone Great Depression-era Americana. It's gorgeous and it's dusty, and it's got one of the things I really like about Altman--that ability to show this quiet little moment and make it feel like it's an important memory that came right from your own head. Also contributing to the period flavor is a lack of movie soundtrack. With this, you get all crackly diegetic music, mostly from radio seriels. Add some creaky rocking chairs and footsteps on a wooden floor and you've got a setting that is as quiet as the 1930s in the middle of all that dust. Even the robbery scenes, all but one at least, are quiet. Most of them are shot in a way so that the action can't even be seen. I think it's Altman trying to be funny. Altman's wry humor is all over this otherwise serious crime story actually. It's seen in the ineptitude of the titular thieves, especially during a "drawing straws" scene that I thought was hilarious but didn't laugh at. I was also amused at a robbing practice scene with a kid in blackface playing a porter. Carradine is good as this naive kid in way over his head, and the other two-thirds of the robbing trio--John Schuck and Burt Remsen--are perfectly cast. And I really do like Shelley Duvall who I always think is underrated as an actress.