Badmovies.org Forum

Hi; I'm in Toronto and lived in Montreal for a couple of years, and with what French I knew, got myself seriously confused over things I saw on TV.  I'm trying to figure out a film I saw bits of; I can't even be sure if it was French or dubbed into French.  The name might have been something like "13 and a half murders".  All I remember are a bunch of people holed up in some hospital-like building getting killed off, one after another.  Each time someone died, the "murder tally" number would be superimposed on the screen briefly.  At one point, someone swats a fly, and the tally goes up by one-half.

Watching English films dubbed into French on TV was a strange experience in Montreal; made even more surreal by the fact that almost everything I saw was a two-star film and had Gene Hackman in it.  It became a game, of sorts.  The film would come on TV, and I'd pull out the movie guide, look up Gene Hackman's name, and try to figure out what film it was, because they inevitably changed the title to something completely different.  Like "The Package" which was renamed to "Operation Twilight"(?) based on some minor lines of dialogue near the beginning.  Actually, the worst translation I saw was for "Ladyhawke", which became "La femme de la nuit" - the lady of the night.

I also had a knack for catching the last 40 minutes of... I forget the names; the Star Trek movies where Spock is resurrected and the one where they're trying to save the whales.  Once you see those movies in another language, you realize how much you've gotten used to the voices in English; once they're gone, man, you *really* start to look at the, um, "acting".

Let's see, what else did I want to rant about... oh yeah, the forum thread about one's first bad movies.  I personally can't remember with any specific clarity.  I remember being stuck on a plane flight in 1980 where the movie was "Meteor".  Just what a 7-year-old needs to see: huge cataclysms and Peter Ustinov covered in sewage.  Other than that movie, I have vague recollections of "Zontar: The Thing from Venus".  By 1990 I was looking at the TV schedule and setting the VCR to tape anything that looked remotely stupid, and I got to watch "Kingdom of the Spiders", "Santa Claus vs the Martians", "The Flying Saucer", and "Werewolf of Washington".  And my father took me to see "The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T." - he'd actually watched in in a theater when he was a kid!  Anyway, I'm no B-movie buff, but it's an occasional pleasure I enjoy exploring to this day.

That first movie you were talking about with the murder tally is "Student Bodies"

Pretty good flick if I do say so myself

-Dan