Badmovies.org Forum

I had a personal movie fest on Saturday ... to catch up on some recent purchases I hadn't yet viewed. I've been a little lost since my favorite video store closed, but I've been trying to cope. My new source is nothing like my old, but hey ... at least there's always E-Bay.

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The Outing: Cheap 80's flick set in a museum, with a plot kinda like Wishmaster only suckier. Some spoiled, precocious teenybopper is drawn to an ancient lamp that houses an evil Djinn (genie). The film starts to get interesting by way of a few 'killer snakes in a bathtub' scenes, then a rape and impaling. Some guy gets killed by a ceiling fan, too. But it all ends flat. Why did so many cheap 80's flicks have such lame endings? Ever see Roberta Findley's 'Blood Sisters?' 'The Outing's' ending reminded me of that.

Haunting of Morella: This Jim Wynorski flick would have been heaps better ... if only it were Italian. Maybe even Hammer. It feels like about a hundred different 60's Italian/Hammer flicks all rolled into one ... only with no style, lots of obvious body doubles, and lousy fake British accents.

Logan's Run: My boyfriend picked this up. I hadn't seen it in ages. It's close to what I remember ... a very pastel future that's fun for an hour, but keeps going long after the story is exhausted. Seriously, it should have ended when they kill the other runner in the library. Tons of weird continuity errors, too. Anyhow, the greatest moment for me was seeing Michelle Stacy play a dirt-covered little girl who's fending for herself. Stacy also played a dirt-covered little girl fending for herself in William Girdler's 'Day of the Animals'. (which was shot about seven months after Logan's Run).

Dr. Phibes Rises Again: Another gem I hadn't seen in a while, but I found a copy used and cheap. They don't make 'em like Phibes anymore. I've seen the first Phibes a zillion times. I've seen the sequel maybe three times. I'm glad I own it now. Maybe it's because I haven't run it into the ground yet, but I might like the sequel better than the original. It's just funnier.

Necromania: My boyfriend bought this for me for Valentine's Day from Something Weird, along with the outtakes from 'Take It Out In Trade.' Actually, he bought them for me as Christmas presents back in October, but SW took forever to ship. Anyhow, it was a double dose of Ed Wood during his REALLY BAD days. Both are interesting as Wood artifacts, though. There's even a Bela reference in Necro. They're both soft-core porn flicks, with lots of those famed furry ... uh, "bedsheets", that were popular in the 70's.  

Claws: I tried to give this another shot. This was a flick I picked up for Girdler purposes many months ago. Rumor had it that Claws started as an AIP production, but I'm beginning to believe that this film had a different genesis. Regardless, this was actually titled 'Grizzly 2' in a number of countries, so it's not unlike Girdler's 'Grizzly.'  An Alaskan mountain man is attacked by a supernaturally-sadistic grizzly bear, then after many years of being haunted by the attack, he is again faced with the bear's bloody wrath.  If the pacing weren't so terrible, the lame special effects would be quite funny. And the finale with the 'flailing bear on fire sailing down a steep cliff' was a nice touch. It just takes way too long to get to the end.

Is this the Logan's Run with Peter Ustinov as the Last Old Guy on Earth at the very end?  They did a made-for-TV one, a theatrical one, and a 2-part episode for the TV SHOW that ran as a feature in Canada, like the Battlestar Galactica 2-part opening did.
I wonder about all those lame endings too.  I speculate that a shared concept of the time was that if you didn't resolve the ending well, then it supposedly created a sense of "timelessness" at the end, eg:  That the story was still "going on out there" somewhere.  Also, this was a time of sequel-mania, wherein everyone wanted to have a film franchise -- an unresolved, sucky ending opened the possibility for a part 2 through 8.

Logan's Run the flick is what I saw on Saturday. I have very VERY hazy memories of the TV show.

And in Findlay's Blood Sisters, the sucky ending just reinforced the idea that you just  wasted 90 minutes watching rehashed slasher crap. There was no room for a sequel, which actually made for a happy ending.