Badmovies.org Forum

My OCD always makes me feel weird about reviewing a movie I didn't like in the "Recent Viewings" thread in the "Good Movies" section, so let's try this out and see how it goes...

BLADE TRINITY (2004):
Second (partial) viewing of something Madame 10rda started watching on her own, got about 4/5ths of the way through, then tapped out on before the end. I won't attempt a score for this one as I didn't endure the whole thing either... but I remember lukewarm feelings about this one from my initial viewing (at least it wasn't as bad as the first BLADE!)  and revisiting (some of) it now, I find it both better and worse than I remembered. For one thing, I remembered this primarily as a Ryan Reynolds movie (and it is) but had somehow forgotten the other selling points of the ensemble.

From a 2023 perspective, I might ask: If one was making a movie where Ryan Reynolds, Patton Oswalt, and Natasha Lyonne are vampire hunters facing off against an outrageously camp Parker Posey....... what else really would you need? In no reality would the answer be "Wesley Snipes sleepwalking through a nominally central role", but such is the logic behind BLADE: TRINITY.......  to be accurate, Oswalt and Lyonne get precious little to do and Reynolds is really just doing all the same shtick he always does (though it was still relatively novel 19 years ago). But for the record, Posey is entirely magnificent, particularly in the scene where she tortures Reynolds and belittles his manhood. Although Count Dracula is technically the Big Bad, he's about as non-essential as Snipes - his lieutenant baddy Posey is the main attraction.

It's unfortunate that Blade was always the weakest link in the BLADE trilogy... Snipes never seemed interested in the role, even before he was fending off new co-star Reynolds for the spotlight. Even here he never breaks a sweat or changes his expression, spitting out one tired cliche after another. At one point in TRINITY, he glances at an actual issue of the 70s comic classic "Tomb Of Dracula" (where Blade originated) and then tosses it aside w/ disinterest... which is entirely reflective of the attitude of the trilogy's producers and writers about its source material.  :bluesad: On the page, Blade was never an emotionless Terminatoralike... he was quite explicitly a groovy (sometimes laconic) yet very human hero ala John Shaft. He hated vampires, but he also cared about his friends and colleagues, and (natch) loved the ladies. The movies missed a great bet in the 90s by enlisting an Andre Braugher instead of the too-cool-for-school Snipes, and I've long feared that any forthcoming Mahershala Ali reboot will just be Wesley Snipes 2.0.  :hatred:    DANIEL KALUUYA OR BUST!!!

Honestly, the first BLADE was a pretty cool movie, and Snipes did a good job portraying the character, but mostly because the film was quite grim and gothic. The sequels landed on cheesy territory, so his serious acting became a detriment. Wesley Snipes cared so little about the third part that in a particular scene he refused to open his eyes as he was supposed to, and they had to do it with CGI. Really bad CGI.

https://youtu.be/Zd5HMHmbwBg?feature=shared

couple of days ago I turned off 3 movies in a row. they went in the player, and got ejected with malice.

LETHAL JUSTICE (1995)
murky uninvolving amateurish no budget-sploitation trash

MY LITTLE EYE (2007)
awful attempt at trendy reality tv based slasher. soul sappingly pathetic

SECOND IN COMMAND (2006)
Totally anonymous. Jean Claude Van Bland. bleh.


Love movies, me!

Personal mileage may always vary of course, and I'm glad someone likes the first BLADE.  :smile: I was in LA doing P.A. or rather peon work about a year or so ahead of the first one's release, and a copy of the screenplay crossed my path....... read it and, while I can't claim it's great literature, there were strong enough bones that I could imagine how it would play w/ a good director and great actors. Stephen Norrington, alas, is not a particularly good director. I've said my peace about Snipes, so I'll just add that, in the screenplay, Whistler is a killer role. Kris Kristofferson....... not even an actor, in my book, let alone a great one. And in "Tomb of Dracula", Deacon Frost is a terrifying ancient creep ala Christopher Walken. Whoever glanced at the dramatis personae and said, "Hmm... Stephen Dorff!" needed an immediate one-way ticket out of the casting business.

It does have Traci Lords and Donal Logue in bit roles, so that's something. I tell you, if you took every good supporting actor from all 3 BLADE movies and cast them in one movie w/o Wesley Snipes....... you'd have a pretty well-acted movie!

I believe it was released in 2002. Reminds me of my time at another horror forum. Everybody was drooling over My Little Eye, like it was the horror discovery of the century.
I didn't hate it, but it wasn't a huge fave either. Loved the snow setting though.

If anything, it was at least better than Halloween: Resurrection (2002) which had the same reality show concept.

I spent too much money on a European DVD of MY LITTLE EYE because of all the '02/'03-era buzz, years before it was released here. (Maybe it was released in States in '07...) I dunno what I paid, but if it was more than $5 (it probably was), I paid too much. I didn't hate it either but its quality is definitely of an "Included with Prime" level.......

oops sorry yeah got the year wrong. don't ask me why but  I have actually come to quite like RESURRECTION (after initially hating it) - but it has no business being part of the HALLOWEEN franchise.

According to IMDb it played UK theaters in 2002, and 2004 in the U.S.

I bought the UK DVD, most likely in 2003. It was distributed by Universal and StudioCanal. They sure had big Studio names attached on that one  :buggedout:

Monster Grizzly (2023) - This movie definitely sucked, but it did sort of cheer me up. You know you're in for a treat when the production company is called "Poverty Row Film Co".

People in rural Iowa deal with a huge bear on the loose, a monster grizzly in fact. The dialogue is really painful, but the cast is sort of likeable and the story actually has a decent amount of build up.

Some highlights

-When the bear starts closing in on it's prey, the director adds some effect that makes it seem like your TV is broken or something is wrong with the feed.

-The "chemistry" between the scientist and police chief is awkward and forced enough to make the likes of Plug Love (don't ask) seem smooth and believable in comparison.

-plenty of both CGI and real snow but not much bear.

I enjoyed this more than Die Die My Darling but I feel embarrassed by that because that one had real actors/ writer and this had maybe one actual actor and dialogue so cringe it should have gotten an X rating. The relatively hot Native American chick is without question the actual highlight here.


2.5 /5  I watched it to participate in this thread. highly recommended!

LOL we appreciate it!

I watched 2 pretty bad movies last night but as I watched 'em on a big screen I guess I'm gonna' go post in the GOOD MOVIES > THEATRICAL thread... counterintuitively!

Magic Magic (2013)

(https://i.imgur.com/MoJcRqhl.jpg)

A group of young adults explore Chile, but one of them slowly descents into... madness, I think? Technically, this isn't a bad movie, at first glance. Once you reach the ending, you'll go, 'oh, boy!'. Great location, and great cast including Juno Temple, Emily Browning and Michael Cera. But yeah, the ending ruins the movie, in my opinion.

1.5/5

update: this image does not appear in the movie Monster Grizzly at all.

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F_66pQzWgAAozzg?format=png&name=small)

THE LAST CHASE (1981):
"In the future", a vague unspecified pandemic has drastically reduced the population of western civilization and yet even still (somewhat counterintuitively) the U.S. has decided to introduce and enforce draconian restrictions on the operation of motor vehicles - not for any particular ecological consideration but instead (it seems) merely for the perceived aesthetics of "tranquility". I swear to God I don't usually go out of my way to watch films w/ heavy political subtext and maybe it says something about me that I can find a lot of it even in BLUE BEETLE and IT'S A WONDERFUL KNIFE, but in this case, I ain't dreamin'....... THE LAST CHASE would be tailor-made for today's climate change denier or anyone panicking over the concept of "15-minute cities", if it hadn't been made 42 years ago by some Canadians who maybe (at best) had the late 70s gas crisis on their minds or maybe just had watched VANISHING POINT too many times. Mostly it's just an excuse for Fall Guy Lee Majors to drive fast and look constipated.

Majors plays "Franklyn Hart", former race car driver. All he wants to do is DRIVE, dammit, and The Man just won't let him! What's a righteous American guy to do but abduct an underage boy and transport him across multiple state lines in an outlawed souped-up porsche in the name of Freedom??? Of course the federal government can't allow this, so three sourpuss deep state operatives (a mean old man, an icy dragon lady, and a balding spineless cuck, naturally) in a Star Chamber-like conference room enlist Vietnam-era fighter pilot Burgess Meredith to stop Majors from reaching the free state of California........ because of course only a jet pilot can catch a race car driver. What the federales haven't counted on is that Meredith JUST WANTS TO FLY dammit, almost as much as Majors JUST WANTS TO DRIVE dammit! You can probably guess the melodramatic twist ending already.

Meredith is good as usual, and Chris Makepeace (later of VAMP and MY BODYGUARD) shows early promise as the willing Robin to Majors' Batman. I'll never bother watching enough of the Lee Majors filmography to substantiate this, but I'd imagine this might be Majors' most understated and serious performance. In spite of how serious Majors is and how straight-faced the film's tone is, THE LAST CHASE alternates between ludicrously amusing and stultifying in its dullness. Rarely has high-speed travel been this sleep-inducing! THE LAST CHASE would've certainly benefitted from a better sense for its own absurdity, and from more lines like the film's fade-out punchline, where mean old President Mr. Burns scowls that Majors' hijinks will set the country "back to the 1980s!".

2/5
Inevitably to be remade starring Kevin Sorbo, Ben Stein as the fighter pilot, and the kid from "Two And A Half Men"? They'll have to change it so Sorbo is driving to the free state of Florida, of course.

I've been trying to remember the name of this film for years!   Thank you.

LOL! I saved you a trip to "What Was That Film?"  :thumbup:

Finally got around to throwing together a haphazard list, not necessarily in any order.....

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyXYmfdRkTcOXDrjrvitSrj0-2_tZjOXN&si=D6F8RMD_c1_z23Am

Mortal thoughts (1991) - My Demi fest came to a halt with this dud. At it's best it's like a Lifetime movie, at it's worst it's like the re enactment parts of an ID channel "Evil Lives at Home" thing. Harvey Keitel is the only bright spot.

The whole thing feels like an acting class for Demi Moore, who plays some kind of Italian working class "old naybahood" person whose best friend marries a jerk played by Bruce Willis. Bruce does his best, but his frat guy wiseass thing doesn't really work as an Italian cokehead wife beater. It never really gets moving or sprouts it's wings or does whatever a movie is supposed to do. Ending was okay if heavy handed. IMDB rates it higher than it deserves so perhaps some people connected with the sad characters it portrayed in whatever place this is. Da bronx???

2.25 / 5

PRIMAL RAGE (1988)

Q: what do you do when a mutant monkey in your college's science lab bites you on the wrist?
A: go on an absolutely insane freakout rampage that lasts forever.

Decent but nowhere near as good as the following year's NIGHTMARE BEACH , with whom it shares writers and a couple of actors.

One of the writers, James Justice, went under the alias Harry Kirkpatrick... If I had a readymade movie blockbuster sounding name like 'James Justice' I probably wouldn't be thinking about going around as 'Harry Kirkpatrick'

Missile to the Moon (1958)

A rogue scientist launches an improptu expedition to the Moon with an improvised crew. There they come across one of those civilisations made up exclusively by pretty girls (and one matriach).

This is a remake of Cat Women of the Moon. The plot is rather better thought out, with much more incident and motivation (not that this is saying very much, mind you). The execution, however is quite on a par of the original, including the goofy moon spider. Special mention to the Lunar Rock Monsters who make the Tabanga look like a cheetah.

LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND (2023):
I started to review this days ago, lost my review during a crash/reboot, and in the meanwhile Indiana Smith gave it a 5/5 in the "Good Movies" section. Lester 1/2 then called it "Julia Roberts frowns for 3 hours" iirc correctly. I was on the fence after watching it, but since Indiana has come out full in-favor, I'll devote equal time to the argument that LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND is at times the worst kind of bad movie, dressed up as Oscar bait.

Alright, the positive stuff for a moment: It's pretty bleak for a mainstream apocalypse flick... not quite Michael Haneke-level bleak, but there's very little hope for society's salvation at the end. It's got some exceptionally nice cinematography and a great deal of suspense. And it's got a good performance from an actor I'm mostly agnostic about (Kevin Bacon), two acceptable performances from actors I generally dislike (Mahershala Ali and Ethan Hawke, the latter well-cast as a clammy, colorless pile of mush whose name is actually "Clay"), and a very good performance from an actor I'm otherwise unfamiliar with (Myha'la). Those elements should probably tip the balance to a favorable rating, in the case of most films. But.

After some reflection, I can limit my serious reservations about LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND to three things, but they're... significant liabilities. Oddly, the three intersect at various times and compound each other's irritations. The first is the soundtrack, full of wholly inappropriate pop, rock, hip hop, and R&B selections that are often wholly discordant w/ the film's grim tone. The two most egregious eruptions of inappropriate or just plain bad music exacerbate the film's second and third liabilities. #2: Hawke's thirteen-year old daughter is preoccupied for nearly the entire film not with the collapse of humanity and civilization around her, but merely by the indignity of being unable to stream the series finale of 90s TV's appalling "Friends". This reads as dark satire at points, but writer/director Sam Esmail invests way too much time and dramatic focus on the daughter's petty anguish, and in fact (SPOILER?) the film ends with the resolution of her ludicrous subplot. Okay, fine, but - did he also need to subject us to The Rembrandts' insufferable "I'll Be There For You" over the closing credits?!  :buggedout: :hatred:

Fortunately, LTWB isn't capable of sinking lower than such schmaltz, right? Sigh... #3: Julia Roberts, who I dislike more than Mahershala Ali but less (on a good day) than Ethan Hawke, plays a sour-faced Karen who's prone to (over)long soliloquys about her distaste for humanity. Okay, I admit, she's convincing, if not sympathetic! Naturally, the smartest thing possible that Esmail could do to help Roberts win the audience's affections is to... indulge her in a two-plus minute long scene where she plays hilariously improbable funk-R&B and then dances to seduce (?!) Ali's character. Oh wait... no, that wasn't a smart move at all. What was Esmail possibly thinking? What, for that matter, were producers Barack and Michelle Obama (who most assuredly know what real dancing looks like) thinking when they greenlighted this travesty against music and movement? Elaine Benes looks like Salome in contrast to Roberts. This is  one of the most awkward, least appealing, most uncomfortable scenes I've watched in any film since I stopped queuing torture porn.

5/5? No. For that third grievance alone... I think I must allow 2/5 at best.
I sincerely hope there are Razzies in this film's future.
Julia Roberts should never be allowed to dance onscreen again.

That FRIENDS plot line sounds absurd. (and I actually quite liked the show)

So far critics seem to like it, reviews are positive. I didn't know it was a Netflix movie though, but I'm not surprised either.

The Razzies usually nominate movies that are disliked on social media.

DOWN aka THE SHAFT (2001)

Possessed evil elevator. directed by same guy who did THE LIFT

insanely daft to the point of being quite watchable. dumb everything. very sweary. apparently no main character. Why is Naomi Watts in it, she came from MULHOLLAND DRIVE to this? I prefer THE DARK TOWER (1987), which is also crap, but in a better way. (and what was Jenny Agutter doing in that?)

The original, The Lift (1983), is an award-winning Dutch cult movie. Director Dick Maas put himself on the map with the acclaimed Amsterdamned (1988).
By the time he remade his own movie The Lift as The Shaft (or Down), Dick Maas had a successful run in movies and TV (though mostly in the Netherlands).
I guess when Naomi Watts signed up for The Shaft she probably thought she was in good hands. After all, Maas made one of the most successful movies in Dutch box office history, Flodders (1986). But yeah, he couldn't capture the spirit and fun of his own movie when he remade The Lift for an international audience.

Watts shot much of MULHOLLAND in '98 or '99 as a TV pilot, which didn't get picked up. Lynch secured Le Canal + money to expand it to a longer feature and brought Watts back for the (new) last 40 minutes. It wasn't released until Fall '01 so she'd obviously signed on to do THE SHAFT well before that and maybe it even premiered in Europe before MULHOLLAND. Watts had done TANK GIRL (she's great) and other stuff even ahead of MULHOLLAND. I haven't seen it but THE SHAFT also features James Marshall from TWIN PEAKS, Ron Perlman, and other folks. You could pick worse co-stars!

Violent Night

This is basically Die Hard with Santa Claus. It starts out as an irreverent, foul mouthed and at times gory take on Santa Claus, but then occasionally switches to a family-friendly Disney approved celebration of the Christmas spirit, including a Tinkerbell moment. Both parts undercut each other, so the effect is lost. Kudos to David Harbour for his bad Santa, but if you want an entertaining chase movie set in a mansion of the rich and the privileged, watch Ready or Not instead.

it's entertaining enough but very intentionally dorky, which could grate depending on your tolerance levels


enjoyed AMSTERDAMNED, didn't realise that was him. the original THE LIFT is pretty good. there's a hilarious scene around the breakfast table with the dad telling his son about the birds + bees

forgot which thread this was brought up in or who mentioned / recommended it, but I watched PARTS: THE CLONUS HORROR (1979) the other night. solid 70s b-movie horror... someone should make a youtube clip of all the times the word "America" is said in the film

Amen!  :cheers:

This looks like to be the must-see movie of the season? On other message boards I visit, it's like on everyone's "just watched" list.

Bought the Blu-ray last February, but I have no desire to watch this yet. Maybe after the holidays.

I think Dr. Whom pegged it dead to rights. It's got the intelligence and style of a Hallmark Christmas movie, just injected w/ occasional scenes of Santa getting brutally beaten, shot, stabbed, etc, and then Santa fighting back of course. Not a good film, and far less satisfying as both an action movie and a Christmas movie than DIE HARD  :twirl: upon which it is closely patterned. But David Harbour is a lovable Santa. I love Santa in any case however and I'm about as interested in watching Santa get his s**t f**ked up as I was watching Jesus get tortured in PASSION OF THE CHRIST.  :thumbdown:

I went to see VIOLENT NIGHT in the theaters when it came out and was thoroughly amused!  Maybe I just have a low entertainment threshold.

it's also possible that I am a snob!  :smile: Merry Christmas!  :cheers:

Well, it is a case of the glass being half full or half empty, but for me the tonal shifts ruined it. Also, I kept thinking 'Ready or Not did this so much better'. I wonder how the pitch meeting went

- so, through the interaction with the little girl, the jaded Santa finds the spirit of Christmas again?
- Yup
- and what does he do then?
- Well, he kills a whole bunch of people with a sledgehammer.

LOL!

For a film that's barely 4 years old, READY OR NOT already has earned some kind of status as the positive point of reference for many lesser films. I saw THE INVITATION a year ago - not the superb Karyn Kusama film but the Nathalie Emmanuel vs Dracula one - and kept thinking the same thing as Dr. Whom thought about VIOLENT NIGHT: Why'd they bother making this junk when READY OR NOT already did it so much better?  :thumbup:

My pre-New Year's resolution: shorter reviews!  :lookingup:

THE H-MAN (1958):
This nice-looking, full-color Toho production seemed like a highly festive post-Christmas late night treat, but realistically it's pretty bad. It boasts all the atomic age anxiety of the original GOJIRA and then some, yet too often it loses sight of the monstrous threat in favor of police procedural, crime melodrama, and showgirls performing nightclub numbers.  :question:  The "H-Man" or "Men" itself/himself/themselves are cool...  basically green versions of THE BLOB (which was released the same year, thus might've inspired H-MAN) who occasionally manifest as green spectral humanoids. They melt victims with their touch, allowing for some fun death FX (that resemble a PG-rated progenitor to STREET TRASH's gooey gore). And there's a spooky sequence aboard a ghost ship, w/ sailors discovering the H-Men and their victims. Otherwise, H-MAN devotes way too much time to its A-plot about one H-Man's human girlfriend and former criminal partners trying to recover his stolen stash of gold, or... something. The H-Men keep turning up to absorb/dissolve crooks, cops, and whoever else is pursuing the stash, leading one to wonder....... What exactly do radioactive mutant freaks care about contraband, revenge, et al? In spite of too many long cutaways to egghead scientists pontificating about atomic energy in their laboratory, this mysterious point is never made clear. Also puzzling: how the police decide to address the H-Man threat by finally setting the entire sewer system ablaze, creating an inferno which appears to break out into open civic waters and threaten the city, w/ no clear evidence that this rash maneuver has successfully neutralized any (let alone all) H-Men. Nevertheless one egghead scientist declares that "these H-Men are as good as dead" while hedging his bets to warn that more H-Men could return in the future. Good job, a***ole!

2.5/5
The literal translation of the original Japanese title is "BEAUTY AND THE LIQUID MONSTER" and that's apropos as the ex-girlfriend gets about 10 Xs as much screentime as the monster(s).

Saw two Christmas movies that I hadn't previously watched. 

Santa Who?
It starred Leslie Neilson as an amnesiac Santa.  Not his best work, but even in something like this, he has charm. 

I also watched a Christmas Karen.
That's a fun little movie.  It's a take on A Christmas Carol except set in Florida and featuring one of those modern day horrible Karen people.  I enjoyed their takes on the Three Ghosts and Marley.

TENTACLES (1977):
Of the many Bad Movies I watched as a child, this was among those that I disliked the most. Somehow I was motivated to revisit it during my vacation movie binging and it's more disappointing than I even remember, due to a few laudable elements amidst the otherwise abominable filmmaking.

Ovidio Assonitis clearly had no interest in making a killer squid-headlined JAWS-alike and thus the most interesting aspects of TENTACLES take place on dry land and usually during dialogue sequences. He choreographs and shoots/edits a mighty peppy parade complete w/ marching band and majorettes, which of course has nothing whatsoever to do w/ the squid or its victims. Top-billed John Houston never gets on a boat as an investigative reporter who, dang it, is pretty sure that corporateer Henry Fonda's research operation has something to do w/ all the waterfront disappearances. Huston is 100% committed and makes all the most hollow pronouncements sound sincere and compelling; he's much better than this crap deserves. Meanwhile Fonda appears onscreen with only one other live actor, playing most of his scenes on the phone and offering cagey line readings that suggest he'd only skimmed the scenes his character appeared in and ignored the rest of the screenplay. (Smart move!)

Bo Hopkins rounds out the leads in the Hooper/Quint role, sometimes delivering an interesting, stoned-Woody Harrelson-kinda' performance, other times just looking hung over and bored. Unfortunately Houston is completely absent from the last 25 minutes or so of the film (no, he doesn't get eaten) and instead Hopkins and his two pet killer whales (!) pursue and fight the squid in a near-totally incomprehensible montage of underlit thrashing and rubber appendages. The squid itself is glimpsed even less frequently than Bruce the Shark, though to less effect. Shelley Winters receives much more screentime, serving no purpose whatsoever except (maybe) to deliver more onscreen terror value than the generally unseen squid. This is easily the most unwelcome Shelley Winters appearance I've seen. In one sequence she wears an enormous sombrero.  :bluesad:

Besides Houston's enjoyable performance, TENTACLES' greatest boons are its highly unusual underscore (which is often in amusing counterpoint to the onscreen action) and its quite thoughtful landlocked cinemaphotography, particularly in dialogue scenes... lots of subtle camera movement, lots of extreme foreground/background deep focus compositions. There's one key extended take where the shot opens on police boats arriving onshore at night, then cranes up and back to reveal dozens of rubberneckers... pans left, then zooms back in on Houston getting his cigar lit by a hippie... and then past Houston to rest on a grieving Hopkins. The shot lasts much longer than it needs to or should, which is a choice, and the underscore is this bizarre yet peppy Euro-tune that's totally discordant for the death of a major character, but that's a choice, too. And if you watched it out of context you'd think you were watching a scene from an Antonioni art film or something. As soon as the action moves to the water, all that conscious artistry, for good or ill, goes away and it's just an incompetent monster movie again.

1.5/5
I think I had more fun watching Julia Roberts dance in LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND than watching Shelley Winters in this... yech.

Backcountry (2014) - There is one vaguely interesting scene in this where a macho tour guide makes a play for the main character's girlfriend right in front of him. It's clever and primal. When the boyfriend suggests they cook up some veggies to go with the massive amount of fish the macho guy brought, the macho guy says "no, potatoes would be better" the girlfriend says "I'll serve both". Did you catch that? Adrian Lyne would be proud.

Unfortunately, the rest of the movie is one boring survival cliche after another. Apparently, it's based on a true story, but I don't want to see a true story. I want to see a good movie.

2/5

was in the "highly rated by rotten tomatoes" section at Tubi. They can have it.

The Demon.

If memory serves correctly, Trevor has repeatedly assured me that this movie represents the high point of South African celluloid culture. Yes, I am sure that is how he described it.

So yeah, there is a thing going on with a serial killer and a psychic ex-marine. The version I am watching is on YouTube and has any hint of nudity blurred out. Even when someone is fully dressed they might be blurred out, I guess on the off chance that the film might change since it was last watched and someone unexpectedly gets naked I guess?

I think I have lost wherever the plot was going though.

The 35mm version at the film archives wasn't much better quality either 🤧😝😉😉

"That Man Bolt" (1973)

Okay, this movie gets credit for Fred Williamson in his prime having a great time playing a super-cool badass. He makes it entertaining, and you want good things for his character.

That being said...WOW! This script is a mess. It makes no real sense. I think someone got drunk/stoned, had a lot of fantasies of The Hammer doing cool stuff, then they found the flimsiest ways to string all those fun scenes together. Total nonsense.

Still, it was great to see Teresa Graves acting sexy and John Orchard (Ugly John from the first season of the "M*A*S*H" TV series) looking flustered in nearly every scene he is in.

Just sit back, drink something intoxicating, and turn your brain off.

"Morbid" (2013)

Not to be confused with the 2022 film with the same name, though it is interesting to note this film has a score of 3.8 on IMDb and the 2022 film (with a more polished look) only has a 3.4 rating.

A psycho is out killing people in a small town while everyone is focused on the local football star and the big game.

You don't see the game. The killing doesn't seem to be connected to anything. The actors are more confused than the plot. The camera work and editing are total crap. The film sticks absurd humor into scenes where it falls flat then tries to pretend it is a moderately serious slasher at other times. Budget must have been around $500 bucks, and most of that likely went for beer to entice the non-actors to be filmed.

Yet, somehow, I sat through the whole thing. I didn't like myself for doing so, but I figured someone should watch it if the hicks that made it had the gall to actually release if for public consumption. While the three-foot schlong towards the end was different, the best scene is where the killer bursts into a room of partying teens (all six or seven of them) from what is clearly a closet. Oh, the implications there!

It is on Tubi. Believe it or not, the commercial interruptions actually make the film bearable because you need a break from the stench of this turd.

"Morbid" (2022)

After watching the other one, I just had to watch this one. To be honest, I wish I had just rewatched the other "Morbid".

This started well enough. A group of young women who were best friends reunite on Halloween to bond a seemingly broken friendship. Things went south when one of them went on some world tour to save...whatever.

Anyway, the one who went on the world tour brought back a game called Morbid from Japan. The game had been outlawed. We find out why.

They play the game. Then we get each girl's perception of the outcome. Sounds like it could work in some "Rashomon" style story telling. But not in the hands of these filmmakers. You get stilted dialogue, limp acting, poor editing, and needless confusion. All of it mired in utter tedium. You will struggle to stay awake. Trust me.

The only upside is that the girls are actually attractive, though the girl playing Ashley, the white-haired anime "Goth" girl, looks like current-day Kirsten Dunst -- pretty, but looking WAY older than the other girls in the film. That's fine. I think Kirsten is hot, even though rumor is that she is a cigarette sucker, which is disgusting.

The beginning and the very end of the film tend to be interesting because it focuses on trick-or-treaters coming to the house where the bulk of the film takes place. These kids are entertaining. The rest of the film -- not so much.

Smoke some crank and you might avoid being put to sleep by this movie. Otherwise, avoid, avoid, avoid.

I read this review 2.5 hours ago but one bit is still pestering me.......


.......How exactly does the errr three-foot schlong come into play? Is it relevant to the murders...? To the big game...? Or is the schlong non-diegetic.......? I might lose sleep over this.

The final girl goes off on a rant about how the killer uses the big knife to make up for a tiny wang. The killer rolls his eyes and whips out the 3 footer to her horror. If her rambling rant hadn't taken so long, the joke would have been a hint funnier. Still, really out of place in a scene shot with the intention of building tension (failed miserably to no one's shock given the poor structuring of the rest of the direction).

It might have been better if she delivered her rant, he made the motions of whipping it out, and you only see her horrified face as she screams. Leave SOMETHING to the imagination. Alas, that would require both a competent director and a decent actress, neither of which had any connection to the film.

"Blood Pi" -- aka "Sorority House" (2020)

Instead of physical self-harm, I just watch movies like this. It may be more self-destructive in the end.

Amber kills her parents and puts them in the basement of the family home. Why? Don't ask, because the movie will never tell you.

She goes to her college and, out of the blue, decides to befriend the class dorkette. Why? Again, don't ask.

After giving the dork girl a hint of self-confidence, said dork girl decides to believe the b***hy sorority girls (who were picking on her) when she say she can be like them and join their sorority.

Cue Amber's killing spree.

No character motivations are explained other than a beefy jock (played by director Jordan Pacheco) having the hots for a mousy girl in the sorority, even though she sells him out to save face with her "sisters", and that the girls intend to humiliate dork girl Agnis in sick, sexual ways, including a roofie rape scene you are shown in detail.

Acting is mostly awful, though Anna Rizzo (Amber) isn't horrible even when she overdoes it now and then. Editing done by a dull food processor. Mostly boring gore that is utterly unconvincing.

The bulk of the film is built around various parties thrown by frats and sororities, yet you never EVER see more than 7 people in any group shot. And, somehow, Lilith Astaroth gets nearly top billing even though she has about 90 seconds of screen time as a DJ at one of the parties.

Stupid film poorly put together combined with throw-away performances equals a waste of your time. Worse yet, this stinker has had two shots at life and died on the table both times. Originally released as "Blood Pi" to VOD, then released on physical media as "Sorority House" a couple of years later. I'm shocked the director doesn't hand out copies of the movie in an attempt to give it some sort of traction. Hope they didn't spend much money on this wreck. If I was an investor, I'd be demanding my pound of flesh, which the director, given his size, could easily give without losing a bit of his bulk or an ounce of his non-existent pride.

"The Families Feud" (2023)

How is God's Divine Name does this have a rating of 7.0 on IMDb without trickery?

Okay, compared to a lot of the garbage I've been watching, this movie has a bit of brains behind it, but it is only there to say, "Hey, we know our movies, so give us a break, okay?"

Some Mafia-type goombas go deep into the backwoods to bury someone they whacked. Based on their reaction to the bagged-up body, it took them a LONG time to bury the body. Yeah, I know, don't apply real-world stuff to movies, but the level of rot they complained about wouldn't have set in if they buried the body within hours of killing the poor bastard.

Anyway, while attempting to bury the body, a few Bigfoot, or Squatch (short for Sasquatch), hunters appear. They have a gun fight and one of the Don's army is wounded. The capo and his right-hand guy go for revenge. After offing the wounded guy. Go figure.

They end up captured, and the Don knows this.

Just so happens that the Don is under fire from another Mafia boss, who is attending the longest running poker game I have ever witnessed. But whatever. It's a movie, right?

You can see where this is heading. Things escalate. More Familia are sent in, and more hillbillies arrive. An all-out war takes place in the backwoods while the Don is fending off hired killers in the big city.

This is a really great set-up. Totally fumbled because the filmmakers must be Tarantino freaks and wanted to show their knowledge of film history as they work in endless references to infinitely better films of the past. None of these references are subtle. I. Mean. NONE!

These references are occasionally funny, but they undermine what could have easily been a "Southern Comfort"-type of situation. I would have loved that.

Instead, beyond the "slap-you-in-the-face" film references, you get poor editing and performances that are both over the top as well as being deeply rooted in simplistic cliches from both "Deliverance" and every crappy Mafia movie, up to and including "The Godfather" franchise. It doesn't work as a straight film, and it ultimately fails as a parody. A double loss.

How in hell does this movie have a rating of 7.0 on IMDb if not for padding by the cast and crew of this mediocre attempt? I mean, if they had played it straight, it might have been interesting, but as a cheap comedy, it falls on its face, even though it clearly had a reasonable budget to work with.

I picked this because of Anna Rizzo, from the previously reviewed/mentioned "Blood Pi". Again, she does a decent job here and, again, looks utterly wonderful with her cleavage deserving its own screen credit. I hope this lady finds some success outside of these crappy movies, but even in low-budget fare, she stands out.

Seriously, other than friends of the production skewing the score, this film deserves a marginal 6 for simply not being totally braindead, but never a 7. A 5 or a 4.5 would be far more accurate.

Again, like most of the recent films I have listed here, it can be found on Tubi. And, no, I'm not advertising for them. They just have a lot of crap to watch. Including the old-school "The Partridge Family" series, which I watched the first episode again and greatly enjoyed in spite of it aging somewhat poorly.

This movie, however, is worth a watch if you just have to see the Mafia, hillbillies, and a touch of Bigfoot horror blended into a comedy that barely works 37% of the time. Be ready for a TON of jokes based on the most tired cliches connected with each overall category.

It only has 37 votes so far. Sometimes people involved with a certain movie boost IMDb rating with fake accounts. However, a rating becomes 'legit' at IMDb when it has 10,000 or 25,000 votes.

It's got Bigfoot, so I'll be watching it eventually. Unfortunately, the movie I'll be reviewing has no giant cryptids...

THE HOUSE OF USHER (1989):
...Unless you consider a portly-looking Donald Pleasance not appearing until nearly an hour into the movie to be a "giant cryptid". Pleasance has a lot of fun playing a kindly-then-menacing kook and therefore is the only reason to watch this absolutely pathetic, grueling 80s Euro-horror. The drawbacks are an entirely bored/hung-over Oliver Reed  sleepwalking through the entire film, a leading lady who can't act at all playing a character who is exceptionally dumb, a molasses-slow plot that repeatedly loses itself, dialogue that routinely contradicts previous dialogue, and only a little bit of gore... nearly all of which is sadistically rung out at the expense of innocent female characters instead of from the loathsome male antagonists. In other words, not much fun...

...So much so that I stopped watching it possibly as many as SEVEN (7) months ago with only about 10 minutes to go in the running time. For some reason I decided to wrap it up this weekend, and in some small way I'm glad I did, because the final scene elevates HOUSE OF USHER to the level of mythically bad movies: as the leading lady stumbles from the burning HOUSE, one of the bad guys or another leaps through a window at her. HARD CUT to... no, not her waking up in bed in her hotel from the first scene of the movie... 'cause It Was All A Dream... instead, Hard Cut to her and her husband driving down a country road as they did about 5 minutes into the film, towards the House of Usher, then deciding to turn around and drive the other way! Yes... the crap filmmakers decided to do the It Was All A Dream bit from countless shocking finales without the main character even waking up.

Now THAT'S some next-level laziness. It would almost be MONSTER-A-GO-GO galling, except MONSTER-A-GO-GO really puts its back into its bulls**t ending. Now I've spoiled the end of HOUSE OF USHER for you, and the end is (besides Pleasance) the only noteworthy thing about it. Thus - never ever watch it! You're welcome.

1/5
MONSTER-A-GO-GO is a much better film than HOUSE OF USHER. I mean, obv!

"Amityville Frankenstein" (2023)

Supposedly cobbled together from a FMV game called "Fiendish Theives". Not making an excuse for this. Just supplying information.

I always scoff at people who repeatedly say in their reviews, "This is the worst movie I have ever seen." Then, two reviews later, they repeat the claim. They are clearly idiots.

THIS...thing I just watched is truly the worst thing I have YET seen. If there is something worse out there (and I am sure there is), I dread finding it.

OVER 8 MINUTES OF REPEATED FOOTAGE OF TWO GUYS WALKING UP STAIRS IN MINIMAL LIGHTING!!!

The film begins with credits that run longer than a prostate exam by a foul-smelling inmate named Bubba with warts on his member.

Then we get "Somewhere near Amityville..." before watching a moron select snacks to eat while watching a horror movie. Yep, that is the Amityville connection. Period.

The dork goes into a room loaded with DVDs and Blu-rays (as a way of someone showing off their collection) where he opts to watch something on TV.

"Terror Telly" is the show, with a nearly two-minute long intro (which is repeated, in its entirety, for the "Thanks for watching" and "Next time on..." bits).

A dreadful host introduces the film.

OVER 8 MINUTES OF REPEATED FOOTAGE OF TWO GUYS WALKING UP STAIRS IN MINIMAL LIGHTING!!!

Two thieves go into a warehouse to steal a watch. Good luck figuring this out as the audio is severely glitched and virtually unintelligible.

OVER 8 MINUTES OF REPEATED FOOTAGE OF TWO GUYS WALKING UP STAIRS IN MINIMAL LIGHTING!!!

They finally come to a room where they find a woman's body and ignore another body leaning against a wall.

One of the guys attempts to turn on the lights, which leads to him being electrocuted for nearly 3 minutes, but, during the last third of this endless scene, the spark awakens the two bodies.

OVER 8 MINUTES OF REPEATED FOOTAGE OF TWO GUYS WALKING UP STAIRS IN MINIMAL LIGHTING!!!

The two guys scream a lot.

We then see the mad scientist who wanders around spouting something that I could not understand no matter how hard I tried or how loud I turned the audio. He is grabbed by hands and pulled behind a wall.

OVER 8 MINUTES OF REPEATED FOOTAGE OF TWO GUYS WALKING UP STAIRS IN MINIMAL LIGHTING!!!

Then we get a glimpse of "tomorrow night's feature" titled something like "I Watch You Slowly Die Whilst Sipping My Tea". This drags on for 4 or five minutes.

OVER 8 MINUTES OF REPEATED FOOTAGE OF TWO GUYS WALKING UP STAIRS IN MINIMAL LIGHTING!!!

Then the show ends. The dork goes to bed, and the overly-long opening credits repeat.

I wish I was kidding. All of this misery wrapped up in about 62 minutes.

OVER 8 MINUTES OF REPEATED FOOTAGE OF TWO GUYS WALKING UP STAIRS IN MINIMAL LIGHTING!!!

Have I made it clear that there is a lot of footage of two guys walking up stairs?

This had to be someone's idea of humor. This person or these persons should never be allowed to interact with humanity ever again. Even Zach Snyder is better than these people, and I hope Zach emulates Tony Scott's final moments on this planet. That should tell you something. I mean. other than telling you that I am not a nice person, because I really am not. Especially after watching OVER 8 MINUTES OF REPEATED FOOTAGE OF TWO GUYS WALKING UP STAIRS IN MINIMAL LIGHTING!!!

Other than all the stuff I have said, this movie really sucked. And not like an ugly hooker with broken teeth giving a BJ in a dark alley while you are both whacked out on meth. That would be pleasurable in comparison. 

For those who care, there is one scene of fart/shart humor. It, like the rest of the film, is not funny.
 

Java - have you ever seen "Marina Monster"? if you like self harm

Welp, now I need to find that movie. Thanks? Or should I wait to watch the film before thanking or condemning you?

UPDATE: Sadly, not on Tubi or on any of my other sources. Apparently it was on Amazon Video, but I no longer have that service.

I do enjoy the fact that the trailer for the movie on IMDb shows the footage running backwards of the guy dragging the net through the water. And from the look of the trailer, it appears to be far superior to OVER 8 MINUTES OF REPEATED FOOTAGE OF TWO GUYS WALKING UP STAIRS IN MINIMAL LIGHTING!!!

I ought to make that my new signature....

"Mister White" (2013)

Up front, this movie falls into the Bad Movie Thread because of two main things: GAWDAWFUL acting and shortcomings in script and direction.

Basic story: A weird guy is the target of other college classmates (the whole thing feels more like a high school premise but it is college for some reason). The weird guy stutters and has strange body tics. At one point, the dialogue seems to indicate that he used to be okay, but after a severe beating, he developed these issues, but this is never mentioned again.

It turns out that the girl dating the alpha male of the tormentors actually spent a night with the weird guy at some party a few weeks prior to taking up with the alpha male dude. She tries to prevent her group of friends from torturing the guy, but she keeps her distance to protect their undisclosed past.

Our main character, the weird dude (here after labelled WD) has been talking to people who aren't there and getting into Hoodoo, which is greatly ignored in the script. His dad thinks he is a Goth freak, and his mom is in the nut house. Well, Daddy just disappears from the storyline, though he deserves to be on the list of victims. The mom can suddenly see this person her son has been talking to for a while as can every other person in the nut house.

When the truth of WD and the girlfriend of Alpha Dude (now called AD) comes out, AD demands she spit on WD during a confrontation. She does, then AD beats the living hell out of WD as their group of twisted friends cheer it on.

We find out that the entity WD is talking to is Mister White, a former slave owner and psychotic doctor, who was cursed and killed by his slaves in an act of revenge.

WD, after the humiliation by his former lover and the severe beating, makes a pact with Mister White to slaughter his tormentors in return for his soul.

Then begins the slaughter.

The story isn't anything new or great. Still, with a little fleshing out (which might have added about 10 minutes or so to the runtime) and some critical direction (and, yes, a slightly larger budget), this could have been a nice little revenge horror flick with a few intense sequences. Sadly, the acting is dreadful by most of the cast with very few exceptions, and even those are shaky. Supporting roles, like the uncle and dad, are fine but have little impact on the film. The former love interest does well enough, but only now and then. I blame the script for her undoing.

Virtually no gore though you are led to believe some of the deaths are quite gruesome. Character issues that should play into the script get tossed aside, such as one character's fear of spiders but then he just gets flailed to death so why set up the fear?

If the script had played a bit with the "Final Destination" concept, the kills could have been more interesting. Also, given the slight element of "It Follows" (which came out the next year), the next victim should have been able to see Mister White while the rest of the friends couldn't. That would have punched up the tension and chaos. Didn't happen.

Like I said, this would never be one of those "Gosh darn, that was fresh!" kind of movies, but it could have done a far better job with its concept than it did.

On YouTube and Tubi if you are curious. Worth watching if you dig horror films built around revenge. And it at least gave you some sense of the history to the situation so it wasn't just a killer whacking annoying teens to fill 90 minutes of screen time. Only mostly bad.

Halfway House.

With boobs and a Lovecraftian monster on screen both within the first five minutes I figure this is a film for Indy. Looks like it was made in the 80s, but seems to be from the mid noughties. Young women are going missing around a halfway house run by nuns. A police officer helps a woman whose sister has went missing infiltrate the house.

Cheerfully bad.

Cruel Jaws (1995) - C'mon guys, lets get it! Powerfully stupid Jaws rip off that does the shark slaughter rampage scene half an hour in and is thus left with an hour of ridiculous trying to find and kill the fish stuff.

There's also a subplot about the main "nerd" scientist guy's girlfriend having an affair with the bad guy's son, but then there's a good guy who looks just like him (the bad guy) so I forgot what happened with all that. His even more bad guy Dad wants to disrupt the "Flipper" like tranquility of a Hulk Hogan looking guy's aquatic zoo thing with a beachfront hotel. The good guy's handicapped daughter is sweet and wants to help the dolphins and the people. The slutty girlfriend sometimes takes care of her they all like know each other.

"We're gonna need a bigger helicopter"   < actual quote. Bruno Mattei is at the helm which means no apologies for intellectual property theft or second takes. Some hot 80's style beach chicks, but not enough. The beach scenes seem to take place in an entirely new time of the day that is both dark and light.

5/5

Lester, I think I watched in early in the pandemic quarantine and luh-UVVV-ed it.

It would have been better if the little girl in the wheelchair was one of the bad guys.

60 Minutes (2024)

German Netflix production about a mixed martial artist running across town to join his daughters' birthday party, otherwise he will lose custody of his child. On his way, he must fight p**sed off goons because he ditched a fight in favor of his daughter.

The last German martial arts movie I've seen was Plan B (2016), an indie production picked up for distribution by 20th Century Fox. Plan B was advertised as a homage to 1980s action movies, though there wasn't anything 1980s about it. It did feature modern day German martial art "legends" Can Aydin and Mike Möller, but the movie was a box office flop despite Fox's digital YouTube ads, and has not gained a cult following to this day.

60 Minutes was filmed in gimmicky real time. It's Run Lola Run (1998) but with a male lead. In other words, our hero won't be taking the bus, car, bicycle, whatever, which would be the most logical thing to do, but they can't use common sense because it would clash with the he must run theme. Cast includes Emilio Sakraya playing the lead and made out to be the next new German action hero. There's also martial arts YouTuber Bruce Willow lending a helping hand and foot. All characters are, well, uninteresting, bringing nothing to the acting table, including two tough female MMA fighters backing up our hero, obviously put there for gender quota.

The fights are average at best and lazy at worst, lacking impact because stylized. No highlights here. Which sucks, because they are the main focus of the movie. It didn't help ripping off John Wick's fighting style, either. It just made the film appear desperate.

On a sidenote, in Run Lola Run Franka Potente's hair is dyed red. In 60 Minutes, the lead actor's hair is dyed yellow. Oh, my.

Since our hero defeats everyone, he could have done the fight he was supposed to do with an easy and quick win, and still make it to his daughters' birthday party with plenty of time left. Matter of fact, he actually fights the guy he was supposed to fight, while rushing through a nightclub, and wins in less than three minutes. Yes, 60 Minutes is stupid like that. There are like six or seven people standing around, watching, without expression. There's no security or bouncer in sight, no one is calling the police. No one cares.

In the real world, he would have custody of his daughter taken away for setting bad examples, and getting charged for using deadly combat skills to beat up people on the street. This would also get him banned from professional fighting for life, even if it's done for self-defense, because he had plenty of time and opportunities to inform authorities but did not. Nobody was stopping him from calling the police. No one. And pounding another guy to a bloody pulp is crossing the line. Doesn't matter if the person is a criminal and deserved it - yellowhair is not the law. But hey, screw realism for the sake of popcorn entertainment, right?

A film without its own identity, defying common sense and logic because of clickbait plot. Cotton candy for the always hungry Netflix crowd. They seem to like it, based on IMDb comments, and praised the "realism" (plot & fights) which I thought was hilarious, though the rating isn't very high.

mine isn't either: 1.5/5

What is going on with Italy? They have the best food, most beautiful women, and a ridiculously awesome past full of sculpture and art ... yet 90% their movies are cheap garbage. How does that work?

funny you should say that, yesterday I watched THE INITIATION OF SARAH (1978) and the opening scene tales place on a beach where it seems to be day and night at the same time... odd. maybe it was the same beach

mini-review: decent tv movie, kind of CARRIE- lite. a few funny bits. very innocent. Morgan Fairchild plays the ultimate b*tch very convincingly

I heard about some law restricting the budget of movies while reading up on The Good, The Bad & The Ugly....
It might still be the case, I dunno.....

I know you guys are taking the p**s here and of course you're aware of the perennial production tactic known as "day-for-night shooting". It's cheaper and easier to shoot night scenes during the day - for one thing, you don't have to set up a lot of production lights, you just let the sun do its thing and then you slap a filter on the lens or you crank the aperture waaay down/underexpose the scene. Of course it almost always looks like complete crap. I've seen terrible DFN photography in many many many European flicks (almost certainly the all-time worst being the lengthy sequences in Jess Franco's OASIS OF THE ZOMBIES) but also plenty of American movies. Francois Truffaut even named a movie after this time-honored filmmaking tradition.  :teddyr:    Of course most of the experts just go to the trouble of actually shooting at night.  :bouncegiggle:

I'm aware of day-for-night of course (Hammer were the 'masters' of that), but in TIOS it was like it was flitting back and forth between 100% day and 100% night, during the same scene? the film is on youtube but in such poor resolution you can't really appreciate it... t'is a weird one fer sure  I tells ye...  

edit, found a much better upload
https://youtu.be/qOzK28-96dU?si=461JgKAnV3ibhwi4

opening 3 mins or so...

Hey, I've seen that one! Wow, Morgans Fairchild and Brittany in one movie, crikey.
I didn't mean to come off as condescending. You're right, that doesn't look like intentional day-for-night... it looks like very poor color timing/correction in post... probably necessitated by quick and sloppy production on a location with inconsistent sunlight/cloud coverage... and also they decided to stage the action in front of a big shadowy reef or something, which casts deep shadows on the actors sitting in front of it, and they didn't set any fill-lights or bounce light sufficiently on those actors. Those cutaways of the dude standing with the water and dark skies in the background... THAT looks like either the shoot ran too long (they got other shots in broad afternoon daylight and then they got that guy's cutaways after the sun went down) and/or those shots are the result of a really poor/botched/sloppy post-production color timing attempt... they were trying to make all the shots match and look like the whole scene took place at twilight (?maybe?) and....... they blew it!

There you have it: four years of film school prepared me uhhhhhhh for this post! :lookingup:

haha... I'd say it totally paid off!  :cheers:

just noticed there appears to be a 2006 remake. I didn't know remakes of tv movies were a thing,

Tidal Wave: No Escape (1997) - Useless movie about a mad scientist who tries and succeeds in starting tidal waves with nuclear missiles. Most notable among the cast is Freddy "Boom Boom" Washington from Welcome Back, Kotter as some kind of science cop. Also on board is main character Corbin Bernsen from LA Law and Julianne Phillips, who for the entire thing I was trying to decide if she was the blonde DA from Law and Order SVU. It's turns out...she's not!

There's a little bit of drama but it's pretty thin. I found myself forgetting about the movie and just looking at the actors like "He must be doing this to pay for a new beach house". The ending is appropriately ridiculous and, I suspect, unscientific. If you saw it you might remember one scene where Bernsen is driving away from a wave and rolls around in his car with water everywhere. Like the images of the wave itself, it's just super realistic and hi tech. Worth checking out for how irrelevant it is and for early examples of what would become hallmarks of this kind of thing: forgotten tv stars, campy crap, etc

2 /5    

(https://play-lh.googleusercontent.com/proxy/yXl5-JcgtGFHEkWcjkckC3rd7Bf_70QV2_MkTGpaL1hc9y7_3aapgop3bS0poFKYdxihgL6PWWajn0a8P5PYJS9rUJN4dTLzaXdGsyyebkyf3uUFAoHmrDBldw9WzvwXTacaCiJz2T9ZGUe6wBZ8cfYl7tWf_bScV261wQ=w240-h480)

"Beyond the Door III" (1989)

**SPOILERS AHEAD**

I can't believe I sat through this totally sober.

First up, the executive producer is Ovidio Assonitis, who has a long track record of dodgy films and a name that sounds like an illness that causes anal leakage.

Group of dumb Americans are packed off to Yugoslavia to see a rare, once-in-a-lifetime religious rite. All of them are snarky, annoying typical American types with one girl, whom everyone knows is a virgin and that she has a LARGE unique birthmark, whose family hails from that area, but no one can smell the blatant sacrificial set up here.

As soon as the idiots arrive in the village deep in the forest, zero time is spent building suspense as the virgin is separated from the others, who are nailed into their huts to be burned to death. One of the group dies in the fire, but all the rest, virgin included, escape. All but two make it onto a train.

The bulk of the movie details the adventure of this possessed train (yes, I said "possessed train") as it defies logic and physics to kill nearly everyone with more than two lines of dialogue. It jumps the tracks, flies past an attempt to derail it, chugs through a swamp to kill two of the kids who didn't make it on the train, turns itself around somehow, and defies being blown up.

All of this just so Satan can have a virgin bride. Oh, but that tells you what happens, doesn't it? Yup. One bonk with a mute flutist, and Satan loses out. In his anger, he whacks everyone BUT THE SOILED BRIDE!!!

Not even Bo Svenson putting on a thick European/Slavic accent can save this.

The only saving grace? A thief on the train is kinda hot and deserves her own series of action movies.

And Vinegar Syndrome chose THIS as a movie to release in 4K? No wonder I have lost respect for them.

Interesting gore effects, but they come few and far between, so watch at your own risk.

Also, why does this rate a 5.2 on IMDb for any reason other than being bonkers?

Note: The cover image below has NOTHING to do with the movie.

(https://m.media-amazon.com/images/W/MEDIAX_849526-T2/images/I/71wZe9L8DFL._SX342_.jpg)

That's hilarious... haven't seen that one. Bo Svenson also did TENTACLES w/ Assonitis (constult your physician) over a decade earlier and looked terribly bored or drunk during most of that film... maybe he was so drunk he didn't remember working w/ Assonitis at all and thus signed on for this one!

Possibly true, though he looked utterly sober in this. I think he must have needed new shingles for his house, so he signed on for this one. Just a guess. And he got to wear a really cool, bright red scarf. That would have convinced me to do the shoot.

I kept thinking something didn't sound right about that, so I pulled it up on Tubi. Bo Hopkins starred in TENTACLES. He either tried to channel James Dean's facial expressions or Hopkins just stayed stoned. Or both. Not to say that I don't enjoy watching Bo Hopkins. I do. But in that dull movie, Shelley Winters' fat folds gave a more active performance. Poor Henry Fonda seemed lost. I think John Houston was just glad he was getting paid.

OHHHHHH thank you for the clarification! There I am crossing my Bo's again.  :thumbup:

LA CHINOISE (1967):
Jean-Luc Godard passed away a couple of years ago and I've been trying to catch up on some of his deeper cuts since then to figure out what I've been missing out on. Increasingly I'm unsure why I bother. I want to exclaim that LA CHINOISE is the most pretentious thing I've ever seen, however in truth it's probably not even the most pretentious Godard film I've seen. I needed to read the Wiki on it to understand it's an adaptation of a Doestoyevski novel (!) and to recognize that there is occasionally some very elusive narrative to this feature film. I'll disregard that discovery in discussing LA CHINOISE though as frankly it's irrelevant! I was actually prepared to grant that Godard might've been actively trying to deconstruct all possibility for narrative inference in this one, as he would later in his career - nope, he's just lost up Chairman Mao's ass again.

So this is the Godard movie where the group of actors (including Jean-Pierre Leaud and Juliet Berto) sit around an apartment reciting socialist tracts to one another. Now if you've seen more than one Godard film made after 1966, you might be saying, Isn't that every Godard film? Touche - but this is the one where they do it for about 90 full minutes. I grant you that sometimes they smoke while doing it, sometimes they fire dart guns at pictures of philosophers and politicians who weren't alive during Doestoyevski's lifetime, and during one brief interval they do it while performing enthusiastic calisthenics.  There's also one long section where they do it while seated on a moving train. And they also stencil or sometimes paint socialist tracts on the walls of their apartment, which provides a little visual interest.

What's it like to watch? It's kind of like the worst sketch comedy film you've ever seen - maybe try to imagine that one low-budget Prime comedy that was 75 minutes of dramatizations of brief sex jokes, or that one time Bill Zebub tried to make a sketch comedy film - only less funny. I'm being glib, of course. There is one funny moment towards the end where two characters drive to a motel to assassinate someone in room 23 and the woman enters, comes back, and says she messed up and assassinated the tenant of room 32 instead, so she has to go back in again. Now that's not a great joke but it's the best you'll get in LA CHINOISE and I gather (per Wikipedia) we have Doestoyevski to thank for that one.

LA CHINOISE isn't entirely w/o value. Godard uses color nicely in many shots and Berto and the other actress look great. Also, it's got Leaud, possibly the most affable French actor of all time and certainly the mid-20th century precedent to Jason Schwartzman. I don't know if Leaud was super into left-wing politics in the 60s and therefore could understand what the heck his character is talking about, but he seems to deliver all his voluminous dialogue and monologues w/ earnest conviction. Of course Leaud's entire thing in every film is being affable and having earnest conviction while he wanders around having absolutely no idea what he's doing, thus I suppose that might be the case here, too.

FWIW I've read some Marx and some leftist theory, and I'm sympathetic certainly to Marxist and socialist ideology. I still felt very confused, disconnected, and apathetic during almost the entirety of LA CHINOISE. I'd guess you'd need at least a full semester of college or post-graduate level coursework in leftist poli-sci to be able to get down w/ JLG here, and maybe there were arthouses upon arthouses full of such filmgoers in 1967 who could grok with what JLG was puttin' down. I think that's a high barrier to entry today, though. But Godard wasn't ever much interested in connecting to viewers anyway.

2/5
I'd say just go watch Allan Funt's WHAT DO YOU SAY TO A NAKED LADY? (1970) instead.  :teddyr:

ARGYLLE (2024):
We watched this primarily for the cat, having seen one TV commercial for it and otherwise going in blind. Often that strategy works, and indeed ARGYLLE has....... twists? So I'll try to avoid spoilers here. In short - skip it!!!

This film is almost as long as EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE, which I reviewed a week ago. ARGYLLE has even more bad ideas than EEAAO, but unlike the 2023 Oscar winner for Best Picture, ARGYLLE executes almost none of them sufficiently, and also unlike EEAAO, ARGYLLE exhausted all my patience in well under two-and-a-quarter hours.

ARGYLLE does have Catherine O'Hara in a large supporting role (and looking great as a redhead again after several seasons of SCHITT'S CREEK), Sam Rockwell doing an honest job trying to play Tom Cruise and then briefly Val Kilmer as the Saint, and a bunch of other likeable actors pitching in some screen time. It also gives Bryce Dallas Howard an opportunity to be an ass-kicking female action hero, which I'd be okay w/ under many circumstances. And it has a lot of CGI cat, though probably not nearly enough CGI cat (or real cat) for my tastes. Unfortunately, it also has sooooooooooo many incessant Matthew Vaughn-isms, dialed up to Maximum Vaughnage, in support of a screenplay that is just doing everything everywhere all at once while accomplishing nothing well whatsoever.

ARGYLLE is also another $200 million + bomb that its producers should've known was never going to recoup let alone make a profit. I say: GOOD!  :thumbdown:

1/5

Just rewatch ROMANCING THE STONE and THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT at home while hanging out w/ your own cat/s!

Night of the Blood Beast (1958)

If The Thing had no money, it would be this film. Kinda slow & talky. Cool animated space ship in the opening credits. The actual space ship set had paper-thin walls; an actor was able to bend one wall by brushing against it. Decent animation of some microbes. Bad monster suit; it looked heavy, barely movable.

The Coming aka Burned at the Stake (1981) -   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYE6kinSt8k (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYE6kinSt8k)


Someone uploaded this Bert I Gordon Salem Witch Trial misfire to youtube. Fun fact: the I in Bert I Gordon stands for I would not want to be associated with this train wreck.

A girl in modern day Salem is the reincarnated spirit of one of the witch trial kids who accused innocent people of all that stuff. The poor little girl who plays her has to act like an insane person and do these endless monologues in Early American dialect. The most memorable thing about this movie is how the husband of one of the accused witches gets transported to the present day where he is solid and can be tackled, but can't be shot. It's like a bad student play. "Worth seeing" if you want to see a big mess. There are some colorful special effects, but it's a chore to get through and the story is ultimately really typical Salem Witch Trial stuff.

1.5 /5 highly reverse recommended

(https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/541648fde4b0f910e312cd76/1415152741005-AIRRQ5SDXIZXS2CSKB6R/image-asset.jpeg)

What a shame. I watched it once. So damned dark you can barely make out the lack of any action.

Honestly, I watched it for Susan Swift. Always liked her. Not a good actress, but she was different.

She give it her all.

Battle in Outer Space (1959)

In the distant year 1965, Earth is attacked by nefarious aliens from planet Natal, who cause all sorts of disaster. They are preparing an attack from a Moon base, so a two ship expedition is quickly launched to destroy the alien base. The destruction of the alien base doesn't help much, however and the aliens launch an all out attack. Earth's fighter defence can't stop them and the aliens are only defeated by a last ditch intervention of  laser cannon.

There is not a lot about this movie that makes any sense. Both sides have impressive weaponry at their disposal (including alien mind control), which is used erratically. There are a lot of explosions and shooting of lasers, with a climactic dogfight in space, long before Star Wars. It is also a very crowded movie, with lots of people in every scene who don't have too much to do. The main message is the power of international cooperation, with the peoples of the world coming together under the flag of the UN to battle the invaders.

Digging into the Ormond box set. This is going to hurt...

UNTAMED MISTRESS (1956): Three men travel into the jungle on a safairy (as they insist on calling their safari), accompanied by a woman raised by gorillas; when they get into gorilla country, the gorillas want her back. Badly stitched together story with some padded narrative added to flesh out stock footage and unused parts of a Sabu movie; the National Geographic-style nudity of topless native women near the end, and newly-shot scenes of topless "native" dancers entertaining men in gorilla suits, is the reason this was made. A movie only RC Merchant could love. I can tell this Ormond box set is going to be quite the chore. 1/5.

PLEASE DON'T TOUCH ME! (1963): A young wife who's frigid because of a sexual assault in her youth regains conjugal bliss with the help of hypnotism. A serious subject given much less respect than it deserves, this forbidden melodrama is an exercise in padding, pseudoscience, shoehorned mondo-style footage of surgery and---its raison d'etre---extensive cleavage (and even side boob). It's an indictment of its times on many levels. 2.5.

The female lead, Viki Caron (who never turned up in anything else), is remarkable. As Joe Bob Briggs would say, she has two enormous talents.

(https://www.cageyfilms.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/please-dont-touch-me_01-300x191.jpg)

I used to post this on my YouTube channel before I got banned. It was always a crowd-pleaser.

WHITE LIGHTNIN' ROAD (1967): A hot-rodder just wants to race, but keeps getting sucked into crime subplots that threaten to become interesting, before extricating himself and getting back to the track. Really boring; I've never understood how watching cars driving around in a circle is supposed to be entertaining. 0.5/5.

Poor Things.

Not quite arty enough for me to call art house, not quite enough sex and nudity to be a porno and not good enough to be enjoyable. Kristi picked this one. I did not recognise Emma Stone with her hair colour and style at all. It does have quite a big-name cast all of whom put in a decent performance, and it has nice sets but the film just wasn't coherent enough. I can imagine the Rev getting more enjoyment out of it than we did.

Indeed, I loved it and thought it was easily the best movie of 2023. I found it pretty coherent, although coherency isn't something I usually care about much.

I gotta get this ormand box set! Oh wait, I don't have a DVD player anymore. Wait, yes I have a travel one somewhere.

The Golden Blade

Colorful but cliche & slow paced Arabian Knights flick. Rock Hudson must avenge his father's death, finds a magic sword which only works for him, & must save the rebellious princess from evil advisor Jafar.

Felt cheap; costumes were anything which looked old; sets looked like Universal's European  village with minor changes.

I recently watched VELOCIPASTOR. I don't know what you're doing right now, but whatever it is, stop it and go watch that film. You won't regret it.

THE GIRL FROM TOBACCO ROW (1966): A butt-ugly but good-natured escaped convict (rock and roller Earl Sinks) comes to town and stays with some hick Bible thumpers, romancing the mute girl while searching for the loot his cellie stashed. It's about 3/4 talk, 1/5 harmonica music, and 1/20 action. One of the worst of the Ormond family movies, which is saying something. Somehow this got a 5.3 on IMDB, which seems insanely high. 1/5.

The Spork of Pleasure and Death (the 3-D version.)

I think I read about that one quite recently.

Such a twist ending! I didn't see him coming like that.

Is that a put-on? A Google search returned no results.......

Because it came up in another topic, I tracked down and watched the Insane Clown Posse western, Big Money Rustlas.  (I found it on youtube.) 

It's actually entertaining and I don't mean unintentionally.  There are legitimately funny moments that made me laugh out loud and lot of the movie has a sort of Troma feel to it where you know it's bad and they know it's bad, but that's what makes it fun. 

There's a midget love interest. 

It also has Jason Mews in one of his few roles that don't mention weed or Silent Bob.

You found it! I'll have to watch it on YT. Your positive comments apply also to the previous entry, B.M. HUSTLAS (minus the love interest, iirc).

Wizard of Mars (1965)

In the distant year 1975 a spaceship carrying out a survey of Mars crashes on the planet. Will the four astronauts survive until help comes?

My God, this was boring. Ostensibly an adaptation of Wizard of Oz, this movie has absolutely nothing to offer. The first 45 minutes are largely taken up by walking through a cave and across a desert, while a voice off tries to hype things up. Instead you get nothing, no incident, no tension, no character development, just some inane dialogue delivered with extraordinary flatness. The quest ends with the disembodied head of John Carradine giving lengthy exposition. The only action comes when they essentially have to change a lightbulb to set time back in motion and all ends well.

I watched this on YT and in the end I was welcoming the commercial breaks as a relief from the boredom.

^ That film is truly horrific, and not in a good way.

WIZARD OF MARS is terrible but at least it's less odious than

THE BEAT GENERATION (1959):
Second viewing of an Albert Zugsmith AIP production co-written by Richard Matheson (!). I remember kinda' digging it and finding it interesting several years back but I was probably drinking when I first watched it. It's definitely very interesting but mostly for all the wrong reasons. It opens in the informal "beat" nightclub/hangout where much of the action takes place and where Louis Armstrong inexplicably performs w/ his entire orchestra and is on a first-name basis w/ the thuggish local white cops. Following ONE brief sub-scene of truly dank, remarkably hilarious "beat" dialogue, Matheson and his collaborator just give up on putting in the effort and everyone talks more or less normally for the rest of the movie. (Diablo Cody may have taken notes here...)

The main plot focuses on a hep-talking home invader/serial rapist who selects the innocent wife of the cop pursuing him as his next target, just for "kicks". That cop is an acknowledged misogynist who thinks all women are whores and suggests that every female victim in the film was in some way asking for sexual assault - including, ultimately, his own wife! When she reveals (post-attack) that she's pregnant and doesn't know if the baby is her husband's or the rapist's, Dirty Harry forbids her to get an abortion - not because he wants to raise the child regardless (he doesn't), but (as he insists repeatedly, pathologically) "it's illegal... it's against the law!". All of this is entirely stomach-churning and made me think I'd nodded off for long stretches of TBG the first time I watched it. There is a certain criticality to the first half of Matheson's screenplay, as he at least is raising some pertinent questions about toxic masculinity et al, and as the character of the wife is presented as extremely sympathetic and reasonable. Yet the film ultimately reaches all the wrong conclusions, most despicably in a scene where the wife's best friend escorts her to the neighborhood priest for advice, and the priest (played by uncredited ubiquitous white guy William Schallert) solemnly assures her that, regardless of the circumstances, she will be murdering her unborn child. I've wanted to punch a few priests IRL but I don't think I've ever wanted to beat up a movie priest as much as I wanted to slug the s**t out of Father Schallert in this scene.

Making matters worse, the film is essentially HEAT with Ray Danton's highly compelling yet detestable rapist in the DeNiro role and Steve Cochran's vacuous dullard fascist detective in the Pacino role. As they finally grapple mano a mano at the climax - underwater, no less! - it's impossible to root for one or the other. I tried to forget I'd already seen the ending years ago and hoped both's lungs would implode or they'd be devoured by sharks. No such luck. What's additionally worrisome and perplexing is that the beatniks who populate the film's background are incidental to the plot, thus presumably Zugsmith and Co. were either trying to repackage their crime potboiler w/ a topical facade or else they were really trying to put over the notion that the nihilist rapist was an accurate reflection of the characters of Kerouac, Ginsburg, and Burroughs. (Okay, maybe Burroughs was fair game.)

The least offensive "interesting" aspect of THE BEAT GENERATION remains its large ensemble cast of (seemingly) whoever was wandering by AIP's front doors that week. Jackie "Uncle Fester" Coogan plays a large and completely serious supporting role as the voice of reason, which in and of itself seems emblematic of TBG's compromised worldview. Coogan is also credited as "Dialogue Coach", which is nothing to brag about in light of the performances of James "Jim" Mitchum (son of Bob), who does a great job as Danton's accomplice when he's silent though blows it every time he opens his mouth; and Mamie Van Doren, who's competent at best as the bait that Cochran uses to try to snare Danton. Better value is delivered by a completely unrecognizable Vampira (!!!) who stops in for one scene where she reads some mediocre poetry and looks more like Mary Woronov in a butch haircut. But honestly the most amusing aspects of TBG are two bit players that hang out in the background for most of the film before figuring briefly in the final act: Norman Grabowski, who looks like a heavyweight boxer but moves and behaves like Marcel Marceau, and "Slapsy Maxie" Rosenbloom, who looks and acts like a drunk Curly Howard and steals the show when he decides to whup the tar out of loathsome fascist Cochran. Neither Grabowski nor Rosenbloom are remotely credible as young beatniks - both look like they're pushing 50 at least - but in this case Zugsmith's cluelessness about his milieu at least yielded some authentic entertainment.

Honestly TBG isn't badly made at all - it's just an ugly thing to endure in a post-Dobbs world and particularly in a week where one of Weinstein's convictions was overturned.
2/5
Will not watch again.

(If you've seen at least a couple AIP or Corman films you'll likely recognize the beachside bungalow where the beatniks hang out.)

THE EXOTIC ONES (1968): A New Orleans strip club decides a swamp monster (actually a tall shirtless guy with a bad haircut) would make a good attraction for raincoaters. A movie about strippers and monsters should not be this talky and boring, but at least there's a stripper who drinks a glass of water while doing a handstand, a catfight, and a serenade from a giant harmonica. 1.5/5.

I love this movie! For just the oddball cast! Vampira and her rat are precious!

That was my initial reaction several years ago after a few drinks, yeah.  :smile:    Maybe the lesson for me is "Don't watch bad movies sober!"

^I'm a BIG Vampira fan, so any rare chance to see her, even for a brief moment, is cool to me.

(https://i.imgur.com/oI2HFV0.gif) (https://lunapic.com)

(https://i.imgur.com/0c5rX93.jpeg) (https://lunapic.com)

Yeah, Maila Nurmi was a cool chick and it's neat to see her out of "drag", so to speak. Tim Burton kind of made it seem like she was Vampira all the time iirc.

I watched the Luarel and Hardy movie A Haunting We Will Go.  It's a bit odd because there are no ghosts in the movie, no spooks, nothing that would do anything even remotely considered Haunting.  Instead it has gangster and a stage magician.  It's not a bad movie, but not one of their better works.

THE BURNING HELL (1974): Two hippies don't believe in Hell, but after one of them dies in a gory but unconvincing motorcycle crash the other listens to a fire and brimstone sermon from Estus R. Pirkle (complete with re-enactments of Biblical stories by parishioners and trips to Hell) and gets saved. Intended to be shown at Sunday schools to terrify (very) impressionable youth, it's full of paunchy deacons and matronly parishioners dressing up like Pharisees and delivering Biblical prophecies through thick Tennessee accents, then demonstrating the torments of Hell by grimacing through burnface makeup while live maggots crawl over their faces. Unbelievable. 1.5/5.

^ I need to see that! I love the Ormand's quasi-Christian/ horror movies!

They are... something else. They scare little kids and make adults laugh. The anti-Communist one is insane.

I remember seeing IF FOOTMEN TIRE YOU WHAT WILL HORSES DO many years ago and went 😳😳😏

You say "Estus Pirkle", I say "How high..."

".......Do I have to be before I can swallow that guy's baloney and not want to puke pea soup in his sanctimonious face?"  :drink:

THE GRIM REAPER (1976): A man refuses to get saved even after his unsaved race car driver son dies and goes to hell, preferring to attend seances conducted by an obvious charlatan (whom the movie obviously believes can really speak to the dead). Spoiler: he eventually goes to church and accepts Jesus. A recycled version of Ormond's previous "The Burning Hell," with less hell footage, but with June Ormond dressed as a Halloween-store witch to reenact Saul's trip to the necromancer in 1 Samuel. 1/5.

The Red Light Sting (Made for TV 1984) - The feds buy a whorehouse in an attempt to take down an extortionist mobster, played by a guy (Harold Gould) who looks like Ricardo Montalbán but isn't. Having Farrah Fawcett as the Madame and girls who look like they just filmed the "Super Freak" video as whores works. Having Beau Bridges as the pimp definitely does not.

In fact, it really starts to get irritating. Maybe there is something clever to Bridges as the worlds first "aw shucks" pimp, but I just wanted to slap the guy. The best part of the movie is the goofy pimp costumery and insanely tacky crib he's holed up in while on the assignment. After this, Fawcett was in the landmark domestic violence movie "The Burning Bed" which I watched in horror as a 9 year old. Didn't the husband try to feed her to alligators or something?

This movie is in no way notable and even if the pimp/ cop role had been correctly cast it would basically be at the level of a Charlie's Angels episode.

1.5 / 5

The "Dondi" of s**tty made for tv movies

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GNHTn9QWEAASCvW?format=png&name=small)

Casting Harold Gould as Ricardo Montalban is just as funny as casting Beau Bridges as a pimp. What a profoundly white White Person movie!

THE BOXER (1972):
After the extremely classy FALLEN IDOL I needed some sleazy sorbet for my movie palate and figured the trick would be done by an Italian crime thriller starring Robert Blake and Ernest Borgnine and directed by Franco Prosperi, the ghoul who invented the Mondo film genre and created its most horrifying and inhumane entries. Well, in spite of the opening credits declaring that THE BOXER is "Directed by Franco Prosperi", can you believe it was actually directed by some nobody named FRANCESCO Prosperi who isn't Franco Prosperi in the slightest? I shoulda' known when mid-way through the flick Blake speeds away from a crime scene, runs over a dog ONLY off-screen (w/ sound FX), and then in a later scene we're told that the dog will be fine. This one detail was a clear signal that I was watching the work of an imposter....... as of course the Real Franco Prosperi was the maniac probably most singly responsible for the introduction of the "No Animals Were Harmed During The Making Of The Film" disclaimer. Now I don't mind NOT seeing (or hearing) dog-death in the slightest - I love dogs and other furry animals. But almost every other aspect of THE BOXER is equally toothless!

Blake at least moves and behaves quite convincingly as a bantamweight who flees one bad match and of course stumbles directly into a much dicier murder plot, set up by greasy bad guy Tomas Milian (as "Hippy!"), who is underused but easily the most entertaining thing about the movie. Eventually Borgnine shows up as a homicide detective and does a pretty weak job of trying to straighten things out. It's unclear if THE BOXER was shot entirely in Europe but it looks like it was mostly or entirely post-dubbed in the Italian tradition. Blake and Borgnine's unmistakable voices are definitely their own, but the looping seems to have inhibited both actors from delivering masterful performances, w/ Borgnine seeming a little stiff in the interest of syncing his lines, while Blake just goes full-chop socky/anime gonzo and litters his vocal track w/ constant weird non-verbal interjections. ("Ah! Huhhhh! Oh?!")

There's some mostly bloodless fisticuffs and gunplay, plus a little okay car-chasing. Camille Keaton appears very briefly in flashback - she'd have been better utilized as the female lead, which is filled by flavorless Catherine Spaak. There's no spaaks to be found between Blake and Spaak, yet she still appears incongruously at the end of the climax and just before the credits roll to stare longingly at Blake (and vice versa) in a series of long awkward cut-away close-ups. It's just about the least well-motivated erotic staring sequence I've seen since the opening weekend finale to LOTR: RETURN OF THE KING in 2003! Fortunately it's about one-thirtieth as long as the erotic staring sequence in that film but it's still too much.

2/5
Nothing to see here!

I figured I should check out the motion picture that everyone's talking about.......

MADAME WEB (2024):
Produced not by but "in association with" Marvel Studios, who I guess didn't give Columbia Pictures the memo about their own recent flop headlined by D-list female heroes, THE MARVELS. I'm gonna' frame this like I would in a lecture for the "Superhero Cinema" college course that I taught for about 3.5 years, through the lens of a lifelong comics reader who now struggles to keep up w/ the increasingly trivial programming of a post-ENDGAME Avengersverse... none of the four female protagonists in MADAME WEB are terribly (or at all) significant in comics or to most comic readers, and nor is the antagonist. The title character was a somewhat sinister minor superpowered old woman introduced in 1980, who only stuck around for a couple years in subplots and bore a closer resemblance to O.G. Aunt May Rosemary Harris than to the lithe and youthful Dakota Johnson. Don and Melanie's daughter is braced by three teenager girls: the Latina (underwritten) is a newer character named "Silk" (though she's never referred as this onscreen) who had her own comic for a while a couple years ago; the redhead (also underdeveloped) was the second Spider-Woman for a bit in the late 80s and then much later took on the "Madame Web" name but remained more or less obscure; and the black girl (supremely annoying as written and played) is no one I've ever seen or heard of in a book. Meanwhile, the villain , "Ezekial", was the focus of a rather unpopular storyline in the 90s and hasn't been up to much (or has been dead) ever since. The absence of Jessica Drew, the original Spider-Woman who probably would have much higher recognition among mainstream filmgoers (or at least some) and wore a similar costume to Spider-Man's is puzzling... for that matter, Spider-Gwen is now super hot in comics and thanks to the SPIDERVERSE movies, so why not just make a movie about her?

All of the context above, plus the tangential appearances of Uncle Ben Parker, his sister-in-law Mary, and even (briefly) Peter as a newborn, stinks of drinkin' thinkin' or just plain desperation. Presumably someone envisioned this as a franchise that could run in tandem w/ more future live-action Spider-Man movies, as its set (otherwise pointlessly) in 2003, allowing the screenwriters to incorporate a Britney Spears song as if it was timely and also (I guess) allowing Dakota to be somewhat older (though probably still just a foxy 45 year old) when Spider-Man himself starts swingin'. Most bizarrely, Dakota's proteges never appear in costume EXCEPT in brief FLASH-FORWARDS to....... a future entry in the franchise! (Always smart to lay a two-hour foundation for something that barely anyone is interested in seeing to begin with.)

To MADAME WEB's credit, there are actually multiple brief bursts of well-directed suspense and/or action, including a surprisingly effective use of that Britney song. Dakota is a more compelling lead than her mother, anyways; Zosia Mamet shows up for several scenes as a plot device, but I'm not complaining; and Adam Scott  :bluesad: delivers what is probably his least punchable performance to date, though of course he's no patch on either Martin Sheen nor Cliff Robertson. All those qualified kudos ultimately amount to little, however, in the face of one preposterously improbable plot contrivance after another hollow dialogic inanity. While it's shot and produced with some panache, you'd have to harken back to the pre-IRON MAN era to find another superhero film this poorly and senselessly written. In fact I was reasonably convinced that MADAME WEB was the first Avengersverse film scripted entirely by A.I., until the closing (and only) credits announce five count 'em FIVE human screenwriters. You know what, if this is what you get after paying five screenwriters to write a movie, maybe A.I. is the right way for studios to go...

Still, it was better than MORBIUS.
2/5

At the climactic moment when Johnson becomes "Madame Web", she is laying on blacktop next to a giant "210" in white paint....... baldly nerd-signaling towards the character's first appearance in AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #210. I guess this is what 21st century Cinema has come to!

THE BELIEVER'S HEAVEN (1977): Having threatened unbelievers with the torments of Hell in his last two films, Estus Pirkle describes heaven in this sermon interrupted by questionable amateur Bible reenactments, icky musical numbers, and trotting out disabled people to point out how they'd be cured in the afterlife. THE BELIEVER'S HEAVEN is much duller than THE BURNING HELL, which is perhaps why they take a brief trip to Hell at the end to relieve the tedium. The first forty minutes or so are a complete waste of time; the singing dwarf, however, is unforgettable, and really belongs in a David Lynch movie. I think Pirkle had zero charisma--maybe that's why he relied almost entirely on fearmongering and freak-show antics to keep his congregation engaged. 1/5.

Street Knight (1993)

The last film Cannon Pictures made I believe.

The black girl was a VERY short lived Spider-Woman in the comics, who actually started out pretending to be Spider-MAN when Peter briefly retired.   She's white in the comics. 

Deadly DILF (2023) -( before I get into the hyperbole, it's an unimaginative Fatal Attraction imitation. Bottom line: that's all it is. )

Wow, I can't believe I finally made it through one of TUBI's "urban" offerings. I got 1/3 of the way through Plug Love and about the same with Lot Lizards. A stupid idiot Dad has a one off with the babysitter, who then becomes a crazy, but clever, stalker. Generally being no help at all are the guy's likeable but also stupid brother and gorgeous but oblivious wife. The director of Jersey Shore Shark Attack loads this with cliches, unexplained stuff ( how did he manage to give her the drug that caused her to fail the drug test???) that probably just got cut out to make the run time, and hot biracial chicks who keep all their clothes on so why even bother having them look so good?  

Yet, there is a kernal of believability in all of it. The Dad does seem like kind of a dummy, and the wife's control of their finances would be genuinely emasculating. Just a kernal, though. Also what happened to the gay best friend? It was colorful and entertaining for the first 1/3 (that number again) but I had to power through the rest.  

2.5 /5 they did nothing with the well worn concept here, but it is "so bad it's good" in places

I don't mind that they made her black, but was she so aggressively insufferable in the comics?

The Last Kumite (2024)

A Karate champion is forced to participate in an illegal underground fight tournament in order to save his kidnapped daughter.

German martial arts film paying homage to Bloodsport (1988) in so many ways, and 1990s martial arts movies. Made by fans for fans, starring Matthias Hues as the evil one, Billy Blanks and Cynthia Rothrock as the good ones supporting the hero, German martial art stunt actor Mathis Landwehr.

There are also sightings of Kurt McKinney (No Retreat, No Surrender 1985), Michel and Abdel Qissi (regulars in many van Damme movies), German martial arts actor/choreographer Mike Möller, and martial arts YouTuber David Kurzhal, Dirk Rabe and David Ruessel.

The GWF (German Wrestling Federation) provided a few fighters including Mike D Vecchio who plays the final 'boss' opponent, looking like Seann William Scott on steroids.

So, is it any good?

Not worse or better than those 1990s direct-to-video martial arts sequels. It's the flawed end fight between Landwehr and Vecchio that pretty much ruins the entire movie. They also had to squeeze in a unnecessary short fight between Hues and Blanks, as a final 'treat.' Anyway, the film is played straight and serious. Hues has a few bad acting moments, Rothrock has a weird final moment that didn't make sense other than to show she can kick a defenseless guy in the head who is already on the floor injured and bleeding. Stay classy, Cynthia. You are better than the one finger salute he gave you.

The fights are alright, though the final confrontation between Landwehr and Vecchio is a joke. Landwehr is beaten to a pulp, has an epiphany / new strength / motivation and, well, defeats Vecchio with only two kicks. That's it.

Wow.

To the idiot(s) who wrote the script => a proper beatdown is essential. It is CRUCIAL. It's like the #1 rule of martial art movies. I can't believe I had to write this. It goes without saying if you know anything about martial art movies. No final beatdown is being disrespectful to the genre, and spitting in the face of fans.

There's also a semi-cheesy theme song.

The Last Kumite had a brief theatrical run in early May 2024 (fan screenings) before going to streaming platforms and physical media.

The IMDb rating is low, and it should be. It has moments of mild entertainment, except for the non-fighting scenes. They are boring AF because no one cares.

Real world rating: 1/5 (poor) Won't stimulate your intellect. Its just guys hitting each other.
Fan rating: 1.5/5 (barely sufficient) Had they included a decent final beatdown it would've been easily 3/5 (good).

On a sidenote, and I'm not judging as we all get old, but the only one who actually aged well is Billy Blanks. I want some of his anti-aging genes.

Thanks for posting that one! I remember when "kumite" was just a funny-sounding word that David Letterman would sprinkle into Top 10 lists now and then for a cheap laff. Good to know (I guess!) that it's enjoying its own legacy...!

It's alright for what it is. I feel like a little wink-with-the-eye humor wouldn't have hurt, but according to Last Kumite interviews I've seen on YouTube, the majority of German fans who grew up with 1990s martial arts b-movies don't like to be made fun of  :buggedout:

THE 39 STRIPES (1979): Religious testimony based on the life of a man who came to Jesus in prison. It could've really been a great anti-establishment movie a la COOL HAND LUKE, sympathetic to the plight of the oppressed prisoner, but it's too blindly focused on getting to the conversion; it treats all the prison drama as necessary to pad out the film to 60 minutes. Strange how the pious warden condones all that vile, sadistic torture in his institution. Who would've thought the Ormonds would make even worse movies without the input of Estus Pirkle? 0.5/5.

IT'S ABOUT THE SECOND COMING (1982): Preachers explain what will happen during the End Times and a disco-dancing hedonist with an Eric Estrada haircut imagines himself rejecting the Mark of the Beast; a lot of Biblical re-enactments are scattered throughout, almost at random. Tim Ormond takes over the backyard Biblical epic business from his departed father Ron, with the same sort of disordered scripting but more focus on STAR WARS-inspired special effects: this one has laser beams! And the destruction of Nebuchadnezzar's statue by an explosive asteroid is nearly impressive. It's actually the most entertaining of the Ormond's work since IF FOOTMEN TIRE YOU. Watchable as a bad movie, in normal terms it's a 1.5/5.

I watched Werewolf by Night. 

It's short with not a lot of time for characterization, but it's got it's moments.  Man-Thing's appearances are great, and how Ulysses Bloodstone set up a machine to play marionette with his own corpse is nicely creepy.  The black and white was also a nice little nod to the classics of old horror. 

If I had a complaint theough it would be that for a movie called Werewolf by Night, there's not a lot of werewolf in it.

Yeah. So many of the recent Marvel movies are falling into that same trap. MADAME WEB = two-hour trailer for a sequel we may never receive (and that's fine) where the main character is actually called "Madame Web" and she actually leads an actual team of actually-costumed actual superheroes. I haven't seen WEREWOLF BY NIGHT yet but I imagine you and most other folks were hoping to watch a movie about a werewolf, not a movie about a guy named "Jack Russell".

THE SACRED SYMBOL (1984): A lecturer at an "Adventurer's Club" shows footage from around the world--snake charmers, a man on a bed of nails, Filipino flagellants--which for some reason convinces listeners that Christianity is the One True Religion. A lazy and senseless attempt at a Christian "mondo" movie, which blessedly marked the end of the Ormond Organization's cinematic mission. 0.5/5.

That pretty much wraps up the Ormond box set for me, although there are a few remaining extra features. I can hardly believe I subjected myself to this, I must be a real masochist. There are good bad-movie moments in the pre-Christian movies, with THE EXOTIC ONES being a worthy bad movie. IF FOOTMEN TIRE YOU is a must see for bad movie fans, and the other Christian movies have goofy moments scattered throughout, though they'd probably feature better on a mixtape--even though they're all about an hour long, watching them can be a chore. Oh well, on to the Coffin Joe boxset soon enough, which I expect to enjoy on a much more sincere level.

If they had called the movie Bloodstone, I don't think there would have been any complaints.  In fact, I'd guess that people would actually praise the inclusion of Werewolf by Night in that case.

A TRIBUTE TO HOUDINI (1987): Magician John Calvert performs a set (with some additional footage), of which only a couple of tricks evoke Houdini. Calvert isn't bad, but this is nothing special; best part is vintage footage of a young Mickey Rooney as an audience plant. Not really a bad movie, but it's an extra in the Ormond set so... 2/5.

JUNE CARR: THE VIRTUAL VAUDEVILLIAN (1987): An aged June Carr performs a few vaudeville routines in front of a clumsy green screen, with clips of her glory days acting alongside Bob Hope and Lash Larue. Intended by Tim Ormond as a tribute to his mother, who was more talented than her work with the Ormond Organization would lead you to believe, it's sweet but not especially engaging; on the plus side, she doesn't mention Jesus once. Another Ormond box set extra, only 30 minutes. 2/5.

DOPPELGGANGER aka JOURNEY TO THE FAR SIDE OF THE SUN (1969):
One of the best things about getting older and having an immense stockpile of unwatched movies is that (increasingly) I stumble upon titles that I have no recollection of acquiring and positively no recollection whatsoever of ever hearing about or reading about in the past. JTTFSOTS - or its working title DOPPELGANGER, which I might as well use for the sake of (lol) simplicity - is one such amusing discovery. I just wish it was a better film!

Universal Pictures funded (and domestically distributed) this opulent UK production that can only have been greenlit in the wake of the success of Kubrick's 2001, which seems to have directly inspired at least a few moments in this DOPPELGANGER. Directed by Robert Parrish, who also helmed the attractive and totally nutty CASINO ROYALE '67, DOPPELGANGER truly looks like a million bucks, and I mean that in 1969 pounds sterling. The dialogue (by British kids-show creator Gerry Anderson) is generally intelligent and the acting is mostly solid, though leading man Roy Thinnes has about as much charisma as the marionettes that headlined Anderson's TV projects. So what's the problem?

The first problem is the pacing. I guess in 1969 audiences were still fascinated enough by space travel to potentially sit still for ten to fifteen minute sequences of astronauts flipping switches, pushing buttons, gazing out portals, and mostly sitting still. A decade later, I know for sure that tastes had changed, 'cause I remember (even as a small child) how folks would complain about the languorous and uneventful launching and docking sequences in STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE, and actually I still see people complaining about those scenes today, and yet DOPPELGANGER makes ST:TMP look like TETSUO THE IRON MAN. I don't have a clock on my DVD player and lost track of the time while watching DOPPELGANGER, and would swear to you it was no less than two hours long or longer. Nope - only 101 minutes.

The other problem with DOPPELGANGER could have been an appealing feature: the premise is so daft it seems like a natural hoot. Following a lengthy prologue where Herbert Lom plays a man with one cybernetic eye who has nothing to do with the rest of the plot, a bunch of British eggheads (led by shouty jerk Ian Hendry) enlist Thinnes to fly "to the far side of the sun" and try to identify a previously unspotted planet that seems to occupy Earth's orbit. After a loooooooong trip (they don't call it "the far side" for nothin', I guess), Thinnes returns to Earth with the inexplicable ability to read handwriting in a mirror.  :question: That's right. (Hendry is completed puzzled.) If you've ever seen an episode of anything Rod Serling created or wrote, you can probably see DOPPELGANGER's twist coming from half a running time away. Should I spoil it? Okay.

*SPOILERS*
Yeah, Thinnes doesn't "return" to Earth, he arrives at a parallel Earth on the opposite side of the sun, where everything is exactly the same, EXCEPT it's....... backwards. Yup. I mean literally reversed. It's Bizarro Superman's dimension, but less fun. Thinnes' bathroom is on the opposite side of his front foyer, the light switch is on the opposite side of the bathroom door, British people drive on the wrong side of the road and American drive on the right side ('cause it's a UK production, natch)....... scientists write in English but backwards... ad nauseam infinitum.
*END SPOILER*

Okay, that could be fun, right? Nah. Anderson insists on taking the high road and denies us even a broad, schticky "You maniacs!" type reveal from the end of PLANET OF THE APES. The climax of DOPPELGANGER is understated to a fault. You ever watch one of the Shyalaman films that DON'T have a climactic "ah-hah" twist... like THE HAPPENING? Yeah, DOPPELGANGER feels like that: academic and deeply unsatisfying.

DOPPELGANGER has no sex or blood, but it does contain discussion of contraception and adultery; a fairly discreet scene of Thinnes joining his naked wife in the shower; Thinnes later slugging his wife in the face (!); and the kind of bleak ending that was de rigueur in the late 60s and 70s. It required cuts in the UK to avoid an X rating but it was rated G in the US! The MPAA ratings board never made any Goddamn sense.

2.5/5

The one consistent source of amusement here is that Thinnes' character is named "Glen Ross", so if you're not above doing Rifftrax in your living room, that's something.

^ I seen that on TV in 1973. Don't remember it all that well- IE it sucked.

Speaking of sucks- SSSSSSS (1973)

Christ. The only fairly decent part was the monster make-up. STUPID! Not in a "Fun bad movie time!" Stupid. Just stupid stupid.
Strother Martin turns Dirk Benedict into a snake. Not even a giant snake! The guy shrinks into a snake. FX are BAD too.
Uh! Why? WHY?

Daughter of the Mind (1969 Made for TV) - It's not quite as bad as some of the movies in this thread, but very underwhelmed by this one. I didn't expect a TV movie would be this crappy. What was the point?

The hook here is the ghost scenes, a guy's daughter apparently coming back from the dead to warn him about stuff. Maybe it was state of the art in 1969, but it looks pretty silly now. A 1920's style seance brings further shenanigans along these lines. Ed Asner and some other guy are detectives investigating the whole thing. There's even a cold war angle because the guy is a government scientist.

What made it even worse was having to sit through a "Creature Feature" type show someone (recently) made around it. There's an interview with one of the actresses so I guess if you are really curious you could watch that, but I just wanted to see the movie. It's a Scooby Doo type plot and has an utterly baffling number of superlative IMDB reviews *. The lead detective guy was competent enough and interesting title, I guess.

*edit: I think the image of the ghost child stuck out in a lot of young viewers minds.

2/5

(https://i0.wp.com/www.kindertrauma.com/images/art2/pamraygenesunday1.jpg?w=640&ssl=1)

^ I seen that on TV in 1969. Scared the s**t outta me. I was 7.
Later on the ghost girl- Pamyla Ferdin- would be in the TOOLBOX MURDERS (1978)

Yeah I think the opening scene in particular stuck with people, but the rest of the movie doesn't keep up