RECENT VIEWINGS (Bad Movie Thread!)

[M.10rda]

And on that very astute note re: remakes.......!

NIGHTWATCH (1994):
Heard about this one in the 90s (it was highly hyped at the time), heard about the remake, saw neither, then started watching this original last month for Halloween but gave up halfway through - just didn't seem worth the effort. Finished it yesterday - it wasn't worth the effort!

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (aka Jamie Lannister from GAME OF THRONES) has his breakthrough role as a young himbo who takes a job as an overnight security guard in a morgue. Weird things happen (sometimes) and he begins to think he's cracking up, or a serial killer is messing w/ him, or - something. To the extent that NIGHTWATCH took place entirely in the morgue, it would be a decent enough suspense thriller. It would also be about 45 minutes long or less. Well over half the running time is wasted outside of the morgue, on Nikolaj laying around naked with his girlfriend and on hanging out w/ his annoying and toxic best bud. All this extra-morgue frittering sets up an extremely labored third act "twist" (kinda' like the "twists" in TWISTERS... nominal at best) and really was mostly unnecessary and unwelcome. Nikolaj does have some discernible star quality, but he gets very little to do besides shudder and cringe in horror. Worst of all (SPOILERS), he spends 10+ minutes of the climax hogtied while other characters try to save him. Ugh.

Miramax bought the rights to NIGHTWATCH and then remade it in English, which seems like it could've been a fair plan - there's definitely plenty to improve upon here! - except that they hired original writer/director Ole Borndahl to (presumably) repeat his own mistakes! Nikolaj was replaced by Ewan McGregor, who must be perfectly cast as a good looking simp/wimp. The hot blonde girlfriend was played by Patricia Arquette, which also tracks, but they did upgrade the best friend role - in the original he's a schlubby Jeremy Piven-type w/o Piven's charisma, whereas in the remake he's Josh Brolin, who possibly might be very compelling in a way the original guy is not. The fourth lead in the original is a creepy homicide detective who provides most of the film's most interesting moments. Watching the original, I fantasized about perfect Anglo casting - unquestionably Sam Neill. Nope - it's Nick Nolte near the beginning of his long late-career habit of collecting checks while sleepwalking. Anyway the remake might be the one to watch if you're at all interested, but I won't be bothering.

2/5 There's also an underage prostitute who Nikolaj and Piven-lite patronize before she gets murdered. I suspect that character aged up a bit in the remake...

[LilCerberus]

Tonight's Stinker
Flight to Mars (1951)
https://youtu.be/ARZX__yEhww?si=Ji4cANFKAuket__Y

Four men & a woman go to Mars....
The first thirty minutes are dreadful, with the pilot & woman going through a break-up in space, the reporter constantly trying to take advantage of the situation, and one of the scientists is a depresso pondering the futility of the mission.... Then the ship is hit by a meteor, & the crash-land on Mars...
There, they meet a group of Martians who promise to help them, but secretly plan to steal the ship & take over earth, while a group of dissidents help them escape.....

[zombie no.one]

THE FOREIGNER (2003)

One of Steven Seagal's absolute worst, and I'm probably the biggest Steven Seagal apologist you'll meet. Boring, humdrum, beige, useless crime drama. Not so bad it's good. no fun at all to the point of being vaguely depressing.

[zombie no.one]

OUT FOR A KILL (2003)

Despite playing exactly the same character as he always does, Seagal's next film after THE FOREIGNER is approx 1500% more entertaining. a complete clusterfruitcake of a plot, but zany and bonkers throughout. fantastically bad acting from most involved. At one point Seagal faces off against a guy who can randomly defy gravity and climb walls, running round them like a spider... what? this makes no sense and has no bearing on anything.

there's a scene in a tattoo parlour that is so badly acted / scripted I wish I could show it to you guys. can't find that bit on youtube

8.5 Stevens out of 10

[pacman000]

Robinson Crusoe on Mars

Surprisingly well done. Some of the FX look more like something from the '80's than the '60's.

Fairly typical story of an astronaut who crashes on an alien world, then has to figure out how to survive.

[VenomX73]

Totally Killer (2023)

I enjoyed it! 

[pacman000]

The Babe Ruth Story (1948)

Old Hollywood biopics have a formula: a man has a dream; he pursues that dream. Along the way, he meets a girl, & she helps him. On this basic outline, the writers hang bits & pieces of the subject's life, usually heavily fictionalized.

Allied Artists knows the formula, but they don't know when to stop the fiction. Babe cures no less than two kids through the power of baseball.

It's not the worst movie ever made; you can tell what's happening & what's happening is usually interesting, but it's not worth your time, unless you want to drink pure corn syrup.

[LilCerberus]

Tonight's Stinker
The Vulture (1966)
https://youtu.be/HWaJv1hOHuk?si=7TpnV3KaZ01a4cCb

It has to do with a family of British aristocrats, whom several centuries earlier were cursed by the owner of a giant bird....
It starts with a school marm seeing the grave of the bird owner open up & a giant bird comes out...
Of course, nobody believes this except for an American scientist who (get this) doesn't believe in an olde witch's curse, but thinks that someone has been messing with "nuclear trans-mutations"....
From there, it turns into a slow, meandering whodunnit with only two suspects...
Of course, there is a monster, which is pretty goofy, with an almost "Scooby-Doo" reveal...

[Dr. Whom]

Tonight's Stinker
The Vulture (1966)
https://youtu.be/HWaJv1hOHuk?si=7TpnV3KaZ01a4cCb

It has to do with a family of British aristocrats, whom several centuries earlier were cursed by the owner of a giant bird....
It starts with a school marm seeing the grave of the bird owner open up & a giant bird comes out...
Of course, nobody believes this except for an American scientist who (get this) doesn't believe in an olde witch's curse, but thinks that someone has been messing with "nuclear trans-mutations"....
From there, it turns into a slow, meandering whodunnit with only two suspects...
Of course, there is a monster, which is pretty goofy, with an almost "Scooby-Doo" reveal...

Is the giant bird the size of a battleship?

[LilCerberus]

Tonight's Stinker
The Vulture (1966)
https://youtu.be/HWaJv1hOHuk?si=7TpnV3KaZ01a4cCb

It has to do with a family of British aristocrats, whom several centuries earlier were cursed by the owner of a giant bird....
It starts with a school marm seeing the grave of the bird owner open up & a giant bird comes out...
Of course, nobody believes this except for an American scientist who (get this) doesn't believe in an olde witch's curse, but thinks that someone has been messing with "nuclear trans-mutations"....
From there, it turns into a slow, meandering whodunnit with only two suspects...
Of course, there is a monster, which is pretty goofy, with an almost "Scooby-Doo" reveal...

Is the giant bird the size of a battleship?

Naw, it's the size of a man.   

[LilCerberus]

Tonight's Stinker
The Day the World Ended 1955
https://youtu.be/qU2ipDetUbI?si=MeMWQqguv4RTwYer

So, there's a nuclear war, and five people, an old prospector, a young geologist & his contaminated friend, a stripper & her no good boyfriend, come across a house where a retired Navy captain & his daughter are holed up...
The captain & the geologist are talking science, while the stripper's boyfriend has nothing nice to say about everyone else....
Meanwhile, the contaminated survivor develops a taste for raw meat, & later reveals there's a bigger mutant out there....
Not "that" bad, considering I'd already seen this gosh awful remake by Larry Buchannan....

[zombie no.one]

BLADE (1998)

cheapo dvd purchase... one of those films I've been semi-aware of ever since it came out... never really known what it was about. Oh great it's a superhero vampire movie. managed about 1 hour of the 2. endless hyperactive CGI techno dross. go away.  to be fair it doesn't look 26 years old (to my eyes anyway).... in fact I have great difficulty in distinguishing between pretty much any year from 1998 to now, movie wise. all looks contemporaneous.

but I did pick up a Wesley Snipes 6-pack dvd box set of some of his mid 2000s movies - an era where he seemed to do a 'Seagal' and just star in numerous straight to dvd action flicks. yay

[M.10rda]

Grateful to see you review BLADE in the correct board.       It has some positive points, including some nice casting in the supporting roles, but the leads sink it. I got ahold of the screenplay a year or two before it came out, back in the day where you didn't really know who the heck was even in a movie that far in advance. Read it and thought, Okay... you get three amazing actors as Frost, Whistler, and Blade... this movie will kick some a$$. Regrettably... they cast Stephen Dorff, Kris Kristofferson, and a sleepwalking Wesley Snipes instead.

The second one is a good time, though. The third one is the film that launched this very thread a little bit over one year ago... and it's still about ten times more entertaining than the original. 

[zombie no.one]

haha, didn't realise you kicked off the thread with pt3.... also I didn't mention that what I actually picked up was the whole trilogy box set (for £1.00... that was less than pretty much all their regluar single dvds. I mean, I probably would've even bought a box set of documentaries about seaweed if it was £1). will get round to attempting to watch the other 2, and compare notes with your assessment of number 3 afterwards. :)

[LilCerberus]

Tonight's Stinker
BATTLE BENEATH THE EARTH (1967)
https://youtu.be/7IDYCQaU5Nw?si=OeHMd-dOOBd9fpXZ
http://www.badmovies.org/movies/battlebearth/

After an accident at a naval research base, a military scientist is put behind a desk...
During the drudgery of menial work, his secretary asks him to check in on her brother, who's an old friend, seismologist, and was recently committed to an asylum...
His friend shows him some charts displaying enemies of America boring tunnels underground...
The army guy investigates, and discovers a Fu Manchu wannabe, who's planting atomic bombs under every US city...

Not that exciting, but not unwatchable, IMHO.....