RECENT VIEWINGS (Bad Movie Thread!)

[Dr. Whom]

I don't necessarily disagree w/ any of your comments about TROUBLE EVERY DAY. It wasn't a rollercoaster of a viewing experience for me. But it's one of those films that lives in my mind and plays out perpetually in my recollections... perhaps a more rewarding film to remember and think about than it is to actually watch.

I can believe that. Memory only tends to retain the significant parts, and not the pointless scenes or those that simply take too long. At one point the young wife goes through her husband's luggage and finds medication. This takes two shots, during which she examines 6 (I've counted) boxes of pills. If you cut out all of the dead wood, you're left with quite a decent movie.

[LordGraal]

Tonight's Stinker
1990: The Bronx Warriors (1982)
https://youtu.be/gqm_nD1kKxk?si=ISnlal0rtLKUabzj

Starts out with a premise like "Escape From New York", then turns into a ripoff of "The Warriors"....
A poor little rich girl escapes her handlers in Manhattan, & falls in with a biker gang in The Bronx...
Her handlers hire a dirty cop to bring her back, but he's more interested in starting a gang war...

Tried to re-watch this recently but couldn't get through it.  I admire some of the location shooting in the States.  The sequel is better as it just goes for action.  And Henry Silva is great in it.

[zombie no.one]

HIRED TO KILL (1990)

A cut-price action hero dude and a bunch of randomly assembled women are hired to infiltrate a south american country disguised as a fashion designer and models, and depose evil Oliver Reed.

Ludicrously trashy and cheesy, with the main guy hero being the most openly misogynystic character I think I've ever seen in a film. he hates his mission, he hates his undercover models, and they all hate each other too. (at one point they have a poolside cat fight over which of them has and hasn't had an orgasm.)

Oliver Reed gives a pretty good Bond-villain esque performance

Take your 2024 head off and replace it with your 1990 head, and this is a decent slice of guilty fun

[LilCerberus]

Tonight's Stinker
Ice Planet (2001)
https://youtu.be/6FjI-pYFUOQ?si=KBO9ucxP4d3a8qAe

An unsold pilot for a tv series, so a lot of questions are raised that are never fully resolved....
On a distant world, an earth colony is attacked by unknown aliens...
A number of them manage to escape in an experimental spaceship that takes them to the ice world...
They discover the ice crystals contain infinite data, There's a tribe of Eskimos already living on the planet, and the aliens are still after them....
Sub par CGI for it's time, rather decent cast....

[LilCerberus]

Tonight's Stinker
Solar Crisis (1990)
https://youtu.be/6bHrkPCRBU4?si=00NqcLkWPByXTQwg

Decent little sci-fi action, with an a list b-movie cast...
Solar flares are cooking the earth, so the military builds a couple ships & a talking bomb to fix it....
Meanwhile, a big greedy evil corporation has planted a rather obvious saboteur on board so that when the big one hits, they'll have control of all the world's resources....
Also on earth, the mission commanders son has run away from military school, gets lost in the desert, & encounters many colorful characters....
Decent pacing...

[M.10rda]

DEAR SANTA (2024):
Apparently this opened in theaters just a month ago, surprisingly grossed a not-unimpressive $110 million, but then quickly f****d right off to make room for WICKED and MOANA 2 and seems to have already been streaming for free on one or more of my services for weeks. I guess that's a respectable theatrical run these days...

Anyway we wanted something Christmas-y and amusing but horror-adjacent but also not too grotesque tonight and this seemed to fit the bill and obv it was calculated to fit that bill and it just about did the trick until the final 10-15 minutes. The premise is such an obvious joke that it's incredible no one built a movie around it until now. Jack Black has driven worse vehicles and it's always a reliably good time to watch him dance, prance, mince, gesticulate, et al. Also he's never looked more like Jack Elam than he does here, so that's good. He plays all his scenes opposite a socially awkward dyslexic sixth grader, whose best friend is essentially a live-action version of Mushmouth from "The Cosby Kids". The fact that both young characters are generally afforded dignity (in spite of their undignified circumstances) is to the credit of the Farrelly Bros, who - whatever else I will say about them below - do have a track record for treating non-white and developmentally disabled characters a little better than they've historically been treated in many other white Hollywood comedies.

Okay, that said, this is ultimately some toothless B.S. decorated with a few edgy jokes that nod in the general direction of molestation, a scene where a supporting character loses control of their bowels, and a running gag about a terminal illness. Those "adornments" aside, Mark Twain wrote a more provocative satire about Satan interacting with small children 115 years ago. IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE is actually a lot darker and more mordant than this thing. DEAR SANTA is a yuletide morality tale pitched at the intellectual level of adolescents and replete with the sort of humor that men in their late 60s think adolescents will appreciate, but bereft of anything so controversial that might alarm the parents who are taking their adolescent kids to see it. As a result you get tacked-on climactic maudlin sentimentality that's more offensive in its artifice than all the poop jokes in the world.

This shouldn't surprise me, though I tapped out of the Farrelly oeuvre completely about 18 years ago. Prior to that point, their films reflected just enough subtlety as well as some subversive or even progressive elements, among the myriad scatology, to remain of interest. Still you could track the devolution from KINGPIN and TSA MARY through SHALLOW HAL and MM&IRENE as the brothers allowed their more perverse instincts to get progressively more homogenized, terminating in the tragically misbegotten STUCK ON YOU. Maybe someday Aaron Schimberg can resurrect and do justice to that promising concept, but in the meanwhile, I guess the most perverse gesture we can expect from the Farrellys is to construct an extended set piece around Post Malone.

2.5/5

Co-starring the somewhat irritating PJ Byrne, a tiny Kyle Gass cameo, Keegan-Michael Key in a few short scenes without Black  , and an uncredited Ben Stiller in one scene technically with Black though they were probably not on the same soundstage during production. The rest of the adult cast consists of nameless unknowns who give indifferent performances, and one's suspicion that the entire budget went towards Black's paycheck is compounded when the "big" Post Malone concert appears to be attended by no more than 75 or so extras. I totally understand - how many actors can a major Hollywood production afford to pay to stand around and pretend to be enthusiastic about watching Post Malone perform? Surely no more than 75.

[Dr. Whom]

The New Barbarians/Warriors of the Wasteland (1983)

In the year 2019, nine years after the nuclear holocaust, survivors try to escape the Templars, who are bent on exterminating the human race.

A laughably cheap Italian Mad Max rip off. They spent what budget they had on modified cars, pyrotechnics and a bit of costuming. There is no script to speak of and everything takes place in the same quarry and on one stretch of road. At least Fred Williamson seems to have had a blast. Also the end of civilisation clearly hasn't affected the capacity of hairdressers to come up with really impressive hairdos.
The only thing that makes it stand out from your run of the mill post apocalyptic movie are the homo-erotic overtones.

[Trevor]

Bells / Murder By Phone (1982)

Haven't seen this in years 😄

[LordGraal]

The New Barbarians/Warriors of the Wasteland (1983)

In the year 2019, nine years after the nuclear holocaust, survivors try to escape the Templars, who are bent on exterminating the human race.

A laughably cheap Italian Mad Max rip off. They spent what budget they had on modified cars, pyrotechnics and a bit of costuming. There is no script to speak of and everything takes place in the same quarry and on one stretch of road. At least Fred Williamson seems to have had a blast. Also the end of civilisation clearly hasn't affected the capacity of hairdressers to come up with really impressive hairdos.
The only thing that makes it stand out from your run of the mill post apocalyptic movie are the homo-erotic overtones.

Terrible film.  It's been paired with the two Bronx Warriors films on disc and it makes them look like masterpieces.

[LilCerberus]

Tonight's Stinker
The Neanderthal Man (1953)
https://youtu.be/yy-DZEe8FXg?si=_GM8w4MD1gFYY0QR

In a Northern California mountain town, a sabre toothed tiger has escaped from a scientists lab, and is now attacking local cattle....
The scientist tries to pitch his discovery to a group of elitist snobs, and it doesn't help that he's also a narcissistic twerp, so he goes back to the mountain town & starts conducting the experiments on himself....

Pretty decent paced movie, manages to stay engaging.....

[M.10rda]

FREEZER BURN: THE INVASION OF LAXDALE (2009):
Discovered accidentally while searching for another indie film from the late 00s titled "FREEZER BURN", didn't find it and watched this for what seemed like an unbeatable onscreen duo: Tom Green and Crispin Glover. Sadly they are onscreen together very little and the film is more Bad than Good but it's odd enough to review here.

In an inversion of THE THING, heat-loving/cold-fearing aliens mount a slo-mo invasion of... a small Canadian town! Although the film is a comedy, very little attention is drawn to this bit of irony. (Why not invade someplace in Arizona or New Mexico? Because the Canadian government underwrote this production, that's why.) Everyone in town is too financially desperate and/or stupid to refuse the benefaction of the encroaching ETs... except of course for former high school hockey star Green, his elderly hockey coach, and a mysterious leggy blonde newcomer in town. Naturally a zamboni will come into play near the film's climax.

If you've seen more than half a dozen low-budget sci-fi/comedies from Canada (as, incredibly, I have!) little about FREEZER BURN will surprise you. It starts off sloooooow and understated to a fault, which we could credit to the budget but also to the Canadian sense of humor, which either runs off-the-wall absurd (sometimes to ingenious ends) or alternately tacky and tiresomely deadpan, as is mostly the case here. The pace does pick up in the final half hour and accelerates to an almost LEONARD PART 6-degree of schticky mayhem, which may float your boat if you're a fan of evil aliens being slain with a variety of food products. The SFX aren't up to snuff and most of the ensemble acting is amateurish, but I guess if you bought a ticket for boob jokes, hockey jokes, and drunk Canadian jokes, none of that will matter.

But I bought my ticket (so to speak) for Tom Green, and I guess I sort of got my proverbial money's worth, not via Green doing what Green was known for doing (...fortunately...?) but from Green quite perversely delivering an almost completely sincere, serious performance as a depressed alcoholic failure, amidst an otherwise frivolous alien farce. Not to say his work is extremely accomplished or anything, but it's clear that Green (somehow) decided to play his lead role entirely straight and sideline all his trademarked lunatic clowning, and - it's kind of fascinating to watch. If you squint sometimes, Tom Green almost looks like a puffier Gerard Butler and thus you can sort of buy him as a no-nonsense action hero/dramatic lead. Heck, it's almost even plausible when the lonely femme fatale, who has the body of a Baywatch star and the face of a weathered truck-stop waitress, climbs on Green's lap and tries to erotically entreat him.

The guys who play Green's coach and the town mayor are also strong enough actors to almost get the weak material over. I gather that the producers could only get Glover on-set for a few days to play the alien Big Bad. He pops up throughout the film but has little dialogue and usually menaces Green in wide cutaways. Amusingly however Glover looks, speaks, and behaves like Ronald Lacey's iconic Major Toht from RAIDERS..., so, that's... something.

2.5/5
Trigger warning: Dog fried by alien heat-laser. 

Green only made a few more features after this, none of which I've heard of or am likely to watch. We'll always have FREDDY GOT FINGERED, anyway.

[zombie no.one]

KILL BILL VOL 2

although I've rewatched Vol 1 maybe a couple of times, don't think I've seen vol 2 again since it came out.

feels like Tarantino is a slave to his own hype at this point. it's all style and almost no substance, but not any kind of style that competes with his first 2 films. Everything feels a bit laboured and overly self aware.

Carradine is good but I never really found Uma Thurman all that compelling... :shrugs:

5/10

[M.10rda]

I think the first chunk w/ Madsen is very good; the last stretch w/ Carradine, incredibly anti-climactic, particularly after the dizzying heights that KB1 reached in its second hour. Indeed, QT high on his own supply...

[LilCerberus]

Tonight's Stinker
Beacon Point (2016)
https://youtu.be/WVVTOb1Z3aw?si=z_tpsdRRh8P4kBWG

An Appalachian trail guide starts a fight with his boss over his criminal record, killing him in the process...
As he's trying to sneak out, the hikers he was supposed to lead show up... He tries to talk his way out of it, but fails.....
Early in the hike, they run into some other hikers who have found a dead body... Knowing the authorities will soon be all over the place, the guide decides to lead the group off trail, and grows increasingly cross every time someone asks where he's leading them...
About 35 minutes in, the guide & one of the hikers start having dreams about being abducted by aliens, & another gets sick....
Talky & fairly slow paced, many questions go unanswered aside from hints at an old indian legend.....

[zombie no.one]

I think the first chunk w/ Madsen is very good; the last stretch w/ Carradine, incredibly anti-climactic, particularly after the dizzying heights that KB1 reached in its second hour. Indeed, QT high on his own supply...

yeah I do like Masden (I mean he's in SPECIES, how could I not  )... but Tarantino's first 2 films actively drew me in, and made me feel like I was in that world. Whereas every film he's done since almost feels like I have to put myself in that 'world' first, in order to enjoy? (strange observation maybe... not had my morning caffeine injections yet). Agree KB1 was better handled.