RECENT VIEWINGS (Bad Movie Thread!)

[LilCerberus]

Tonight's (other) Stinker
Black Angels (1970)
https://youtu.be/57uSnAVOQZk?si=dvAiEcRlPW4x5W5p

Plot? What plot? Oh yeah, so.....
A young black biker plans to become leader of his gang by killing the leader of a white gang, but after a ridiculously long chase, he's killed in a crash.... He takes the boy's "colors" back to the black gang & tries to smooth things out & goes back to his own gang.....
Meanwhile, a stranger shows up posing as a stereotypical southern racist who wants to join the gang... One gang member is suspicious of everything about the guy, while the leader thinks he's okay....
At that same time, a local cop visits each gang & convinces them that the other is about to move in on their territory.....

Amusingly, this movie uses pretty much every cliché I've ever heard of, with lots of long drawn out scenes of rides & bad music.... Only exception, there's a central figure who's not really a protagonist... None of the characters have any redeeming qualities.....

[zombie no.one]

JIGSAW (2017)

3rd movie in the SAW franchise I've seen, after part 6 (at the time), and part 8 (about a year ago).

not that bad actually! reasonable modern horror movie fare (a place where 'reasonable' = way above average!)

the twist confused me so much that I rewound the end of the movie and watched it twice, then read the explanation in the wikipedia plot page, and I still don't really understand it!

bit like the standard giallo in that sense then!

strange thing is, I searched 'SAW movies ranked' before watching and this one was either last place or in the bottom 2 of all the lists I checked

[M.10rda]

GOESI aka A MONSTROUS CORPSE (1981):
I am now 0-for-3 with 20th century Korean horror I've most recently watched, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to stick to the current millennium in the future per SK horror. At least it isn't a soap operatic melodrama with no genre elements for the majority of its run-time, but it's much more technically inept and every bit as slooooooow.      It does have some historical cache, as it appears to be South Korea's first "modern" zombie film. Of course one might debate this, as these zombies are so retrograde they might not even scare Mantan Moreland.

Off the bat it seems like GOEJI is remaking NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD in slow motion: a man and a woman drive (then walk) aimlessly around the countryside as a pale undead shambles about in and around their general vicinity. But Johnny from NOTLD gets attacked in under 10 minutes and then all heck breaks loose, whereas in GOESI it take twenty-five whole minutes for that zombie to actually catch up to a victim... and when he does, it's offscreen.    This made me think that the Youtube  copy I was watching was maybe cut/censored, but nope. Once more zombie shenanigans (very gradually) ensue, it's clear that these zombies have no interest in biting nor eating human flesh... they just like to strangle their victims.  #Thrillsville'81!

Fortunately - for the zombies, not the viewer - the victims put up very little fight. This is one of those classically lousy zombie flicks where victims stand facing one direction, motionless and spacially unaware, while zombies waltz right up behind them; or worse, where victims face the zombie in uncomprehending shock, at arms length, and make no attempt to stop the zombie from choking them out. The female lead, particularly, is perhaps the most profoundly imbecilic character I've ever seen in a Bad horror Movie - which is saying a lot. She can't fight, can't run, can often barely walk, and never behaves appropriately within any context. She is literally hopeless... and yet (through sheer luck or bad filmmaking) she manages to survive to the credits, so I guess that speaks rather poorly of the zombies' efficiency or the filmmakers ability to stage convincing action.

As GOESI lumbers laboriously towards its conclusion, it occurred to me that it was intended as a remake not of NOTLD but of the deeper cut BREAKFAST AT MANCHESTER MORGUE. The internet confirms this, but the similarities are so superficial that one could suspect GOESI's makers never actually watched BAMM and instead just read brief descriptions of a handful of scenes and maybe saw a few stills from the earlier film (and none of those stills contained any gore whatsoever). Thus GOESI staggers aimlessly around a general idea of a zombie movie for 80-ish minutes, mostly killing time with exterior landscapes and wideshots of people walking at mid-tempo. Although it's a laughably Bad film, it wouldn't cut muster for a Rifftrax because of the low density of actual content. I suppose you could put it on while you drift off to sleep though, like those Sleepcore videos, and it wouldn't give you nightmares!

1.5/5

The 4 most amusing or noteworthy things about GOESI, so you never have to watch it:
1.) The quarrelsome homicide detective (played by Arthur Kennedy in BAMM) looks and acts like Kojak here - because 1981, I guess.
2.) One of the zombies looks a lot like Matt Berry in some shots, including close-ups, which made me chuckle.
3.) There is a long, senseless sequence where Zombie Matt Berry tires to climb in the female lead's car window while she repeatedly accelerates, reverses, accelerates, reverses, accelerates, and reverses to shake him off.
4.) Zombie Matt Berry's zombie wife (not Nadja, alas) actually lays down and plays possum at one point, prompting a character to pick her up, put her in the back of a car, and start driving... at which point of course she sits up in the back seat and does exactly what you'd expect her to do.  This is an incredibly cheap and ludicrous death, of course, but at least it's one novel trick in GOEJI's threadbare bag...