RECENT VIEWINGS (Bad Movie Thread!)

[LilCerberus]

Tonight's Stinker
The Venusian (1954) aka Stranger from Venus (1954)
https://youtu.be/8QoKGNK85AE?si=mSezFWmnKMLKPKDo

Flying saucers are spotted along the English countryside, then a woman get in a car wreck... After the opening credits, a strange dude walks into an Inn, & while the police are searching for the woman, he convinces everyone he's from Venus & the woman shows up with a few minor bumps & bruises....
From there, it's a lot of Q&A about how his ship works, how he's able to survive on Earth, Etc........
Then, close to the end of the movie, he tells military leaders he needs to talk to world leaders to stop using nuclear weapons, and they plot against him......

Predictable, but watchable....

[M.10rda]

SUPERHERO MOVIE (2008):
Between TROMEO & JULIET and DAWN OF THE DEAD 'O4, James Gunn wrote and co-starred in a funny and interesting superhero comedy called THE SPECIALS, directed by a guy named Craig Mazin. Presumably based on the charm of THE SPECIALS, Mazin later got to direct this Zucker Bros-style parody mash-up in the proud [sic] tradition of SCARY MOVIE, EPIC MOVIE, NOT ANOTHER TEEN MOVIE, et al. In the absence of Gunn's contributions, however, SUPERHERO MOVIE is no SPECIALS, and Mazin never directed again. (He did co-write the two HANGOVER sequels and some later SCARY MOVIE entries.)

Essentially this has the plot of the Raimi SPIDER-MAN movies with random appearances by some members of the X-Men and Fantastic Four sprinkled in recklessly. It does have a stacked cast of funny actors, including Leslie Nielsen (of course) in the 'Uncle Ben' role, Nielsen's AIRPLANE! co-star Robert Hays, Regina Hall (who probably paid off a couple mortgages with all these dumb comedies), Tracy Morgan, Jeffrey Tambor, a young Kevin Hart (in a mostly thankless role), and relatively serious actor Keith David, who gets to be dryly funny (in the old school Nielsen tradition) in a couple of brief scenes. Pamela Anderson (who stars in this year's NAKED GUN reboot) appears and disappears as the Invisible Woman and Craig Bierko is visible in 2-3 shots as Wolverine. Apparently most of his dialogue was cut and only one brief bit appears during the closing credits, and is so unfunny the mind reels at how dire the balance might be.

I admit that Madame and I laughed out loud multiple times, as we tend to do during these stoopid movies, but most of the comedy is derived from rather sadistic slapstick instead of any kind of character insight or clever reflections on the genre... ala the kind of thing Gunn brought to THE SPECIALS.

2.5/5
Oh yeah - Brent Spiner aka "Data" appears briefly in the film proper and then more extensively in  the closing credit outtakes, and his performance is startling similar to that of Trace Beaulieu as Dr. Clayton Forrester, only with a haircut.