RECENT VIEWINGS (Bad Movie Thread!)

[Rev. Powell]

OK, back on the Joe Christ horse:

"Acid is Groovy Kill the Pigs": A meth addict buys acid because his dealer has no meth, eats the entire blotter, then, I guess, goes on a killing spree and interviews other serial killers he knows. The "pigs" of the title aren't cops, they're everyone who isn't a serial killer. The only halfway good scene is death by puppy. I was tempted to give this 1 star just because it shows improvement over the last 3 Christ films, but c'mon... it's 0.5/5.

"Sex Blood and Mutilation": This is actually a documentary on body piercing and mutilation. Christ introduces it while dressed as a priest and holding a chihuahua. Subjects include Genesis P-Orridge, whose penile and scrotal piercings we see way too much of, a porn director whose dominatrix girlfriend pierces him with needles, a tattooed man who drives a nail through his tongue, and a guy who's voluntarily had his penis removed (skeptical about this one, as his commentary was delivered in altered voiceover--his claim that he now has 5 orgasms a day is laughable, and it could well be someone who his organ to cancer). Christ claims these people are more than freakshows but never offers much insight as to why they do it. In the end Christ puts the dog in a bad and swings it against the wall--almost certainly faked, but it's a convincing trick. Still, it doesn't help his "this is not a freakshow" case. Just because I feel sorry for him and it does contain some real (not badly staged) shock footage... 1/5.

M.10orda, if "Acid is Groovy" was the only one you saw... you're lucky. It's actually the BEST of the fictional ones!

[zombie no.one]

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY (2007)

enjoyed this when it came out, not seen it since but remembered it as being superior horror fare.

lightning did not strike twice. kind of laborious to get through... still way better than all the sequels though

[M.10rda]

M.10orda, if "Acid is Groovy" was the only one you saw... you're lucky. It's actually the BEST of the fictional ones!

I will count this among my blessings.

[zombie no.one]

TORQUE (2004)

Some bikers don't like some other bikers, and so the bikers fight those bikers. Ice Cube is a biker.

kind of movie that if made in 1974 would probably be loadsa fun. sadly it's trapped in the era of flashy shallow early 2000s throwaway fluff, where even things like a guy stepping on a bug or pointing at a wall apparently requires some kind of CGI enhancement.

Everything also looks like it's filmed with a bright neon day-glo filter. my eyes

[LilCerberus]

Tonight's Stinker
Atomic Rulers (1965)
https://youtu.be/eLcJupntrhk?si=MhMmDephrDg4vqcu

Japanese Superhero Starman is back, this time to stop an evil empire from using nukes to hold the world hostage...
Starts out saving a commuter plane from crashing, then gets in a fight with a pair of thugs carrying atomic dust... Meanwhile, a group of orphans steals the suitcase with the dust, and while Starman goes to get it back, the thugs kidnap one of the orphans....

Drags most of the way, but has a goofy brawl about fifty-five minutes in....

[M.10rda]

SUDDEN FURY (1975):
A guy who looks like a budget Donald Sutherland or an even more punchable Jeffrey Jones loses all his money in a bad business deal and can't fathom having to tell his wife, so he takes her on a long drive in the provincial countryside where he plans to murder her and almost does in a drawn-out yet reasonably tense sequence. He spares her, though, and they keep driving around until he gets road-rage at another Sunday driver who looks like a mildly tough John Oates. Their brinksmanship escalates into a deadly game of cat-and-mouse up and down a country road, down a ravine, and all over the property of an unsuspecting farmer and his wife. That may sound promising - it's also deeply frustrating and ultimately hugely disappointing.

This was somehow nominated for the Canadian version of the Oscar for Best Picture in 1975. (I don't know what else was nominated but the winner was THE APPRENTICESHIP OF DUDDY KRAVITZ.) Many reviews on Letterboxd consider it a lost gem. Often Badness is subjective and I admit I was riding the fence for much of the length of SUDDEN FURY. Some moments are nicely handled though a lot of the beats are perfunctory and could have been executed in far more thoughtful or effective ways. Its escalating action is a textbook Idiot Plot, in that every character behaves illogically and makes the worst possible choice at every turn in order for the plot to proceed. I realize this was probably very much by design of the writer/director, who seems at times to be gesturing to some larger statement about human fallibility and our worst primal instincts. It's even possible that the filmmaker intended SUDDEN FURY as a commentary on Vietnam, similar to 1973's CAGED TERROR aka GOLDEN APPLES OF THE SUN, also Canadian and a film that functions (or fails to function) counter-intuitively in all ways.

In SUDDEN FURY's case, though, it's impossible to tell what the first-time filmmaker was intending, which isn't a boon to their craft. (They never made another film, award nominations notwithstanding.) If you really squint at the film's final five minutes, I suppose you could see an incredibly daring and quietly profound subversion of narrative expectation and auteurial morality, like something Michael Haneke would do at the end of one of his films. But I tried to squint and I still couldn't see it and instead I just wanted to put my fist through my widescreen TV. It's a lot easier to imagine the MST3K crew moaning in torment through this very slow, taxing, sometimes clumsy movie and then getting to the end and hollering bloody murder. Sometimes even in the contest of man and steer the issue is not certain, but finally in the contest of "Underappreciated Rare Indie Gem" and "Amateurish Horse$#!t", I am confident in my finding.

1.5/5       Even the film's admirers on Letterboxd admit the ending is pretty dumb.