RECENT VIEWINGS (Bad Movie Thread!)

[M.10rda]

I watched DECAMERON last year or the year prior and I hated it, too. I think I rated it 1/5 or 0.5/5. My review was much more cruel than yours! However -

Il Decameron (1971)
These stories could be very funny, if done with a slapstick Benny Hill/Carry On approach.

.......That line is a masterpiece of meanness - I salute you!       It's funny 'cause it's true, too. Watching BH or CO would be more "fun" than this Pasolini arthouse movie!

[Dr. Whom]

I watched DECAMERON last year or the year prior and I hated it, too. I think I rated it 1/5 or 0.5/5. My review was much more cruel than yours! However -

Il Decameron (1971)
These stories could be very funny, if done with a slapstick Benny Hill/Carry On approach.

I didn't intend to be mean. I was just talking about the source material. Way back, when I was taking my degree in Medieval History I did a course on Chaucer's fabliaux, so I read a number of them. These are rowdy knockabout farces very much in the spirit of Benny Hill or 70s sex comedies. So if you adapt them, it should be in this spirit, and not try to make Serious Art.
It is what I like to call the Carl Orff effect. If you read the Carmina Burana, you find that they are very frivolous: about students partying, and chasing girls, or spending all their money on drink and pleading with their patron not to cut them off. Yet if you hear the orchestration of Orff, you might be forgiven for thinking that the end of the world had arrived.

.......That line is a masterpiece of meanness - I salute you!       It's funny 'cause it's true, too. Watching BH or CO would be more "fun" than this Pasolini arthouse movie!

[Rev. Powell]

DECAMERON is the weakest of that Pasolini trilogy. CANTERBURY TALES has one cool scene. ARABIAN NIGHTS is the best but none of them are great. I find Pasolini pretty overrated; TEOREMA is pretty good, and the basic plot has been imitated many times, but outside of that... eh.

[M.10rda]

Having now seen a handfiul of Pasolinis, I must lean uncomfortably towards the position that SALO is the best of those. It was the first Pasolini I saw and @ the time I thought it was the most horrible thing ever. Honestly it's pretty well-written, acted, and directed, and it makes a cogent statement, even if I need never watch the torture scenes again. The second was PORCILE, which is interesting though it doesn't add up to much. TEOREMA is like PORCILE but worse, I think - interesting ideas that are waaay underbaked. Then I've seen a couple that are as bad as DECAMERON. I will probably keep trying now and then to find one I can admire more than SALO....... which, you know, is a film to be justly rejected and abhorred, not admired!

[zombie no.one]

HEART EYES (2025)

dear oh dear oh dear oh dear oh dear oh dear. a slasher that looks and feels like it was made by a bunch of people whose only frame of reference is AI generated Youtube shorts about makeup, SEX & THE CITY, and pop rap videos of the 2020s. not 'badly made', but tonally just abysmal from every angle. left a bad taste in my brain. that's the real horror. they got my money. they win. they win.

[LilCerberus]

Tonight's Stinker
The Jesus Trip(1971)
https://youtu.be/QoH2yDfO5Vc?si=68Td8qd3U4Csb3sL

A group of bikers returns from Mexico with some new(ish) bikes, but runs into trouble at a border checkpoint...
They make a break for it, & ditch the cops by going off-road..... One of them was shot in the run, so they decide to crash at a nearby convent they think is deserted (at least for the weekend), but find three nuns are still there.... One of the nuns patches the hurt biker.... Later that night, one of the bikers finds that the new bikes had heroin hidden in them, meaning drug dealers are also looking for them....
The next day, a cop shows up to flirt with one of the nuns, but he spots one of the bikes, so the bikers take him hostage, then ride out with the cop & the nun as hostages....
They leave the cop in the middle of nowhere, while taking the nun with them.... The drug dealers' helicopter finds them, & they dispatch it with a pistol....
They decide to hide out in a tiny town where one of them grew up, only to find it abandoned... The nun starts to get Stockholm syndrome.....
Three of the bikers go into town for a grocery run, but decide to stop at a nearby bar & get hammered, so they end up having to spend the night.... The next morning, the cop & his dirt-bike club find & capture them, & this time, he aint looking to make any arrests.....

Not thrilling, but not grating either.... Most of the scenes are poorly lit.....

[M.10rda]

LIANE, JUNGLE GODDESS (1956):
Some claim this nominally-titillating but realistically quite tame potboiler is based on a true story though I am dubious. (It's the same "true story" as Jess Franco's WHITE CANNIBAL QUEEN, surely!) German scientists (?!) deep in the jungles of Africa (...) happen across a teenage girl in leopard (or giraffe?)-skin shorts with long blonde hair that conveniently clings to/obscures her nipples like she was painted by Boris Vallejo or something. It would be a stretch to say that Liane (pronounced "LEE-Uh-Ne" instead of "Lee-AH-nee" or "Lee-ANN") is treated like a "goddess" by the natives (really only one guy seems smitten with her and the rest of them just tolerate her illogical presence) but that's exploitation marketing for ya'. Because they're a bunch of white guys (and one lady), the Germans decide they must rescue Liane (who is perfectly happy in Africa) and return her to Europe, where a rich old politician thinks she might be his long-lost granddaughter but the politician's sinister aide (played by Reggie Nalder, hence we know he's Sinister) wants to kidnap Liane because Something. It mostly moves along at a reasonable pace and isn't unpleasant to endure! 

In spite of mondo-style footage of animals (including identical shots that appear twice), there's fortunately no bloodshed in LJG. The film opens with found footage of full-frontal nudity from unidentified African women (and then there's a bit more later) which was totally okay with censors in the 50s I guess, but of course the wardrobe and crew go to great lengths to mostly protect Liane from ever being visibly topless. (Supposedly there was one shot of her exposed breasts that is missing from many/most/all prints, including mine: Liane trips and falls forward in one shot and her hair flies up and it looks like she will be on full display, but a jump cut omits several frames which I must presume ended up in the personal collection of some greasy old projectionist somewhere.) Honestly that's perfectly fine, because when one gets a good look at Marion Michael as Liane, one realizes she looks entirely too young to be appearing nude. (Michael was 15 or 16 when she shot the film, which wasn't too weird in Europe at the time, but she uhhh looks younger to me...) In fact I got alarmed when the German nurse cuts her hair into a sub-shoulder-length bob - what then would protect Liane's modesty? But fortunately she wears real clothes for most of the rest of the film.

Its approach to nudity isn't the only wonky or objectionable thing about LJG. A pushy German tries to sexually assault the nurse early in the film and later gets real-trigger happy towards the Africans, so one might expect him to be the Big Bad and ultimately get killed or defeated - but nope, everyone just overlooks his crimes! There's also a romance initially hinted at between Safari Hunk Hardy Kruger (who would later steal the show w/ his psychotic performance in FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX) and the Nurse, but as soon as blonde-haired Hardy lays his blue eyes on little Liane, they're inseparable for the rest of the film. (At least this doesn't go unnoticed by the Nurse - who is actually foxier than Liane and an adult to boot! - or the other Germans, who seem to recognize that Liane is way too young for Hardy...) The film ends with Hardy and Liane stripping down to their birthday suits and swimming starkers like some kind of Aryan fantasy.  The water mostly blurs any of Liane's naughty bits in this scene and her earlier, totally gratuitous nude bathing scene... though young viewers in a pre-internet age probably wore out the "Pause" buttons on any VHS dubs........

"Young" Reggie Nalder is almost kind of normal-looking, BTW... almost like Henry Silva.       2/5    TBH the highlights of the film are several moments where Liane is seen playing with lion cubs and, in two puzzling shots, a tiger cub.       ...A tiger cub being, of course, every bit as lost in an African jungle as a blonde teenager.