RECENT VIEWINGS (Bad Movie Thread!)

[chainsaw midget]

The Dark Power (1985)

This is one worth seeing.  It's all over the place in tone and even in the set-up.  At the start it feels like they might be setting this up as a slasher, but the undead that show up never really feel slasher-like.  If anything, I would compare it to Neon Maniacs and I didn't think I'd ever have anything to compare to that movie.

The plot uses the old "ancient Indian burial ground" but the monsters when they appear are so far away from anything feeling "Indian" like that only the most sensitive of people looking to be offended would find anything wrong. 

A group of four good looking college girls, one of them black, one of them extremely racist, move into a house that was built on the previously mentioned Indian burial ground.  The racist girl invited her dickweed brother and his annoying friends to annoy the others when she finds out that she has to live with a black person. 

Then the dead rise because it's that time of year when the dead rise and because somebody removed the protective objects that were stopping that from happening.  There's an odd humor and silly slapstick even while they're killing people that feels out of place.  There's also one great kill where they grab a guy's mouth and stretch it open peeling his face away. 

And in the end the day is saved by ... an elderly Lash LaRue.  if you don't know who that is, he was a cowboy actor in the 40s and 50s famous for using a bullwhip instead of guns, dressing all in black despite being a good guy, and looking a lot like Bogart.  He even gets into a whip fight with one of the undead.  Which is honestly, kinda dull. 

[M.10rda]

That's a good one. It's slow at times but it is very very odd.

[LilCerberus]

Tonight's Stinker
The Devil's Sleep(1949)
https://youtu.be/848xrrlpbzg?si=NHDCjnfY1bid1hxh

Opens with flashing headlines about teenage crime, kids popping pills, with an announcer blabbing something, then roll opening credits, then a teenager running down a dark alley & the cops catch him.....
So, the female judge of juvenile court is discussing what's gotten into kids these days with a police chief & his head of narcotics cop.... The narc's girlfriend's kid brother is from the same neighborhood, & figures he could enlist the boy's help.... Thing is, the boy is one of the bad guy's customers, along with his girlfriend, who happens to be the judge's daughter.....
The drug dealers run their operation out of a lady's spa & gym, where he sells uppers to the clients, & has a young recruiter sells stolen pharmaceuticals to teens & persuades them to rob medical warehouses.....
The narc gets to work, while the teens go to pool parties at the recruiter's house.....

Watchable, with the gym being a setting for fat jokes & Hays Code exploitation, under the guise of being anti-drug propaganda......

[LilCerberus]

Tonight's Stinker
SuperHigh(2017)
https://youtu.be/NDMR86gc_Sw?si=nfM4i60NwdW9VBnr

A college age Latino wakes up with a huge hole in his wall & a pair of friends who want to know what happened.... He thinks back to the previous day, when his girlfriend dumps him, & then a mysterious homeless man, who somehow knows a lot about him just gives him a bag of weed..... He gets high, & then a friend takes him to a rave, which gets busted by the cops.... In the confusion, he shoves a cop, who goes flying across the room & t-bones a squadcar.... Then he runs away, busting through walls as he goes....
They conclude it must be the weed, and develop superpowers.... They decide to become superheroes, but assaulting a cop isn't the best way to get started.....

This is a ten part webseries edited into a seventy-five minute feature, so the tone isn't entirely consistent... The one liners & punchlines had me cracking up for the first thirty minutes or so, then at about forty minutes, it takes a dark turn from which it has a hard time coming back from.....

[Dr. Whom]

Harvest (2024)

After Minions and Monsters, I thought it was time for something more artsy, so I picked this one. Apparently the novel it was based on, got to the shortlist of the Booker Prize in 2013, and I am willing to believe that it s more interesting than the movie. However I haven't been as baffled by what a movie is wanting to say (if anything) since Barbie. It keeps making points and then undercutting them, while leaving much unnecessarily unexplained.

A small Scottish village, barely scraping together an existence, comes in the possession of a new landlord, who wants to turn the people out and give the ground over to sheep for wool production.
According to Wikipedia set in the early modern period with the transition of feudalism to capitalism, yet the material culture is that of the mid 19thC. The henchmen wear bowler hats, for one thing.

It has some interesting points to make, but the whole thing is painfully slow. This is one of those movies where people do mundane things (like lighting a pipe) in realtime for no good reason. Most shots are twice as long as they could be. It takes about an hour before the main problem of the movie (ie the arrival of the new landlord) happens. Even then there is no narrative tension. The two main protagonists do not take any action and simply let things happen. The main character does call out people on their inaction, although he himself does not act and seems to think action is futile. I can see why the director made this choice, but it doesn't make the movie any easier to sit through. It is hard to care for any of these people.
So, some good ideas, wonderfully filmed (at times it feels like you're in a painting by Ford Maddox Brown), but ultimately too boring to recommend

[Alex]

Harvest (2024)

After Minions and Monsters, I thought it was time for something more artsy, so I picked this one. Apparently the novel it was based on, got to the shortlist of the Booker Prize in 2013, and I am willing to believe that it s more interesting than the movie. However I haven't been as baffled by what a movie is wanting to say (if anything) since Barbie. It keeps making points and then undercutting them, while leaving much unnecessarily unexplained.

A small Scottish village, barely scraping together an existence, comes in the possession of a new landlord, who wants to turn the people out and give the ground over to sheep for wool production.
According to Wikipedia set in the early modern period with the transition of feudalism to capitalism, yet the material culture is that of the mid 19thC. The henchmen wear bowler hats, for one thing.

It has some interesting points to make, but the whole thing is painfully slow. This is one of those movies where people do mundane things (like lighting a pipe) in realtime for no good reason. Most shots are twice as long as they could be. It takes about an hour before the main problem of the movie (ie the arrival of the new landlord) happens. Even then there is no narrative tension. The two main protagonists do not take any action and simply let things happen. The main character does call out people on their inaction, although he himself does not act and seems to think action is futile. I can see why the director made this choice, but it doesn't make the movie any easier to sit through. It is hard to care for any of these people.
So, some good ideas, wonderfully filmed (at times it feels like you're in a painting by Ford Maddox Brown), but ultimately too boring to recommend

Sounds like he'd have been better framing it as a modern representation of the Highland Clearances.

[Dr. Whom]

That was certainly an inspiration, although, so Wikipedia informs me, this happened earlier than the mid-19C setting of the movie as suggested by the style.

I think the setting was mainly chosen for esthetic reasons , much like is done in opera, when you set, say a Wagner opera in 1920s Chicago. In this movie it does work in a sense, because it creates a Thomas Hardyesque atmosphere.

[Rev. Powell]

This is a lot of discussion for such a boring movie, but HARVEST is an adaptation of a book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvest_(Crace_novel). The setting/time period was likely chosen to express the theme of transition from a (probably mythical) in-harmony-with-earth agricultural world to a capitalist society based on exploitation/ownership of resources.