RECENT VIEWINGS (Bad Movie Thread!)

[M.10rda]

FEAR (1996):
Second viewing of this big ball of cheese because Madame wanted to watch it for some reason. I puzzled over which section to post this in. It isn't a Good Movie but it isn't incompetent either and it is pretty fun Bad Movie to howl at and make fun of, from time to time, but on the other hand if you've seen it once, it takes a loooooooong time to get where it's going and really tried my patience for about an hour.

When I met and spent time w/ director James Foley, he said he was proud of two things about FEAR - one, that he got a decent performance out of Marky Mark, and two, he was proud of the rollercoaster scene and generally happy w/ the frisson between Marky Mark and Reese Witherspoon. I'm glad he felt good about that stuff. I do wish he had a better screenplay to work with - this ain't Mamet, that's for sure! However I also have to hang some of the blame for what fails to work in FEAR on Foley's shoulders. The final 25 minutes becomes a home invasion thriller and replays many familiar beats from STRAW DOGS and even the most famous moment from the Coens' BLOOD SIMPLE. This final act should have been the best part of FEAR - and it probably is, only by virtue of the first three-quarters being so rote. But the finale never fully picks up steam and although FEAR is Rated R, the climactic violence still lacks the bloody gruesomeness that would've delivered a big payoff.*

Witherspoon, legit 80s star William Peterson, and Amy Brenneman all seem to know that FEAR is pure cheese and never really invest more than what is required of the material. Alyssa Milano, on the other hand, must have thought FEAR was her shot at an Oscar or something and swings wildly for the fences. Wahlberg, though, really is the film's strongest asset - electrifying and totally convincing as a completely conscienceless, reprehensible, inhuman piece of trash. Was he acting?  James Foley thought he was acting, and took a lot of the credit for getting the performance out of Marky - who Foley claimed was an annoying idiot but not a bad person (though Wahlberg's own criminal history and public rhetoric may suggest otherwise).

2.5/5    * The bloodiest part of the movie, unfortunately. is what Wahlberg does to the family dog. If you're a pet-lover, you can safely skip FEAR altogether.

[Rev. Powell]

SWOLLEN CREEK (2025): A woman with a conjoined twin in her torso seeks romance, but runs into an evil insect queen and her fly-headed, dung-harvesting assistant instead. Juvenile zero-budget nonsense made from Halloween masks, toy rubber bugs, and too much free time; half a star for some ingenuity in making something out of nothing, and for making me chuckle exactly once. If you watch movies like this, please stop. If you don't watch movies like this, don't start---not even one. Free on Tubi, Fawesome, etc. 0.5/5.

[M.10rda]

In spite of your sober pleas, the film you describe sounds rather irresistible.......!

[Rev. Powell]

My plan is working then...  Inflict maximum pain!

[LilCerberus]

Tonight's Stinker
The Glove(1979)
https://youtu.be/5WZZtS2Ae5I?si=A0KAIQ0hHMnuKvyV OR HERE https://youtu.be/ORIKDF7d_tc?si=lUGyNltD1EcGTg7y

Roosevelt Grier is an escaped con, who dons a riot suit & a five pound gauntlet, which he uses to hunt down a prison guard & bash him to death (along with his car)....
We cut to John Saxon as a down on his luck bounty hunter spending the weekend with his daughter.... He later drops her off at school, as he narrates how he's behind on his alimony, & always on the verge of losing custody.... Of course, it's not coming up with the money that's the problem, but he's got a gamble bug...
Grier finds out that Saxon is looking for him after passing out flyers & taunts him over the phone...
Meanwhile, Saxon gets in a couple fights, shakes down an old lady, & gets burned in a poker game set up by his sleazy bookie, who runs a sleazy real estate agency.......

Mostly about how the bounty hunter's life really sucks, padding what feels like a sub plot about a killer...

[M.10rda]

THE SILENT HOUSE (1929):
I thought to myself, "I should really take a break from Roscoe Arbuckle films" and then after half an hour of this (90 minute!) ordeal I was ready to go right back and watch another dozen Roscoe Arbuckle films. What starts as an Old Dark House flick w/ a shadowy murder and an inheritance amd a retinue of glowering servants quickly becomes... a sunlit globe-hopping adventure w/ white guys in pith helmets and non-white guys shlepping stuff around for the white guys and also some white guys in yellow & brown face  and one sinister supporting character who, I dunno who he's supposed to be, but he's got a very anachronistic looking head of cornrows...  ...and generally very little action or interest whatsoever, and then when eventually things return to the redundantly-branded eponymous house, things barely pick up.

In spite of some yucky stuff hidden in a secret chamber beneath a floor in a torture room, SILENT HOUSE isn't a horror movie, it's a Fu Manchu movie      except Fu Manchu is called "Chan Fu"              and of course he's played by a white guy. There is one other major Asian character played by an actual Asian actor, but that character is so offensively broad and weird that maybe the one other Asian actor the producers had on file read the script and turned down the role of Fu Manchu Chan Fu. 

SILENT HOUSE had money behind it and there are moments of very slick, professional craftmanship - but who cares? There's no Content to carry the Form. I guess I watched this for female lead Mabel Poulton, a winsome starlet who looks a lot like Kirsten Dunst or a super-cute Michelle Williams and who was tremendously winning in THE CONSTANT NYMPH, a thankless vehicle that allowed her to be overwhelmingly appealing though forced her character to be persistently abused and then die slowly.  Mabel somehow has less to do in SILENT HOUSE - her big scene is played unconscious on the floor. There is really nothing positive to say about this interminable slog.    1/5    Okay, one of the actors is named "Arthur Pusey".

[M.10rda]

CAMPING OUT aka FATTY'S VACATION (191?):
It was bound to happen - if I insist on watching nearly every surviving Roscoe Arbuckle movie (and there are dozens), eventually I'm gonna' find one (...) that kinda' sucks. This one is about as bad as the one about "Fatty" and Mabel Norman wandering pointlessly around the world's fair, which Roscoe didn't write or direct and which dates back to 1914. Sources claim that "CAMPING OUT" is 1919, but that doesn't track for the following reasons:

1.) It's Roscoe and Al and Alice Lake, but no Buster, which either dates it at around '16 (like WAITERS' BALL) or late '19/early '20 (after Buster took a break from Roscoe and Roscoe made about 3 more movies w/o Buster before Virginia Rappe died);
2.) It was likely produced by Mack Sennett, who was photographed on the set w/ Roscoe, but Sennett didn't produce any of Roscoe's movies after about 1916;
3.) The title card on the Euro print I watched is "FATTY'S VACANTE" ("vacation"), not "CAMPING OUT", and Roscoe stopped including "Fatty" (a nickname he understandably loathed) in the titles of his films around '15-'16;
4.) Roscoe was a pretty darn good filmmaker by 1919, and this thing is hot garbage.

Roscoe (as "Victor", not "Fatty") writes his wife a "Dear Alice" letter from the deck of a cruise ship. He's dissatisfied with her cooking and has decided to rough it on his own in a tent on the coast of a small (settled) island. Al is on the cruise ship twice - once in no make-up and once in crazy old man drag (w/ a peg leg, even!). Roscoe and the Als keep coming to loggerheads and throwing each other overboard. Eventually when they get to shore Roscoe sets up his tent and there's a neighbor lady and a goat and eventually his wife comes looking for him. There is very little story or action or, uh, humor. A couple guys in the island town get mad at Roscoe and throw eggs or rocks or round fruit at him. In the film's one mildly memorable moment, Roscoe catches a volley of those objects, one after another, in one hand and puts 'em in a basket. On top of all his other skills he coulda' been a major league catcher!

Maybe he just wanted to take a vacation and chalked it up as a production expense. Or maybe historians have the timing on this one all wrong. It was thought totally lost for many years and some shots remain lost and what has been found looks like trash. I suppose folks who want to believe that Roscoe was useless w/o Buster would point to this one as proof.    2/5

[lester1/2jr]

Consent (2017) - This started off as a decent, if half assed, demo reel type tubi movie. I've seen better and I've seen worse, but what lands it in this section is the ending, or rather, the lack of one. It's a movie, not a series, but it act's like there's another episode coming up. No one is more sympathetic to amateur film making than me. I might be in the top .01% of amateur film sympathizers, but you can't do basically a script run through full of plot holes then ask the audience to hold on for a thing you haven't made yet.

1.5 /5

[M.10rda]

With apologies, a long one:

THE GENERAL (1926):
As a young person I never read anything but glowing praise for this one. I watched it 15-20 years back and was unimpressed, yet remember very little about it. (To be fair, I would often drink heavily while watching movies in those days.) As a newly minted Buster Keaton fan, I figured I should revisit it.

Enlightenment (or Red Pill vs Blue Pill, if you prefer) is a tricky business. My only perception of Roscoe Arbuckle until about a year and a half ago was that he was an overweight disgraced sex criminal of legendary status. Watching a ton of Roscoe's movies (and doing associated research) has demonstrated that he was railroaded for an unfortunate death he played no direct role in (and eventually was entirely cleared for) and also he was sort of a cinematic genius. My only perception of Buster Keaton until I started watching Roscoe's films that co-star Buster was that he was an extremely famous silent film star that I never quite got the appeal of. Watching Buster in Roscoe's films taught me that Buster was an extraordinary, Jackie Chan-level physical talent. Watching THE GENERAL and doing associated research has... diminished my opinion of Buster. 

Purely technically, THE GENERAL is... competent. Co-directed by Buster and his frequent post-Roscoe director Clyde Bruckman, THE GENERAL is a full-length feature that has high production values and looks/feels like a Real Film....... unlike many of Roscoe's shorts, which look and feel like LSD-fueled fever dreams predicting the Warner Bros' animated catalogue. I guess this accounts for THE GENERAL's extremely warm late-20th century reputation. It isn't aesthetically embarrassing - it's a "prestige picture".

This is the nicest thing I'll say about THE GENERAL: there is a certain innate appeal to a story about a man simultaneously contesting with nearly unstoppable technology (in this case, a locomotive) and also the machinations of other men. That sounds like it should make for a great movie, and I know that many people value the idea of a film over the execution of said film. For the record, none of what I thought I remembered about THE GENERAL actually happens in THE GENERAL. My few fleeting positive recollections of my first (potted) viewing of THE GENERAL are actually scenes from the second half of GO WEST, the 1940 Marx Borthers runaway-train movie which is remembered fondly by no critics whatsoever yet which is, iirc, actually much funnier and more impressive than THE GENERAL.

Alas, from a cinematic perspective, THE GENERAL is not very interesting, entertaining, or funny. Buster is in full-Chaplin (or Harry Langdon) mode here: he's mostly deadpan in all circumstances, unlike in Roscoe's films where he displays a great range of emotions and characteristics through his facial expressions and body language. There is no single moment in THE GENERAL where Keaton does anything nearly as funny or impressive as what he does in ANY Arbuckle film I've seen, sometimes twice or several times, excepting THE HAYSEED (which is pretty boring). As comedy or action, THE GENERAL is... quite pedestrian.

But in order to communicate my distaste for THE GENERAL, it's important to describe what does happen in THE GENERAL... which (somehow!) I forgot about or didn't recognize 15-20 years ago. I'm not proud - alcohol can really compromise a viewer's mental faculties and judgment.

THE GENERAL begins with Buster working as the engineer of his beloved locomotive. Immediately the Civil War begins - oh, I'm sorry, I guess that would be "the War of Northern Aggression" from the perspective of THE GENERAL - and Buster's second great love, an actual woman, shames him and tells him she doesn't want to see him again until he's a Confederate war hero. Meanwhile, Union officers plot the hijacking of Buster's train, in order to sabotage the Confederate war effort. They  launch their plan, but at great length, Buster foils the sabotage. At film's end, Buster is promoted to General of the Confederate Army, and his girl kisses him as a parade of Confederate soldiers march pass, and the soldiers salute General Buster, and he salutes them.

The Union Army are depicted as sinister villains, the Confederacy as valiant heroes. No African Americans appear onscreen or are mentioned.

    

Kneejerk response: Nah, son. Naaaaaaaaaaah.

So, I did some research. What was Buster thinking? Alas, though Buster only receives co-director credit, Buster was 100% responsible for the Direction taken by THE GENERAL. The film is adapted from a novel, which was based on a true story from the Civil War. However, the novel and the true story are about Union soldiers foiling a Confederate plot to hijack a Northern train. Buster looked at the source material and decided that it would be easier for audiences to sympathize w/ the protagonists if they were Southern Confederates. 

...Hey... I almost see his point, in the most cynical and commercial terms imaginable. BIRTH OF A NATION was a big hit eleven years earlier, and the Ku Klux Klan are the heroes in that one. 

Perhaps, though - somehow - audiences in 1926 were smarter than audiences in 1915 and smarter than the critics who rediscovered and celebrated THE GENERAL 30+ years following its release or maybe even some audiences today. I always wondered what Buster did after THE GENERAL, if THE GENERAL was so great. Well - Buster didn't do much after THE GENERAL, because THE GENERAL was such a colossal critical and financial failure that Buster was automatically demoted back to doing comedy shorts for the rest of his career. Justifiably, I would add.

Was Buster Keaton a bad person? Again, alcohol really does a number on the human brain. Apparently alcohol allowed me to watch this seventy-eight minute movie 15-20 years ago and not realize how horrifically wrong-headed and objectionable it was. Maybe alcohol also compelled Buster to make this seventy-eight minute movie and not realize how horrifically wrong-headed and objectionable it was. This isn't uninformed speculation - by the early 30s, Keaton's heavy drinking eventually p***ed off Louis B. Mayer to the extent that Mayer booted Keaton permanently out of MGM, right around the same time that Roscoe Arbuckle was being accepted back into polite society.

Should we remember the cinematic achievements of Buster Keaton? Absolutely. (Hey, Jackie Chan has some questionable political affiliations, too.) The best way to remember the cinematic achievements of Buster Keaton are in the remarkable films of Roscoe Arbuckle.

But we can forget about THE GENERAL.    1.5/5