RECENT VIEWINGS (Bad Movie Thread!)

[zombie no.one]

FINAL DESTINATION 5 (2011)

pretty much the only enduring horror franchise born in the 2000s that I can get down with... seen 'em all about 3 or 4 times. just trashy popcorn throwaway stuff but somehow watchable to me. they know what they are, and aim mid-height  ... the gymnastics scene in this one still gets an 'uurgh'.


didn't like the recent reboot though.

[M.10rda]

I forget if you posted about it a year and a half ago... what didn't you like about BLOODLINES? Basically another sequel, not a reboot, final appearance of Tony Todd et al.

[zombie no.one]

I felt like it was trying way too hard to ram home the fact that it's a Final Destination movie, while ironically seeming more like any other random 2020's teeny horror... plus an overload of crash-bang-wallop chaos as it went on. just didn't tickle me

[M.10rda]

I liked the "crash-bang-wallop chaos" myself. It was a little mean-spirited but then they all are. I will be posting a retort to your RESIDENT EVIL review in the other section... 

[Trevor]

I saw COYOTE VS ACME last Friday and was hoping that it would break my crippling depression.

It didn't, sadly 😢

[M.10rda]

I'm sorry you are depressed, Trevor. Don't watch this next one - it won't help!

EYES OF THE MUMMY (1918):
This is, somehow, an early film from Ernst Lubitsch, a highly regarded director who later made the very good TROUBLE IN PARADISE. It's amazing he kept working after this one. To quote another fat film reviewer - It stinks!

A British guy visits Egypt to find mummies. He enters a pyramid (the entrance to which is sitting wide open) and finds no mummies but does find Emil Jannings and Pola Negri, supposedly playing indigent Egyptians. The white guy steals away w/ Negri and Jannings follows, looking for revenge. (Spoiler Warning: He gets it.  )

Okay, Negri and Jannings are supposed to be Egyptian, but the Polish (maybe Romani) Negri's character is named "Ma" and the white guy fetishizes her like she's Chinese (including ordering her to dance to "Oriental music"); and German Jannings wears insane brownface and a fright wig to play "Radu", which is a Romani/an name, not an Egyptian one. Also his character is a complete psycho but I guess we're also supposed to feel a little bad for him? This poor cultural representation would be distasteful even in a great silent movie, and EYES OF THE MUMMY is dull as hell.

Negri does play with a little kitty cat in one scene.    1/5    No, there is no mummy in this movie!

[chainsaw midget]

I watched Love at first Bite and Once Bitten.  They came together in a Blue-ray two pack.

Love at first bite is a funny little romantic comedy with George Hamilton as Dracula.  He's not in my top ten list of actors who have played Drac, but he does the role all the justice it needs here. 



Once bitten is one of Jim Carrey's earliest movies.  He was the "relatable teen romantic lead" and there were time he was a bit ... well... too Jim Carrey for the role, but it was all in all a fun movie.  I loved the dance-off and the vampire's gay servant was a really fun character. 

All in all- both a good recommendation, neither GREAT, but if you're in for some romantic vampire comedies, you could do worse. 

[zombie no.one]

SPIDERS (2000)

I guess by 2000 all other names for spider movies had been completely exhausted

anything with Boaz Davidson's name attatched can usually be relied on to provide at least some kind of wacky entertainment, and this just about complies

typical kind of trash sci fi no budget 'fun'.

 set up... assertive mildly foxy tomboy-ish heroine + a couple of wisedumb-cracking tech dorks go on some mission and find... spiders. mutant spiders. everywhere!

special fx: 7.5/10, surprisingly good for the most part. two howling CGI fails - in one, a guy gets wrapped in a web that is clearly not real and looks like it was done in Microsoft Paint in 30 seconds... the stupid thing is they could've easily done this effect using a 'real' web?  but the rest is more than passable for this kind of thing.


6/10

[M.10rda]

ONCE BITTEN is fun. This movie, less so:

FEAR (1918):
No, not a third viewing of the Marky Mark movie, but the first (?) horror movie by Robert Weine, the director of CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI. Also, more orientalism and brownface.  In a plot quite similar to that of EYES OF THE MUMMY, a white guy visits a Hindu (?) temple and steals a prized artifact. He puts it in a display case in his bedroom, gets paranoid about it, then slowly (slowly) turns into a megalomaniac party animal mad scientist who creates world-saving inventions and then destroys them in front of the press, just to be a wild-and-crazy-guy about it. Finally (SPOILER?) he self-destructs.

The main actor looks like a clean-shaven Robert Downey Jr. and has some decent manic/panicked energy. Weine makes pretty good use of foreground/background in his compositions, but otherwise there is none of the transformational style seen in CALIGARI.  Also, FEAR is 75 minutes long and if I didn't make this clear earlier, it is slow. This ain't no rollercoaster sex/home invasion thriller.

Any Letterboxd reviewer will tell you that Conrad Veidt (later Cesare the zombie in CALIGARI) is the best thing about FEAR. He's a specter of East Indian vengeance that haunts the rich guy - very occasionally - but basically just stands in one spot and stares at him and sometimes says something foreboding to him. Unfortunately, Veidt is wearing thick greasepaint.  Fortunately, though, even in greasepaint, no one stares forebodingly like Conrad Veidt. At the end of the film (post self-destruction) Veidt's spirit leaves his body and walks (slowly, natch) into the rich guy's mansion, through the parlor, up the stairs, up more stairs, through the upstairs hallway... retrieves the artifact... then repeats course all the way out the house and back into his body and Weine shows us every single step of the stroll.  Weine, WTF?

2/5    I'm a little scared to watch DR. CALIGARI again now.

[M.10rda]

MIDNIGHT FACES (1926):
Oh boy, another silent horror movie that's barely a horror movie. This is the "Old Dark House" subgenre of people hanging around an old spooky mansion counter-intuitively. (As usual, there's an inheritance at stake.) A damsel in distress is pursued into the mansion (not out of it) by a Fu Manchu-alike with a large knife, but inside the mansion there's a guy dressed like the Shadow menacing folks, and also there's a supposedly paralyzed invalid in a wheelchair who I instantly knew would be up to no good. 

Also, surprisingly, the bland white guy lead has a wisecracking yet danger-averse black sidekick/chauffeur of the Mantan Moreland variety. I didn't think that was a trope until the mid-30s but here he is. That stock character is usually my favorite character in any old movie in which he appears, because he's the only character who's reacting to the scenario in a semi-plausible and sane way. But the character loses something when his wisecracks are delivered via intertitle instead of aloud on the soundtrack.

I might've been paying less than totally close attention to MIDNIGHT FACES but I am relatively sure the twist at the end makes little or no sense. However, I didn't hate this movie. The male lead does get in an enthusiastic fistfight w/ the Shadow at the end, which carries on for something like ten minutes    and travels from the basement up two floors and then out a window on to the roof...!     

2.5/5    The Mantan Moreland character is played by a real African American, fortunately. However, Fu Manchu is played by a white guy. 

[LilCerberus]

Tonight's Stinker
Princess of the Nile(1954)
https://youtu.be/xO_m-FNfe9o?si=pyuGRgcisnflHYiE

In the year 1249, the city of Hanwan, Egypt is overrun with Bedouins as a Persian prince stops for a visit... Debra Paget is leading a double life as an Egyptian princess & a dancer at a bar, while a shaman keeps her father doped just enough to cooperate with the Bedouin chief....
While escorting the prince through the streets, a riot breaks out, the Bedouin chief takes the opportunity to kill the prince's friend in hopes of getting permission to kill more Egyptians, but the princess sees him....
The prince finds out, but is alone against the Bedouins, so he gains the help of all the town's thieves....

Just over an hour long, fairly amusing.... Confusing at first, as you have modern American actors trying to speak in medieval vernacular.... Lots of goofy sword fights, & a few good excuses to show Debra Paget dancing in skimpy outfits....

[Jim H]

Started watching a new horror series for my usual 31+ Halloween season horror movie watches.

Leprechaun 1 - Hadn't seen this since the 90s.  Wow what a stinker.  Just, so bad.  Many scenes feel like a rough cut they're so badly put together, especially early on when often there is no music in a "temp track" kind of way.  Never scary, almost never funny, and often kind of annoying.  Not clever at all with any ideas really.  Jennifer Aniston is there, that's about all you can say.  I like how her father gets injured halfway through the film and is then never seen again.

Leprechaun 2 - Not great, but a SIGNIFICANT step up.  Much better direction, visually stronger.  Occasionally funny and a bit more clever with Leprechaun things.  It's still not very good.  Just not a lot to say.

Leprechaun 3 - A large step up from the first two, and genuinely pretty funny and consistently entertaining.  Brian Trenchard-Smith taking over as director is probably almost all of it really, but at a basic level the writing is better too.  To give an idea of what I mean about Trenchard-Smith, there's a bit where the Leprechaun gets picked up and thrown out a window.  There's stuff like that in the first two often done by just showing the Leprechaun fall back out of frame - but in this one it cuts to a wide shot of an obvious dummy in a Leprechaun costume falling like four stories onto concrete.  If you know B-movies, you know this is almost always an entertaining gag.  Trenchard-Smith gets it.  For something similar, there are like three separate times a character just grabs an object and throws it at the Leprechaun and hits him in the head in a wideshot.  It's dumb, but entertaining.

There's other small bits, like just setting it in Vegas was smart, and there's a couple of side characters that get amusing moments just to have them, like the two goons talking about underwear.  Oh, and the two leads are actually relatively likable, something the first two films fail at.

Lastly, I did not previously realize that almost all of these movies apparently do not share continuity with each other.  They don't even try to link up the ending of each film to the next one.  And really, that's fine for these, it lets them do whatever the hell they feel like each time.