RECENT VIEWINGS (Bad Movie Thread!)

[chainsaw midget]

Kill Her Goats (2023)

A beautiful big breasted blonde has just graduated college, so her rich father buys her a house.  SAhe decideds to invite a few of her friends over for a girls' night, where they strip down to their undewrwear, take showers, and then hang out in their underwear.  Lots of underwear.  Except when they take it off. 


HOWEVER... this house has a reputatio for being haunted.  Or not. 
Then a maniac wearing a goat mask (played by Kane Hodder) shows up and starts killing people.  At one point, one of the women is killed in her dreams by somebody with a goat face when our goastfaced killer is busy elsewhere killing somebody else.  These weird dream powers are never explained. 

Also at one point, the killer has two chainsaws stuck together with sparklers on them. 


Eventually our leading lady kills Goatface by decapitating him. 


He shows up a scene later alive-and-well, and nobody mentions how. 

There's also a couple of goats that show up.  Again, no idea why. 

The killer is revealed to be ... well, I won't spoil that, but he's just a guy, one that does NOT have supernatural dream powers nor is he a ghost or anything.  He's just a guy. 

Eventually, Goatface gets killed again, and the person responsible suddenly goes crazy and tries to kill her sister. 

The gore is actually pretty good in a practicle effects/80s slasher kind of way but the plot is very much like the women's outfits. Not always there and very skimpy when it is. 

If I had to compare this to any more, I'd say it strongly resembles the Slumber Party Massacre 2.  So, if you like that kind of thing, check it out. 

[M.10rda]

Kill Her Goats (2023)

This could also be the title of a SEVERANCE S2 episode.

[M.10rda]

PRACTICAL MAGIC 2 (2026):
Madame wanted to watch this. We could have spent $24 on seeing it at the drive-in but she was wise enough to wait for streaming. Here's how our conversation went last Saturday:
"Are you sure you want to watch this with me?"

"Yeah..." Hey, it's about witches - that's kinda' Halloweenish. Also Stockard Channing.

"Arya Stark is in it..."

     "Hell yes I'll watch PRACTICAL MAGIC 2!!!"      

...Well...

24 hours later Madame was still complaining about this movie. That's how bad it is. Although she enjoys watching all kinds of rom-com schlock, she's actually much more vicious about bad movies than I am. Her primary complaint seemed to be that Lee Pace, in spite of being (essentially) naked, failed to redeem the film for her. She loves Lee Pace. His character is utterly gratuitous and makes no sense, FTR. The kid from "Cobra Kai" and BLUE BEETLE is also in it... in a coma for two hours. 

There are light horror elements. There are three deaths (more than a lot of rom-coms). Two characters are stabbed in the heart (!) and live/have no wounds.  By the climax things deteriorate into Harry Potter-style horse$#!t.

Bullock (62) and Kidman (59) have had a lot of work done and it's getting harder for them to emote w/ their faces. Much of the running time is commanded by them doing awkward (improvised?) comedy patter, and Bullock's humor chops have altogether evaporated. She looks a lot like imminent pre-death Michael Jackson in many close-ups. Kidman actually looks okay - she's a redhead anyway.

Joey King plays one of their kids and also looks weird, but Hot-weird and she comes by it naturally. (She didn't need to get her face paralyzed or sliced up w/ scalpels to look weird.) Dianne Wiest (78) looks totally natural and good. Stockard Channing (82) has had some work done but looks better for 82 than Bullock does for 62.

Maisie Williams is fifth-billed and (of course) looks extraordinarily (naturally) lovely and is very entertaining - mostly reacting to lines from other characters. The internet seems pretty upset about how she's treated in this film - and I am too. She plays a brain surgeon, so when Xolo M. is hit by a car and enters a coma, one might expect Maisie to have to learn magic in order to save Xolo's life w/ magical brain surgery. Nope!  She and Stockard sit in a room staring at unconscious Xolo for two hours while Bullock, Kidman, and King have actual adventures.

Still, Maisie and Stockard sitting around a room staring is a hard 2.5/5 for me.       I think I enjoyed this stupid, stoooooooooooopid movie more than my wife.

Elsa Lanchester used to routinely get fifth-billing for doing very little in dumb movies. If Maisie's career is only as good as Elsa's, I'll be okay w/ that, but I'm holding out for more!

[M.10rda]

TURTLE ISLAND (2014):
I gotta' watch some more modern horrors in the next week... this one's a Found Footage flick ostensibly about Bigfoot, or........ so I thought. The first 10 minutes had me wondering, though. Those are entirely focused on the problematic love life and stalled career of a lame reality TV/social media dude. None of it ends up mattering in the final third of the film, of course, once the BLAIR WITCH-style running and screaming start. Thus that early exposition ends up feeling quite gratuitous and masturbatory, since the lame dude is played by the writer/director. He's also easily worst actor in the movie. 

To be fair to w/d/star dude, in some way - all the other acting is very good, so at least he knows how to spot a good actor anywhere besides the mirror! Even the small roles of witnesses discussing their BF encounters are well-performed. The other three leads are above average, and all three of them are attractive people, if that's one of your requirements for your BF movies. I'll also acknowledge that there are a couple of cool/funny moments where something that looks like BF makes a low-key appearance in the back of a shot and the characters don't even notice.  Those are fun in an IN A VIOLENT NATURE kinda' way.

The biggest (enormous) problem w/ TURTLE ISLAND is similar to that in many FF flicks, but worse - the inherent logic of it being Found Footage fails to hold up. Yeah, it doesn't make any sense why the characters keep rolling tape as they're being pursued through pitch black woods and terrified for their life, but moreover we get a couple of brief interjections early on in the film/"in the tape" where footage has been recorded after the events at the end of the film. Why? How? These questions aren't answered (implausible as any answer would be) and furthermore they set-up the reveal at the end of TURTLE ISLAND, which I will just go right ahead and SPOIL for you below:

.......Like two semi-famous BF films from the 70s, the BFs in TURTLE ISLAND are (diegetically) just guys in suits. Apparently these guys in suits also have enormous metal teeth and claws.  Why? In this case, one can only speculate. However if not for those unnecessary and inexplicable early cut-ins of events post-climax, the viewer would just think these Bigfeet are actual (fake-looking) Bigfeet instead of homicidal rednecks in mangy white gorilla suits. TURTLE ISLAND's director really outsmarts himself on this one.    2/5

[M.10rda]

I forgot to mention the worst and funniest Bad Movie thing about PRACTICAL MAGIC 2, which is that the bad guy drives the left side of Joey King's head into a stone wall, knocking her unconscious, and then when she's rescued she has a large contusion on the right side of her head.      Somehow I will relate this information to

THE LEVENGER TAPES (2012):
...Another FF film that I didn't watch consciously after TURTLE ISLAND, though the title should have been a tip-off. An annoying geeky community college kid and two girls who are way too hot to ever be hanging out w/ him commit a couple minor crimes during a road trip in the woods and then spot a famously missing/abducted little girl (yes, in the woods) and can't call the police after having committed some minor crimes so they attempt to investigate/rescue her themselves. Now, spotting a famously missing/abducted little girl in the woods could have been a sufficiently suspenseful premise all on its own, but THE LEVENGER (that's the little girl) TAPES, in its infinite wisdom, decides to add a second little girl in the woods who is possessed by a demon. Actually, come to think of it, it might be the same little abducted girl who is possessed by the demon, though I couldn't figure out that part and honestly I don't think it made any sense or really mattered anyway.

LEVENGER TAPES has all the same problems as TURTLE ISLAND but none of the positive attributes. The three protagonists [sic] receive a lot of laborious character development that never matters to the plot. The guy is insufferable and the two ladies either act with improbable earnestness or transparent boredom. Every (handheld camcorder) shot is perfectly framed on the action at all times, even in moments of stark terror when by all indications the character holding the camera wouldn't be looking in the direction of the camera. I know some people really hate CLOVERFIELD, but that film provides a psychological motivation for keeping the camera pointed at the action. How do CLOVERFIELD-detractors feel about FF films like LEVENGER...?

LEVENGER has a similar tragic flaw to TURTLE ISLAND in that both films seem to acknowledge the limitations of the FF genre and thus introduce additional narrative elements that end up compromising the FF premise altogether. LEVENGER has non-FF sequences where three cops (including Chris Mulkey, who was a regular on TWIN PEAKS for God's sake) sit around watching the Found Footage. During these scenes, two of the characters in the FF are described as being totally dismembered and disemboweled, which contradicts what we see or hear about happening to them in the footage.  Did LEVENGER's filmmakers even watch their final cut before they released it, or did the demon girl kill two people hastily, then return to further dismantle their bodies?

Incidentally, it would seem as if the demon girl picks up the camera herself and carries it through the woods at the end on an errand. Or maybe this is just further narrative confusion engendered by the misconceived multiple diegeses.......

1/5    Also, FTR, a plurality of characters are attacked and knocked unconscious in the middle of the film, survive, and come to in order to wander the woods again before meeting their inevitable fates. This happens quite often in films that I watch, including PRACTICAL MAGIC 2, in which both King and Lee Pace receive blows to the head, fall unconscious, and then recover w/ no apparent significant concussive trauma/brain damage. (Well, Lee Pace is even more attracted to imminent pre-death Michael Jackson Bullock after she knocks him out, so there's that.)

In reality, losing consciousness for more than a few seconds from head trauma generally results in some small or large amount of short- or long-term cerebral impairment. An ex-girlfriend's brother fell off his skateboard and hit his head, momentarily blacked out, then forgot his name and couldn't recognize his family for weeks. (That kid went on to star in some relatively well-known low-budget horror flicks, btw.) I made a horror feature in college where multiple characters are knocked out, but when they come to they wander around seriously f***ed up, as one tends to do. I myself have received multiple heavy blows to the skull as a child, though I only was hit in the face and blacked out once (in my 20s), totally sober, and recovered consciousness w/in 2-5 seconds. Now did I receive any brain damage? I ask you, behold my reviews on this website and you make the call!   

[LilCerberus]

Tonight's Stinker
Come Back Charleston Blue(1972)
https://youtu.be/b9Irpa2r984?si=mnBDrXl3GuSYpfiS

At a charity ball in Harlem hosted by a known drug dealer, a local police chief is being honored, & is asked to crown a local beauty queen... Meanwhile, detectives Gravedigger Jones & Coffin Ed Johnson are working the floor to ensure two-bit pickpockets are taken care of.... Then a kitchen worker is found murdered, & the murder weapon, a high end strait razor, is left behind.....
Rumors of a gangster from the 1930s returning (From the dead?) start circling.... Meanwhile, the local drug transporters are getting attacked, & the local supply of heroine is drying up....

The story meanders, but stays entertaining, with a decent soundtrack.....
About an hour in, there's a really crazy gun battle in a cemetery that always stuck out in my childhood memory.....

[LilCerberus]

Tonight's Stinker
The Solarnauts(1967)
https://youtu.be/MVe-rT4TpJI?si=YbFBl0Q-zQ73ccVn

An unsold TV pilot....
A pair of space cadets named Power & Tempo are flying their spaceship around Mars, when they see a cloud form over one of it's colonies.... They report it back to headquarters, the cloud explodes, and a skinhead in green facepaint & silver lipstick contacts everyone demanding mining rights.....
HQ sends the two flyboys to an observation station, which they find is already destroyed & replaced by bad guy station.... When they land, they find a female survivor....

This kept turning up in my Pinterest suggestions, & I finally broke down & looked it up....
Not too bad for a half hour, with a pretty amusing soundtrack......

[LilCerberus]

Tonight's Stinker
Argoman the Fantastic Superman(1967)
https://youtu.be/wU6_faz7Y54?si=y6NEFD0ZQrJBJZrQ

The British Royal Crown has been stolen, and a woman calling herself Queen Of the World is demanding the world's largest diamond, which was accidentally created by an atomic bomb.... The diamond's size could wreck the world economy, but is also has energetic power that could turn it into a superweapon.....
We meet Argoman, a rich kid with all those batman gadgets, who in this movie, has superpowers (unlike other versions of the character), but he can lose them for six hours if he gets laid.... And of course, that's the first thing he decides to do after using telekinesis to steer a young woman's boat towards his summer home while Scotland Yard waits for him......

Decent production values.... The soundtrack is pleasant Italian muzak... More corny than anything else, with the fight scenes being really lame....

[M.10rda]

EVIL DEAD (2013):
Having spent 13 years processing/getting over the reflective aversion to an EVIL DEAD remake/reboot, I was pretty excited to watch this on Halloween night. We didn't like it at all. In fact we stopped after 10 minutes and watched HOKUM instead - we just couldn't take the insipid, unrealistic dialogue. I watched the rest later myself.  

Based on EVIL DEAD alone, here are things I know that Fede Alvarez is at least competent at: use of color; use of loud noises; decent orchestration of violence. (This was also clear in the climactic scene from DON'T BREATHE where the protagonist is stuck in a car w/ a vicious attack dog.)

Based on EVIL DEAD and DON'T BREATHE, here are things it's clear that Alvarez has no competency for: believable and sympathetic characterization; credible dialogue; situational plausibility; delicate/thoughtful/tasteful handling of serious and sensitive subject matter.

The way this film uses/exploits the chemical dependency of its main character to justify the plot contrivances that permit her (physical and sexual) abuse is waaay more problematic than the simple/low-minded (yes, gratuitous) tree r@pe in the original.

Am I willing to accept (in this kind of movie) that burying someone alive will cure them of their demonic possession? Sure. However, I am unconvinced that burying them alive will also automatically heal their "third or fourth" degree burns or their bisected tongue!

Alvarez and his cowriter hail from Uruguay thus presumably were native speakers of Spanish. They might now be fluent in English, as well, but it doesn't reflect in their screenplay's dialogue.  

Lou Taylor Pucci's acting abilities almost elevate him above the dreadful material. Jane Lynch is cute (when she isn't a demon) and seems to be trying hard but has little success w/ her impossible role. The other two girls likewise can't accomplish a thing and the guy who plays the ostensible "Ash" role has about 1% of Bruce's inherent charisma.

So that leaves EVIL DEAD as a feature-length assault of intense and fairly realistic gore. Although that could be a plus for the film, it actually underlines the most profound failing of the project. Raimi's '81 original is still a delightful tour-de-force of horrific abuse because, in spite of its virtuoso practical splatter, it maintains a level of artifice close to old EC comics or 70s Richard Corben stories from "Creepy". Thus no matter how much the characters suffer (and they suffer far more than in the more popular EVIL DEAD 2), one remains ghoulishly entertained.

Alvarez has unfortunately committed to making his EVIL DEAD gritty, nominally "realistic", and devoid of all camp aplomb. He would have viewers believe that Lynch and the other actors are playing "real" people instead of two-dimensional comic strip figures. He fails in rendering these characters believably, but he succeeds in creating an utterly grey (then red) onscreen world of human suffering and joylessness. I generally have little interest in watching "real people" suffer horrific sadistic violence in a bleak world for 90 minutes, but if I do want to watch that, I'll watch Haneke or Gaspar Noe - not an EVIL DEAD flick!!!

Totally unnecessary, a full-length gratuity beyond any mere tree-r@pe.    1.5/5    I'll admit that the finale where the protagonist chainsaws their doppelganger in the face would have been a more satisfying ending to Alex Garland's ANNIHILATION.   

[M.10rda]

DISCLOSURE DAY (2026):
Not a horror film, obviously, so rather an anti-climax to my October viewing.  Also, in spite of a good bit of excitement in the first half or 90 minutes, ultimately this is quite underwhelming/disappointing, as many other viewers have remarked. Perhaps I'd hoped my contrary inclinations would allow me to find this to be a diamond among the Spielbergian rough - I am, after all, a defiant defender of both READY PLAYER ONE and 1941.       But, no - DISCLOSURE DAY seems crafted to make absolutely no one entirely happy (except, maybe, Spielberg himself?).

There are plenty of small and large issues w/ DISCLOSURE DAY, which have been discussed elsewhere, so I'll only focus on my biggest issue... with both DD and many other Spielberg films:

Here Colin Firth plays (initially with commendable loathsomeness) a fanatical Musk/Thiel-type tech oligarch who will go to any and all amoral ends to prevent the eponymous day of disclosure, including deploying a (surprisingly) small army of mercenaries to murder anyone who would hasten said revelation, and/or utilizing alien technology to remotely commit murders himself (by puppeteering innocent accomplices). Eventually it's explained that all national security oversight for extraterrestrial obfuscation has been outsourced from the federal government and the U.S. military to Mr. Firth, which seems a little implausible at first and then much much much more implausible at the film's climax, when Firth spontaneously surrenders in the face of imminent "disclosures" even though his mercenaries could just machine gun a room full of disclosers and witnesses and waltz away with impunity... a contrivance which is necessary for Spielberg to proceed w/ the main event which justifies his entire project, but which nevertheless seems to confound the chief mercenary, and also confounded this viewer, who wondered why there were no subsequent cut-aways to the POTUS, Secretary of Defense/War, Joint Chiefs of Staff, or any other high-ranking Illuminati, $#!tting their pants in progress and ordering air strikes on the small Kansas City block where Emily Blunt was blithely dismantling their entire empire.......   

This nonsense points to two larger shortcomings of Spielberg's alien-centric filmography at large (and perhaps beyond just the alien flicks in his canon). Naturally DISCLOSURE DAY is disappointing simply on account that he's been teasing out these identical themes for my entire life - initially w/ significant intrigue in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, then variably through E.T., A.I., TAKEN, and ...CRYSTAL SKULL, each promising then forestalling some euphoric culmination of cosmic enlightenment. At the end of DD, most viewers reaction seems to be: ...This is it? Really? Not only don't we know more than we knew in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, but the flat revelation and resolution at DD's end actually kind of diminish the alluring mystery of CE.

And, of course, the non-answers that Spielberg offers in DD further confuse the morality of his onscreen universe. I intentionally omitted WAR OF THE WORLDS from the previous list of Spielberg's alien saga, as that (not very good) one-off at least was willing to commit to the malice of its extraterrestrials. They kidnapped Cary Guffey in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS and drove Dreyfuss to madness, but somehow I'm still able to accept the ambivalence of their mission. But even as a five-year old watching E.T. in the theater, I felt great relief when the scientists took the creepy little bastard into custody, and no end of dismay when those dumb kids on bikes set him free. This same instinctive aversion to these unearthly child-grabbers is reflected briefly in DD by one of the lead characters (himself taken and probed by aliens as a kid), but his scene-partners quickly urge him to get over it and embrace his shady overlords, just as 80s pop culture norms emphatically informed me that I'd watched E.T. THE E.T. incorrectly and should have cheered on his escape to more adventures w/ his child-loving glowing finger.        2002's TAKEN (w/ Tobe Hooper) at least afforded some additional ambiguity about who were the bad guys and who were the good guys - the aliens abducting and traumatizing children, or the military spooks at least ostensibly taking steps to counter the alien maneuvers. But, nope, DISCLOSURE DAY homogenizes the entire conflict by its conclusion: the aliens are the Good Guys and, actually, the murderous tech Deep State are also the Good Guys, shucks! ...As long as we give 'em a chance!

This profound lack of moral clarity has now kneecapped Spielberg's career-long endeavor, but it looms large beyond the alien flicks as well. Always my thoughts return to the crowd of Stepford Aryans at the end of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, reassuring teary-eyed old Matt Damon that everyone who died to save him (including all those Jews) did so justifiably, as (implicitly) it helped replenish the good genes of Der Vaterland! Of course Spielberg couldn't have intended this message - but why then would he, the Master Filmmaker of the late 20th century, have labored to construct and transmit it? The most sympathetic presumption is that Spielberg is, unconsciously, both the Jeremy Davies and Adam Goldberg characters in SPR - bending over backwards enthusiastically to credit the humanity and decency in the captured Nazi, then living to regret it as that Nazi sadistically and slowly stabs him to death while spitting anti-Semitic epithets at him.

Spielberg's occasional collaborator Tony Kushner - the much cannier Jewish writer who rendered Roy Cohn as implausibly, impossibly charismatic and sympathetic in ANGELS IN AMERICA while still reminding audiences that Cohn will happily serve Satan in Hell - may have been subtly criticizing the director in THE FABELMANS, when he has the Young Spielberg character dramatize his childhood bully as a hero in a short film, and then when Lil' SS is pressed to explain his choice, he can't begin to rationalize his actions. I guess when the Overlords of the UFO do finally descend upon us, ol' Steven will be first in line to board the craft, and first with his @$$-up on the examination table-slash-hibachi grill.

2.5/5       .......But the girl at the end who plays the network anchor was great, right?

[Dr. Whom]

Battle in Outer Space (1959)

In the distant year 1965, Earth is attacked by aliens!

This popped up in my YT feed, and I started watching it because it is not often I see a SF movie that is set in the year I was born. About ten minutes in, I realised I had seen this before, but as I had only a vague memory of it, I continued. This is one of those sedate action movies, with plenty of incidents, but all at a measured pace, and hardly any suspense. As such, it is more of a kid's movie except that is mercifully has no kid characters or comic relief.

You still have to admire it for its optimism about Earth's capacity to work together through the United Nations to achieve the common good