RECENT VIEWINGS (Bad Movie Thread!)

[zombie no.one]

The beach scenes seem to take place in an entirely new time of the day that is both dark and light.

funny you should say that, yesterday I watched THE INITIATION OF SARAH (1978) and the opening scene tales place on a beach where it seems to be day and night at the same time... odd. maybe it was the same beach

mini-review: decent tv movie, kind of CARRIE- lite. a few funny bits. very innocent. Morgan Fairchild plays the ultimate b*tch very convincingly

[LilCerberus]

I heard about some law restricting the budget of movies while reading up on The Good, The Bad & The Ugly....
It might still be the case, I dunno.....

[M.10rda]

I know you guys are taking the p**s here and of course you're aware of the perennial production tactic known as "day-for-night shooting". It's cheaper and easier to shoot night scenes during the day - for one thing, you don't have to set up a lot of production lights, you just let the sun do its thing and then you slap a filter on the lens or you crank the aperture waaay down/underexpose the scene. Of course it almost always looks like complete crap. I've seen terrible DFN photography in many many many European flicks (almost certainly the all-time worst being the lengthy sequences in Jess Franco's OASIS OF THE ZOMBIES) but also plenty of American movies. Francois Truffaut even named a movie after this time-honored filmmaking tradition.      Of course most of the experts just go to the trouble of actually shooting at night. 

[zombie no.one]

I'm aware of day-for-night of course (Hammer were the 'masters' of that), but in TIOS it was like it was flitting back and forth between 100% day and 100% night, during the same scene? the film is on youtube but in such poor resolution you can't really appreciate it... t'is a weird one fer sure  I tells ye...  

edit, found a much better upload
https://youtu.be/qOzK28-96dU?si=461JgKAnV3ibhwi4

opening 3 mins or so...

[M.10rda]

Hey, I've seen that one! Wow, Morgans Fairchild and Brittany in one movie, crikey.
I didn't mean to come off as condescending. You're right, that doesn't look like intentional day-for-night... it looks like very poor color timing/correction in post... probably necessitated by quick and sloppy production on a location with inconsistent sunlight/cloud coverage... and also they decided to stage the action in front of a big shadowy reef or something, which casts deep shadows on the actors sitting in front of it, and they didn't set any fill-lights or bounce light sufficiently on those actors. Those cutaways of the dude standing with the water and dark skies in the background... THAT looks like either the shoot ran too long (they got other shots in broad afternoon daylight and then they got that guy's cutaways after the sun went down) and/or those shots are the result of a really poor/botched/sloppy post-production color timing attempt... they were trying to make all the shots match and look like the whole scene took place at twilight (?maybe?) and....... they blew it!

There you have it: four years of film school prepared me uhhhhhhh for this post!

[zombie no.one]

haha... I'd say it totally paid off! 

just noticed there appears to be a 2006 remake. I didn't know remakes of tv movies were a thing,

[lester1/2jr]

Tidal Wave: No Escape (1997) - Useless movie about a mad scientist who tries and succeeds in starting tidal waves with nuclear missiles. Most notable among the cast is Freddy "Boom Boom" Washington from Welcome Back, Kotter as some kind of science cop. Also on board is main character Corbin Bernsen from LA Law and Julianne Phillips, who for the entire thing I was trying to decide if she was the blonde DA from Law and Order SVU. It's turns out...she's not!

There's a little bit of drama but it's pretty thin. I found myself forgetting about the movie and just looking at the actors like "He must be doing this to pay for a new beach house". The ending is appropriately ridiculous and, I suspect, unscientific. If you saw it you might remember one scene where Bernsen is driving away from a wave and rolls around in his car with water everywhere. Like the images of the wave itself, it's just super realistic and hi tech. Worth checking out for how irrelevant it is and for early examples of what would become hallmarks of this kind of thing: forgotten tv stars, campy crap, etc

2 /5    

[javakoala]

"Beyond the Door III" (1989)

**SPOILERS AHEAD**

I can't believe I sat through this totally sober.

First up, the executive producer is Ovidio Assonitis, who has a long track record of dodgy films and a name that sounds like an illness that causes anal leakage.

Group of dumb Americans are packed off to Yugoslavia to see a rare, once-in-a-lifetime religious rite. All of them are snarky, annoying typical American types with one girl, whom everyone knows is a virgin and that she has a LARGE unique birthmark, whose family hails from that area, but no one can smell the blatant sacrificial set up here.

As soon as the idiots arrive in the village deep in the forest, zero time is spent building suspense as the virgin is separated from the others, who are nailed into their huts to be burned to death. One of the group dies in the fire, but all the rest, virgin included, escape. All but two make it onto a train.

The bulk of the movie details the adventure of this possessed train (yes, I said "possessed train") as it defies logic and physics to kill nearly everyone with more than two lines of dialogue. It jumps the tracks, flies past an attempt to derail it, chugs through a swamp to kill two of the kids who didn't make it on the train, turns itself around somehow, and defies being blown up.

All of this just so Satan can have a virgin bride. Oh, but that tells you what happens, doesn't it? Yup. One bonk with a mute flutist, and Satan loses out. In his anger, he whacks everyone BUT THE SOILED BRIDE!!!

Not even Bo Svenson putting on a thick European/Slavic accent can save this.

The only saving grace? A thief on the train is kinda hot and deserves her own series of action movies.

And Vinegar Syndrome chose THIS as a movie to release in 4K? No wonder I have lost respect for them.

Interesting gore effects, but they come few and far between, so watch at your own risk.

Also, why does this rate a 5.2 on IMDb for any reason other than being bonkers?

Note: The cover image below has NOTHING to do with the movie.

[M.10rda]

That's hilarious... haven't seen that one. Bo Svenson also did TENTACLES w/ Assonitis (constult your physician) over a decade earlier and looked terribly bored or drunk during most of that film... maybe he was so drunk he didn't remember working w/ Assonitis at all and thus signed on for this one!

[javakoala]

That's hilarious... haven't seen that one. Bo Svenson also did TENTACLES w/ Assonitis (constult your physician) over a decade earlier and looked terribly bored or drunk during most of that film... maybe he was so drunk he didn't remember working w/ Assonitis at all and thus signed on for this one!

Possibly true, though he looked utterly sober in this. I think he must have needed new shingles for his house, so he signed on for this one. Just a guess. And he got to wear a really cool, bright red scarf. That would have convinced me to do the shoot.

[javakoala]

That's hilarious... haven't seen that one. Bo Svenson also did TENTACLES w/ Assonitis (constult your physician) over a decade earlier and looked terribly bored or drunk during most of that film... maybe he was so drunk he didn't remember working w/ Assonitis at all and thus signed on for this one!

I kept thinking something didn't sound right about that, so I pulled it up on Tubi. Bo Hopkins starred in TENTACLES. He either tried to channel James Dean's facial expressions or Hopkins just stayed stoned. Or both. Not to say that I don't enjoy watching Bo Hopkins. I do. But in that dull movie, Shelley Winters' fat folds gave a more active performance. Poor Henry Fonda seemed lost. I think John Houston was just glad he was getting paid.

[M.10rda]

OHHHHHH thank you for the clarification! There I am crossing my Bo's again. 

[M.10rda]

LA CHINOISE (1967):
Jean-Luc Godard passed away a couple of years ago and I've been trying to catch up on some of his deeper cuts since then to figure out what I've been missing out on. Increasingly I'm unsure why I bother. I want to exclaim that LA CHINOISE is the most pretentious thing I've ever seen, however in truth it's probably not even the most pretentious Godard film I've seen. I needed to read the Wiki on it to understand it's an adaptation of a Doestoyevski novel (!) and to recognize that there is occasionally some very elusive narrative to this feature film. I'll disregard that discovery in discussing LA CHINOISE though as frankly it's irrelevant! I was actually prepared to grant that Godard might've been actively trying to deconstruct all possibility for narrative inference in this one, as he would later in his career - nope, he's just lost up Chairman Mao's ass again.

So this is the Godard movie where the group of actors (including Jean-Pierre Leaud and Juliet Berto) sit around an apartment reciting socialist tracts to one another. Now if you've seen more than one Godard film made after 1966, you might be saying, Isn't that every Godard film? Touche - but this is the one where they do it for about 90 full minutes. I grant you that sometimes they smoke while doing it, sometimes they fire dart guns at pictures of philosophers and politicians who weren't alive during Doestoyevski's lifetime, and during one brief interval they do it while performing enthusiastic calisthenics.  There's also one long section where they do it while seated on a moving train. And they also stencil or sometimes paint socialist tracts on the walls of their apartment, which provides a little visual interest.

What's it like to watch? It's kind of like the worst sketch comedy film you've ever seen - maybe try to imagine that one low-budget Prime comedy that was 75 minutes of dramatizations of brief sex jokes, or that one time Bill Zebub tried to make a sketch comedy film - only less funny. I'm being glib, of course. There is one funny moment towards the end where two characters drive to a motel to assassinate someone in room 23 and the woman enters, comes back, and says she messed up and assassinated the tenant of room 32 instead, so she has to go back in again. Now that's not a great joke but it's the best you'll get in LA CHINOISE and I gather (per Wikipedia) we have Doestoyevski to thank for that one.

LA CHINOISE isn't entirely w/o value. Godard uses color nicely in many shots and Berto and the other actress look great. Also, it's got Leaud, possibly the most affable French actor of all time and certainly the mid-20th century precedent to Jason Schwartzman. I don't know if Leaud was super into left-wing politics in the 60s and therefore could understand what the heck his character is talking about, but he seems to deliver all his voluminous dialogue and monologues w/ earnest conviction. Of course Leaud's entire thing in every film is being affable and having earnest conviction while he wanders around having absolutely no idea what he's doing, thus I suppose that might be the case here, too.

FWIW I've read some Marx and some leftist theory, and I'm sympathetic certainly to Marxist and socialist ideology. I still felt very confused, disconnected, and apathetic during almost the entirety of LA CHINOISE. I'd guess you'd need at least a full semester of college or post-graduate level coursework in leftist poli-sci to be able to get down w/ JLG here, and maybe there were arthouses upon arthouses full of such filmgoers in 1967 who could grok with what JLG was puttin' down. I think that's a high barrier to entry today, though. But Godard wasn't ever much interested in connecting to viewers anyway.

2/5
I'd say just go watch Allan Funt's WHAT DO YOU SAY TO A NAKED LADY? (1970) instead. 

[M.10rda]

ARGYLLE (2024):
We watched this primarily for the cat, having seen one TV commercial for it and otherwise going in blind. Often that strategy works, and indeed ARGYLLE has....... twists? So I'll try to avoid spoilers here. In short - skip it!!!

This film is almost as long as EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE, which I reviewed a week ago. ARGYLLE has even more bad ideas than EEAAO, but unlike the 2023 Oscar winner for Best Picture, ARGYLLE executes almost none of them sufficiently, and also unlike EEAAO, ARGYLLE exhausted all my patience in well under two-and-a-quarter hours.

ARGYLLE does have Catherine O'Hara in a large supporting role (and looking great as a redhead again after several seasons of SCHITT'S CREEK), Sam Rockwell doing an honest job trying to play Tom Cruise and then briefly Val Kilmer as the Saint, and a bunch of other likeable actors pitching in some screen time. It also gives Bryce Dallas Howard an opportunity to be an ass-kicking female action hero, which I'd be okay w/ under many circumstances. And it has a lot of CGI cat, though probably not nearly enough CGI cat (or real cat) for my tastes. Unfortunately, it also has sooooooooooo many incessant Matthew Vaughn-isms, dialed up to Maximum Vaughnage, in support of a screenplay that is just doing everything everywhere all at once while accomplishing nothing well whatsoever.

ARGYLLE is also another $200 million + bomb that its producers should've known was never going to recoup let alone make a profit. I say: GOOD! 

1/5

Just rewatch ROMANCING THE STONE and THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT at home while hanging out w/ your own cat/s!

[pacman000]

Night of the Blood Beast (1958)

If The Thing had no money, it would be this film. Kinda slow & talky. Cool animated space ship in the opening credits. The actual space ship set had paper-thin walls; an actor was able to bend one wall by brushing against it. Decent animation of some microbes. Bad monster suit; it looked heavy, barely movable.