RECENT VIEWINGS (Bad Movie Thread!)

[M.10rda]

I seem to think I've seen that BIG BAD WOLF ending... though maybe only in my nightmares! I thought my next review would be ghoulish and grotesque though it can't compare to your BBW review. But nevertheless:

EL HOMBRE BESTIA: LOS AVENTURAS DEL CAPITAN RICHARD (1934):
I'm-a' gonna' go ahead and spoil most of the onscreen action of this partially lost, only semi-coherent Argentinian adventure/thriller, as it's pretty obscure and also my attempts at a cogent synopsis may still misinterpret or misrepresent some plot points. The early exposition seems particularly fractured - there is some sync dialogue and also some intertitles, both in Spanish, and the auto-translate on Youtube helps w/ the former though not the latter. I know enough Spanish or Latin to get the basic gist of those intertitles, except that gist inherently makes no sense to me. And also the auto-subbed dialogue will sometimes last for 1.5 sentences and then cut off in the middle of a character's line as the assemblage lurches to a different scene.    So here goes:

Lindbergh/Earhardt-type celebrity pilot "Capitan Richard" defies sound advice and flies... somewhere remote. He crashes and can't fix his plane, so goes native and starts looking like Tarzan after a months-long Florida meth-bender. Yes, Capitan Richard has become "the Beast Man"! Another pilot takes off from civilization to search for him (?), lands in Beast-Man's general neighborhood, and instead of thanking him for a ride back to civilization, CR/Beast-Man beats up the second pilot and hijacks his plane (!), leaving the pilot behind and flying to Buenos Aires or wherever most of this movie is set. So, okay, Beast-Man retains enough intelligence and sanity to fly and land a plane (covertly)....... but once back in high society, he decides to shack up in a cave and make occasional trips into town, where he creeps up on unsuspecting women, scares them so much they pass out, and carries them back to his cave, where the Letterboxd synopsis claims
"he subjects them to atrocities". That may well be but alas the Youtube print includes no onscreen cavebound atrocities.

EL HOMBRE BESTIA's YT patch-job runs 35 minutes while Letterboxd cites the running time as 50m. Whether the YT copy is missing 15 minutes or more than that, it's unclear whether any amount of additional plot and dialogue would make the movie more sensible or more interesting/entertaining! After BM begins lady-snatching, the flick is just 20 minutes of dude creepin' on fainting ladies then punching and strangling a (long!) procession of men who chase and attack the BM, one at a time for his convenience.  Rinse and repeat and repeat and repeat! Although reviewers seem to classify EL HOMBRE BESTIA as an early "horror" film and its plot is inherently horrific, there are also elements that seem inescapably like intentional comedy, like a weird sequence where a guy pulls a handgun on his friend as a gag  and while they're engaged in this ludicrous drama the Beast-Man is abducting one guy's girl, literally five feet away from them. I also haven't mentioned the mad scientist who likes giving Beast-Man injections (why?) and is sorely, rather improportionately non-plussed when his own wife finds out about it; or the abrupt hypnotist who finally helps in the scheme to rescue the kidnapped ladies. Or the nice doggo!

So yeah there are things clearly happening in this movie and if it was totally intact it might just play like a Bad Movie. However in its current discombobulated condition (amplified by surviving establishing shots and cutaways that appear to serve no purpose whatsoever, badly decomposed print quality, and erratic audio cut-ins and -outs), EL HOMBRE BESTIA takes on something of the appearance of ancient mystery and hermetic surrealism. The film is actually more fun and freakier if you lay back in bed and kind of half-dose through it and pretend you can comprehend none of its plot mechanics.

2.5/5
Actually you could probably announce to an auditorium full of 18 year old film school freshmen that you were going to show them UN CHIEN ANDALOU or L'AGE D'OR and then play this movie for them instead and they'd probably accept your deception passively. Actually they might enjoy EL HOMBRE BESTIA more than those Bunuel/Dali classics!

[Rev. Powell]

^ Hmm...

Continuing my journey through KRAZEE KIDZ VIDEO PARTY (only one film left to go after this!)

FUN IN BALLOON LAND: A boy dreams of fairy tale characters (who are mostly creepy parade balloons), then dreams he's watching a badly narrated and shot clips of a second-rate Thanksgiving parade, in this advertisement for a parade balloon company (?)/exercise in kiddie padding. The most interesting thing about FUN IN BALLOON LAND is trying to understand why it was made and how they hoped to make money off it, but it's reputation as an entertainingly bad/weird movie is---forgive me, but I have to say it---inflated. 1.5/5.

POLLY POCKETS: As woman with lots of pockets (many of which hold notices that a commercial is coming up) and her magician sidekick entertain kids with comedy sketches and serialized stories. This pilot for an unproduced kiddie show isn't badly made or exceptionally strange; its quality is above a locally-produced kids show, but it's clear that it's not a threat to replace "Bozo" or "Captain Kangaroo," much less the soon-to-come "Sesame Street" and "Mr. Rodgers' Neighborhood." Only a little over 30 minutes. 2.5/5.