RECENT VIEWINGS (Bad Movie Thread!)

[indianasmith]

CRACKCOON (2024) - A wild raccoon ingests some souped-up crack cocaine mixed with bath salts and goes on a rampage, killing a dozen or so people - from the gay drug dealer to a pair of bumbling hunters to some obnoxious college guys to three naked women.  The raccoon is a very badly animated puppet, periodically swapped out with an equally bad CGI raccoon.  This thing is pure, glorious B-movie badness from start to finish.  This movie is the kind of movie this site was made to treasure!  Throw away your Rembrandts, CRACKCOON is the only art you will ever need!

 5/5 on the bad movie scale

[Dr. Whom]

Mission Stardust (1967)

Your typical late 60s Italian space extravaganza. Ostensibly an adaptation of one or the early stories in the German Perry Rhodan series of books (which is still going strong). Apparently it has very little to do with the source material and is hated by the true Perry Rhodan fans.

It is a curious mash up of two stock plots: stranded technologically advances aliens who need some stuff from Earth to get back home and a supercriminal trying to get his hands on a McGuffin to take over the world. Rather like the started out adapting a SF story and halfway through decided to do James Bond instead.

You have all the ingredients for a silly but fun action movie: lots of incident, exotic settings, plenty of extras and explosions, a fair bit of military hardware and a helicopter. What you get is very flat acting, people standing about and talking for most of the time and some very inept action scenes.

[M.10rda]

CRACKCOON (2024) - A wild raccoon ingests some souped-up crack cocaine mixed with bath salts and goes on a rampage, killing a dozen or so people - from the gay drug dealer to a pair of bumbling hunters to some obnoxious college guys to three naked women.  The raccoon is a very badly animated puppet, periodically swapped out with an equally bad CGI raccoon.  This thing is pure, glorious B-movie badness from start to finish.  This movie is the kind of movie this site was made to treasure!  Throw away your Rembrandts, CRACKCOON is the only art you will ever need!

 5/5 on the bad movie scale

Great recommendation - sounds like a thrillingly self-aware and absurdist alternative to COCAINE BEAR. I usually avoid SPOILERS, however I'll request one here before I go watch it - is the Crackoon harmed or  destroyed/killed at the end, or does it survive for a presumable sequel?

[indianasmith]

CRACKCOON (2024) - A wild raccoon ingests some souped-up crack cocaine mixed with bath salts and goes on a rampage, killing a dozen or so people - from the gay drug dealer to a pair of bumbling hunters to some obnoxious college guys to three naked women.  The raccoon is a very badly animated puppet, periodically swapped out with an equally bad CGI raccoon.  This thing is pure, glorious B-movie badness from start to finish.  This movie is the kind of movie this site was made to treasure!  Throw away your Rembrandts, CRACKCOON is the only art you will ever need!

 5/5 on the bad movie scale

Great recommendation - sounds like a thrillingly self-aware and absurdist alternative to COCAINE BEAR. I usually avoid SPOILERS, however I'll request one here before I go watch it - is the Crackoon harmed or  destroyed/killed at the end, or does it survive for a presumable sequel?

He does get shot at the end, but he's a puppet, so who knows?
Something I didn't catch at the time but saw in the IMDB writeup - in one of the female victim's rooms is a teddy bear who has white powder around his nose, as a homage to COCAINE BEAR!

[LilCerberus]

Tonight's Stinker
Invasion U.S.A (1952)
https://youtu.be/yPYY_J8oDLs?si=648Ama11IIHDxaM3

A haughty group of movers & shakers are watching TV at a bar in New York, when a reporter shows up asking if they're for or against the government commandeering industry & labor to help build up the military.... Most of them are against it, as it sounds like communism... Another man in the cattle business laments the regulations on the price of feed, beef & high taxes....
The we come to a man with a foreign accent who gives a little speech about how people always want somebody else to do stuff...
Later that night, Russia invades Alaska, & the bar patrons hurry back to their hometowns to help with the war effort.... What follows is a lot of stock WW2 newsreels, with a recurring theme that the military doesn't have enough weapons....
Pretty exciting, even though it becomes pretty obvious halfway through, that it will have a surprise ending & what that surprise will be.....

[M.10rda]

CRACKCOON (2024) - A wild raccoon ingests some souped-up crack cocaine mixed with bath salts and goes on a rampage, killing a dozen or so people - from the gay drug dealer to a pair of bumbling hunters to some obnoxious college guys to three naked women.  The raccoon is a very badly animated puppet, periodically swapped out with an equally bad CGI raccoon.  This thing is pure, glorious B-movie badness from start to finish.  This movie is the kind of movie this site was made to treasure!  Throw away your Rembrandts, CRACKCOON is the only art you will ever need!

 5/5 on the bad movie scale

Great recommendation - sounds like a thrillingly self-aware and absurdist alternative to COCAINE BEAR. I usually avoid SPOILERS, however I'll request one here before I go watch it - is the Crackoon harmed or  destroyed/killed at the end, or does it survive for a presumable sequel?

He does get shot at the end, but he's a puppet, so who knows?

  Well....... okay. I don't like to see violence to cute furry animals (even vicious murderous ones), but if he's a particularly ridiculous puppet, I'll probably be able to deal with it.......

[indianasmith]

Maybe the sequel will be ZOMBIE CRACKCOON!

[LilCerberus]

Tonight's Stinker
Sound Of Horror (1966)
https://youtu.be/qrKzG5tCVY8?si=ko5S9KK38wW3NoOQ
 Or at https://youtu.be/jYpZ7Ic3Fi0?si=mjYtoZ8NO05zlNFT

A scientist uses explosives to look for buried treasure... Instead, he finds dinosaur eggs and a mummy...
Then an old friend shows up with the other half of a map he's been using... Meanwhile, one of the eggs hatches...
The next day, they think they've found the treasure, & go fetch more explosives... A scientist who stays behind to study the mummy is killed by the dinosaur, which is now invisible (really)...
The rest of the movie, the cast stays holed up in a villa next to the cave....
http://www.badmovies.org/movies/soundhorror/

[M.10rda]

CAT BALLOU (1965):
I've been trying to watch fewer "bad" bad movies - like, ones that are a drag as opposed to ones that are a riot - but you can't win 'em all, and when I draw a low-card I at least have been refraining from wasting my precious time complaining about it on this thread. However, CAT BALLOU is oddball enough to warrant a couple paragraphs... particularly as it seems enough like a legitimate "good" movie that someone might watch it accidentally and regret it... thus I consider this review a service to public health and safety!

Newly-minted schoolmarm and titular heroine Jane Fonda (who does look delectable) encounters two charming outlaws on a train at very great length, even though the outlaws have f**k-all to do with the rest of the movie (in spite of hanging around for the remainder of it and contributing little). She's on her way home to daddy John Marley (!), who's being harassed by a mysterious bad guy with a fake nose (?!), so Jane uses her new teaching money to hire infamous gunslinger "Kid Shelleen" by mail to protect her old man. When "Kid Shelleen" shows up, though, he's an over-the-hill drunk who can't shoot straight played by Lee Marvin. Okay, got all that so far? Good, so I'll also mention that the story is told in flashback from outside Jane-as-Cat Ballou's jail cell on the eve of her hanging and narrated musically by a pair of troubadours played by Nat King Cole and Stubby Kaye!!! That sounds like fun, right?

Like Kid Shelleen, CAT BALLOU simply cannot hit the broadside of a barn from ten paces. The plot crawls very very slowly, with numerous irrelevant digressions and delays, towards a climactic confrontation with the bad guy that happens completely offscreen.   In fact there is barely any action whatsoever in this musical-comedy Western, which would perhaps be okay except there are also no laughs. Cole and Kaye are an offbeat treat, and they sound great together... but they sing variations on the same song nearly every time they appear, thus by the midway point I was just groaning "Ohh, these guys again..." When the best thing about a 97 minute movie seems stale after fifty minutes and also the 97 minute movie feels like 157 minutes - SKIP IT!

2/5
Marvin won what I think was his only Oscar for playing the double role of Kid Shelleen and the bad guy in the fake nose. He has some nice moments but also wears a grotesque cheap-looking frightwig for much of the movie and seems too-convincingly drunk in many scenes. (According to John Boorman, Marvin woke up drunk and went to bed drunk and sometimes got a head-start on the set.) I would never begrudge Lee Marvin an Oscar but winning for CAT BALLOU is like Al Pacino winning his only Oscar for JACK & JILL!

[LilCerberus]

Tonight's Stinker
The Atomic Submarine (1959)
https://youtu.be/5lGEgFY4hA4?si=twUdPDz-7wFZKP49

Ships in the Arctic have been exploding for no reason, so a Navy sub is sent to see what's causing it...
They discover a flying saucer underwater, & figure out it's going back to the North Pole to recharge (Setting aside, the magnetic north is in a different place)...
There's a sub plot involving a new kind of diving bell, & the second in command hates it's young operator...
Riffable....

[M.10rda]

EEGAH! (1962):
Eegah! Is it the only line of dialogue that anachronistic caveman Richard Kiel can or will mumble through this film's running time? (It didn't sound like he was saying "Eegah" to me, but writer/director/co-star Arch Hall Sr. insists that's what Kiel is saying, and who am I to argue?) Or is it the sound the viewer unintentionally emits every time romantic male lead/tuneless troubadour Arch Hall Jr. lurches into an alarming and unsightly close-up? You make the call!

If there's any living audience for a movie about a giant prehistoric humanoid abducting/terrorizing a young woman, I am that audience, and even I could not be arsed to deal with EEGAH! AHSR must've been inspired by "Alley Oop", the comic strip caveman who was popular 30 years before SR passed this bowel movement onto drive-in audiences. Alley Oop bares a passing resemblance to Kiel's character but Oop's simplistic funny page adventures were nominally more entertaining, action-packed, and thought-provoking. EEGAH! almost seems like an intellectual exercise in seeing how little action or comedy one can include in a feature-length film about a rampaging cro-magnon without sending viewers into irreversible comas. Would-be teen pop star AHJR never looked more like John C. Reilly as "Dewey Cox" than in this movie. His dad and shameless promoter AHSR is no Rock Hudson himself (more like Victor Buono or John Candy as Burton Mercer in THE BLUES BROTHERS w/ a sex offender stash) yet the most entertaining part of EEGAH! is hearing SR insult JR's looks and music (!) onscreen. The film ends in the sort of ostentatious/nonsensical twist that I loved in MONSTER-A-GO-GO but EEGAH!, sir, is no MONSTER-A-GO-GO!

Hall SR's first attempt at buying his big-headed kid a Hollywood spotlight was the even less entertaining THE CHOPPERS (1960). After EEGAH!, SR wisely delegated the directorial duties to Ray Dennis Steckler, whose WILD GUITAR seems like a Spielberg flick compared to EEGAH!, though it's THE LOST WORLD or KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL rather than one of the actual good ones. (Steckler and his wife/leading lady Carolyn Brandt show up briefly in EEGAH! to get menaced in a nightclub.) Hall JR finally escaped from his pop's clutches and starred in an almost pretty decent James Landis flick called THE SADIST. Where was SR during that one, crying on a stool in a bar on Sunset next to Brian Wilson's dad?

The Rhino MST3K disc offers a feature I don't remember from other MST3K discs - Crow's face intermittently appears to signal that there's an extra scene cut from the episode that you can watch (sans riffs), This seems like a great idea at first but for 2 things: once you click on the deleted scene, there's no single-click method to return to the episode; and... who needs or wants to watch more EEGAH!???

1/5 Terrible.

The riffs aren't very good either, oddly (maybe even Joel and the Bots were too depressed by this film to make funny). Unusually (imho) however, the skits are hilarious... the invention exchange (where Joel plays the Porkerina and Clay replaces Frank's  blood with propylene glycol) had me literally L'ing OL. 

[RCMerchant]

^ Almost decent the SADIST? I thought the Sadist was GREAT.

[M.10rda]

That's fair. I liked it. Compared to EEGAH and THE CHOPPERS it's THE GODFATHER!

[Dr. Whom]

The Creation of the Humanoids (1962)

Nuclear war has come at last, and mankind has rebuilt civilisation. But, what with most of humanity being wiped out and the rest being of questionable fertility, humans have created a race of robots (the titular humanoids) to do menial tasks.This is not to the liking of the Order of Flesh and Blood, who preach human supremacism, harass humanoids and throw the occasional bomb, all while wearing uniforms of the Confederate Army.

This is a Movie With A Message, at once an enquiry into the nature of mankind and a thinly veiled allegory for the civil rights movement.

It is an oddity, because it has practically no action. About 90% of the movie is people standing immobile next to eachother while making declarations. Together with the minimalistic sets, this makes it all look like avant garde theatre. It does also make it very boring. Dark Corner Reviews describes it 'Blade Runner without all the action', and that sums it about up.

[M.10rda]

Awwww! Well I liked CREATION OF THE HUMANOIDS quite a bit... but then I like some avant garde theatre, too! (Heck, I've produced some.) It's a "challenging" film, we can probably both agree...