RECENT VIEWINGS (Bad Movie Thread!)

[LilCerberus]

Tonight's Stinker
Mad Warrior(1984)
https://youtu.be/WHw85h3Ur2s?si=gk_3r6YgZ68r75zb

Maxploitation from the Philippines, & no visible sign of a budget.....
A crazy warlord makes prisoners fight in the ring.... One night, his best gladiator escapes with his son & the warlord's favorite concubine... The next day, the warlord's cronies catch up, kill the boy & the concubine, but are all killed by another escaped concubine.....
She leads him into the mountains, where they find more just & fair warriors who have just discovered a cure for radiation poisoning....
Of course, the warlord, who goes crazy every time there's a full moon, just can't let it go....

Pretty goofy, with a light saber battle at the end....

[M.10rda]

THE STUDENT OF PRAGUE (1926):
This has developed a strong reputation as a silent-era horror classic, but sad to say, it takes forever to deliver any frisson whatsoever, then once it does it goes back to sleep again for an eternity, only rousing itself for a (pretty good) finale. So there's this guy Balduin who's a student in Prague, right? And he's also a soldier or... something. He hangs out at picnics and in bars, gets in fights, crushes on a cute girl who totally seems to dig him yet fails to make a move and loses her to a rich dude, and... stuff. There's also an other guy who wanders around on a hill, watches people riding horses, then shows up at Balduin's apartment and offers to transform him into the guy Balduin has always wanted to be. It turns out this second guy is the Devil, which is something of a surprise as... he just looks like a boring old prat and (unlike most onscreen Devils) his performance is utterly uninteresting.

The moment where Mr. D introduces Balduin to his (literal) Mirror image is in fact quite arresting, but following that impressive visual, the film settles into a quite predictable groove where Balduin's doppelganger runs amok in the physical world, doing all the irresponsible and destructive stuff one would expect one's id to do. It's only in the final ten minutes or so that Balduin realizes he must put a stop to his evil twin's mayhem, and that final bit looks nice and is reasonably spooky and evocative. It's easy to imagine that the climax to STUDENT OF PRAGUE could've somehow lingered latently in the mind of David Lynch and influenced the TWIN PEAKS S2 finale and much of THE RETURN. I likewise suspected that STUDENT OF PRAGUE was inspired by Poe's "William Wilson" and as it turns out this was completely uncontested by the filmmakers. 

Conrad Veidt plays "Balduin" and perhaps the reason STUDENT OF PRAGUE has a following of its own is due to the surprising legions of Conrad Veidt stans on the internet. Veidt (most famous for playing THE MAN WHO LAUGHS, Cesar in CALIGARI, and the evil Nazi in CASABLANCA) is okay as Balduin but I also just watched (and will soon review) another Veidt vehicle where he's spectacular... so the fact he's just okay here indicates some real issues with the direction. Besides the two parts I mentioned above, TSOP is shot indifferently and edited carelessly. It's possible that the story is actually deep and thoughtful and I've missed all its nuance, as the intertitles were in German w/o English subtitles. But I know a little German and anyway there are only maybe 20 or so subtitles in the whole film, and everything besides the spooky parts are dull and listless and therefore sort of pointless. Did I mention STUDENT OF PRAGUE is almost two and a quarter hours long?

2/5
At 20 or 25 minutes it would be a classic. In this condition, it's just a drag.