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.

[LilCerberus]

Tonight's Stinker
W (1983)
https://youtu.be/vTnHdPCNMcc?si=Bw1xasvdNzSBrN1h

Same cast & crew as last night's stinker!!! Slighter better....

W2 is a cop on an elite special task force.... Meanwhile, a cult leader has amassed a large number of skinheads he's trying to turn into an army with the help of a drug syndicate...
One day, W2 kills the cult leader's brother during a robbery.... The cult leader kidnaps & emasculates W2, which W2 tries to avenge, but backfires....

An awful lot is packed into this 90 minutes.....
Must be seen to be disbelieved!!!!!

[M.10rda]

Tonight's Stinker
W (1983)
 The cult leader kidnaps & emasculates W2

...Literally...??? 

[zombie no.one]

MURDER ROCK (1984)

A Dance studio set Fulci that I'd seen on youtube years ago, in a horrendously bad unfocused and shakey scanned upload.

Starts off fairly standard Fulci style giallo, but morphs into a more talky detective thing.

Every time the dance instructor counts 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8 to the music, she goes waaaay off tempo. Pretty sure exactly the same thing happens in a gym scene in another Fulci (NIGHTMARE CITY maybe?)

Obviously this is due to dialogue being dubbed on over the music, but did nobody involved with the production notice this glaring error? lol


This film also has the most grating repeated door-buzzer sound in cinema history.  like a chainsaw

6/10, vaguely fun but not a patch on his previous giallo NEW YORK RIPPER

[LilCerberus]

Tonight's Stinker
W (1983)
 The cult leader kidnaps & emasculates W2

...Literally...??? 

They don't show anything, But he wakes up in the hospital & notices something's missing.....
Part of the plot.....

[M.10rda]

THE SATANIST (1968):
I took a break from watching fuzzy B+W dups of teens/20s/30s horror flicks to watch a fuzzy B+W dup of (what I assumed would be) a late 60s horror flick... and it was a mistake! Shot MOS and with a droning post-dubbed narrator (which I'm often a fan of, ftr), THE SATANIST follows a married couple who (literally) run into a neighbor (with their car) in the Hollywood hills. Fortunately she's unhurt and eager to invite them to her pad... and begin indoctrinating them in to the swingin' satanic lifestyle! That's... the entire plot, pretty much! Just one slow softcore screw scene after another, and then near the end a group of cultists writhe around on the floor nekkid with each other while wearing dumb masks.

The women are all nice looking, which was obviously this film's raison d'etre in 1968. No one needs to endure such stultifying trash to see nudity these days, thus SKIP IT!

0.5/5
Director "Zoltan G. Spencer" also made TERROR AT ORGY CASTLE and THE HAND OF PLEASURE, neither of which can possibly be as boring as this. (...Right???) THOP reportedly has "robot cat-women" in it, which definitely sounds like an upgrade!

[zombie no.one]

^^ huh... I saw a late 70s film recently with basically that exact plot, and I'm sure the title had a Satan-y type connection as well... can't remember what it was called. hmm

what's 'Shot MOS'? Mis-On-Scene? no...

[M.10rda]

"Mit out sound" - 

A lotta' German immigrants working in Hollywood in the early days... enough of them anyway for the amusing malaprop to catch on and be shortened to "MOS"... which was the term for getting shots w/o sync sound that I learned in film school in the 90s. You're in the UK, right? Maybe they called it something else over there!

[zombie no.one]

ok I would not have guessed that haha... I'm only aware of plain old  'silent movie' as a descriptor.

[M.10rda]

Silent movies are still silent. "MOS" is what you'd say today when you wanted to quickly get some shots of an exterior location or something and you didn't want to bother taking the time to record sync sound 'cause you're just gonna' dub some ambient noise over the shots later. So you're shooting a "talkie" but you're getting some shots "mit out sound".

[Dr. Whom]

In the Year 2889 (1969)

This is one of Larry Buchanan's infamous TV remakes of 1950s black and white 'horror' features. This one is based on Roger Corman's The Day The World Ended, with typical Buchanan production values and acting quality.

In one of the least apocalyptical post nuclear war settings ever, a group of survivors tries to fend off mutants. I watched about an hour of it on YT, when suddenly the sound cut out and I gave up.

[M.10rda]

THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (1962):
Written by Robert Bloch (fresh off the success of PSYCHO) and with cinematography by the same guy who shot PSYCHO....... this ain't PSYCHO, to put it lightly, but moreover it ain't anything remotely like 1920's CODC! They could've just as well called it THE OFFICE OF DR. ABSOLUTELY-ANYONE-OTHER-THAN-CALIGARI!

An icy, brittle blonde (Glynis Johns) attends a dinner party at a cool mansion and then is barred from leaving. She's compelled to make regular visits to "Dr. Caligari", the glaring bearded host who holds court in his upstairs den and asks Glynis probing questions about her history with men while playing w/ a scary-looking knife. None of the other "guests" seem to think there's anything remotely odd about this,  and even the suave handsome blonde guy that befriends Glynis urges her to stick around and warm up to the Doc. The movie's over 100 minutes long and (although it isn't revealed until about the 90 minute mark) it's no "Norman's Mother"-type SPOILER to tell you that Dr. Caligari is the suave handsome blonde guy in disguise....... I mean, both of them have Dan O'Herlihy's bone structure and deep baritone, and Caligari's just got dark hair and glasses and a fake beard.  Nevertheless Glynis starts screaming and running through the mansion, cueing a brief psych-out sequence that swipes some Expressionist visuals directly from the original plus adds a couple of shots of a dude shoveling infants into an oven. (!) Then Glynis snaps out of it for a final two-for-the-price-of-one twist - the first of which is entirely obvious even if you've only read this synopsis, and the second of which is kinda' pointless and rather insulting to Johns herself.

Then again, it's hard to warm up or generate much sympathy for Johns or her character, as she gives a monotonous performance as a totally helpless drip. Bloch's screenplay does her few favors, either: approximately 30% of the dialogue is some slight variation on Johns saying either "Please help me!" or "Oh, why won't you help me?!" to every member of the supporting cast, often repeatedly. I have no idea why this film was made, besides to cash in on PSYCHO (surely not to cash in on a 40+ year old silent flick!). I only watched it because I so vividly remember Johns' performance as the monstrous piece-of-work grandmother in ZELLY & ME (co-starring Isabella Rosselini and David Lynch in his only romantic male lead  ). There are few other characters in cinema history I've wanted to thrash so violently as I wanted to thrash Johns' character in ZELLY (and none of those other characters are old ladies, iirc). Johns was also effective as a similar mean old battleaxe in THE REF. Unfortunately she doesn't appear to have had a bone in her body that was capable of eliciting any viewer empathy.

But I will say the cinematography is nice, and the lighting is often fabulous - better even than in PSYCHO! The gorgeous atmosphere almost lulls you into consistently forgetting how dull and repetitive the dialogue is....... almost. 

2/5

O'Herlihy was Andrew Packard in TWIN PEAKS, btw.