RECENT VIEWINGS (Bad Movie Thread!)

[M.10rda]

That sounds like a fun one! Canada, of course, has no nukes to steal. 

[LilCerberus]

Tonight's Stinker
Eyes Of The Serpent (1994)
https://youtu.be/EVJIb8AU7TM?si=i7ixqjDwg5iF6RuG

Schlock from Troma, slightly cleaned up for YouTube....

Opens with a narration about a pair of swords & pair of feuding queen sisters....
So, the evil queen's forces raid a camp & find the good queen's daughter & the other sword... While the bad queen has a scholar translate some scrolls, her own daughter tries to torture the first one, but things go sideways & she escapes.... The next day, the good princess is rescued from the bad queen's soldiers by a guy with an eyepatch & a heavily gelled up mullet....
That's when the good queen shows up, who looks the same age as the princess....

Looks like it was shot on VHS, converted to film, & back to VHS again....
Some sleaze tossed in to increase the runtime, with set that look like they were borrowed from a haunted house ride.....

[zombie no.one]

One big issue, for me anyway, is the offscreen assault/abuse/probable homicide of a cat halfway through Story 2. Hey, these things do happen in genre flicks, and at least we don't see it....... but somehow even worse than seeing it, the old lady then (logically, understandably) appeals to her son at length to understand why he would do that to her cat, which happened to be her only friend. In other words, she aggressively rubs it in... to no detriment to the $#!t#33l who just victimized her best friend the cat, but to endless detriment to me, the viewer, who was already bummed out by this depressing scenario and at this point pretty much had to throw in the towel on this flick.

cats tend to get a raw deal in movies (especially bad ones).. they are either the de facto source of all evil, or completely expendable.

or worse, being portrayed by James Corden

I am a devoted mog-father myself, but to be honest simulated animal abuse onscreen has never really troubled me that much  . or at least beyond the extent that it's troubling in the context of the movie... the real stuff can gtfo obviously

[M.10rda]

You make some good points... context is everything, and the much more graphic cat-abuse in the original RE-ANIMATOR is somehow less disturbing to me than the completely unseen cat-abuse in this old Argentinian movie, because RE-ANIMATOR strikes a tone of absurdity in the zombie cat scene (and elsewhere) that prevents one from taking anything too seriously. NEVER OPEN THE DOOR on the other hand really wants you to feel reeeeeeal bad about the offscreen cat-stomping/strangling/whatever and lays it on thick. No need to rub it in, dudes!

Come to think of it, there's also the doggo in BRIDE OF RE-ANIMATOR that gets messed up (and repaired) in such a surreal, funny way that I struggle to imagine any pet-loving horror fan taking offense.

Conversely, crummy director of musicals Tom Hooper's cinematic cat-abuse should earn him a lifetime spot as the SPCA's Public Enemy #1! 

Anyway. Cheers to your moggy! 

[M.10rda]

Speaking of moggies...

A BLOODTHIRSTY KILLER (1965):
For a while, this b+w Korean flick really seems to be on to something. A pudgy salaryman in a cheap suit races around in media res looking for a seemingly very important painting. He finally tracks it down but is forced to hide and (in hiding) witnesses a murder. Accused of the killing, he is chased away to a hospital and then to his home... but alas some sort of undead/demon woman follows him everywhere, threatening everyone the man encounters (including his mother, his wife, and their three small children).

I had no idea what was happening for close an hour of this one, which wasn't an unpleasant experience as the action was so intense (occasionally berserk) and all of the characters behave in completely irrational, inexplicable fashion. Some of the received surrealism could be less generously interpreted as textbook Bad Movie-making: the violence is sometimes absurdly awkward instead of ferocious or scary, and a nocturnal rooftop scene features day-for-night shooting nearly as egregious as that in OASIS OF THE ZOMBIES (a film so janky even Jess Franco didn't want his name attached to it). The resulting sensation of these disparate elements (some confident, some jejune) is that of a long nightmare... which in cinematic form can be thrilling - case in point ERASERHEAD (who rather resembles the Asian male lead here, btw). Of course spending long periods of time in complete confusion can also wear on one's nerves and patience (as ERASERHEAD's detractors have claimed).

Still I enjoy digesting my own food, even if it means watching a carefully constructed piece of art like ERASERHEAD multiple times in order to make sense of it. BLOODTHIRSTY KILLER's most serious issue is that it stops the nightmare at the one-hour mark and then spends its next/last thirty minutes explaining the first sixty minutes. Those last thirty minutes are, not incidentally, 100% melodrama and devoid of all supernatural/horror/thriller elements. Yep, they're a total let-down.

For the record I'll acknowledge that this film is figuratively and literally crawling with cats. Sometimes they're just passing through the shot and sometimes they're integral to the plot, such as the one walled up Poe-style with the wronged female victim, living off her remains (!) and thus imbued with her undying lust for vengeance. (Yes, it's entirely silly.) The titular "bloodthirsty killer" seems to be a vampire at first (casts no reflection, drinks human blood) but is actually a cat demon that assumes human form but still sometimes freaks out and hisses in rage and swats at inanimate objects like a cat. In the film's funniest moment, a cat clings to a victim's head as if attacking them (the cat seems fine). But when schlubby salaryman defeats the cat-demon-vampire-ghost-woman at the film's climax (...half an hour before the end of the movie...), the bludgeoned human woman transforms briefly into a quite-fake looking cat prop  and then at last into an all-too-authentic looking limp "dead cat". Uh.  Maybe it was only sleeping?  Or maybe f**k this movie.

1.5/5
One of the last lines of dialogue is "So the strange woman was a boddhisvatta!" I gave BLOODTHIRSTY KILLER too much credit early on. It's a stoopid movie.

[zombie no.one]

I mean considering the location I don't want to ask if one of the featured cats ended up as soup du jour?

coincidentally the only b/w film from 1965 I can name off the top of my head is FASTER PU$$YCAT KILL! KILL! 

(you may have noticed this site censors that title if you type it normally)

- passed on your cheers to my furball.