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. 

[M.10rda]

Yay p-cats & furballs! 

THE BOOK OF STONE (1969):
This seemingly well-regarded Mexican spookshow is probably the textbook definition of what kids today call "mid". It falls roughly between THE INNOCENTS and THE OTHER and traffics in the same "creepy children under the influence of evil from beyond" business, but it's nowhere near as good as either. Then again, maybe you're just really in the mood for a passable alternative to those horror classics. (I guess I was...)

There is a concerned new governess, a pair of confused parents, an easygoing family friend who isn't taking circumstances nearly serious enough (good luck with that, buddy!), a doomed family pet...  ...y'know, all the usual ingredients of such flicks. And there's the central child, who insists that she has a close friendship with an unseen and presumably imaginary little boy named "Hugo", which happens to be the name of the little statue on the family's property. Surely Hugo doesn't really come to life and cause mischief, right? 

Most of BOOK OF STONE is shot indifferently and paced for extremely mild chills rather than thrills. There is one nicely understated, quite effective, yet slow pan around the little girl's room 2/3rds of the way through. The film ends just about exactly how such films always tend to end. Finally I'll add that I often wanted to smack this little girl around and tell her to snap out of it, like the little boy in THE OTHER, but I never felt as much sympathy for her as for the OTHER brother nor as much as for the kids in THE INNOCENTS. She just kinda' sucks.

2.5/5 Meh!

[M.10rda]

NIGHT MONSTER (1942):
Here's a Universal Monster movie almost guaranteed to be excluded from Chainsaw Midget's set, and with good reason! It does have generally solid acting, an intriguing eponymous "monster", and a high fatality rate for a film of this vintage... but the compliments end there! Wait, NIGHT MONSTER also boasts Bela Lugosi and Lionel Atwill as its top-billed stars. Unfortunately, they play at best maybe the fourteenth- and fifteenth- most important characters among a large ensemble cast.  Yeah, NIGHT MONSTER is so inept it can't even benefit from the presence of Bela!

All those other characters gather at the mansion of a rich paralyzed weirdo for Reasons. A mostly unseen, generally invisible (?!) presence is stalking the cast and strangling them one by one, leaving puddles of blood (not belonging to the victims!(?!)) besides each body. A guru named Singh delivers a convoluted monologue about metaphysics or something and uses the power of his mind to briefly summon a skeleton with a cursed jewel (!) and no one seriously thinks this might be related to the murders. Meanwhile Leif Erickson (who looks like a creepy Will Ferrell) sexually harasses every female character - even the mean old housekeeper(!!!).

In many bad films where Bela plays the Butler, one can at least take solace that the Butler might've done it; in NIGHT MONSTER, the Butler does nothing. Almost 100% of Bela's dialogue is introducing characters as they enter a room or summoning them from their rooms to visit the rich weirdo. Bela is one of eight characters who hasn't gotten picked off by the finale, when two characters get in a big fight inside the mansion and burn it down and then five more end up fighting outside the mansion. Where is Bela, though, when the credits roll? Unknown - the star of DRACULA, WHITE ZOMBIE, ISLAND OF LOST SOULS, and BLACK CAT has been totally forgotten somehow.   

Director Ford Beebe is either a barely functional imbecile or his hands were hopelessly tied by a Universal exec with a grudge against Bela and Atwill (or both?). NIGHT MONSTER is actually a persuasive argument against the studio system - even if they hated these guys, they were already paying them, so refusing to give them anything to do is cutting your nose off to spite your product. This would've gained another full star or more if Bela had played Singh the spooky mystic, who features prominently in the finale and has the long ridiculous monologues (a Bela trademark!). Yeah, Bela would've had to do brownface, but he'd already played Chandu the Magician, and the bad actor cast as Singh is named "Nils Asther" so obviously he wasn't cast appropriately either. Feh!

2/5
The original poster byline asked "What kind of a thing is it?" Even after the final reveal I couldn't hope to explain it to you.

[LilCerberus]

Tonight's Stinker
Doctor of Doom(1963) AKA Rock N Roll Wrestling Women vs The Aztec Ape
https://youtu.be/a_2VWw4ZJr8?si=iudzUrlclqvW5NBi

Starts out with a bad VHS rip, but smooths out after two or three minutes....

So, it starts out with these two sisters, one a scientist, and the other a wrestler....
Cut to an evil mad scientist who keeps trying & failing at transplanting the brains of women..... His one success is a man with the brain of an ape that he keeps in the basement....
He thinks a smarter brain will work, so he kidnaps the scientist sister, but that fails, so his assistant suggests the brain of a female athlete....
Meanwhile, the wrestling sister takes a new girl under her wing, aaand female empowerment ensues.....

So, there's that issue with the tracking at the beginning, but no problems after that....
From Rhino home video, they changed the name because they added in a few new surf rockabilly songs the the action sequences, which turns out to be a small improvement to a film of this genre...

[LilCerberus]

Tonight's Stinker
Stomp! Shout! Scream!(2005)
https://youtu.be/silNzOPHEBo?si=Va5kE2wBuAeQbRDc

A sendup of '60s beach monster films, the sheriff of a small beach town is trying to solve a series of murders near a stinky pile of brush... One of his deputies calls in a biologist to find out where the brush came from...
At the same time, an all girl rock group's car breaks down, & a local mechanic takes a shine to the lead singer, who's recovering from more than just a broken heart....
The monster turns out to be a Florida skunk ape, who walks like he's really gotta go to the bathroom....

At times, the movie starts to take it's self seriously, whereas most of the attempts at humor are a little too goofy for their own good....
Mostly watchable, it has it's moments, and a soundtrack college radio fans might enjoy....

[M.10rda]

NIGHT OF THE GRIZZLY (1966):
What do you expect when you buy your proverbial ticket to a film titled NIGHT OF THE GRIZZLY? Granted it came out two years before NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD but was released after NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (which has a lot of The Hunter Hunting at Night) and DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS (featuring plenty of Triffids, sometimes during the Day). If you're arriving at NOTG in modernity, you've been raised to expect some certain degree of truth in advertising. NOTLD takes place almost entirely at Night with plenty of Living Dead; NIGHT OF THE LEPUS, well... it's often night and there is uh Lepus. Films with such titles have even famously over-delivered: NIGHT OF THE CREEPS eventually focuses on a Night full of Creeps but prior to that there's been some Night and some Creeps and we also get a poop-ton of zombies into the equation. Heck, the titular NIGHT OF THE COMET has passed and is done with about 20 minutes into that movie, but the rest of the film is wall-to-wall post-apocalyptic fun (sometimes even nocturnal) so you never miss the Comet anyway.

I guess what I'm trying to say at great length is, I came for a Night full of Grizzly and what I got was about 2.5 minutes tops of Grizzly and 105 long minutes of mostly daylit Western-Comedy (...pre-BLAZING SADDLES
Comedy Westerns being one of my least favorite sub-genres, naturally). What I'm trying to say is there oughta' be a law. At the very least there oughta' be a class-action lawsuit, and I plan to pursue one, by gum!

What we get instead of an all-nite Grizzly rampage: land disputes, fistfights, comedic alcoholism, acoustic guitar love-ballads, a little girl who farts and pees her pants a lot, a Carol Burnett-ish "homely" old maid trying to romance any unwashed varmint who enters her shop, a bad actor I've never heard of weeping and vowing revenge for his Grizzly'd horse, Clint Walker occasionally gazing off into the distance and similarly pledging that someday he'll get that durn Grizzly, Clint's wife telling him that if he goes to hunt the Grizzly one more time she won't be there when he comes home, Leo Gordon (who looks unnervingly like aging Leo DiCaprio) turning up midway through the movie and taking it over as Clint's old buddy who Clint done wrong and now Leo wants revenge, etc etc etc. Oh, also a ten-plus minute holiday party scene (also with fistfighting) where no one mentions the rampaging Grizzly the entire time. Two and a half minutes of onscreen Grizzly is probably overly generous - two and a half minutes may be the amount of time that Clint and friends are looking scared and retreating from the Grizzly or firing angrily offscreen at the Grizzly. An actual Grizzly probably appears onscreen for no more than 30-45 seconds of the film, and looks as confused and unhappy about it as I was.

Jack Elam (one of my lifelong fav character actors) faced off against legendary movie badasses like Bronson, Meeker, and Sasquatch. (Elam usually lost, but at least he tried.) This near-worthless movie could've benefitted from a little Elam-on-Grizzly action - but no, Elam spends the whole film rolling his lazy eye at the antics of the farting, pants-wetting little girl.   

0.5/5
I looked into it and it turns out the statue of limitations for legal action has passed on this one and also I wasn't even born when this film was released so there may also be an issue with "standing". Nevertheless I demand justice!