RECENT VIEWINGS (Bad Movie Thread!)

[LilCerberus]

Tonight's Stinker
The Venusian (1954) aka Stranger from Venus (1954)
https://youtu.be/8QoKGNK85AE?si=mSezFWmnKMLKPKDo

Flying saucers are spotted along the English countryside, then a woman get in a car wreck... After the opening credits, a strange dude walks into an Inn, & while the police are searching for the woman, he convinces everyone he's from Venus & the woman shows up with a few minor bumps & bruises....
From there, it's a lot of Q&A about how his ship works, how he's able to survive on Earth, Etc........
Then, close to the end of the movie, he tells military leaders he needs to talk to world leaders to stop using nuclear weapons, and they plot against him......

Predictable, but watchable....

[M.10rda]

SUPERHERO MOVIE (2008):
Between TROMEO & JULIET and DAWN OF THE DEAD 'O4, James Gunn wrote and co-starred in a funny and interesting superhero comedy called THE SPECIALS, directed by a guy named Craig Mazin. Presumably based on the charm of THE SPECIALS, Mazin later got to direct this Zucker Bros-style parody mash-up in the proud [sic] tradition of SCARY MOVIE, EPIC MOVIE, NOT ANOTHER TEEN MOVIE, et al. In the absence of Gunn's contributions, however, SUPERHERO MOVIE is no SPECIALS, and Mazin never directed again. (He did co-write the two HANGOVER sequels and some later SCARY MOVIE entries.)

Essentially this has the plot of the Raimi SPIDER-MAN movies with random appearances by some members of the X-Men and Fantastic Four sprinkled in recklessly. It does have a stacked cast of funny actors, including Leslie Nielsen (of course) in the 'Uncle Ben' role, Nielsen's AIRPLANE! co-star Robert Hays, Regina Hall (who probably paid off a couple mortgages with all these dumb comedies), Tracy Morgan, Jeffrey Tambor, a young Kevin Hart (in a mostly thankless role), and relatively serious actor Keith David, who gets to be dryly funny (in the old school Nielsen tradition) in a couple of brief scenes. Pamela Anderson (who stars in this year's NAKED GUN reboot) appears and disappears as the Invisible Woman and Craig Bierko is visible in 2-3 shots as Wolverine. Apparently most of his dialogue was cut and only one brief bit appears during the closing credits, and is so unfunny the mind reels at how dire the balance might be.

I admit that Madame and I laughed out loud multiple times, as we tend to do during these stoopid movies, but most of the comedy is derived from rather sadistic slapstick instead of any kind of character insight or clever reflections on the genre... ala the kind of thing Gunn brought to THE SPECIALS.

2.5/5
Oh yeah - Brent Spiner aka "Data" appears briefly in the film proper and then more extensively in  the closing credit outtakes, and his performance is startling similar to that of Trace Beaulieu as Dr. Clayton Forrester, only with a haircut.

[lester1/2jr]

I Know What You Did Last Christmas (2025) - Sometimes, all you have is a title. A group of friends, about half of whom are British for some reason, get invited to a party and reflect on the horrible thing that happened years before: they locked one of their friends out of the house as a joke and she wandered away and died. Why didn't she just go around the back or something? What kind of "joke" is that anyway?

It's incredibly cheap and there's not much incidental music or music at all, so it feels dead. Sometimes low budget movies can compensate for the cheapness by being campy and crazy and so forth, but this just feels like a mainstream movie that's missing the music and the celebrities and uses an AI script. One thing it proves: if the main character is a blonde woman I will keep watching it.

The killer is identified but keeps the mask and Santa outfit on for some reason.

2/5

You'd expect it to be a cheap cash in, but it's not even good enough to be that.

edit: the female lead is a top ranked kickboxer irl, so congratulations to the producers for not making any use of that at all.

[LilCerberus]

Tonight's Stinker
The Magic Christmas Tree (1964)
https://youtu.be/PYtvzTUdudI?si=AV-YwiA3bDkNmyoj

On Halloween, a little boy dares his two friends to visit an old witch's house... They get scared & run off, but the old woman catches the boy, then asks him to get her cat out of a tree....
So, he climbs the tree, falls, and the movie changes from black & white to color, kinda like in The Wizard Of Oz... It turns out, the old woman really is a witch, who who rewards him with a Santa Claus ring, & tells him there's a magic tree seed inside.... First, he has to wait for Thanksgiving, so he can plant the seed with a wishbone.....
Then, Christmas comes, the tree can talk, & grants the boy three wishes, which he promptly uses to get into mischief, then kidnaps Santa.....

Some attempts at slapstick.... All the dialog is dubbed in at a rather shrill tone.... Pretty grating at times... I was gonna try & make it a Sunday twofer, but this one used up all my patience.....