RECENT VIEWINGS (Bad Movie Thread!)

[Rev. Powell]

HORRORS OF SPIDER ISLAND (1960): Why have I seen this terrible movie so many times? More times than CASABLANCA, more times than 8 1/2, more times than VERTIGO? Anyway, I finally got my hands on the "hot" German version with nudity intact. I has sort of thought this was an urban legend like the "hot" version of BARBARELLA, because everyone talked about it but no one actually had a copy. Until Severin put it out on Blu-ray, that is. The nude scenes are there (Severin edited the uncut German language scenes into the English language print, so we wouldn't lose that wonderful dubbing). There is a long topless dance, you see a lot more during the skinny-dipping scene, and one of the ladies even briefly flashes pubic hair because she ain't wearin' underwear. Must have been dynamite sleaze in 1960. A lot of padding was cut for the English version, too (the cut version still drags, of course). Classic crap. 1.5/5.

[M.10rda]

THE HOUSEMAID (2025):
Madame had read the book (or book series) and was looking forward to this, so we watched it on the plane to Florida. It's similarly themed and similarly surprisingly grisly to Zoe Kravitz' BLINK TWICE... actually a lot less grisly than that unexpected gruefest though still more bloody than I'd expect from what looked like a Lifetime original movie released in theaters. What I'll say for HOUSEMAID is that it's definitely a glossy, high-budget production that is shot and edited and directed and performed like a real movie, which makes one briefly overlook the fact that the plot  (which I will generally spoil here) makes no sense whatsoever.

So, an apparently desperate young woman is hired as the housekeeper and nanny for a wealthy couple and their 7-year old daughter. The wife almost immediately begins behaving like a psychotic maniac, so the housemaid has an affair w/ the hunky husband, but then he turns out to be a sadistic psychopath as well, and it turns out that the wife hired the housemaid (who is a former murderer!) in the hopes that the couple's combined psychotic behavior would inevitably drive the housemaid to murder the sadistic husband. Obviously that plan inherently seems like flying all the way to India just to get a cup of Darjeeling tea, but besides its counter-intuitive inconvenience, how could the wife know that the housemaid wouldn't murder her, instead? I certainly wanted to murder the wife after only about 20 minutes of her histrionics! Plus I haven't yet mentioned a final twist by which the eventual murderer/s narrowly and unwittingly escape detection of their sloppy crime because the most convenient investigating police officer possible happens to coincidentally arrive at the crime scene, totally beyond the guilty party's expectations. 

Don't get me wrong, I can enjoy a completely insane plot as long as I am somehow invested in or entertained by the character(s). But there's HOUSEMAID's biggest problem: the wife is completely unlikable (in spite of an honestly pretty good performance from Amanda Seyfried), the husband is completely loathsome, the husband's hilariously petty mother (Elizabeth McGovern, fully transformed into Stockard Channing) is similarly unsympathetic, the 7-year old daughter (who looks more like 10-11) is the least sympathetic/most unlikable member of the family, and the housemaid is played by eugenics enthusiast Sydney Sweeney. 

In other words, it was a tough two-hour flight.    1.5/5