RECENT VIEWINGS (Bad Movie Thread!)

[chainsaw midget]

The Dark Power (1985)

This is one worth seeing.  It's all over the place in tone and even in the set-up.  At the start it feels like they might be setting this up as a slasher, but the undead that show up never really feel slasher-like.  If anything, I would compare it to Neon Maniacs and I didn't think I'd ever have anything to compare to that movie.

The plot uses the old "ancient Indian burial ground" but the monsters when they appear are so far away from anything feeling "Indian" like that only the most sensitive of people looking to be offended would find anything wrong. 

A group of four good looking college girls, one of them black, one of them extremely racist, move into a house that was built on the previously mentioned Indian burial ground.  The racist girl invited her dickweed brother and his annoying friends to annoy the others when she finds out that she has to live with a black person. 

Then the dead rise because it's that time of year when the dead rise and because somebody removed the protective objects that were stopping that from happening.  There's an odd humor and silly slapstick even while they're killing people that feels out of place.  There's also one great kill where they grab a guy's mouth and stretch it open peeling his face away. 

And in the end the day is saved by ... an elderly Lash LaRue.  if you don't know who that is, he was a cowboy actor in the 40s and 50s famous for using a bullwhip instead of guns, dressing all in black despite being a good guy, and looking a lot like Bogart.  He even gets into a whip fight with one of the undead.  Which is honestly, kinda dull. 

[M.10rda]

That's a good one. It's slow at times but it is very very odd.

[LilCerberus]

Tonight's Stinker
The Devil's Sleep(1949)
https://youtu.be/848xrrlpbzg?si=NHDCjnfY1bid1hxh

Opens with flashing headlines about teenage crime, kids popping pills, with an announcer blabbing something, then roll opening credits, then a teenager running down a dark alley & the cops catch him.....
So, the female judge of juvenile court is discussing what's gotten into kids these days with a police chief & his head of narcotics cop.... The narc's girlfriend's kid brother is from the same neighborhood, & figures he could enlist the boy's help.... Thing is, the boy is one of the bad guy's customers, along with his girlfriend, who happens to be the judge's daughter.....
The drug dealers run their operation out of a lady's spa & gym, where he sells uppers to the clients, & has a young recruiter sells stolen pharmaceuticals to teens & persuades them to rob medical warehouses.....
The narc gets to work, while the teens go to pool parties at the recruiter's house.....

Watchable, with the gym being a setting for fat jokes & Hays Code exploitation, under the guise of being anti-drug propaganda......

[LilCerberus]

Tonight's Stinker
SuperHigh(2017)
https://youtu.be/NDMR86gc_Sw?si=nfM4i60NwdW9VBnr

A college age Latino wakes up with a huge hole in his wall & a pair of friends who want to know what happened.... He thinks back to the previous day, when his girlfriend dumps him, & then a mysterious homeless man, who somehow knows a lot about him just gives him a bag of weed..... He gets high, & then a friend takes him to a rave, which gets busted by the cops.... In the confusion, he shoves a cop, who goes flying across the room & t-bones a squadcar.... Then he runs away, busting through walls as he goes....
They conclude it must be the weed, and develop superpowers.... They decide to become superheroes, but assaulting a cop isn't the best way to get started.....

This is a ten part webseries edited into a seventy-five minute feature, so the tone isn't entirely consistent... The one liners & punchlines had me cracking up for the first thirty minutes or so, then at about forty minutes, it takes a dark turn from which it has a hard time coming back from.....

[Dr. Whom]

Harvest (2024)

After Minions and Monsters, I thought it was time for something more artsy, so I picked this one. Apparently the novel it was based on, got to the shortlist of the Booker Prize in 2013, and I am willing to believe that it s more interesting than the movie. However I haven't been as baffled by what a movie is wanting to say (if anything) since Barbie. It keeps making points and then undercutting them, while leaving much unnecessarily unexplained.

A small Scottish village, barely scraping together an existence, comes in the possession of a new landlord, who wants to turn the people out and give the ground over to sheep for wool production.
According to Wikipedia set in the early modern period with the transition of feudalism to capitalism, yet the material culture is that of the mid 19thC. The henchmen wear bowler hats, for one thing.

It has some interesting points to make, but the whole thing is painfully slow. This is one of those movies where people do mundane things (like lighting a pipe) in realtime for no good reason. Most shots are twice as long as they could be. It takes about an hour before the main problem of the movie (ie the arrival of the new landlord) happens. Even then there is no narrative tension. The two main protagonists do not take any action and simply let things happen. The main character does call out people on their inaction, although he himself does not act and seems to think action is futile. I can see why the director made this choice, but it doesn't make the movie any easier to sit through. It is hard to care for any of these people.
So, some good ideas, wonderfully filmed (at times it feels like you're in a painting by Ford Maddox Brown), but ultimately too boring to recommend

[Alex]

Harvest (2024)

After Minions and Monsters, I thought it was time for something more artsy, so I picked this one. Apparently the novel it was based on, got to the shortlist of the Booker Prize in 2013, and I am willing to believe that it s more interesting than the movie. However I haven't been as baffled by what a movie is wanting to say (if anything) since Barbie. It keeps making points and then undercutting them, while leaving much unnecessarily unexplained.

A small Scottish village, barely scraping together an existence, comes in the possession of a new landlord, who wants to turn the people out and give the ground over to sheep for wool production.
According to Wikipedia set in the early modern period with the transition of feudalism to capitalism, yet the material culture is that of the mid 19thC. The henchmen wear bowler hats, for one thing.

It has some interesting points to make, but the whole thing is painfully slow. This is one of those movies where people do mundane things (like lighting a pipe) in realtime for no good reason. Most shots are twice as long as they could be. It takes about an hour before the main problem of the movie (ie the arrival of the new landlord) happens. Even then there is no narrative tension. The two main protagonists do not take any action and simply let things happen. The main character does call out people on their inaction, although he himself does not act and seems to think action is futile. I can see why the director made this choice, but it doesn't make the movie any easier to sit through. It is hard to care for any of these people.
So, some good ideas, wonderfully filmed (at times it feels like you're in a painting by Ford Maddox Brown), but ultimately too boring to recommend

Sounds like he'd have been better framing it as a modern representation of the Highland Clearances.

[Dr. Whom]

That was certainly an inspiration, although, so Wikipedia informs me, this happened earlier than the mid-19C setting of the movie as suggested by the style.

I think the setting was mainly chosen for esthetic reasons , much like is done in opera, when you set, say a Wagner opera in 1920s Chicago. In this movie it does work in a sense, because it creates a Thomas Hardyesque atmosphere.

[Rev. Powell]

This is a lot of discussion for such a boring movie, but HARVEST is an adaptation of a book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvest_(Crace_novel). The setting/time period was likely chosen to express the theme of transition from a (probably mythical) in-harmony-with-earth agricultural world to a capitalist society based on exploitation/ownership of resources.

[Dr. Whom]

Quite, and I must say reading the summary of the book explained a lot about the movie.

This is actually one of the more successful aspects of the movie, which relies heavily on visual storytelling and implied information. The costuming clearly sets the story long before our contemporary world, while the dress code remains legible: you can tell which ones are the farmers, which ones are the city folk and so on.

This movie is sometimes classed as folk horror, which is absolute nonsense. There is some violence yes, and blood is shed, but there are no horror elements whatsoever.

Made by Athina Rachel Tsangari, fellow traveler of Yorgos Lanthimos

[chainsaw midget]

The Bride (2026)

This is a new one, so I'm going to do something I don't normally do. 

I'm going to give you a spoiler warning.
This post spoils everything. 
and now you're warned. 

I just watcheed The Bride, the new Bride of Frankenstein movie. It only took me a few minutes in before I realizes ... damn. It is not looking good. That Mary Shelly intro is just all sorts of terrible not only from a narrative point of view, but disrespectful.

It starts with a very tell-no-show scene where Mary Shelly, is in some dark void talking about how she wants to present the story that she REALLY wanted to tell. She comes across as either drunk, insane, or some combination of the two in a very disrespectful way.  She ends up possessing a woman... who is almost immediately killed. Then the actual Frankenstein's Monster (called Frank through most of the movie), shows up at some random mad scientists house. He tells her straight up that he wants sex, so she needs to make him a Bride. I'm not joking. That's actually how he puts it. So... they end up end up digging up the body of that woman who Mary Shelly possessed. And it appears that Mary Shelly is still in there, although what effect that has on the actual plot never seem to be apparent.

The woman is brought back, she doesn't know her name and the movie makes a big deal out of this. She distinctively does not want to be Frank's bride, although they go out together and they bond ... somehow. It's just that they start getting along. I don't know.

So, one night the two of them are attacked by some drunken punks and Frank kills them when they try to rape The Bride. From here on "the Killer Monsters" seem to be a big news story. This introduces a detective and his secretary that never seem to actually have anything to do with the plot until the last few minutes.
Eventually while on the run, they sneak into some big fancy party where they pretend to be waiters. For some reason they do a big dance number to "Putting on the Ritz". Then The Bride has this weird long rant afterwards they shoot and policeman and run. Apparently this inspires like, six women to run through the streets shooting guns in the air and shouting "Brain attack" for reasons I can't figure out. This is apparently some big femminist movement.
so Frank and his Bride are on the run.  A cop pulls them over and tries to rape the Bride and Frank shoots him (kinda odd that this is the second time in the movie that somebody tries to rape her and Frank saves her.) 

There a scene later in the movie where they got to a theater, and Frank confesses that she's not actually just recovering from an accident like they told her ealier.  They brought her back to life and he had no idea who she was before that.  There's a weird thing where they're sitting in a car talking, but the drive-in theater shows them as actors on screen delivering the same lines and this ISN'T a stylistic effect because there's one other character who can see this and has no idea what's going on.  Anyway, this is when she decideds she has to have a new name and declares herself "The Bride."
Frank proposes to her and she says she doesn't want to be anyone's bride.  Kinda mixed signals there.  Then the police show up and shoot Frank in the head.  And he dies.  The Bride decides to take his body back to the mad doctor from the begining. 

She can't revive him and isn't going to try.  Here's where we get a last minute revelation that she and her former lover used to experiment on each other until one of the experiments went wrong, he forgot who she was, and she had to put him down.  Kinda too little too late to mean anything to the movie. 
The detective that has been following them the whole time jumps out and shoots the Bride a bunch. Then other police show up and open fire on Frank and his Bride and the detective runs. 
The secretary then says she's in charge, she's the detective, and pulls out a badge, which is another revelation too late to mean anything.

The movie ends with a flash of electricity and we see the Bride and Frank's hands start to move.  Then we hear The Monster Mash.  No seriously. 

I don't know what this movie was trying to be.  It felt very much like Frankenstein itself, pieced together from various plotlines that were in no way meant to be attached to each other. 
Also, I don't know why they thought making making the Bride look like that scene in Ernest goes to Jail where he's eating the pen was a good idea. 

[Rev. Powell]

Dude, the reason they do the bog dance number is because Mary Shelley's ghost possesses them! Pay attention! 

I recommend this movie to everyone. I love a big, insane mess of a movie. (I also recommend MEGALOPOLIS, so take that into account).

[chainsaw midget]

I mean, if you're looking for an insane mess, by all means.  It's rare that you get an insane mess that's this high a budget.

SOmewhere in that plot there's material for about three good movies... it just doesn't work well together. 

[indianasmith]

LOL, to each his own.  I loved it BECAUSE it was insane and incomprehensible!