RECENT VIEWINGS (Bad Movie Thread!)

[LilCerberus]

^Forgot to mention; I wanted to point out that I thought it was sincere, and the difficult to see black captions for the towns wanted me to send a shout out to an old friend who always said "I didn't like the font".....^

[M.10rda]

GORILLA AT LARGE (1954):
It's hard for me to think of a more stacked cast in the mid-50s slumming in a greater mediocrity (though I am open to suggestions). Thus I submit to you Anne Bancroft, Lee J. Cobb, Lee Marvin, Raymond Burr, and Cameron Mitchell... in a Man-In-Suit potboiler where characters are menaced (very very slowly) at an urban circus by either a killer in a gorilla suit or a real errant gorilla or possibly both. If GORILLA AT LARGE was produced by Fox or Paramount or MGM you'd think this was a one-fell-swoop revenge strategy against a bunch of contracted actors who'd p**sed off the studio chief - but no, it was made by "Panoramic Pictures"  so presumably that fly-by-night studio just threw buckets of money into the Sunset Strip and then brought out the nets to capture anybody who ran into the street to nab a few bucks.

Bancroft was a working ingenue on the verge of playing wives and fallen ladies, still years off from THE MIRACLE WORKER; she plays the star trapeze artist and looks good enough that she might still have been a stretch for short comedy writer Mel Brooks. (I dunno when they met but they married a decade later.) Burr, a few months before REAR WINDOW and a year and change before GODZILLA, is Bancroft's hubby and the owner of the circus. In his big scene, he (falsely) confesses to being the gorilla-suited maniac and then punches a plate of glass.    Cobb (within months of ON THE WATERFRONT) brings a lot of gravitas to his investigating cop role, but he's clearly bored by the project. (At one point he reclines sleepily at his desk and orders an underling to brief him on the case because he's "too busy".) Marvin had already played the heavy in THE BIG HEAT but has the smallest (and silliest) role of the bunch, as an absentminded patrolman who gets knocked out and locked in the gorilla's cage. That leaves Mitchell, historically the weakest actor of the toney bunch, to enjoy the most screen time, including tons of dialogue, some light action, and even a love triangle w/ Bancroft and another dame. I primarily know Mitchell from his (even much worse) flicks from the 70s and 80s, when he was a wizened silver fox  - plus lots of his early 50's credits are nearly invisible ensemble bits - so the full-color GORILLA AT LARGE is something of a revelation as it shows that young Mitchell (besides being only a serviceable actor) was also a weird-looking ginger.......  .......Yes, double-standard time: Redheaded women, hottest entities in all God's Creation, but as for Mitchell and many redheaded men.......  ...Makes sense now that Mitch worked a lot more when he turned gray.

There's lot of relationship drama and very little monkey-action. (The climax is just KING KONG on a tiny fraction of the scale.) Although shot and released in 3D, there's almost no attempt to exploit the format for funsies. All that said, I did enjoy the gorilla suit! It's one of the sumo-wrestler-sized ones, like in Ron Ormond's UNTAMED MISTRESS, but of a higher quality, and w/ pretty slick facial feature-articulation. In the movie's best/funniest moment, the escaped gorilla wanders the midway and gazes upon first some cheezy animatronic chimp robots, and then on some wholly uncool sambo-like dancing puppets.  The racist iconography is a bummer, but the disapproving look on the gorilla's face is priceless.       2.5/5

[LilCerberus]

Tonight's Stinker
Robotrix (1991)
https://youtu.be/5ScNL0rondU?si=2_GmYL-Mx1MqTVQs

A middle eastern prince goes frolicking in the pool with a group of nude women while a team of Asian policemen assigned to guard him watch..... The one policewoman on the team is put off & decides to step out.... A kidnapper gasses everyone in the pool, then shoots the policewoman on the way out......
Later, at a convention organized by the father of the prince, American & German android developers vie for a contract for a middle eastern android army.... Two androids get to fighting, things get out of hand, & a Japanese android comes in to save the day..... Then an evil mad scientist sends a video tape saying he's kidnapped the sheik's son, then transfers his mind into an android.....
This plot point is quickly forgotten until about an hour later.....
The dead policewoman's mind is put into an android..... Meanwhile, the police start looking for a man killing hookers.....

This one kept turning up in b-movie recommendations, had me thinking it was just going to be silly martial arts, but for the most part, was porn with jokes about misogyny & voyeurism set to a grating synth score, with no real plot....

[M.10rda]

RISE: BLOOD HUNTER (2007):
Madame wanted to watch this because she said she remembered really liking it 20 years ago. After it ended she admitted she might've just had a crush on Lucy Liu. That's a fine explanation, Liu looks great here and playing a butt-kicking vampire who hunts other vampires w/ a crossbow should have been a no-brainer home-run-outta'-the-park role for her. Unfortunately the film is complete nonsense. When you turn into a vampire do you instantly become a perfect marksman w/ a crossbow? What is the title even referring to? Those are just two of the questions you may ask during RISE: BLOOD HUNTER. (Should the colon in the title have been a comma instead, as RISE, BLOOD HUNTER might make more sense? There's a third question.)

Sebastian Gutierrez, the genius who gave the world SNAKES ON A PLANE, also w/d this less-overtly amusing clownshow. His brand of sloppy stylishness actually does occasionally recall Lynchian noir from LOST HIGHWAY, WILD AT HEART, et al, and there is a scene early on w/ party girls being stalked in a creepy house that is actually atmospheric, intense, and borderline scary (...in spite of the scene still defying all sober logic). To his credit, Gutierrez has also been partnered for 30 years w/ ultra-gorgeous Carla Gugino. She appears briefly here as a supporting vampire but honestly (based on Gugino's excellent work for Mike Flanagan) the film would have likely been better had Gugino played Liu's underwritten lead role.

For good or ill, the large and inexplicable cast is the most noteworthy thing about RISE. Michael Chiklis is 2nd-billed as a character with only two apparent attributes - "alcoholic" and "cop" - until the last 30 minutes of the film, which deliver a wholly unsupported left-field plot twist which depend upon us knowing heretofore unrevealed things about his relationship with his estranged daughter.  Character actor Julio Oscar Mechoso appears in the middle as "Vladimir Exposition", setting up expectation that his character will return by the end of the film (but he doesn't). Holt McAllany (from "Mindhunters") and Mako are vampires and Elden Hensen is a Renfield; Marilyn Manson (also briefly in LOST HIGHWAY, actually) appears pointlessly as a bartender and Nick Lachey  gets too much screen-time before (happily) getting his throat ripped out.  Most unnervingly, Robert Forster (!) appears in the first scene - and then never reappears! I suspect Forster enjoyed sub-sixty second cameos more than large roles - his 21st century credits are replete w/ "blink and you'll miss him" gigs.

Not offensively bad.    2.5/5    The pointless and oddly depressing CARRIE-esque final shot was probably setting up a franchise for Liu's character, lol.