Bad Movie Night Recap

 The time has once again come for Bad Movie Night: my shameless celebration of the movies that just aren't quite good enough, but also aren't so terrible they become unwatchable. It's a fine line, and sometimes it's just the right goofy element that pushes it over. Sometimes it's just who you watch it with, and the Cap'n has a fairly loyal crew of masochists willing to descend on Blogorium Headquarters every year. Even though I subjected them to Things last year, they came back. What that says about their cinematic fortitude is up to you, but I'm proud to call them my friends. This year, I opted to give them a less agonizing experience, but not without some serious brain bending. Let's take a look at what you (hopefully) missed out on:

 We started with Devil Girl from Mars, based on the hit London stage play (or, that's what I'd like to believe), and it shows. Despite the fact that a Martian spaceship lands outside of a remote Scottish Inn, most of the motley crew of patrons are concerned with their own stupid problems, leaving time for Naya, the titular character, to enter and exit through the same door, repeatedly. At least it's nice to know that Martians also call their planet Mars. They - well, she - arrived on Earth with her new prototype spaceship, which has organic metal and runs on an engine that creates nuclear reactions that explode inward, creating perpetual motion. Their science is vastly superior to ours, but in the great war of the sexes, all men were wiped out and they need some breeding stock, if you catch my drift. Perhaps if she'd landed in America, rather than Scotland, this would have been an easier task, because the citizens of the United Kingdom are more interested in cockamamie plans to shoot or electrocute her, to no avail.

 Brave newspaper columnist Mike Conner (or Carter, depending on who's saying his name) has the scoop of a lifetime, but would rather his on a fashion model hiding out in the inn. Thankfully his indeterminate accent doesn't bother her, and she even falls in love with him in the two hours between when they meet and when he agrees to join the Devil Girl on her ship. That, of course, is a ruse for him to try to steal the remote control for Johnny, a robot who "looks very similar to you Earth people," in that he looks nothing like humans but instead a guy in a robot costume. Naya has a ray gun that's effective on everything but glasses, constructs an invisible wall that the only scientist in the group somehow runs into headlong, and loves to open the same doors over and over and make sweeping pronouncements about how stupid we humans are. There are other characters, because we clearly care about an escaped adulterer who murdered his wife or some dumb kid, but the innkeeper's husband's name is Jamie Jameson, which is amusing. Also, they sit down to eat dinner at 10 o'clock at night. If only Mike and the Professor had taken the turn to "Loch Something" (actual line), they might have missed this unfortunately duller than it sounds movie.

 Speaking of dull, I hadn't seen Disney's knock-off of Star Wars, The Black Hole, in close to 25 years, so I didn't remember what a bore it was. Fortunately, I also didn't remember a lot of other things about it, like the fact that a 90 minute film had an overture and that all of the music - by James Bond composer John Barry - sounded just like any other Bond music. I did remember the robot with the Texas accent, and that Event Horizon lifted quite a bit from this terrible, terrible movie. When it's not ripping off Star Wars, it's borrowing liberally from the released-the-same year Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and Forbidden Planet, and Battlestar Galactica, and pretty much any other vaguely popular science fiction film they could think of. To be perfectly honest with you, we lost interest about fifteen minutes in, started talking about the new music on Star Wars and about The Hobbit, and eventually made some jokes about Ernest Borgnine's libido and the movie Alligator, while pausing to note just how badly one could steal from George Lucas. I might have even said something kind about The Phantom Menace, which might be a first for the Cap'n.

 High School Confidential! eased us out of the "boring" zone of bad movies - hey, I try, but sometimes things just don't land with the crowd - by being entirely too interested in being "hip" and "with it". That works wonders in its favor, because the ridiculous overuse of slang, coupled with what seems to be not even veiled suggestions about incest between Tony (Russ Tamblyn) and his aunt Gwen (Mamie Van Doren). In Tony's defense, it's mostly one way, and given there's a twist, I guess it's possible that they maybe aren't related, but why would he refer to her as his aunt behind closed doors? There are a number of questionable "bait and switch"-es in High School Confidential!, a movie about Tony moving in to town and taking over the high school drug trade in the course of two or three days. He's tough talking and backs it up, and pops his collar, even when it's on a sweater. Why? Because he's hip, daddy-o.

 There are so many ways to address how hard the writers are trying to sound "cool" and failing miserably: the hip version of Columbus that J. I. Coleridge (John Drew Barrymore) "lays" on his class, or the awful (even for Beat Poetry) performance at a "Jazz Club" the kids all go to. Or the notion that marijuana is a gateway drug to heroin, and nothing else. Tony, a "7th year" high school student, immediately starts hitting on his teacher and also moves in on Coleridge's girl, who turns out to be a junkie. The drug kingpins in town are played by Charles Chaplin, Jr. and Jackie Coogan. Yes, Uncle Fester forces Tony to shoot up to prove he's not a narc. But wait, he is! (SPOILER) Tony is really Mike, who works with the cops, and there's a big shootout at the jazz club when a deal goes bad. Fortunately, the leader of The Rangers - played by Michael Landon - is there to help out, even though they're the rival gang to Tony's Wheelers and Dealers. Also, Jerry Lee Lewis begins and ends the film playing the title song, in what appears to be the same shot.

 High School Confidential! picked up the pace a bit, and after a musical interlude, it was time to dive right into Raw Force. It's an almost perfect storm of kung-fu zombie cannibalism interspersed with gratuitous nudity and hokey special effects. And yet, some people were grumbling, perhaps because I oversold the "cannibal monks who raise kung-fu zombies" part of the movie. Yes, most of Raw Force's 86 minutes is devoted to a Kung-Fu cruise to "Warrior Island," where disgraced martial artists are buried. It's also where Hitler sells prostitutes in exchange for jade. Is his name Hitler in the movie? I honestly don't remember, but if he looks like Hitler and talks like Hitler, we're going to go with "that guy is Hitler". The cannibal monks eat the girls because it gives them power to raise the dead, which they use (eventually) for the final showdown.

 In the meantime, there's a lot of showing off of kung-fu skills, coupled with late 70s / early 80s clothes, music, and nudity aboard the cruise ship. Almost everyone on the boat - from the cook to the bartender - seem to know how to fight, and are therefore well equipped to handle Hitler's lackeys. You see, despite the fact that Warrior Island is the home of an illicit human trafficking ring, it's also the subject of its own tourism guide. Because, why wouldn't it? When the cruise ship catches on fire (or, rather, has fire overlaid over the image), some of the passengers escape, and the rest are presumably killed. We never hear from them again, so let's just assume they died. What's important is that the life raft lands on Warrior Island and the monks raise the dead. There's lots of chop sockey, some decapitations, some dynamite, and piranhas. How are there piranhas in salt water, in the ocean? My guess is they couldn't find any stock footage of sharks. So Hitler gets munched on by piranhas (SPOILER).

 Rather than launching into the "Luc Besson Presents an Affront to Science" double feature as promised, I gave them the option of getting the Trappening out of the way, which they decided was best. What they didn't know was that this year's mystery feature wasn't just a Bad Movie - it was a Great Bad Movie. By no stretch of the imagination could one call Commando a "good" movie, but I'll be damned if it isn't one of the most fun films to throw conventional cinema out the window. Continuity errors? Check. Bad one liners? Yessir. Gratuitous nudity? Well, it has absolutely nothing to do with the fight scene, so yep. The mall from Chopping Mall? Sure is! Arnold Schwarzenegger killing an entire army, single-handedly? You know it.

 To get Alyssa Milano back, Arnold will plow his way through David Patrick Kelly (John Wick), Bill Duke (Predator), Dan Hedaya (Alien Resurrection), and finally The Road Warrior's Vernon Wells (Weird Science) for the mother of all bad puns. Oh, and his name is John Matrix, because Rambo is a pansy. I firmly believe that Commando is what everybody thinks all action movies from the 80s are like (that, and First Blood Part II), and why they hold the admittedly average Expendables series to an impossible standard. Matrix is introduced hauling a log down to a cabin (on his shoulder), and then eats ice cream and feeds a deer with his daughter. Because he's tough, but sensitive. Until you steal his daughter, and then he just kills you. Rae Dawn Chong's Cindy isn't even developed enough to have Stockholm Syndrome when she assumes the role of "new mom" at the end, having been kidnapped by Matrix less than twelve hours before. Commando is all killer and no filler, but I asked attendees to give it the same scrutiny as any of our other howlers, which is exactly the point at which you realize the many logic gaps and inherent flaws that make it technically "Bad." Now that everybody was in a great frame of mind, it was time to throw common sense out the door and let Luc Besson insult our basic intelligence...

 I've been hosting official fests for nearly a decade now, and in all that time I have never heard the phrase "wait... what?" as many times as I did during Luc Besson's Lucy. Perhaps the mini-review in the "Worst Of" recap didn't quite convey just how painfully cavalier Lucy is with the concept of "science," but the reactions were hilarious. During the film, at least one large bottle of Kraken was consumed, and descriptions of what they'd seen ranged from "an atrocity" to "amazing." A friend of mine whose dissertation is on Philip K. Dick insists that it's not science fiction at all, but rather a brilliant example of "slipstream," a newer iteration of magical realism. The entire room erupted with laughter when Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) explained that she could "feel her brain" in what's supposed to be heartfelt scene over the phone with her mother. The comical, video-game-esque use of brain percentage "unlocked" was also a source of enjoyment, but nothing stood out quite as much as figuring out how long it took for Johansson to "say this horseshit with a straight face." One viewer worried that she could no longer take Morgan Freeman's Through the Wormhole seriously after seeing him in Lucy. I freely admit that Lucy is a bad movie, but it's a very entertaining one, and it was somewhat validating to see the baffled reactions as they tried to take Besson's affront to science seriously.

 That said, I made a critical mistake in putting Lockout after Lucy, because by comparison, the former is just a "run of the mill bad science fiction film". It's true that after you've heard Scarlett Johansson explain what it's like to feel your bones growing, or to become the monolith from 2001, a high speed unicycle chase just doesn't have the same impact. Even my favorite line of awful science, "the gravity should keep you floating" just can't compete with Besson's double-down on Insane Clown Posse-like disdain for science. Lockout is still a bad movie, and it's insistence on identifying everyone and every location on screen (repeatedly, in the case of the latter) is amusing, but it just wasn't the same head-scratcher that it was in 2012. On the other hand, the outcries of mental anguish reconciling what Lucy was saying vs. what they knew to be true was more than worth it.

 By the end of Lockout, just about everybody was ready to go, but a few stragglers felt like they had one more Bad Movie in them. Despite the fact that it meant Cap'n's Choice - I hadn't planned on anything past Lockout - they were willing to suffer through another one. Being that it was late, or comparatively late (we can't do movies until sunrise anymore), I opted to go short and show Cranpire a "Cranpire Movie": Sorority House Massacre II. As I'll be writing about that and the first Sorority House Massacre soon (and possibly Hard to Die), I won't go too into detail about it, but he enjoyed it. There's barely a plot, and most of the first half of the movie is devoted to showing as much gratuitous nudity as possible, followed by another 30 minutes or so of women running around a house in their nighties and going out in the rain for no good reason. Jim Wynorski (Chopping Mall) even takes a pointless side-trip to a strip club to shoehorn in more nudity under the specious logic that one of the characters from a flashback is now dancing topless. Classy stuff.

 For the immediate future, I think I've hit my quota of schlock (although that doesn't rule out watching Furious 7). There's enough time to reload the queue in time for Summer Fest, where I think 80s cheesefests Without Warning and Deadly Eyes are going to be a hit. Thanks to everybody who made it, and to the folks at home who didn't, you now have a roadmap for your own Bad Movie Night. Just have alcohol and a good support system of friends nearby. And whatever you do, don't watch Things.

Cap'n Howdy's (Back)Log: The Night the World Exploded

 The Night the World Exploded is a bit of an odd bird as movies go. Had a friend not asked me about it out of the blue, I probably wouldn't know it existed. I'm guessing most of you have never heard of it, and it's not surprising necessarily: the film comes from dependable cast and crew members who you probably haven't heard of but have definitely seen before. For example, director Fred F. Sears made movies like Teen Age Crime Wave, Apache Ambush, and Cha-Cha-Boom! - he worked a lot, but if you've seen anything he made, it was probably Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, even if you didn't catch the director's name. He worked reliably and consistently, but perhaps not notably.

 Similarly, stars Kathryn Grant and William Leslie appeared in a few movies you might have heard of: she appeared in Anatomy of a Murder and had an uncredited cameo in Rear Window, and he has a small role in John Ford's The Horse Soldiers. The Night the World Exploded is what would fall into the classic description of "B-Movie": the second film to play in a double bill with a more prestigious picture, and at barely over an hour long, it would fit nicely after some cartoons and short films at a Drive-In. In fact, according to IMDB, it was the "B" picture to legendary Summer Fest flick The Giant Claw.

 Dr. David Conway (Leslie) has been working on a high powered seismograph in order to better predict earthquakes with his colleague Dr. Ellis Morton (Tristram Coffin) and research assistant Laura "Hutch" Hutchinson (Grant). One night the machine gives them readings of a quake of serious magnitude about to hit the west coast, but their warnings fall on deaf ears and calamity ensues. It turns out only to be the first of many massive earthquakes, first in the U.S. but eventually all over the world. When strong seismic activity appears deep in Carlsbad Caverns, Dr. Conway, Hutch, and Dr. Morton head down to find the source and discover a natural phenomenon that threatens the entire world...

 I'm not quite sure what I have more of a problem with in The Night the World Exploded: the "bad science" or the rampant sexism towards Hutch. Early in the film, Dr. Morton tries to talk Hutch out of leaving as Dr. Conway's assistant because she's planning to marry the never seen but often mentioned "Brad." His argument is, I kid you not, that she should wait for Dr. Conway to realize he's in love with her because "why settle for something rather than expect the best?" Mind you, he's not asking her to stay because she's a valuable team member - which is actually why Dr. Conway wants her to stick around - but because eventually she'll be seen as a romantic object by the male lead and that should be good enough for her. It's far from the last time that pervasive sexism is directed at Hutch in the film, but it gives you a good idea how The Night the World Exploded is going to approach women in the scientific field.

 The "bad science," on the other hand, is pretty funny: the cause of the earthquakes as a new element (dubbed "112") that's been pushing itself up to the earth's surface. When in water, element 112 is dormant, but when exposed to air it increases in mass and heats up, eventually exploding (as a Carlsbad Caverns guide / amateur rock collector unfortunately discovers). Hutch suggests that "maybe the earth is fighting back after all of the mining we've been doing" which, it turns out, is exactly what's happening - all of the worst quakes seem to be based in areas with heavy mining.

 The solution is actually just as comical: Conway manages to pull the world's scientists together and get all of the disparate governments in line to fix the problem by flooding these areas, largely by bombing the ground to create new rivers and with weather machines to generate rain. When that's not working fast enough, a volcano appears out of the ground in New Mexico and Conway and Hutch have to blow up the nearby dam to stop it from erupting. I did not make up that last sentence. It's the climax of the film, as a matter of fact (SPOILER). They go to the dam despite the toxic fumes from the volcano and bring along some acid, which "escalates the reaction of element 112" in order to blow up the facility faster, only the acid is spilled and they have to run out and barely make it to the helicopter in time. But it's all okay in the end because even as large parts of the world are flooded, Dr. Conway realizes he loves Hutch and they're together at the end and that's what counts.

 I'd like to mention something that stood out to me in an already silly and mostly inaccurate movie (I watched it a second time with a scientist who confirmed that The Night the World Exploded, like The Happening, wasn't the least bit plausible). While in New Mexico a few years ago, I went to Carlsbad Caverns, and as a result I could tell immediately that the people who made this movie had seen pictures (maybe) but had mostly just heard about it. The rock formations were largely correct, but even by Hollywood conceits, the "caverns" were way too well lit and, well, small. Carlsbad Caverns is a prehistoric undersea cave, absent the "sea" part. The caverns are massive - so much so that 99% of the pictures I took failed to convey any sense of scope because there isn't enough light to do it justice. Once your eyes settle, you can make out just how large the space is, but the only photos that came out at all were ones taken very close to a rock formation or near a large source of light that indicates where the walkways are headed. The "Great Hall" that Conway and Hutch are standing in is, at best, a tenth of the size in any direction of the real Carlsbad Caverns. I appreciate the attempt to use the location, but like many things in The Night the World Exploded, it just doesn't do the real deal justice.

 The Night the World Exploded is available from Sony as an "On Demand" DVD-R, or you can find it on YouTube. It's exactly right for some harmless Saturday afternoon shenanigans with friends if you're in the mood for some 50s cheese. Pair it up with The Giant Claw for even more fun - in fact, I think I might do that in the near future...

Shocktober Revisited: Documentaries - American Scary and The 50 Worst Movies Ever Made

Well, one documentary and a "list" movie, American Scary and The 50 Worst Movies Ever Made, both thanks to Netflix streaming video.

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American Scary is easily the better of the two: it deals specifically with the cultural trend of "Horror Movie Hosts" which caught on regionally in the 50s and 60s. For those not familiar with the movement or have just heard of Elvira by reputation, in the early days of television the networks were starved for content to fill out their schedules. The film studios began leasing out their back catalogs (particularly horror) to the stations, and local stations would punctuate the films with a gag-spouting "host" who alleviated the tension for kids watching at home. As the "Horror Movie Host" spread, it ended up at all hours of the day and grew popular with local audiences.

The documentary covers the birth of the "Host", takes a regional journey through hosts in Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Trenton. Many of the surviving Hosts are on hand to tell their stories, including Roland / Zacherley, Vampira, Ghoularid, Count Gore D. Vol, Crematoria Mortem, Son of the Ghoul, and Penny Dreadful. Elvira doesn't appear in the interviews but he impact is mentioned on a national level.

Along for the ride to share memories of the Hosts are Neil Gaiman, Curtis "Booger" Armstrong, Joe Bob Briggs, Bob Burns, author James Morrow, Chris Gore of Film Threat, Joel Hodgson of MST3k, Tim Conway, Leonard Maltin, Patricia Tallman (the evil witch in Army of Darkness), John Kassir (the Crypt-Keeper), Len Wein and Phil Tippett.

I found the discussion of MST3k's role in carrying on the "host" tradition (albeit in different ways) an interesting take on the show's impact. If you look at Mystery Science Theater 3000 in that light, it does bridge the gap between the corporatization of network television (which effectively ended "Horror Hosts") and the rise of Public Access "Horror Hosts". It's strange that while Joe Bob Briggs appears, no mention is made of Monster Vision. USA Up All Night also fails to register even though it did similar work.

Still, this is quality stuff, and you'll get a lot of footage from people you may have only read about. Check it out.

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The 50 Worst Movies Ever Made is less a documentary and more of a quick hit kind of list. The "movie" itself is 60 minutes long, so you can do the math. Generally you spend barely more than a minute with each film (the runtime includes credits and "graphics" devoted to a booing audience) so it's more of an overview than anything.

All things considered, I did pick up a few ideas for future Bad Movie Nights, and I buffered out the "trailer gallery" for this weekend (available here). I can't really argue with the list too much (other than possibly Spider Baby, which I like), but here are the 50 Worst Movies Ever Made:

50. Glen or Glenda?
49. Mesa of Lost Women
48. Troll
47. Teenage Zombies
46. The Fat Spy
45. Voodoo Woman
44. Ishtar
43. Frankenstein Conquers the World
42. The Creeping Terror
41. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians
40. Howard the Duck
39. They Saved Hitler's Brain
38. Black Belt Jones
37. Greetings!
36. The Great Alligator
35. Hillbillys in a Haunted House
34. TNT Jackson
33. Robot Monster
32. The Incredible Melting Man
31. Firebird 2015 A.D.
30. Dracula Vs. Frankenstein
29. Bride of the Monster
28. Smokey and the Bandit Part 3
27. Xanadu
26. Leonard Part 6
25. The Wild Women of Wongo
24. Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla
23. The Ape
22. Galaxy of Terror
21. The Robot vs the Aztec Mummy
20. Snow White (German Version)
19. Creature from the Haunted Sea
18. The Swinging Cheerleaders
17. Trial of Billy Jack
16. Killers from Space
15. Spider Baby
14. Trog
13. The Three Stooges in Orbit
12. The Crippled Masters
11. Sorceress
10. The Crawling Hand
9. Bloodsucking Freaks
8. J.D.'s Revenge
7. Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster
6. Killer Shrews
5. Great White
4. Plan 9 from Outer Space
3. The Thing with Two Heads
2. Eegah!
1. The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies


Honestly this "movie" has next to no value unless you want a quick overview of some bad movies with next to no insight and clips of bad acting and cheap monsters. All Monsters Attack is better for that, as are the 42nd Street Forever discs. This is a "Watch Once" at best, but I'd advise skipping it altogether.

Summer Fest 5 (Day Three): Shocker, The Blob, and Beware! The Blob

 Over the years I've learned that a light day is the best way to close out a Fest. After all of the marathon-ing and late nights, it's good to take an afternoon and kick back with three easy-going films that aren't going to send people away in droves (like a, say, ThanksKilling 3). With that in mind, I selected a Wes Craven movie that's just strange enough to be entertaining, a better-than-it-ought to be "alien invasion" B-movie from the 1950s, and its fourteen years later quasi-sequel directed by J.R. Ewing. Good times.

 I already said nearly everything I have to say about Shocker while covering it for The ABCs of Movie Masochism earlier this year, so click on that link to have a gander at what you have to look forward to when you sit down and watch Wes Craven's failed attempt to kick start another franchise (and you should). The one thing I can't believe I forgot to mention was the electric blue lips! How did that escape my recap last time??? If, for some unfathomable reason, you aren't going to watch Shocker,

 Horace Pinker is on death row, moments away from walking "the green mile" and he's managed as a final request to be given a TV set and a pair of jumper cables. Prisons in the 1980s, I guess. So he's doing some kind of evil ritual and out of the TV comes a pair of floating blue electric lips to grant him his wish (they say something to the effect of "If you want it, baby, you got it!") to turn into Electricity Slasher Man. In a movie where our hero (director Peter Berg, he of Battleship fame) runs into a goalpost and gains a psychic connection to a serial killer, something like electric blue lips isn't actually that out of place, but it was worth mentioning.

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 In the interest of full discretion, there's another reason I chose The Blob for this Summer Fest. Every year, friends of mine who live in Pennsylvania invite me to come to Blobfest, which is a weekend-long celebration of the film. It culminates with a recreation of the scene where the blob invades the movie theater and everybody runs out, and it sounds like a lot of fun. Almost without fail, Blobfest happens right around the same time I'm getting Summer Fest together, so I've never been. Maybe someday, but not yet, so I felt like The Blob should get some recognition here at Summer Fest. It is the perfect kind of summer B-movie experience, and five years in one could argue we're long overdue to watch it. Also, I love the theme song. For good measure I threw in Beware! The Blob, because what the hell, right?

 The Blob is the story of the worst first date ever. If you're being picky, you could the worst first two dates ever, since they do technically go home and then sneak back out. The "they" in that sentence are Steve Andrews (Steve McQueen) and Jane Martin (Aneta Corseaut). For Jane, it starts out less than great because she's convinced Steve brought her up to Make Out Point to, well, make out, but it turns out he's just really into astronomy and falling stars, so she doesn't even really get to be indignant about his advances. He's too much of a dork to be a horndog. But he does offer to take her back to town and buy her a sandwich after they can't find a meteorite that lands somewhere in the woods. Good on you, Steve.

 They never get that sandwich because the meteorite lands near a cabin where an Old Man (Olin Howard) and his dog live, and inside said meteorite is the titular monster, which promptly affixes itself to his hand. Steve and Jane find him on the road begging for help and take him to Dr. Hallen (Stpehen Chase) and then they go about their merry way, which involves backwards drag racing with some other teenagers. Lt. Dave (Earl Rowe) doesn't really approve of this, but those crazy kids these days, right?

 So we've set up a carefree atmosphere of teenagers being teenagers and police that already have every reason to doubt they're telling the truth about anything, so an audience of twenty aught thirteen should know what happens when the blob eats the old man and the doctor and his nurse. Nobody believes them because the doctor was headed out to a conference and Steve and Jane caught him just in time but we won't know for sure if they made it up or if he really was eaten by a gelatinous space monster until he arrives at the conference (or doesn't). Better sit on that for now. Those crazy kids!

 Well Jane and Steve go home with their respective parents after making statements at the police station but they decide to sneak back out and find out what happened. Meanwhile, the blob continues to eat people, which makes it grow, but it only eats people with convenient excuses about needing to be somewhere else so nobody really misses them. Say what you will about this nearly brainless thing, it knows how to pick victims!

 Anyway I don't want to spoil the rest of the movie because The Blob is a lot of fun in the way that you just don't get with "wink wink" B-movies these days. There's no sense of snark or mean edge to the film, just some basically decent kids trying to save everybody from a space monster before it's too late. There are parents and kid brothers and people who seem like jerks but turn out not really to be so bad after all and the solution to stopping the blob is a pretty good one that you might not immediately think of so that's good too. I hope Jane and Steve went on to have a normal date.

 In reading about The Blob, you invariably find out one of two things: this is Steve McQueen's first starring role and / or that he was 27 when he made it. I guess maybe you're supposed to think it's funny that he's playing a high school student but Aneta Corseaut was twenty four, so it's not that crazy. That was pretty much par the course up through the 1990s (I mean, did you really think the kids in Scream were 18?). He's not quite the Steve McQueen you're used to - in fact, his line delivery at the beginning of the movie is pretty shaky - but he gets better throughout the film and you can see that this is a guy to pay attention to. Before too long he'll be making some really classic movies and then his grandson will be in Piranha 3D. But The Blob is good stuff.

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 Beware! The Blob is entertaining for different reasons, and not always good ones. It's not a sequel in the strictest sense, although it does (SPOILER IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE BLOB) basically start because somebody brings home a frozen sample of the blob and leaves it on the counter. Other than that and an ending that tries to up the ante on the "movie theater" scene, it's not really related to The Blob at all.

 In fact, it's barely a movie: Beware! The Blob is a collection of vignettes strung together by the barest of narrative-through-lines you're likely to see. Mostly it seems like Larry Hagman decided he wanted to direct a bunch of his friends doing stupid things and then sometimes being eaten by the blob (but just as many times not). The "movie" is a who's who of character actors, and even if you don't know the names, I guarantee you'd recognize the faces: Sid Haig, Gerrit Graham, Dick van Patten, Cindy Williams, Burgess Meredith, Robert Walker Jr., Shelley Berman, Godfrey Cambridge, Marlene Clark and for good measure, Larry Hagman.

 After the blob gets out and starts eating people, we jump from one "bit" to another, involving hippies, hair stylists, cub scouts, and even a naked Turkish man (Tiger Joe Marsh) and his little dog. Most of the scenes are terrible skits (the hair stylist gets a dirty hippie who wants a haircut) that end when the blob eats them, or in the case of the scouts, go nowhere at all. Dick van Patten is nowhere to be found at the very end of the film, but two of the scouts are there to use clacking balls to... I don't even remember. Sorry. There's even a birthday party / psychedelic happening early in the movie, because why not?

 Well, if you can have a blob invading a movie theater, why not a bowling alley? And if it's a bowling alley, why not have a full diner attached to one side and an ice skating rink that's "under repairs" on the other side? It makes perfect sense in the same way that the "spa" in Death Spa does. Since there's an ice skating rink and I technically implied the spoiler to how to stop the blob, I'm guessing you can figure out how the young and less interesting couple manages to save the day.

 If The Blob encapsulates B-movies of the 1950s well, then I guess it would be fair to say that Beware! The Blob captures the vibe of the early 1970s. We're not quite into leisure suits or anything people would clearly associate with "the 1970s", but there are still people who hate hippies and the movie is kind of built on a variety show structure of "guest stars" who show up for no good reason and then go away just as quickly. It's not very good and not as much fun as The Blob, and you should probably never watch them back to back (as we did), but if you're in the mood for a very silly movie that also features the blob in it and you already watched The Blob and / or The Blob remake last week, I guess this is a good option.  It was a light, goofy way to close out Summer Fest, and exactly the kind of movie that works in this atmosphere.

 Thus ends Summer Fest 5! It was a great time with a lot of highs and only a few lows. It was ball hugging, bad science-ing, and Ninja-tastic, with just the right does of audience participation. And now we're only three months out from Horror Fest... yeesh, I need to get the lineup together!

Summer Fest 5 (Day One): The Astounding She Monster

 To kick off Summer Fest, I decided it would be fun to continue in the vein of Bad Movie Night favorite She Devil and present another sci-fi / horror hybrid from the 1950s about the inherent danger of femininity. Why? Because in the mid-twentieth century, B-movie filmmakers were obsessed with it, and none of them seemed to be able to make a decent picture out of it. Which is not to say they couldn't make an entertaining picture: it just wasn't the type of entertainment they planned on.

 To wit: The Astounding She Monster shovels expository narration to us for the first ten minutes, to the point that one could suggest that there was no usable dialogue to accompany the image, and then abruptly shifts tone, meanders for a bit, reaches Abbott and Costello-like proportions in the construction of its "chase" scenes, and slaps everything together with the kind of preachy ending that only really worked in The Day the Earth Stood Still. It doesn't help that the ending directly contradicts the opening narration, but before I get ahead of myself, a few observations on the "plot":

 The Astounding She Monster, after a long explanation of other planets that fear the "danger" that Earth poses and how they've determined to "destroy us before we destroy them" then shifts to a fairly mundane kidnapping story told in the least sensible way possible. After a "socialite" leaves her house (one that I'd swear is the same location used for She Devil), two gangsters immediately run her off of the road and force her into their car, leaving hers abandoned in the road for the police to find.

 So that's suspenseful, if seemingly unconnected, but it's worth noting that they then pull into the driveway that she just pulled out of, where her house is. They kidnap her and drive her home, presumably so that somewhere between when the police find her car and when we next see them, the socialite can change her coat and the gangsters can pick up a drunken tag-along. Why? It's never entirely clear, but it makes splitting them up later possible.

 Meanwhile, a geologist who lives in the woods with his dog sees a meteorite land not far from their secluded cabin. The narrator explains he's the "innocent bystander" in this story, which I suppose is true. We don't see him again until after the Astounding She Monster starts wandering around, scaring animals and causing the camera to go all "drunk cam."

 She / It eventually wanders into the road, causing the kidnappers to crash their car (at least, I think that's what happened). Fortunately, this is a contingency in their precision plan, so they head up a road into the woods and eventually end up at a secluded (albeit spacious) cabin. I wonder who might live there?

 Just in case you weren't already convinced that the cast and crew were making it up as they went along, our geologist responds to one of the hoodlums taking the keys to his Jeep by telling him it "isn't safe" to drive at night and that they should stay with him until morning. I'm not exaggerating this at all - he actually advises a man holding him at gunpoint NOT to leave, and this is before he knows about their hostage.

 As you can imagine, the tense situation in the cabin between heroes and villains is only compounded when the Astounding She Monster (sporting proto-Romulan eye makeup) shuffles on up to the cabin and kills one of the gangsters (and the poor dog, who for no apparent reason had to go outside to help fix the Jeep). After running in and out and in and out of the cabin to the point of absurdity, the geologist discovers she's protected by a thin layer of radioactive metal and they concoct a way to kill the Astounding She Monster, only to reveal the film's great twist about why she was actually on Earth.

 If nothing else, I will give the film credit for making good on its promise of the Black Bear the geologist constantly warns of being outside. Aside from that, pretty much everything that happens in The Astounding She Monster is because that's what has to happen to pad out the running time to 67 minutes. If you can imagine a Mad Magazine spoof of an episode of The Twilight Zone adapted by Ed Wood, you're in the ball park of The Astounding She Monster.

 That said, the film is (unintentionally) hilarious - whether struggling to apply logic to the early section of the movie, where nobody but the narrator is speaking (including when the gangsters turn on the radio and the narrator is explaining that the police are closing in on them) to determining exactly how a geologist who lives alone in the woods is going to explain having the missing socialite and a dead body in his bedroom to the police when they arrive, it's a constant source of laughter. While I sincerely doubt director Richard V. Ashcroft (who only made two other movies after this) intended that to be the case, there's something to be said for the accidental end result.

 A note on the poster: it's a great example of selling a product more titillating than the finished result. While one of the gangsters refers to the She Monster as "nude," it's fairly evident she's wearing a body suit and there's nothing "sexy" at all about her in the movie. She shambles about, often unsure what to do with her arms, leaving the end result more comical than sensual, if that was even the goal.

 Up next: Roger Corman presents a movie that is not at all a knock-off of Star Wars - the coincidentally titled Star Crash!

Bad Movie Night Recap (Part One)

 A big chunk of my time away from the ABCs of Movie Masochism has been putting together a feat of REAL movie masochism. I haven't had a proper "Bad Movie Night" in several years, but the basic idea is to put together some of the best of the worst, get some nearest and dearest to come over, and subject them to an all day marathon of movies you would never choose to watch of your own volition.

Sometimes I've been known to cheat - the first Bad Movie Night began with a "field trip" to see Crank 2: High Voltage, but we immediately followed it up with The Giant Claw. Perhaps you've read about The Giant Claw somewhere on this blog. The following day we watched Batman and Robin, Mac and Me, Troll 2, Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky, and the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special. So, uh, the bright spot was clearly the worst subtitles ever on the super-violent Riki-Oh. And I like The Story of Ricky.

 Actually, I like The Giant Claw too, and in some twisted way, anything else that makes it into Bad Movie Night. On some level you have to be able to enjoy these movies, or there's no point in watching them. The trick to why Ed Wood movies and Mystery Science Theater 3000 are so successful isn't that the movies are bad and easy to make fun of - it's that the films are charmingly dumb in their own right. There are plenty of terrible movies I'd never show because we'd all be bored and grow angry at the movie, like when we tried to watch the remake of The Wicker Man at Summer Fest, or any time I've tried to get through The Room.

 With that in mind, I had to program this year's Bad Movie Night with schlock that had gaping plot holes, unfortunate sidekicks, gratudity, and wooden line delivery. Would you like a brief run down of eleven hours worth of terrible decisions? Let's look at the first half of the "night"...

 We started with She Devil, which is not the Roseanne movie but a much better (relatively speaking) film from 1958 about the dangers of tinkering in God's domain. Scientist Dr. Scott and his benefactor physician Dr. Bach live together in Stately Wayne manor like an alternate version of The Dark Knight Returns starring Adam West and Burt Ward. Anyway, Dr. Scott has been experimenting with fruit fly serum to cure well, all diseases. It worked on mice, a rabbit, a cat, a dog, and a cheetah. Well, the cheetah looks suspiciously like a panther, but they work that into the plot.

 Dr. Scott talks Dr. Bach into letting him try the serum out on a woman dying of tuberculosis, and it turns her into Wolverine. Well, Wolverine minus the claws but with the ability to change her hair color at will, which comes in handy because her newfound lease on life comes with the desire to kill people for no good reason. Despite being literally the only other people on Earth who know what this "She Devil" can do, our intrepid men of science can't put two and two together for most of the movie, but it doesn't stop Dr. Scott from hooking up with her (in front of the panther!).

 She Devil is filled with "SCIENCE!" in the best possible way, a rambling, semi-coherent plot, and the most improbable car crash you'll ever see, unless you normally see cars driving backwards over cliffs. From the era where all you needed was a "science"-y gimmick to sell a B-Movie, She Devil is exactly the way to start something like this.

 After that, because bad acting and incomprehensibility aren't unique byproducts of the 1950s, we watched 1987's Hard Ticket to Hawaii, from skin flick auteur Andy Sidaris. If you didn't frequent USA Up All Night or late night Skinemax, I guess there's a chance you missed out on Picasso Trigger or Return to Savage Beach, but Sidaris specialized in pointless nudity, an over-abundance of plot threads, and truly bizarre plot twists.

 I could give you the breakdown of what happens in this film that involves two Playboy Playmates / DEA agents / Travel Guides / Witness Protection Program members / Super Spies, but it would take up the rest of the post. It involves diamonds, espionage, drug dealers, remote controlled helicopters, not knowing how to use nunchucks, a quad-rocket launcher, and a "contaminated" snake that ate "cancer infested rats" and is loose on the island. Also a sportscaster with four names (Jimmy John Jim something or other) that ended up being the bad guy in a movie we watched later, a transvestite bartender, and a quad-rocket launcher. Oh, and a guy doing skateboard tricks with a blow up doll.

 And that's the truth. For the highlights, watch Red Letter Media's breakdown of Hard Ticket to Hawaii.


After pointless nudity and excessive plot, it was time for the "kids movie" portion of Bad Movie Night, and I selected a movie I'd never heard of, A Gnome Named Gnorm. It turns out there's a VERY good reason I'd never heard of it before, despite a cast of well known actors and a director that any fan of sci-fi and horror will recognize by name: Stan Winston.

 Yes, the Stan Winston that designed the Predator, the Terminator, the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, as well as The Monster Squad, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, Galaxy Quest, the Penguin in Batman Returns... yeah. The same one you thought I couldn't possibly be talking about. A Gnome Named Gnorm wasn't his first film - it turns out Pumpkinhead was - but it was the last full length feature he directed, and now I know why.

 A Gnome Named Gnorm (or Upworld) is... uh... well, it's a "buddy cop" movie starring Anthony Michael Hall and a partially animatronic gnome that's the creepiest goddamned thing you'll ever see. It's as though Winston saw The Dark Crystal and thought, "I could make a Gelfling look more realistic" and nobody told him what a horrible idea that would be. Because it is. The first fifteen or so minutes spent with Detective Gallagher (Hall) and Gnorm are cringe-inducing because of how creepy that thing is.

 Now, I'm no expert on children's movies, but I did grow up in the 1980s so I saw a LOT of movies with dumb kid humor. Mac and Me may well be a 90 minute commercial for McDonald's and Coca-Cola, but it knows its target audience and goes for the saccharine plot at every opportunity. A Gnome Named Gnorm can't possibly be for children, but I don't know who the hell would want to watch it, even in 1990.

 To wit: the film begins with an undercover sting operation involving a drug lord name Zadar (not played by Robert Z'Dar, although the Maniac Cop himself IS in the film*)  where Hall ends up being knocked out and the other cop is BLOWN UP in a playground. In fact, Gallagher is only interested in Gnorm because he's a MATERIAL WITNESS TO MURDER. Seriously. All the crap about Gnorm and the "lumen" that people keep stealing or the fact THAT HE'S A GNOME doesn't seem to factor into most of the story. Nobody seems to notice or at the very least care that Gnorm isn't human.  For a while I was convinced that Hall's character was insane and that Gnorm didn't really exist.

 But he does and there's a lot of wrangling between Gallagher's old partner (Claudia Christian) and his chief (Jerry Orbach) and his new partner (Mark Harelik) who Gnorm somehow gets to strip naked before the gnome makes his escape (I must have looked away because I honestly don't know how that happened). There are more murders, a car chase involving a hearse (with full funeral procession behind it) a good samaritan trying to revive the corpse, crotch biting, implied sexual favors, hooks up the sphincter, and a fist fight that wouldn't be out of place in A Christmas Story.

 You know - for kids!

 It's worth mentioning that the plot is coherent enough that Blogorium regular Cranpire was thanking A Gnome Named Gnorm for at least making sense after the last two movies. But then it was time to hit them with the whammy bar...

 Join me tomorrow for the second half of Cap'n Howdy's Bad Movie Night. It only gets better... well, depending on how you look at things.



 * Okay, not AS the Maniac Cop, but considering where this movie goes, it honestly wouldn't be THAT surprising.

Blogorium Review: Attack of the Crab Monsters

 Greetings, gang - the Cap'n has quite a bit to do for tomorrow, but I didn't want to leave you high and dry after a long weekend of not being around, so here's a quick review of an early Roger Corman joint, Attack of the Crab Monsters. It may be low budget, but the film packs a few punches when it counts and is head and shoulders more interesting than a lot of cheapies from the 1950s and 60s.

 A remote island in the Pacific Ocean near atomic bomb tests was the base of a scientific expedition, but when the entire team disappears, the Navy sends a team of scientists and seamen out to discover what happened. Included in the team are nuclear physicist Dr. Karl Weigand (Leslie Bradley), botanist Dr. Jules Deveroux (Mel Welles), geologist Dr. James Carson (Richard Cutting), biologists Dale Drewer (Richard Garland) and Martha Hunter (Pamela Duncan), along with Naval technician Hank Chapman (Russel Johnson), and seamen Ron Fellows (Beach Dickerson) and Jack Summers (Tony Miller). The team arrive to find the island deserted, save for birds and a few (SPOILER) land crabs. The seismic activity is causing the island to collapse, but more concerning to our heroes are mysterious noises in the night, coupled with what sounds like the voices of dead colleagues...

 I must admit that I was pleasantly surprised with Attack of the Crab Monsters, even if it barely scraped the hour mark. It's a compulsively watchable low budget sci-fi / horror hybrid from the late 1950s, one that overcomes its limitations with good ideas and tactful execution.

 Sure, the dialogue is often silly (an example: "Dr. Weigand, you are a great nuclear physicist, while I am a simple provincial botanist, but there are things I do not understand" "There are many things I do not understand also, Jules. You had better climb."), and continuity is touch and go. And let's not forget the "Day for, well, Everything," but Attack of the Crab Monsters exemplifies everything that would become the "Corman Technique." Yes, the budget is limited and shortcuts are taken, but the story makes up for its shortcomings, silly accents, and limited effects.

 Speaking of which, I have to say that Corman wisely holds off the crab monster (technically there are two, making the plural title accurate), instead suggesting with sound and creature POV shots something terrifying in the dark. Believe it or not, the monster itself doesn't look all that bad; the legs perhaps don't move as they ought to, but it's much larger than I was expecting and Corman avoids the old "normal creature on miniature set" trick that hampers so many films from the 50s and 60s.

 Attack of the Crab Monsters is also a more bleak movie than the beginning would lead you to believe, with its joke-y seamen and goofy French botanist (played, of course, by an American). The central gimmick (that an irradiated crab is capable of ingesting its victims and assimilate their memories and voices) is used effectively to keep you guessing, even if the title leaves nothing to the imagination. The constantly shrinking island (a result of nuclear tests that left the area unstable, coupled with strategically placed dynamite) adds some tension, and one is able to mostly overlook the "from the house to the cave and back again" structure of the middle of the film.

 The film also doesn't skimp on some gore, in particular a major character losing their right hand in a graphic fashion, especially for 1957. The ending is abrupt, appropriate, and when considered in the context of everything that came before, actually rather bleak for the survivors. It makes sense when coupled with the opening voice-over, a quotation of Genesis 6:7 ("And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them"). I've given credit to Corman for the trappings and construction of the film, but writer Charles B. Griffith deserves as many kudos for setting the stage for the director / producer.

 I'd always caught pieces of the film on television - it was a fixture on Joe Bob Briggs' Monstervision - but had never actually watched the film from beginning to end until today. It's certainly a "lazy afternoon" kind of movie, or one you can put on in the background at a party, with enough lurid imagery to catch the eye of a wandering guest, and I'd certainly consider programming it during a Horror or Summer Fest afternoon session. While not the best cinema has to offer, Attack of the Crab Monsters is never dull and well worth checking out if you see it on TV.

Quick Reviews: American Scary and The 50 Worst Movies Ever Made

It's Bad Movie Night in six hours or so, and while The Cap'n waits for the first wave of guests to arrive, now seems like a good time to give quick hits on two documentaries. Well, one documentary and a "list" movie, American Scary and The 50 Worst Movies Ever Made, both thanks to Netflix streaming video.

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American Scary is easily the better of the two: it deals specifically with the cultural trend of "Horror Movie Hosts" which caught on regionally in the 50s and 60s. For those not familiar with the movement or have just heard of Elvira by reputation, in the early days of television the networks were starved for content to fill out their schedules. The film studios began leasing out their back catalogs (particularly horror) to the stations, and local stations would punctuate the films with a gag-spouting "host" who alleviated the tension for kids watching at home. As the "Horror Movie Host" spread, it ended up at all hours of the day and grew popular with local audiences.

The documentary covers the birth of the "Host", takes a regional journey through hosts in Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Trenton. Many of the surviving Hosts are on hand to tell their stories, including Roland / Zacherley, Vampira, Ghoularid, Count Gore D. Vol, Crematoria Mortem, Son of the Ghoul, and Penny Dreadful. Elvira doesn't appear in the interviews but he impact is mentioned on a national level.

Along for the ride to share memories of the Hosts are Neil Gaiman, Curtis "Booger" Armstrong, Joe Bob Briggs, Bob Burns, author James Morrow, Chris Gore of Film Threat, Joel Hodgson of MST3k, Tim Conway, Leonard Maltin, Patricia Tallman (the evil witch in Army of Darkness), John Kassir (the Crypt-Keeper), Len Wein and Phil Tippett.

I found the discussion of MST3k's role in carrying on the "host" tradition (albeit in different ways) an interesting take on the show's impact. If you look at Mystery Science Theater 3000 in that light, it does bridge the gap between the corporatization of network television (which effectively ended "Horror Hosts") and the rise of Public Access "Horror Hosts". It's strange that while Joe Bob Briggs appears, no mention is made of Monster Vision. USA Up All Night also fails to register even though it did similar work.

Still, this is quality stuff, and you'll get a lot of footage from people you may have only read about. Check it out.

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The 50 Worst Movies Ever Made is less a documentary and more of a quick hit kind of list. The "movie" itself is 60 minutes long, so you can do the math. Generally you spend barely more than a minute with each film (the runtime includes credits and "graphics" devoted to a booing audience) so it's more of an overview than anything.

All things considered, I did pick up a few ideas for future Bad Movie Nights, and I buffered out the "trailer gallery" for this weekend (available here). I can't really argue with the list too much (other than possibly Spider Baby, which I like), but here are the 50 Worst Movies Ever Made:

50. Glen or Glenda?
49. Mesa of Lost Women
48. Troll
47. Teenage Zombies
46. The Fat Spy
45. Voodoo Woman
44. Ishtar
43. Frankenstein Conquers the World
42. The Creeping Terror
41. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians
40. Howard the Duck
39. They Saved Hitler's Brain
38. Black Belt Jones
37. Greetings!
36. The Great Alligator
35. Hillbillys in a Haunted House
34. TNT Jackson
33. Robot Monster
32. The Incredible Melting Man
31. Firebird 2015 A.D.
30. Dracula Vs. Frankenstein
29. Bride of the Monster
28. Smokey and the Bandit Part 3
27. Xanadu
26. Leonard Part 6
25. The Wild Women of Wongo
24. Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla
23. The Ape
22. Galaxy of Terror
21. The Robot vs the Aztec Mummy
20. Snow White (German Version)
19. Creature from the Haunted Sea
18. The Swinging Cheerleaders
17. Trial of Billy Jack
16. Killers from Space
15. Spider Baby
14. Trog
13. The Three Stooges in Orbit
12. The Crippled Masters
11. Sorceress
10. The Crawling Hand
9. Bloodsucking Freaks
8. J.D.'s Revenge
7. Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster
6. Killer Shrews
5. Great White
4. Plan 9 from Outer Space
3. The Thing with Two Heads
2. Eegah!
1. The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies


Honestly this "movie" has next to no value unless you want a quick overview of some bad movies with next to no insight and clips of bad acting and cheap monsters. All Monsters Attack is better for that, as are the 42nd Street Forever discs. This is a "Watch Once" at best, but I'd advise skipping it altogether.
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Soon we'll be watching another Jason Statham epic: Crank High Voltage. Yes!