Reflections on "Bad Movie Night" by Cap'n Howdy

 Bad Movie Night is coming up this weekend. For some of you that means you'll be at the Blogorium, inexplicably sharing in on the agony and the ecstasy of the best of the worst I can throw at you. For some, it will be a recap you take a look at later on, and think to yourself "wow, I'm glad I didn't have to sit through that." For the Cap'n, it's a fun, if admittedly unorthodox way to spend time with friends. It's also a good opportunity to clarify a few things, as I do from time to time. There's an inherent contradiction coming up, but I am vast and contain multitudes. Or I'm a walking contradiction. I can't remember. Anyway, let's discuss how Bad Movie Night fits into the evolving notion of the Blogorium and the Cap'n Howdy mission statement overall.

 Without fail, at some point during Bad Movie Night, someone is going to ask me if I'm going to see X or Y terrible movie, and I'm probably going to say "no". A friend recently asked if there was a review on the Blogorium for Tusk, and was confused / disappointed when I explained that I stopped watching the movie around the time that Johnny Depp showed up. That was the straw that broke the camel's back for me, the point at which I realized that nothing Kevin Smith had in store for Tusk was worth investing any more time on. If you really want to know how I feel about post-SMODcast Kevin Smith as a director, there's a review for Red State out there that pretty much covers it. I'll add that it isn't particularly enthralling to hear his M.O. for making movies that aren't sequels is to get really high, record a podcast, and then turn whatever he comes up with into a movie. You know, like "Jaws with a moose." Nevertheless, I fully expect a question about how excited I am for Mallrats 2 (not at all).

 That said, it's totally fair to ask me that, especially at something called Bad Movie Night. Historically speaking, the get together-s hosted by the Cap'n have centered around horror movies or schlock, and primarily schlock. They're fun films to rally around, and are conducive to a party atmosphere. It's an informal crowd that comes to Blogorium events, and while you aren't expected to participate in any MST3k-like riffing on movies, I don't discourage making comments when something just doesn't make sense. The specious plot that bridges gratuitous nudity in Andy Sidaris films practically begs for some level of commentary. But I wouldn't do the same if I was at Nevermore (well, sometimes, but much more quietly). We do, on occasion, watch screwball comedies or more serious fare, and there's talk of branching into different "fest" directions, but let's stick with Bad Movie Night for now.

 Bad Movie Night was borrowed from a tradition my brother and his friends started more than a decade ago: during birthday celebrations, they'd each buy the birthday boy or girl the worst movie they could find, and everyone would have to sit through it. They would drink heavily and apparently it got quite loud. I'd never actually been to one, but the first Bad Movie Night was built loosely on that premise. Having had some experience with Horror Fest and Summer Fest, I thought I could program one that had some really entertaining stinkers, and we'd kick it off with a field trip to see Crank 2: High Voltage. Trust me, while highly entertaining, it falls squarely within the rubric of "bad movie". That was followed by The Giant Claw, Batman and Robin, Mac & Me, Troll 2, and Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky. A good time was had by all, and whenever possible, I've tried to keep it going.

 The Blogorium has existed in various forms over the years, but since I moved to this service, I've kept the "about" information over to the right basically the same. Sometimes, the phrase "Trash Savant" has come back to haunt me, because it implies that my movie watching palate is limited to sifting through lots of garbage to find the Least Worst Of. And I get it, because around the turn of the century / millennium / whatever, there was a point where the Cap'n and friends would go see anything. Like, literally, we'd just go see a movie to see a movie. How else do you explain watching The In Crowd, or Loser? Or the double feature of The Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps and The Replacements when I had an entire multiplex to choose from? Yes, I saw 8mm and Idle Hands and the first two Resident Evil movies. On the big screen. I don't know why. Well, I do: they were playing and we had already seen Payback or whatever else we really wanted to see. Sure, I also spent the summer of 99 watching Eyes Wide Shut and The Sixth Sense, even The Blair Witch Project and South Park (and, yes, The Phantom Menace), but for some reason only the bad movies stuck.

 It continued over the years, and yeah, I would organize group outings for Alien vs. Predator or The Matrix Reloaded, or Professor Murder and I would just go see, well, anything. Again, allow me to stress that yes, we only saw Paycheck because we were too late for Win a Date with Tad Hamilton. I don't remember why we went to see Godsend or The Butterfly Effect, or even Saw. A lot of that was a throwback to high school, I think, when we would regularly go to the discount theater to see things like The Big Hit or Suicide Kings, or The Big Lebowski. And also Godzilla, Lost in Space, Scream 2, and whatever else was playing. It was fun, and cheap, and bad movies are tremendously entertaining. The summer of 2008 had to be a record for "what's playing this week," because I saw The Dark Knight, The Happening, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, and The X-Files: I Want to Believe. One of them was good.

 But, over time, they became a smaller part of my cinematic consumption. I know that a lot of friends from that era didn't necessarily keep up with that, which is why I'm still chided for not having watched Alien vs. Predator: Requiem. I'll probably still get grief for it, because I have no plans to watch it, and what I'll go out to the theater to see grows more and more limited. Most of the things I've seen on the big screen over the last year ended up on the Best of List. The last two movies I saw were Birdman and It Follows, both based on the great word of mouth I had been hearing from friends. Despite what people might assume, It Follows was the first movie I saw in theaters from 2015. These days, if a movie just looks bad (like, oh, Seventh Son), I'm less inclined to see it just to see it. The last time that happened was probably Movie 43, which was every bit as forgettable and terrible as you've probably heard. Lockout was the last time I really had fun with a terrible movie, which is why it's playing as a double feature with Lucy at Bad Movie Night this year.

 Herein lies the aforementioned contradiction, because I do still watch bad movies. Hell, I watched Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster last week, and Sorority House Massacre II the week before that. They are, by no stretch of the imagination, good movies. In the past you'd have reviews up for those, instead of It Follows and The Babadook. In fact, Sorority House Massacre and Sorority House Massacre II are probably going to end up under the "Cranpire Movies" banner, which is what I tend to use when I want to talk about schlock. It's not that Cranpire will watch anything (even he has limits), but it's become a running joke between us that he'll sit through what I won't. Still, the two (technically three) Sorority House Massacre films are so disparate, even from each other, that I'd like to share their charms with you all. But I'm probably never going to watch Taken 3. And I doubt I'll ever finish Tusk.

 The funny thing about having had this blog for so long is that I'm frequently held responsible for reviews I wrote years ago. That's fair, I suppose, but I have tried to evolve as a writer and as a reviewer, so when I look back at a quarter review of something like Student Bodies and have to defend it when someone from the film takes exception to it, I cringe a little. Not because I didn't write it - I did, in the middle of a Fest - but because it's not really a review. It's a reaction to something that happened that I wrote quickly while people had a smoke break. It's a time capsule of a moment in the history of the Blogorium, but it's not how I would write it today. But you can't tell that to somebody who finds the review through a Google search - it's not an ongoing evolution of film criticism to them. It's a review, one that says the movie they like sucks.

 Or worse, it's The Mechanic review, which was a run of the mill Jason Statham movie, where I didn't feel one way or the other about it. In fact, by and large I gave up reviewing films headlined by Statham because they'd all be like The Mechanic - an overview of the plot, general comments about the action, he was good, the supporting cast was okay, the story was serviceable. Other than the Crank films, it's a pretty succinct reaction to most of his starring roles, and if I can't add anything to the conversation, I'll find something else to review. That doesn't stop people from reading The Mechanic review - which they do - and assuming that's currently how I feel about the movie. Honestly, four years later? I've forgotten almost everything about it. Even the "World Champion" ring, but it doesn't matter. Everything is contemporary on the internet.

 Which brings us back to Bad Movie Night and bad movies in general. As long as the Blogorium exists and posts can be found ala carte on search engines, people can and will safely assume that's all the Cap'n is about. And that's fair - I like the Dr. Re-Animator picture at the top of the page and The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman background scroll bar. Perhaps someday they'll change, but hopefully it gives visitors an indicator that things aren't taken too seriously around here. Please don't think that I don't enjoy bad movies: one of the things that drove me crazy in film courses was an attitude of intellectual snobbery, of a dismissal of "low art" that wasn't to be bothered with. It wasn't rampant, but there is an attitude of "if it isn't a classic or a modern classic, it's not worth bothering my time with". I remember working with someone who sneered at the idea that Peter Jackson would adapt The Lovely Bones because it was "pop fiction" and that he was "above" that*. He should just stick to Tolkein, I guess. Look how well that worked out for The Hobbit.

 Over the years, I've tried harder to provide a balance of "high" and "low" art, and to be honest with you, I don't watch a lot of these neo B-Movies. If you read my Hobo with a Shotgun review, you'll notice that I didn't have a lot of fun with the movie. I hated Machete Kills. There wasn't enough about Wolf Cop to merit a review, to be honest, and I don't watch Syfy Channel Originals. It's not a matter of being dismissive of them, to jump back a paragraph - I don't particularly care one way or the other, and I'm not going to tell anyone not to watch them. I try to mention them as little as possible, so unless someone asks why a Sharknado movie isn't at Bad Movie Night or Summer Fest, you won't hear about it in the Blogorium. It's the same thought process behind the Transformers series: I haven't seen them, I'm not planning on it, so why devote time and energy into insulting them? There are literally thousands of blogs that do that. But if you want to know about The Beach Girls and the Monster, I've got you covered.

 Moving forward, the goal is to try to bring you reviews for films you maybe haven't heard about, old and new. If it's a major release, I might review it if there's something worth bringing up I haven't seen anywhere else. Otherwise, you probably won't see it until the Recap. In the meantime, I'd rather focus on movies like Under the Skin or Spider Baby (to name a couple from last year). They're very different movies for very different audiences, but I really enjoyed both of them, and you might too. I'm always open to suggestions, but it's been a long time since the Cap'n would go watch literally anything. By the same token, I'll pay money to see Samurai Cop with an audience, even though I own two copies of Samurai Cop. It was worth it to see their reaction. That was the same situation with Things at last year's Bad Movie Night - I suffered through it alone so I could see the faces I made on my friends. And by the way, they could have left, but no one did.
 

 This year's Bad Movie Night is a... shall we say, unique assemblage of "so bad, it's good"**: Continuing in our trend of "being afraid of women in the 1950s," there's Devil Girl from Mars, followed by High School Confidential, Disney's The Black Hole, Raw Force, the aforementioned Luc Besson double feature, and a special Trappening. Because you shouldn't always know what you're getting at a Bad Movie Night. A recap should follow some time next week, and then after that, it's back to whatever strikes the Cap'n as worth writing about. Maybe schlock, maybe not. We're on the cusp of blockbuster season, so maybe those will make it into the mix. I'm not sure. Above all else, my goal for the immediate future is to make Cap'n Howdy's Blogorium as unpredictable as possible, so as to keep you from settling in to "this is what to expect." Hell, I might even go back and re-review some of the older posts, just for kicks. Stay tuned, and if you're on your way to Bad Movie Night, prepare yourself...



 * I never saw The Lovely Bones, so I can't weigh in on whether it was any good or not, but it's a similar attitude to refusing to read a book that's been adapted into a film - like Trainspotting - because that "taints" the source material. And yes, that was another instance that came up with a similarly dismissive person.
** That's a big criteria for me - bad movies that are just bad are a waste of everybody's time.

Summer Fest Recap: Day One

 Greetings, virtual Summer Fest-ers! Welcome to Cap'n Howdy's handy recap-o-rama-rama, covering all of your Hyde Park Summer Fest Massacre Part 6 needs!

 This year I'm going to try something a little different in covering the films watched during the Fest. Instead of full write-ups that take much longer and give away too much, I'm going to appropriate the structure of "Hamlet Week" from a few years ago to give you some idea how these movies work in tandem with each other. Fest entries often have some shared elements, and you'll find that many selections this year overlap in the most unusual ways.

 We started the Fest with:

 Creature with the Atom Brain

 Year of Production: 1955

 What's the Haps, Cap?: Gangster Frank Buchanan (Michael Granger) wants revenge on men who betrayed him, so he forces ex-Nazi scientist Dr. Wilhelm Steigg (Gregory Gay) to reanimate the dead using radioactive blood and electrodes implanted in the brain. They are controlled by Buchanan's voice and take vengeance on his enemies. Police are baffled and eventually declare Marshal Law on "Our City."

 Who's the Hero?: Dr. Chet Walker (Richard Denning), who works in the police laboratory, along with his brother(?) Capt. Dave Harris (S. John Launer). They try to work out the source of the radiation and the common element between murders, until (SPOILER) Buchanan kills Dave and uses him to get to the targets in police custody. Dave also shows up at Chet's house, confuses his wife, Joyce (Angela Stevens), and daughter Penny (Linda Bennett). Zombie Dave breaks Penny's doll, presumably because, in death, he's a jerk.

 Bad Science: Chet mixes up a radioactive concoction in the police laboratory using chemicals on his desk to prove that the blood they found wasn't blood. Buchanan and Steigg's highly radioactive lab is accessed through a plastic tunnel that's open on both sides and is attached to a door that anybody could open at any time. Planes specially rigged to detect high amounts of radiation repeatedly fly over Steigg's "shed" and never find anything. The device that controls Steigg's zombies kinda looks like The Tingler.

 Other Bad Ideas:  Chet jumps out of a car moving at high speeds and shows no signs of injury. He also shares confidential police investigation information with Joyce, who then tells Zombie Dave / Buchanan everything needed to kill men in protective custody. Nobody notices the obvious scars from brain surgery. Buchanan's suit is too big. Never give your producers a role that requires them to say more than one line of dialogue. Other characters calling Dr. Chet Walker "Joe" throughout the film.

 Unusually Progressive Moments: Penny gives her girl doll a boy's name, and argues with Dr. Chet Walker when he protests. This is offset by Chet's casual ass-slap of Joyce when he comes home from work. The Ex-Nazi scientist objects to Buchanan's plan and wanted to use his experiments for good, although it's not clear how.

 Recurring Summer Fest Themes: Geiger Counter, Questionable Science, Using the Dead for Nefarious Purposes, Marshal Law, Monsters That Hate Radios, Explosions in Close Proximity to Actors, German Doctors.

 Final Prognosis: Creature with the Atom Brain starts off with a bang, becomes a boring procedural, and then has a surprisingly violent conclusion. Lots of bad science and examples of 1950s casual sexism. We're continually introduced to characters by seeing their name and job title on an office door. It wasn't clear that Dr. Chet Walker was the hero until about halfway in, but the ending kind of makes up for the lackluster mid-section. It's always nice to start the Fest with some Bad Science.

 Remote Control

 Year of Production: 1988

 What's the Haps, Cap?: Aliens are using a videotape called "Remote Control" to beam a signal to Earth. Anyone who watches the tape is driven to murder, and only two video store clerks can save the day...

 Who's the Hero?: Cosmo (Kevin Dillon), Georgie (Christopher Wynne), and later on, Belinda (Deborah Goodrich). Jennifer Tilly appears briefly as Allegra (with a truly 80s hairdo), but is killed by Victor (Frank Beddor), Belinda's boyfriend. Oops, SPOILER.

 Bad Science: Ummmm the aliens also try to send their signal through a plastic antenna in the "Remote Control" store display?

Other Bad Ideas: Cosmo kills a police officer, steals his car, and wonders why people are chasing him. When our heroes discover the company responsible for Remote Control (run by Asians, plus the grandpa from TerrorVision) has a truck full of tapes with a delivery list, they follow the list but don't destroy the tapes inside. Cosmo tries to woo Belinda by watching a dubbed version of Truffaut's Stolen Kisses, and it doesn't work out for him. Never give Cosmo a gun - he's a terrible video store employee, but a great killer.

Uniquely 80s Moments: Other than everything about Jennifer Tilly in the movie? Well, Remote Control is about video stores and tapes, so if you tune out of the movie, there are many opportunities to get lost in background details. Posters and VHS artwork are just about everywhere in the film, and director Jeff Lieberman (Squirm, Satan's Little Helper) and his production designers have a great eye for finding weird juxtapositions. In what other movie would you find a copy of Tess next to the remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice? Also, every video store in Los Angeles had the poster for House, according to this movie. Make sure to check out the Retro club, which for 1988 is anything but.

 Wait, Did You Say All the Villains Are Asian?: According to the IMDB trivia, Lieberman did this as a tribute to Japanese sci-fi movies from the 1950s and 60s, so I guess that's... okay? I should point out the Main villains are Asian - lots of possessed people are just normal 1980s Caucasians.

Recurring Summer Fest Themes: Aliens, Films Released in the Same Year, Explosions, Mind Control, Killing the Most Interesting Character Off Too Early, Boring Main Character, Vehicular Chicanery.

 Interesting Sidenote: During Remote Control, not a single person could name one other movie Kevin Dillon had been in. I forbade the use of IMDB until after the film was over, at which point we realized how many he had been in that we had seen. Still, without looking it up, name one.

Final Prognosis: Remote Control is an amusing sibling to TerrorVision. It's not quite as campy, and Kevin Dillon has about as much charisma in this film as a toaster, but it moves at a brisk pace, is unusual enough to keep you invested, and has a ton of background details to smooth over the bumps. The only way to get it at the moment is to order it from the director (like I did), but if you like TerrorVision, it's worth considering.


 The Visitor

 Year of Production: 1979

 What's the Haps, Cap?: Uh... Well, have you ever seen The Omen? It's kind of like that, except not.

 Who's the Hero?: Well, I guess maybe the title character, played by director John Huston (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre). He's from outer space, and after interrupting Space Jesus (Franco Nero)'s story about the evil General Sateen, he flies - via Eastern Airlines - to Atlanta to hang out on rooftops with a bunch of bald dudes. Eventually he starts stalking Katy Collins (Paige Conner), the improbably Southern daughter of Barbara Collins (Joanne Neil) and Dr. Sam Collins (Sam Peckinpah). Katy is also somehow the progeny of Sateen, and has psychic powers that she uses to mess with basketball players and people ice skating. Oh, and she has a pet falcon, that she keeps inside of their apartment.

 What the Hell is This Movie???: I know, right? Nothing about The Visitor makes any sense, and I'm not even halfway through the setup of the plot. Barbara is divorced from Sam and is dating Raymond Armstead (Lance Henriksen), who owns The Atlanta Rebels basketball team and is also part of a secret cabal of Sateen worshipers run by Dr. Walker (Mel Ferrer), who want him to impregnate Barbara with a boy, because that would be better than Katy. Also, when Katy accidentally(?) shoots her mother in the spine during a birthday party, a nanny / housekeeper (Shelley Winters) comes in and slaps the living hell out of Katy. Detective Jake Dunham (Glenn Ford) is investigating the shooting, until Katy calls him a pervert and the falcon causes some serious vehicular mayhem. Did I mention that most of this paragraph happens before the halfway point of The Visitor?

Bad Science: Take a look at the first two entries. See anything that sounds remotely plausible in there? I guess after Raymond fails and Dr. Walker sends him away, the cabal stages an "alien invasion" that results in Barbara being pregnant (how she drives while paralyzed and without hand controls isn't even addressed), so she has to go to Sam for an abortion. Peckinpah was so drunk that most of his scene is dubbed, with random cutaways to cover points where they clearly had no usable footage. I guess the worst science involves Huston, who stands on the roof and makes lights appear. He also takes a plane from outer space to Atlanta, and can't seem to walk down stairs in a timely fashion.

 Other Bad Ideas: Well, when the Italian producer and director decided they didn't like the screenwriter's rip-off of The Omen, they continued changing it and eventually fired the writer. The music is jarringly inappropriate for almost every scene, but my favorite is what we dubbed the "walking up the stairs" theme for the titular character. It's so bombastic and juxtaposed with, I kid you not, walking up stairs. Nothing else. We couldn't wait to hear it again. The final scene, where pigeons and a few doves attack Katy, features one of the fakest looking plastic birds I've ever seen. The Visitor is pretty much just one Bad Idea after another.

 Recurring Summer Fest Themes: Aliens, Evil Scientists, Animal Related Mayhem, Psychic Powers, Southern Accents, Vehicular Chicanery.

 Final Prognosis: I'd be hard pressed to call The Visitor a good, or even competent movie. It's almost impossible to follow in any way, so you're better off not trying to figure out what's happening or why. However, as movie watching experiences go, there's really nothing quite like The Visitor. It starts out like a realized version of Jodorowsky's Dune, and just gets weirder from there. Just be prepared to say "What?!" a lot, and collapse into fits of uncontrollable laughter.


 Tales from the Crypt Presents Demon Knight

 Year of Production: 1995

 What's the Haps, Cap?: Brayker (William Sadler) is a man on the run. He's somewhere in New Mexico, in a high speed chase with Billy Zane (Billy Zane) in hot pursuit. Brayker runs out of gas and decides to bring a gun to a car fight in the middle of the road, which works about as well as you would think it might. But somehow both of them survive and Brayker sneaks into Wormwood, NM, where he tries to steal a car, but some dumb kid (Ryan Sean O'Donohue) rats him out. He has some wino booze with wino "Uncle" Willy (Dick Miller) and decides to crash at a motel that used to be a church. He meets the owner (CCH Pounder), a prostitute (Brenda Bakke), a mailman (Charles Fleischer), and Jeryline (Jada Pinkett), who is on work release and cleans the stoves (badly). When Billy Zane and two cops (Gary Farmer and John Schuck) show up shortly after Roach (Thomas Haden Church), we hit the magic number on Brayker's palm, and... demons.

 Who's the Hero?: I guess that'd be Brayker, although nobody seems to agree with that until almost everybody is dead. One could make an argument that the Cryptkeeper (John Kassir) is our hero, since he's presenting this here movie, but if it's not Brayker, I guess it's Jesus. SPOILER if you say that out loud 45 seconds before the first flashback, like Cranpire did.

 Wait... Jesus?: Yeah, but not Space Jesus. Just regular old crucified Jesus. His blood is what the first Demon Knight captures in a "key" to the universe that Demons want. The blood protects you and prevents Demons from crossing thresholds. Demon blood, on the other hand, makes more Demons. Or, at least, Billy Zane blood does anyway. It's the same color as what I imagine the radioactive blood in Creature with the Atom Brain would look like.

 And You're Saying Billy Zane Plays Himself?: I can understand your confusion, but we can all pretend he's more like the boring characters he plays in Titanic or The Phantom if you prefer. I'd like to think that the dude who is practically gnawing on the scenery in Demon Knight is the REAL Billy Zane, and that he had one opportunity to let loose and just be himself. Even if the rest of the cast weren't a "who's who" of "that guy!" Demon Knight would be a no brainer just to watch Zane own the screen.

 Bad Science: None that I can think of. Maybe Brayker surviving the car explosion. I get why Billy Zane survived, but not so much Brayker. Demon Knights are surprisingly when it comes to injuries. Also, when Zane punches through the Sherriff's skull (SPOILER), his arm gets stuck, which seems more plausible than when Jason Voorhees does it. Roach also lets someone hook jumper cables to his nipples - that doesn't seem safe.

 Other Bad Ideas: Well, Billy Zane uses his demon powers to lure people into doing his bidding - also known as turning them into Demons who try to steal they key. Uncle Willy is lured in by Zane as a bartender and surrounded by topless woman and at least one porn star. Since Willy is a lush, I don't even know why he needed the women, but Gratudity sells, right? Roach doesn't even try to make a deal, he just gives the damn thing to Billy Zane, because Brayker is "kinda bossy." At least we get to see Billy Zane pop a sponge out of his mouth. I can't leave this section without mentioning how unhygienic Jeryline is for (SPOILER) covering herself with the blood in the key just to kill Billy Zane's buzz when she (DOUBLE SPOILER) takes over as Demon Knight. I mean, yeah, Jesus and stuff, but that's blood going back millenia. Gross. Also, it came from (TRIPLE SPOILER) Brayker's heart, and (QUADRUPLE SPOILER) Demon Possessed Kid's Gene Simmons Tongue had been all up in there. Not very sanitary, if you ask me.

 Uniquely 90s Moments: The opening credits / car chase play over Filter's "Hey Man, Nice Shot." If there's a better time capsule of something that was cool for one year and one year only, that'll do it. I guess there's another post-grunge song that plays during the credits, but I already forgot what it was.

 Recurring Summer Fest Themes: Gratudity, Vehicular Chicanery, Mind Control, Using the Dead for Nefarious Purposes, Southwestern Locations, Religious Imagery

 Final Prognosis: As Tales from the Crypt movies go, I still prefer the Amicus version from the 1970s, but if it's post-TV show, I'm going with Demon Knight over Bordello of Blood. This is far and away the best thing Billy Zane ever did, and he owns every moment he's on screen. It's cool to go back and see a pre-Big Willie Style Jada Pinkett take control of the movie, or that someone built a film around William Sadler. The cast is so much fun because you don't usually get to see any of them showcased, let alone all of them (this was almost ten years before Sideways, and if you say "I liked Thomas Haden Church on Ned and Stacey," you're lying. Maybe Wings - I know Cranpire likes Wings.) Anyway, Demon Knight is just fun, and if you somehow think "Ernest Dickerson... why do I know that name" after the "directed by" credit, it's because he was Spike Lee's cinematographer. The director of Demon Knight shot Do the Right Thing. And that's a good thing.


 Join us tomorrow for even more Summer Fest madness, gang! We have so many movies to come...

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.

Retro Review: The Terminal

 Today's Retro Review is a special request from Blogorium regular Cranpire, who asked me to write about "anything with Chi McBride." Specifically, he asked for Let's Go to Prison, but it's hard to write a movie where I look back at something I never saw the first time around. He also mentioned Baby Mama, which I did see, but that doesn't appear to have Chi McBride in it.

 So while refreshing my memory about what Chi McBride movies I have seen (answer: not many) on IMDB*, I remembered he was in The Frighteners, and as it's October that makes sense to take a look back at. But instead I'm going to write about Steven Spielberg's The Terminal.

 I don't remember much about The Terminal because I saw it on DVD seven or eight years ago and while it was pleasant I would not consider it to be of a "higher quality" Steven Spielberg joint. It's like mid-level Spielberg, somewhere between Hook and Always. Not as bad as 1941 but not in the same league as the much better movie he made before this, Catch Me If You Can. It's definitely not a movie that anybody's going to mention in Spielberg or Tom Hanks' obituary. Chi McBride's, maybe.

 So Chi McBride plays Mulroy, who if I remember correctly is one of the guys who works in the baggage claim / behind the scenes mechanic stuff with Diego Luna (Cas de Mi Padre) and who befriends Viktor Navorski (Hanks), the foreign guy trapped in the airport because the fictional country he comes from no longer exists and he therefore cannot leave the terminal and go to America or be sent home. Why this was a movie and not a sitcom, I'm not sure, but now that I've mentioned this fact we can look forward to it on ABC next fall.

 And yes, it's based on a true story about an Iranian who lived in a French airport for 17 years because somebody stole his passport, but that's not going to stop sitcom shenanigans. Tom Hanks is clearly playing eastern European in the movie, and people love eastern European stereotypes (see: Perfect Strangers).

 Honestly I can't remember what Chi McBride's story arc is, so I'm just going to assume he's involved in helping Viktor to woo Enrique (Luna)'s love interest, Dolores Torres (Zoe Saldana) by appealing to her love of Star Trek. I wonder if JJ Abrams saw The Terminal and thought "Huh. Well, that was okay, but I think I found my new Uhura for the Star Trek remake I'll direct in five years!" Stranger things have happened (see: The Terminal sitcom next fall on ABC). They are successful, or at least more successful than Viktor is at wooing Amelia (Catherine Zeta-Jones), which if I remember correctly doesn't pan out. Sometimes it's too much to ask for a stewardess (pardon me, flight attendant) to fall in love with a Krakozhian.

 Even back then I wondered why this movie needed to be two hours long, and as impressive as the terminal is (and it's a set) and the actors being fine and all, the script by Andrew Niccol (In Time) just doesn't need to be this long. I forgot I was supposed to care about the box of photos of jazz musicians that Viktor is carrying around (is that right? I'm just going to pretend it is and somebody can correct me in the comments) and it just felt like one of those contrivances to keep this movie from seeming as trivial and formulaic as it is.

 And it's not like I hated The Terminal, I just didn't think it was all that impressive. Catch Me If You Can, which has an as arguably gimmicky "true story" premise, manages to pack in more genuine emotion and unexpected twists and turns and while I didn't like Minority Report it looked like a different movie than Spielberg usually makes. Mind you, Munich pretty much removed any questions about whether the director was taking it easy during the mid-2000s, so The Terminal is just kind of there. It's a movie people don't mention much, but I bet Chi McBride doesn't mind putting it on his filmography. I mean, he's worked with Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg. I mean, no offense Dominic Sena**, but their track records are a little better.

 


 * He was also in I, Robot, Undercover Brother, and a bunch of movies I never saw because they were Mercury Rising, Waiting..., Still Waiting..., Cradle 2 The Grave, Roll Bounce, Annapolis, and Revenge of the Nerds Part III.
** But in all seriousness, Mr. Sena, I did like Kalifornia a lot when I saw it in high school. Haven't seen it since but I bet it's still pretty good.

Retro Review: Bad Santa

 Picking up where we left off last week, Bad Santa was released on November 21st, 2003. That puts it out of the range of "movies we saw on Christmas night" but is certainly something we saw leading up to the Holidays. If I remember correctly, that was the winter between jobs, so I had time to be around town and see several movies with friends. It is unclear to me whether I saw Bad Santa with Professor Murder or with Cranpire. I attribute this to the fact that we saw it in the same auditorium of the Crossroads 20 where I saw Ghost World twice, once with each person. Even though Ghost World played a full two years before Bad Santa, I am frequently conflating the memories thanks to director Terry Zwigoff.

 Going in, this was what we knew about Bad Santa: it was from the same director as Crumb and Ghost World, the Coen brothers produced the film and possibly wrote an early version of the story, and Billy Bob Thornton was the "bad Santa" in question. Beyond that, the anemic trailer did an okay job drawing us in:



 Thankfully, the vulgarity was immediately worth the price of admission. Bad Santa is a filthy movie, one that doesn't really cave in to the "bad guys turns nice" ending (a holiday predecessor to Gran Torino, I like to think), and we laughed our asses off. I'd share the litany of horrible things Willie mutters, but it's more fun to let you discover it for yourselves. Bad Santa is a spiritual sibling to The Ref, but one that laces its cynicism with grossly inappropriate behavior on all parts.

 It wasn't until later (following the existence of Badder Santa) that I learned Zwigoff was angry with the cut released by Miramax, apparently one that included narration and additional sequences he had nothing to do with. While I can imagine that I may have been able to objectively sit down and watch the Director's Cut of Bad Santa, I made the mistake of watching Zwigoff's Art School Confidential first, a movie I found to be pretentious and obvious in its criticism of "audience expectations." His shorter cut of Bad Santa removed everything that Zwigoff wasn't involved in, restoring the film to a disjointed, sloppy, sarcastic slice of nihilism that played like Kevin Smith's early cut of Clerks.

 Count me among the unwashed, illiterate masses if you like, but the Weinsteins did Bad Santa a service by tinkering with the director's vision. I hate saying that, but I take a similar stance with 20th Century Fox's theatrical version of Donnie Darko, made with the concessions of Richard Kelly (but against his desires). Zwigoff pushed his outsider characters too far beyond a film that's worth investing time in, and his cut plays like a Todd Solondz film without the laughs. Yes, feel free to stop and let that last sentence sink in. The self satisfied commentary where he lambasts the "dumbing down" of his film doesn't help the Director's Cut either, but that's neither here nor there.

 Anyway, I have one last anecdote about Bad Santa, or more specifically the Badder Santa DVD. I brought it home to show to my family in December of 2004, and my father was appalled at the rampart bad taste on display. The following year, I bought a copy of the DVD, put it in a shoebox surrounded by coal, and scrawled "Merry F'n Christmas from Bad Santa" and left it under the tree for him. For some reason, he's never opened the DVD. But he did keep the box. Strange.

Retro Review: Christmas Surprises

 For today's Retro Review, I thought I'd take a holiday trip down memory lane. You see, every year we (that being the Cap'n, Professor Murder, and Cranpire) go and see a movie on December 25th. We've been doing it for so long I can't actually remember when the tradition started. Some years we don't see anything new, but we usually try to go out and give those poor bastards working on Christmas a reason to tear their tickets and pop that horrible popcorn. Here are a few instances where our often assumed "bad" taste served us well...

 Last year we didn't see anything on Christmas night - there was talk of Black Swan, but Cranpire was sick and the weather was indeed frightful. We did see Tron Legacy two days later, and True Grit the week after that, but it doesn't really work in this situation. Let's skip back to 2009...

 Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans - technically, we saw this the day AFTER Christmas, but since the widely loathed Sherlock Holmes was the 25th's essential viewing and it still seems like I know five people who like it and nobody else, let's focus on a movie that was the exact opposite. If you've seen the trailer for Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, you - like we did - had a sneaking suspicion that it was going to S-U-C-K. Trainwreck levels of suckery punctuated by Nicolas Cage Mega-Acting. Twas not the case, fortunately: there was an ace in the sleeve, and that's Werner Herzog. Never count out that crazy German filmmaker from being able to take a bad idea ("hey, let's not actually remake Bad Lieutenant or really make a sequel, but give it roughly the same kind of sleazebag main character") and turn it into an exquisitely bizarre but also really great movie. It has iguana POV shots, for crying out loud, and it still works.

  Role Models - There's going to be a trend here of "movies we thought might be okay / kinda bad but went and saw because Cranpire wouldn't come to the really terrible ones" which is exactly how Role Models happened. The film wasn't even still playing in regular theatres - we went to the $1.50 joint on Blue Ridge Road and watched another movie that was much better than advertised. The ace in this sleeve? David Wain - director of Wet Hot American Summer and one of the creative forces behind The State. As I wrote in 2008, it's a "hybrid of Judd Apatow and David Wain sensibilities" and works despite that odd pairing.

 Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story - I've been beating the drum for Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story for the last four years and I'm not going to stop now. I'm so glad we skipped AvP:R because Cranpire (shock) didn't want to come out for our annual Christmas night movie, because I probably wouldn't have given Walk Hard a shot otherwise. It just seemed too questionable as quality went. How wrong I was. Just watch it, like right now.

 Rocky Balboa - The last movie I can remember Cranpire coming with us to see (unless you count Tron Legacy, which doesn't count because it was a few days later). It washed away the awful memories of Rocky V, which always seems to be on television. Honestly, it's been five years and I don't remember a whole lot other than being pleasantly surprised. We tend to be rewarded for taking a shot on questionable movies during the holidays - that's the trend I'm sensing here...

 I don't know what we saw in 2005, because looking at the list there's not a film released in December that I saw until it was released on DVD the following spring. That would include The Matador, Munich, The New World, Santa's Slay, Match Point, and Brokeback Mountain. It's possible we saw King Kong, but since Cranpire hated the Lord of the Rings films, I somehow doubt he's go see another three hour
Peter Jackson joint. Going even further back, I can only find Dracula 2000, which wasn't a good "surprise." I wonder where Bad Santa fit into all of this...

Retro Review: The Blair Witch Project and Book of Shadows - Blair Witch 2

 At this point, it's been so long since The Blair Witch Project came out that people have by and large forgotten all about the film. Considering that we're still feeling the impact of "found footage" movies, including no less than three that I can name released in the U.S. this year (The Troll Hunter, [REC]2, and the upcoming Apollo 18). That's not including [REC], Quarantine, Diary of the Dead, Paranormal Activity 1 and 2, The Last Exorcism, Cloverfield, The Zombie Diaries and The Poughkeepsie Tapes. These are, in one form or another, the offspring of The Blair Witch's Projects success; a low-budget horror film passed along like an urban legend until it was time to explode in the mainstream. It captured the zeitgeist at a time when horror was winding down from self-referential Scream knockoffs, and scared the hell out of a lot of people.

 And then there was that second film. Yeah, I don't blame you for not remembering Book of Shadows.

 Back to the success story - The Blair Witch Project was a movie I'd hear about long before I saw it. In 1999, the internet was agog about this "found footage" of three film students making a documentary in Burkittsville, Maryland about the "Blair Witch" legend. Something went horribly wrong and they were never heard from again. In fact, I bet you remember the tagline:

 In October of 1994 three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary...A year later their footage was found.

  Very few people knew who Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez were, and since The Blair Witch Project ended without credits, there was good reason to perpetuate the myth that this WAS "found footage" and not a horror movie designed to make you think it was real. By the time it opened wide in the U.S. (in the summer of 1999), internet savvy geeks already knew it wasn't (online critics love to be the people who have the "scoop" that shows the seams of an illusion), but there were plenty of "John and Jane Moviegoer"'s who didn't know. I was taking some summer classes at N.C. State, and there was a guy in one of the poetry classes that I overheard talking about having a bootlegged copy of the film. A clerk at Schoolkids Music claimed it had already been in "secret" screenings in Raleigh when I purchased the soundtrack (containing footage from the film as part of a CD-ROM feature). I always seemed to be one step behind The Blair Witch Project.

 And then it opened at The Rialto, and the next part is not going to endear the Cap'n to theatre owners. I can only say that it's something I did once and never again, and not something I would do again. Some friends were in town to see The Blair Witch Project with the Cap'n and friends, and the midnight showing was SOLD OUT. But we needed to see that showing of the film, so while standing in front of the vacant box office, we noticed that instead of using special tickets, The Rialto (at the time) had the kind of tickets one could purchase at, say, an Office Max. So we maybe kind of bought a roll of tickets from Office Max, tore five off, and got in line early. And it worked. It was a shitty thing to do, but it's the kind of thing you'll do at twenty to see the movie everyone wants to see. Our ruse wasn't a total success, as before the film started the manager came out to say that he knew some people got in when they weren't supposed to, and we shrunk in our seats a little. The moral of the story is don't do this, kids - you'll feel shitty about it twelve years later.

 The movie? Well, if you were old enough to see it in 1999, then you already know what The Blair Witch Project is like. It's a nice setup, a whole lot of pointless bickering, some carnival tricks to rattle you, and a baffling ending that's really only effective with an audience willing to be scared shitless already. The reason that nobody remembers The Blair Witch Project is that when people know it's a film and are watching it at home with no suspension of disbelief or desire to really let the adrenaline take over, the film is a total bore. There's virtually no rewatchability to The Blair Witch Project, and other films have taken the crude elements and refined them with less believable but more effective narratives and gimmickry. The success of Paranormal Activity is in large part a reflection of how much it borrowed from The Blair Witch Project in publicity and execution (appropriately ten years later, following an excessive cycle of gory horror films often lumped together under the moniker "torture porn").

 By the time that Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 came out, nobody was that interested in the film anymore. The curtain had been lifted, the actors done the publicity rounds, and the directors moved on to make... well, not much for seven years. They didn't even want to make Book of Shadows, and instead acted as executive producers for new director Joe Berlinger, a documentary filmmaker best known for the Paradise Lost films about the West Memphis Three. Book of Shadows was Berlinger's first (and, as far as I can tell, last) narrative feature, which he co-wrote with Dick Beebe (the House on Haunted Hill remake). It attempted to look at the Blair Witch phenomenon, but quickly devolved into a terrible movie about possession, murder, and surveillance footage wrapped up in a pale Rashomon "multiple perspective story" mold.

 It took quite a while for me to muster up any memories about Book of Shadows, which should give you some idea how forgettable the film is. Until I looked it up, I'd completely forgotten that it involved two different "Blair Witch" tours in Burkittsville or that one ended up butchered and everyone else went to a house with excessive closed circuit cameras. I vaguely remembered people being picked off and someone being accused of being the witch, as well as stock stereotypes of Wiccans, Goth Chicks, hippies (?), and mentally unstable characters.

 Looking at the film from a distance, it's kind of funny how many people I recognize for roles they took after Book of Shadows: Jeffrey Donovan is now better known for being the lead on Burn Notice, Kim Director worked with Spike Lee before and after the film, and Erica Leerhsen played virtually the same role in the 2003 Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Only Tristen Skyler and Stephen Barker Turner haven't done anything I noticed since 2000. Oh, and there's that Kurt Loder guy; wasn't he in Get Him to the Greek or something?

 While it should come as no surprise to people that I saw a movie with Cranpire where he fell asleep, I can't honestly fault him for nodding off during a late showing of Book of Shadows. There's nothing in the movie worth staying awake for, and I think he got more out of the nap than I did the movie. The only other fun tidbit is that when the DVD came out, Artisan was desperate for a gimmick, so they tried a variation on the "flipper" disc: on one side, the movie; the other had the soundtrack. The problem was that the disc was often too heavy for CD players and when it wasn't, the film portion scratched easily, meaning you could never sell the damned thing when you got bored of having it around. And yet, I suspect if you go anywhere with used DVDs, you'll find a copy of Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 in the "three for $1" bin. It's still not worth it.

Retro Review: Dungeons & Dragons (an imagined conversation)

 Cap'n Howdy: Hey, do you guys remember when we went to see Dungeons & Dragons?

 Professor Murder: Yeah, of course I do.

 Cranpire: Nope.

Professor Murder: What do you mean "Nope"? How do you not remember an evening from eleven years ago?

Cranpire: All I remember is that I didn't like the movie.

 Cap'n Howdy: None of us liked the movie; in fact, I bet I remember only a little more about the movie than you do.

 Cranpire: Probably.

 Cap'n Howdy: Well, there was Jeremy Irons as a... wizard? Mage? That's what they're called, right, Mages?

Professor Murder: Don't look at me. I have no idea.

 Cap'n Howdy: Well, anyway, then there's his sidekick -

Professor Murder: The dude with blue lip gloss.

 Cap'n Howdy: Exactly. The bald guy that was in Highlander: Endgame: Bruce Payne.

 Cranpire: Oh, he was on Keen Eddie.

 Professor Murder: Keen Eddie? Did you watch that show?

 Cranpire: Yeah, I like to watch shows that were canceled early.

 Cap'n Howdy: You remember that, but not Dungeons & Dragons?

 Cranpire: Well, I make a point of following obscure supporting actors.

 Cap'n Howdy: Anyway, so the movie also had that guy who looks like Wil Wheaton, but isn't -

 Cranpire: Justin Whalin, from Child's Play 3 and Serial Mom.

 Professor Murder: Wait, Andy from Child's Play 3? Impressive, Cranpire.

 Cranpire: Thanks.

 Cap'n Howdy: As I was saying, he goes on some quest with his friend (?), Marlon Wayans. They're thieves and Jeremy Irons is trying to raise a dragon or something and Thora Birch is in the film, and so is Richard O'Brien.

 Professor Murder: Who, if I remember correctly, was one of your selling points.

 Cap'n Howdy: Yes, he was. If I was more of a Doctor Who fan in 2000, I might have pointed out that Tom Baker was in the movie.

 Cranpire: Huh.

 Professor Murder: Yeah, that's really more than I remembered about that movie. What was more fun was how we got Cranpire to see it with us.

 Cap'n Howdy: That's why I wanted to have a review of the film in the first place. The story behind the movie is more interesting to me.

 Cranpire: I have no idea what you're talking about. Seriously.

 Cap'n Howdy: Do you not remember that you were working at the Rathskeller*, and we came by to talk you into seeing Dungeons & Dragons with us?

 Cranpire: Nope

 Professor Murder: You were cleaning up and we talked your manager into letting you off an hour early to come along. We paid for your missed hour, your ticket, and snacks - we bought you!

 Cranpire: Drawing a blank.

 Cap'n Howdy: I think that Professor Murder even drove us from your work to the theatre and then brought you back to the Rathskeller to pick up your car, and even though we laughed through the whole movie, you complained about how we "ripped you off" by dragging you to Dungeons & Dragons.

 Cranpire: That makes sense, but I don't remember that at all. I remember not liking the movie, and I saw the sequel at the video store.

 Professor Murder: Wait... you hated the first one but watched the sequel? Did you?

 Cap'n Howdy: No, I've never seen it. I don't even know what it's called.

 Cranpire: Yeah you do, I called in to the radio show you did to tell you it was Wrath of the Dragon God. It wasn't any better.

 Cap'n Howdy: It amazes me what you can and can't remember.

 Cranpire: I don't really remember seeing Dude, Where's My Car? with you. And I didn't fall asleep for all of The Man Who Wasn't There, for the record.

 Professor Murder: But you did sleep through part of it.

 Cap'n Howdy: Anyway, whether that jogged your memory or not, that happened. It was funny to me, and it's also kinda funny you don't remember that at all.

 Professor Murder: Good times.

 Cranpire: Well, if you guys are all done, I'm gonna smoke a cigarette and finish watching River of Darkness. It has Kurt Angle vs. zombie Kevin Nash.



* I feel no concern about mentioning this because the Rathskeller no longer exists and it's very unlikely anyone would figure out what employee is being mentioned here.

Retro Review: Dude, Where's My Car?

  I've seen Dude, Where's My Car? once. That's it. Every time I see Ashton Kutcher and Sean William Scott together on television, I change the channel. I have no desire to ever watch Dude, Where's My Car again, no matter how many people of the marijuana-friendly persuasion suggest that I give it another chance. The story of how I came to loathe Dude, Where's My Car? is not a new one in the Blogorium, but perhaps this will be the complete story that allows me to put it to bed.

  At the time that Dude, Where's My Car? opened (December of 2000), I had already left the movie theatre I worked at and was working for a shipping company (if it helps, it's the competitor to the one Tom Hanks works for in Cast Away), and it was routinely kicking my ass five days a week after the relatively cushy projectionist job I was used to*. During the week, I really didn't want to do much of anything before going into work at 9 and after leaving at 3 a.m. However, I still had an "in" with the assistant managers at the old movie theatre, and this is where the Cranpire enters the story.

 I bring him up because he's not going to care much, and he's central to why I went to said movie theatre before work one night to see a movie I didn't want to see. Cranpire wanted to see Dude, Where's My Car?, and he doggedly pursued talking me into going with him so that he didn't see it alone. Why? I'm not sure. Odds are he can fill in that detail in the comments, but I went along with him (in his car, and that's important), got us in for free, and we plopped down in the auditorium to watch two stoners who lose their car and repeat lines ad nauseum.

 There were two other people in the auditorium: a pair of giggling teenage girls who thought Kutcher was "totally cute" or something like that. Really, they just giggled a lot - in fact, they giggled at everything in the movie, which probably would have driven the Cranpire to make some horribly offensive comment, had he ever heard them giggling. But he didn't, because Cranpire fell asleep.

 Memory tends to work in funny ways, so it retroactively makes sense this would happen - he subsequently slept through The Man Who Wasn't There and... something else. There were three movies that he went out to the theatre for and simply nodded off, but to me Dude, Where's My Car? was the most infamous.

 He may have made it through the trailers, he may not; it's hard to say because I didn't notice he'd nodded off until I was trying to salvage my disinterest in Danny Leiner and Phillip Stark's lame alien abduction / implied pot head comedy. I don't even remember IF there were jokes about getting high because as the inanity piled up, so too did my rage level at being talked into coming to see a movie I didn't want to see with someone who wasn't even awake to watch it. Worse still, I couldn't leave the auditorium with the giggling girls and the sleeping Cranpire because he drove and he drove a manual, which I couldn't drive. I was stuck there, trying to find any way to make a movie I already didn't like bearable before going to work and getting the hell beaten out of me.

 The kicker is that as the ending credits started rolling, like clockwork, Cranpire woke up. He missed the entire movie but had the impeccable timing to wake up just as the narrative itself was over and done with. Needless to say, I broke my usual rule of staying through the credits (a holdover from film classes in college) and he dropped me off at home so I could head to work.

 I've had no desire to watch the film since, and as the years pass, I remember less and less about the film. There was something about giant alien women and necklaces that grow their girlfriends' breasts, but what really sticks is the repeating of lines over and over again. "What does mine say?" "Dude. What does mine say?" "Sweet, what does MINE SAY?!" etc. As I understand it, Cranpire saw the film again sometime later with some other friends, and they loved it. It has been posited to me that I, in fact, saw the film with friends in Greensboro when I know that could not be the case. I saw Dude, Where's My Car? once. That's it, and that's what it's going to be. I give a lot of movies second (and third and fourth) chances, but not this one. It's not up for revisiting any time soon, and probably never.





 * Yes, this may sound contradictory to a prior Adventure in Projectioneering, but believe me when I say that as busy as I was juggling sixteen screens, it was nothing compared to five hours of non-stop boxes hurling into a truck from Monday to Friday. I wrecked both of my ankles, my left knee, and my back during the year-and-a-half I worked at said shipping company.

Retro Review: Cap'n Howdy's Four Favorite Summer Fest Moments

 After getting the bad news out of the way, let's move on to happier times, shall we? After last year's Horror Fest: A People's History, wherein the Cap'n collected memories from folks who attended the first seven Horror / Summer Fests, I thought that to follow it up with my own favorite moments.

 Summer Fest was always designed to be more on the "fun" side: we'd watch horror comedies, focus less on being scared than being entertained, intentionally or otherwise. The atmosphere at Summer Fest is designed to be looser, less regimented. I like to put a list of movies out there, and adhere to it slightly - that way, you never know what you're going to see on a given night, which gives you incentive to come every day of the fest.

 It's traditionally where we'll try out some kind of new "gimmick": field trips, 3D, guest bloggers, or one of the five moments listed below (that happened after the oral history came into being). They slowly transformed from being all night affairs to include afternoon mini-marathons, as was the case at Summer Fest 3. Listed below, in no particular order, are four memories from Summer Fests 1-3 that stick with me. Many of them are film related, and even the one that isn't directly tied to a movie is an experience I'll never forget (or live down).

4. The First Field Trip - What often gets lost when discussing The Happening's role as our first "field trip" screening was the film that followed it when we got back to The Apartment of Solitude: Plan 9 from Outer Space. The experience of watching The Happening was a jovial one, save for one major issue - the air conditioning was so loud that half of the group couldn't hear the film. While that may sound like a godsend, considering how bad The Happening is, it doesn't help convey just how awful the film is without the wooden line delivery.

 Most of the negative reaction to The Happening comes (I think) from the second time I screened it, during Horror Fest III - it was an unannounced surprise, following the already bad Paul Lynde Halloween Special, and being exposed to something so terrible less than six months later was a bit cruel. That said, I think that during Summer Fest 2, following The Happening with Plan 9 from Outer Space gives you a much better idea of how the Cap'n views M. Night Shyamalan's "B-Movie." The idea was to convey a disasterpiece in its classic and modern forms, and had I not dropped The Happening in out of context four months later, it might not be as infamous as it is now.

 Or not.

 3. Late Nights / Early Mornings - What sticks with me about the first Summer Fest, beyond The Happening, was that it was the last time we consistently watched movies from dusk till dawn. I have vivid memories of being half-awake, watching Shark Attack 3: Megalodon and Friday the 13th Part 2 with Neil and the Cranpire at six in the morning. We'd nod off a little, wake up, nudge each other to catch some unforgettable moment (and there are many in Shark Attack 3), and then try to go on as long as we could before passing out as the sun came up.

 As I get older, it gets harder and harder to stay up all night, and we usually peter out somewhere between two and four a.m., and agree to regroup the following afternoon. During Summer Fest 3, we actually started Saturday at 2 in the afternoon, watching a quadruple feature of Phantasm III, Cheerleader Camp, The Gate, and Thankskilling, then took a dinner break (more on that next) and continued well into the night. Alas, the Cap'n and compatriots aren't as young as we used to be, and no amount of caffeine has been able to alter our curmudgeonly ways. Before too long, I'll be hosting Horror Fest Early Bird Specials, so we can all be in bed by 9. In that respect, it's nice to look back at those barely awake moments of shocks and laughs, aided by sleep deprivation.

 2. The Great McGangbang Experiment - Okay, so I don't think I gave her proper credit at the time, but the Rianimator (and at the time, Dominator) brought the concept of the McGangbang to my attention during Summer Fest 3. They insisted we read an article from Cracked.com about "food for failures," which was so funny that their insistence we try the McDonalds catastrophe seemed like a great idea. There were a handful of intrepid McTaste Testers, and after the matinee feature, we went to get the necessary materials to rock a McGangbang.

 I mentioned this in the original coverage (which has pictures), but the unholy combination of cheeseburger and McChicken sandwich wasn't all that bad. At first. The combination worked, in some illogical way, until your stomach caught wind of what was going on upstairs. Then rebellion began, and with the exception of our intrepid junior Summer Fest attendee, Chris, everyone who finished their McGangbang spent the next two hours in their own personal digestive hell. We had an extra one, thanks to a snafu about who was going to pick them up, but none of the people who arrived after the challenge wanted any part of it, mostly because they could see how miserable we were.

Luckily, iron stomach Chris took the last one home, secretly hoping that we could try the Taco Bell variation some time soon. It's the first food challenge we've ever had at a horror fest (if you don't count trying to drink Bud Light with Clamato or our Wild Irish Rose mixed beverages a challenge), and I don't know if there will ever be another one. If so, it would have a lot to live up to.

 1. Discovery, discovery, discovery - I'm not even sure where to start with this one. My main goal with the Blogorium is to expose people to films they've never heard of or have never considered before. Horror and Summer Fests are an opportunity to move beyond just writing about it and to actually watch those movies with and audience. Sometimes, it may be a film we've seen before that takes on a life of its own (like the Night of the Lepus screening at Summer Fest 1 that became a twenty person version of Mystery Science Theater 3000), but more often it's about films that I've heard of and save for a fest, often without watching them myself. Better still are movies that someone brings to a fest that knock everybody off of their feet.

 I mention Blood Car and Terrorvision a lot on the Blogorium, but would have never known they existed without Neil and Dr. Tom (respectively) bringing them to my attention. That they stand out at their respective fests (Summer Fests 1 and 2) is saying something, considering just how many great movies played those weekends, but it's so. I'd also like to highlight Teeth, The Giant Claw, Fido, Hillbillys in a Haunted House, Death Bed: The Bed That Eats, ThanksKilling, Shark Attack 3: Megalodon, Drag Me to Hell, and Basket Case, which I hadn't seen to that point. The lost, forgotten, and obscure gems are what keep these festivals interesting to me, or we'd just watch our favorite horror movies over and over again (which we sometimes do).

 In that spirit, if there's a Summer Fest this year, I have many films that I'd never heard of prior to 2011 that should be fun to watch, including The Boogens, Abby, Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, Dr. Black and Mr. Hyde, Rubber, Bug, and From Hell It Came that should provide hours of enjoyment. I also have ideas for new "theme" nights, although they might be split up over the next few years, devoted to blaxploitation films, animals gone wild films, and marathons based on actors from Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, and Doctor Who (would you believe that I'm working on finding horror movies for as many of the twelve doctors as I can?).