A respectable number of reviews and my much-delayed contribution to November’s roundtable:

Battle Beyond the Sun (1963), in which Francis Ford Copolla somehow makes The Heavens Call less interesting by trimming it down to just over an hour and throwing in a couple of gleefully obscene hand-puppet monsters…

Cheeky! (2000), in which you could attempt to engage with Tinto Brass’s extremely eccentric notions of what romance ought to look like, or you could just sit there for 100 minutes drooling over Yuliya Mayarchuck’s butt…

Chopping Mall (1986), in which a terrible career sustains its deceptively promising start…

Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), in which… crap, I don’t even know where to begin…

Monster from the Ocean Floor (1954), in which Roger Corman literally makes a whole movie just to prove to himself how far one can stretch a buck, and makes history doing it…

and…

Monstrosity (1987), but you already knew that.
 
 
 

Wearing out its welcome like a Christmas tree in mid-February — or a visiting in-law whose flight back home has been cancelled — here’s the follow-up to my Secret Santa roundtable entry:

Intercessor: Another Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare

This is all Andrew’s fault, though he may try and deny it. Still, I’d like to think there’s a little extra misery in this movie that spreads, like a nasty winter cold from a shared cup of wassail, to all my fellow B-Masters. This is, after all, the only film that Ken Begg ever sent back to Amazon as being just… too… dreadful. Also, if you’ve read Nathan Shumate’s book The Golden Age of Crap — and if you haven’t, what’s keeping you? — you’ll remember from his review of Robot Ninja that he used to work in the comic illustration field; so I can’t wait to horrify him with the ineptitude of the comic-book illustrations… which are used not only to pad out the action, but to substitute for entire major characters! It’s a Holiday Crapnucopia!

Space Gods help us, every one!

I must have kicked Liz’s cat one time and forgot. Although apparently, according to Freeman, I’ve somehow ended up being the Cabal’s official punching bag: “Apparently all of us were waiting by our computers with something horrible in our hands, hoping against hope that we would get Ken. There is also the probability that there was a muttered chant of “Oh please oh please oh please” as we rocked back and forth, like preschoolers awaiting word from their parents that they may charge downstairs on Christmas morning.”

Well, the woman is deadlier than the male, and sadly for me, Liz drew the lucky straw. Better I had gotten assigned the secret lost sequel to Prayer of the Rollerboys than the plodding, endless jungle hell that is Bo Derek’s Tarzan the Ape Man.

“

“Well, I’d rather be in Philadelphia.”

THE SPIRIT

Dr. Freex put “The Spirit” under my tree for this Sadistic Santa gift exchange. It’s not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, but I think that Freex is getting soft in his old age.

What I am saying is that I like my bad movies to be a lot better at being bad than this one.

Review Snippet:
After the battle, the Octopus returns to his subterranean lair with a mysterious box that he stole from a mysterious woman in a hole at the bottom of the city’s sea. When the super criminal opens the box, he finds that it is full of bling. He becomes very upset, because he didn’t want a box full of bling. What the Octopus was looking for was a vase in the box in the hole at the bottom of the sea. Inside the vase is supposed to be the blood of Hercules. All of the cloned morons saw the woman, Sand Saref, leave with the other box. They was watching.

Deprived of the blood in the vase in the box from the hole at the bottom of the sea, the Octopus lets his rage get the best of him. He turns into Samurai Jack and kills the morons. What this accomplishes is a mystery, because the only way he can replace the dead morons is to clone even more morons. Meaning that the new morons are going to be just as stupid as the ones he just chopped up.

Lesson Learned:
Never, ever make a movie in Albuquerque.

When I agreed to come out of retirement to take part in the Secret Santa roundtable, little did I know I was giving Ken Begg a golden opportunity to continue his jihad against my sanity. The latest bunker buster to be employed against the bastions of my beleaguered brain: director Jerry Warren’s swan song, Frankenstein Island (1981). Bikini cavegirls, alien civilizations and ski cap-wearing zombies somehow figure into the master plan of Dr. Frankenstein (skillfully portrayed by the Disembodied Floating Head of John Carradine). Is it better than Teenage Zombies? Yes. Is it better than Wild World of Batwoman? Certainly. Is it better than oral surgery without anesthesia? Debatable. Extremely debatable.

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On the sixth day of Christmas, Keith Allison gave to me—

ESCAPE FROM GALAXY 3 (1981)

…and I don’t forgive him, even if that does rhyme rather nicely.

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Hey, you know what? This entire project has been an exercise in how some people just cannot take a hint. Reviewing this was comparatively easy; comparatively. Getting to review it was something else, a process encompassing the mysterious transfer of the wrong file, a corrupt file, a file that took six hours to download, a computer that refused to play the downloaded file despite its declared compatibility, more downloading, suddenly corrupt add-ons that stopped Internet Explorer opening, a computer that refused to acknowledge it held a disc and therefore refused to eject it until rebooted, a playback program that gave me sound but no picture, and a different playback program that kept hiding its control functions and also refusing to bring them back without rebooting. Oh, and just now, while I was drafting this, WordPress refused to let me insert a link, and I had to do a crash-course in HTML to make it go in.

There is scarcely anything more than Keith’s and my collective technology could have done to warn me off this movie, short of suddenly fusing together like a transformer, taking on human form, and shaking me violently by the shoulders while screaming, “DO NOT WATCH THIS FILM, YOU SILLY COW!!!!” into my face. But did I listen? Noooooooo…

[Some partial nudity in screenshots, so probably NSFW.]

Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare (1987)

I was going to head this, “For those about to suck, we salute you!” But alas, that’s really the wrong band.

Andrew Borntreger of Badmovies.org chose the movie, but if this review leaves you as Dazed and Confused as I was, then it’s Nobody’s Fault but Mine (damn it, that’s still the wrong band).

If you’re expecting a decent movie, You’ve Got Another Thing Coming…

…

Oh, for crying out loud, the heavy metal band in this movie is Thor: can anybody come up with a clever Thor song-title reference? Or any Thor song-title reference?! I’m stumped. Guess I’ll have to lean on Patton Oswalt’s impression of a guitar solo instead: Squibbly Blabbly Doo! That makes about as much sense as this movie.

Anyway. Welcome to my Nightmare. No, no, wait: that’s Alice Blooper… Cooper! Aw, just read the damned review…

…Will Laughlin gave to me:  four aged punks, three dead thugs, two monkey parts, and Andy Milligan’s Monstrosity!  After lulling me into a false sense of security a couple weeks ago, Netflix and the Post Office have resumed their campaign of Ghandian non-cooperation with my plans, so consider this but a teaser for a significantly more ambitious full update to follow sometime between now and next weekend.
 
 
 

I always thought Nathan and I were amiable toward each other. Sure, we were two very different people, but we always seemed to get along well. So I don’t know what it was that I said or did that made him lash out at me with such venom, seeking with every fiber of his being to destroy me and anyone within a 5km radius by unleashing upon me my Secret Krampus (Santa obviously had nothing to do with this) gift:

ARMAGEDDON: THE FINAL CHALLENGE
Movies try to evoke a wide range of emotions and reactions from their viewers. Shock, delight, sadness, joy, despair — in the century or so that humans have been making movies, the bag of tricks film makers use to manipulate our emotions has become large indeed, and the range of emotions and experiences movies seek to simulate has grown to encompass pretty much everything we’re likely or unlikely to ever encounter in real life. There are, however, a few mental states and experiences that, while a movie could potentially ask us to invest ourselves in, it probably shouldn’t. At the top of my list of experiences I don’t need recreated for me by a movie would be the frustrating tedium of phone-based customer support.

For my contribution for the Secret Santa roundtable, thank El Santo for assigning me the British comedy Whoops Apocalypse. I must admit I was dreading the task of watching this movie. Considering the quality of the movies the B-Masters assigned each other years earlier for the first Secret Santa, and considering there are few things worse than a failed comedy, I thought I would be in for a rough time. But to my surprise… no, I didn’t like this movie, but I have to admit that I didn’t find it completely bad.

Sorry, folks.  I was supposed to kick off the “Secret Santa’s Revenge” last night, but events conspired to put me in bed by 8pm.  (Alone and trying to sleep, lest you think that I blew you off for some nookie.)

Nevertheless!  I’m here bright-eyed and bushy-tailed*, to present you with the feature which was “gifted” to me by Greywizard of The Unknown Movies: Titanic: The Animated Movie (2001).  Enjoy!**

*As far as you know.

** Technically impossible.

Announcing my belated contribution to the Roger Corman Roundtable:

It might have been Corman’s best film, and Vincent Price’s finest hour… had it not been for…

…but Gareth Edwards’ Monsters (2010) proves that, even with a budget of $200,000 a filmmaker can craft a movie to be proud of.  (Better not let Hollywood know, or Michael Bay might never work again.)

In Hyper Sapien: People From Another Star, future soap opera star Ricky Paull Goldin meets a female alien from outer space. Don’t worry, by an amazing coincidence this alien happens to look completely human, so there’s no sight of him snuggling up with a creature with multiple tentacles in this family film. Though quite frankly, a sight like that would have made the movie more interesting than it is now.

Golden Eyes: Secret Agent 077
In the genre ghetto of India’s B movie industry, attempts were being made at churning out spy films that hued a little closer to the European model. Unfortunately for these films, while the attitude might have been there, the cash wasn’t. Given that, the end products were frequently films that tested the notion of just how sparely represented the basic tropes of the spy genre could be in a film without it falling short of being a spy film at all.

The 1968 film Golden Eyes: Secret Agent 077 fits pretty neatly within this last described category. It’s the sort of movie where bare-walled sets are dressed by way of colored lighting (it’s amazing what 1960s movies could accomplish with just a couple lights and some primary colored gels) and a super villain’s high-tech lair is represented by having what looks like the contents of an old Radio Shack “Build Your Own Ham Radio” kit strewn on a wooden table. In another villain’s hideout, the only decoration is a giant inflatable whiskey bottle

Si Muore Solo Una Volta
Si Muore Solo Una Volta is not a masterwork, but it’s linear and makes sense, something which many other Eurospy films can’t claim. In many respects it is better than many of the more readily available Eurospy productions on the market – but still, realistically this is only one for Eurospy completists – and if you are one of those aforementioned completists, then you’re going to want to watch this anyway, regardless of what I have to say — good, bad or indifferent.

Superseven Calling Cairo
Director, Umberto Lenzi, in the 1970s, with many of his hard and fast Euro Crime films, proved that he can make taut, and tough films, with proficient action scenes in them. It didn’t matter that they were almost bound to the one city, such as Rome, Milan or Naples. In fact, he made that work in favour of the stories. But here, much of the time is wasted on shots that simply seem to be inserted into the story for the sake of the location. The sequence at the pyramids is a perfect example – cutting it from the movie, wouldn’t detract from the story at all. But then again, when you promote your film as being set in Egypt, I guess some skylarking amongst the antiquities is expected. But it doesn’t make it a better film.

Lightning Bolt
Although the production is cheap and the plot is outlandish, this is actually a pretty fun little adventure. Anthony Eisley looks tough and handsome, and he’s probably one of the few spies in any of these movies who begins his mission by trying to buy off the bad guys — with a check! Imagine Sean Connery asking Robert Shaw how much money he’d need not to kill Bond, then saying, “OK, mind if I write you a check?” They don’t even accept checks at the grocery store where I shop!

And then he’ll see you again, and again, and AGAIN:

Before I Hang (1940), in which Boris Karloff plays a doctor who becomes a serial killer when he has himself injected with an experimental serum made from the plasma of an executed murderer…

The Devil Commands (1941), in which Boris Karloff plays a doctor who becomes obsessed with transdimensional telepathic communication when his wife is killed in an auto wreck…

The Man They Could Not Hang (1939), in which Boris Karloff plays a doctor who gets himself resurrected in order to take revenge on the people who got him unjustly executed for murder…

and…

The Man with Nine Lives (1940), in which (you guessed it) Boris Karloff plays (you guessed it again) a doctor who accidentally freezes himself and several of his enemies for ten years using an experimental cryogenic technique, and picks up the feud where he left off when a second doctor finds and defrosts all the preserved bodies.

 
And in addition, because I just couldn’t bear to do an update devoted solely to turn-of-the-40′s mad doctor moves, I also give you:

 
I Am Legend (2007), in which Will Smith is not only much better than Charlton Heston, but is nearly as good as Vincent Price…

Let the Right One In (2008), in which the Swedes show us all the correct way to do an adolescent vampire love story…

and…

The Toolbox Murders (1977), in which a guy with a toolbox commits a whole bunch of murders.

December is a month full of spies and espionage at Teleport City, and we’re kicking things off in…well, not style.

DEVIL’S MAN As alluded to earlier, The Devil’s Man‘s production exhibits an almost poignant level of impoverishment. It’s interior scenes are so tightly shot that, for all we can see, they could just as easily have been set in a curtained-off corner of a warehouse or the cramped basement rec room of the director’s house as in an actual studio — and I suspect that in many cases their backdrops consisted of little more than a blanket hung over an exposed drain pipe. The resulting over-reliance on extreme close-ups and tight two-shots makes for a claustrophobic viewing experience, to the extent that your enjoyment of the film will depend a lot on how much you’d like to be locked in a closet with Guy Madison for seventy-five minutes.

Plus…

BOTTLED IN BOND Repeal Day in the US is December 5th. So we thought we’d put a twist on our espionage theme and revise and expand considerably our Bond’s Bar material to give you BOTTLED IN BOND, a rambling, insane primer on how to drink whiskey like James Bond.