The Art of Love (1983), in which– surprise, surprise– there’s a whole lot o’ screwin’ going on in first-century Rome…

The Car (1977), or, “Hermanos!  The Devil has built a hotrod!”

The Craft (1996), in which shooting up the school is for suckers.  Why bring a gun to class when you can lay curses on the popular kids instead?

Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein (1972), in which we can count on Jesus Franco to remember that “Frankenstein” is the doctor’s name, even if we can’t count on him to make a movie that sane people would consider watchable…

Orca (1977), in which Captain Ahab is the whale…

and…

Repo Man (1984), in which unemployment can lead one to the damnedest places.

Dean Jagger’s name is not usually associated with stinkingly bad movies. It’s true, he was in the disappointing Revolt of the Zombies in 1936… but those were early days, both for Jagger’s career and for zombies on film.

Jagger went on to win acclaim for his roles in Brigham Young and Twelve O’Clock High (for which he won the 1950 Oscar for Best Supporting Actor). As for his genre performances, he’s fondly remembered for playing a Quatermass surrogate in X: the Unknown, in which he teamed up with Leo McKern to fight a radioactive blob from the Earth’s core.

That’s why it’s so surprising to find a movie like Evil Town (1973/74/87) near the end of his distinguished career. It’s not just that Dean Jagger’s in a movie this bad — Evil Town took 14 years, three versions and at least five titles before it finally got released, so you can imagine what a nightmare the finished product turned into. No: the real surprise is that of all the terrible things in this terrible movie, Jagger’s performance is pretty close to the bottom.

This may be a bit of a variation on the Falling Stars theme, as it’s not a film per se. But it is a very cinematic project, combining prog rock opera, symphonic bombast, HG Wells, and a near-the-end-of-his-career Richard Burton.

The Musical Version of War of the Worlds

“This was no disciplined march; it was a stampede–a stampede gigantic and terrible–without order and without a goal, six million people unarmed and unprovisioned, driving headlong. It was the beginning of the rout of civilisation, of the massacre of mankind.”
– HG Wells, The War of the Worlds

My parents were always willing to indulge my state as kind of a weird kid. One year for Christmas, they got me an LP with which I would become obsessed as a kid, and one that continues to find it’s way into my playlist. It was a bizarre amalgamation of rock opera and old time radio play, featuring the voice talent of none less than Richard Burton: Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds.

The tag line for The Skeptic is “A tormented man’s reluctant search for greater meaning in his life.” Uh, no: that’s the synopsis for last week’s “Dr. Phil”. Actually, The Skeptic is a ghost story. But it’s a ghost story that spends about half its time crowing about how stunted and miserable people become if they question the Great Beyond.

Sure, I’ve seen much more aggressive and less technically-proficient attacks on rationality, but still: even when expressed so mildly, this sort of thing sets my teeth on edge. In fact, I found some of the implications so irritating that I had to comment on them, however briefly.

Fortunately, about halfway through, the movie forgets it has an axe to grind and remembers how to tell a story. But, oh, that first half…

It’s the nature of acting that there will be good parts and bad parts, and that if you want to eat, you can’t always afford to be choosy. Nevertheless, this platitude hardly accounts for all those actors – or all those agents – who apparently can’t tell a good script from a stinker. Nor can it explain away the number of actors for whom a major award is the first stop on the road to oblivion. For some, the journey from professional triumph to professional humilation is slow and steady; for others, it happens so fast, it takes your breath away.

So join us as we take a look at the careers of some actors who truly do know what it’s like to go from one extreme to the other.

It’s FALLING STARS – all through February at the B-Masters’ blog!

This movie features an army of well-armed, leather clad Filipinas with shaved heads. If you know me, you know that alone qualifies this as one of the greatest movies of this or any generation. Everyone is all crowing about Citizen Kane all the time, but to those people I ask 1) have you ever even seen Citizen Kane; and 2) did it feature even a single well-armed, leather clad Filipina with a shaved head? It didn’t, did it? So stop calling it the greatest film of all time. And since W is War is Filipino trash cinema, it’s not satisfied with just cute women with shaved heads, even though that was enough for me. W is War is the sort of movie that just keeps giving and giving. Cartoonish villains in capes, dune buggies, motorcycles shaped like sharks, massive shootouts, dudes in leather pants, exploding huts, sloppy kungfu fights, scenes shot from between the legs of hairy men wearing yellow Speedos — truly W is War is the movie that has something for everyone, and plenty of it.

ALIEN 2: ON EARTH

In this unauthorized Italian sequel to “Alien” a group of spelunking bowlers (Or are they bowling spelunkers?) discover that their favorite cave and favorite bowling alley are infested with alien monsters that hatch from rocks.

Review Snippet:
Now we are subjected to another ten minutes of watching the group perform a spelunking rescue in every detail. Once Jill’s inert body is hauled back up, the only person at the top is Rod. He starts the process of rigging the ropes so the others can ascend. Unbeknownst to Rod, the camera is slowly panning back through the cave and up Jill’s body to her face. This takes an additional four minutes. So, for the last twenty-four minutes the only thing keeping my attention has been complaining about the complete lack of anything to keep my attention.

Lesson Learned:
Spelunking is an important branch of physics.

THE HAUNTING (1999)

In which Jan de Bont and David Self teach us all new appreciation for Robert Wise’s 1960 adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s seminal horror novel by botching every one of its set-pieces. In which a subtle tale of psychological horror becomes the $80 million equivalent of trying to frighten someone by blowing up a paper bag and bursting it behind them.

In which we learn that 19th century architects never argued with their clients, that decapitations don’t bleed, that a dead child in your bed is nothing to get worked up about, and that the best way to rid your house of an evil spirit is by yelling at it.

Oh – and that scientists are unethical. Big surprise.