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This Dawn of the Dead reboot sucks.

If nothing else, Black Friday has simply become another reality show opportunity; a chance for the well-off to sneer at news media reporting on the less fortunate engaging in impromptu gladiatorial battles for the possibility of affordable consumer goods. I’ve only been badgered into journeying out on Holiday Fury Road once, and all I came out with was a five dollar blu-ray of the Nick Cage movie Drive Angry. For the record, I enjoyed the movie. Then Rick watched it on my say-so and proclaimed me a horrible human being, so that was a nice bonus. In any case, that one experience did not convince me that poking my head outside the relative safety of my home on Black Friday would be made a yearly event.

Which is why the day was perfect for a Crapfest.

In attendance were myself, my son Max, Rick, Erik, and of course, Host Dave. Alan was a bit late, and poor Paul worked for Communists, so he could not attend. Erik made a truly wondrous mess of Rice ‘n’ Beans with attendant sausage, which we filled up on, and then rolled ourselves into the Mancave to see if we could make ourselves lose that lunch.

In the gap since the last Crapfest, Dave had to switch out some elements in the AV setup to construct a death ray or something, so the first portion of the evening was spent making the new setup work. The guinea pig for this process was the pilot episode of the Japanese TV series, Magnificent Zubat, which is going to require some explanation.

Our hero is Ken Hayakawa, a wandering, guitar-strumming detective. In the first episode, he rescues childhood friend Asuka (“a penniless scholar with an interest in mountain climbing”) from the gun-slinging henchman of the “Consortium of Evil, Dakkar”, unquote, by proving he’s a better gunman. He does this by shooting the dude’s bullets out of the air. This will become traditional in the series, as Ken is just that damn good at everything. YouTube only has this showdown from a later episode:

So I think you get the drift. It’s a kid’s show, pure and simple, with little grounding in any sort of reality not associated with the smoking of certain herbal substances. Asuka is eventually murdered by someone in the Consortium of Evil, Dakkar, and Ken will spend the rest of the series trying to find out whom. To do this, he visits the “penniless scholar”s high tech lab and finishes his projects, the Zubat suit for space exploration, and the Zubat-mobile (excuse me, Zubacar), for flying around. The Zubat suit can only be used for five minutes, which certainly moves the episode’s closing minutes along, but seems a really odd feature for a space suit.

Anyway, if you have a love of the absurd and a penchant for seeing black-clad bad guys beat up women and orphans, this is the series for you. I’m quite certain that the Magnificent Zubat will return in a future Crapfest.

I also have to bear some responsibility for the next part.

Erik had wanted to bring the 1987 movie The Barbarians and had ordered the new blu-ray for that purpose. The problem: Amazon wouldn’t be delivering it until the Tuesday after Crapfest. The solution: ask Freeman if he had a copy of it, or the co-feature on the blu-ray. No to one and yes to two, as Buckaroo Banzai would say, and that is how we wound up watching The Norseman.

Possibly the best part of the viewing was the introductory crawl, referencing lusty blonde giants on longboats, which made the poor unsuspecting among us think that we were in for a comedy. Alas, no, what you get is an adventure movie written, produced and directed by Charles B. Pierce, best known for Legend of Boggy Creek and The Town That Dreaded Sundown. At least this time he didn’t cast himself as the comic relief.

It is the tale of a Viking expedition led by Lee Majors (!) to what will be eventually known as America, because their king Ulrich (Mel Ferrer) led a similar voyage the year before and vanished. What we will discover is that they encountered a tribe of the whitest Indians ever (well, theoretically they’re supposed to be in Canada, so I guess that possible). The two bands of warriors apparently hit it off pretty well, until the comely Indian princess Winetta (Susie Coelho) started making time with one of the Vikings, and the jealous chief captured them, had them blinded, and now they’re slaves continually pushing a stone mill. Good thing Winetta doesn’t agree with this, so she helps Majors and his men rescue them.

And truly, Cornel of Wilde didst wonder what happened to his career, that he did find himself playing the second of bananas to a cyborg.

There’s a good movie in there trying to get out, and almost succeeding. MGM certainly thought so. That cast includes Cornel Wilde, Jack Elam as a wizard (who needed more screen time) and TV staple Kathleen Freeman as the evil medicine woman. As it is, though, it is largely a case of watching Lee Majors run along the beach in slow motion, and Historical Inaccuracies on Parade. Of course all the Vikings have horned helmets, with the same fur from the same skein of faux fur lovingly attached to each one, although that was dreamed up by the costume designer for a Wagner opera some 1100 years later. The Vikings are also wearing what appear to be Roman armor breastplates. And using crossbows. I’m still not sure about Majors’ helmet, which has no horns but for some reason incorporates a Lone Ranger mask. I haven’t even addressed Deacon Jones as Thrall, the Black Viking, who is given absolutely nothing to do, but at least I got to name him Motherfucker the Barbarian.

“No I will NOT call you Kimosabe!”

Such wasted potential is pretty much the byword for The Norseman. What would have been the best scene takes place offscreen: Majors and the rescued Vikings are trying to make it back to the boat, with the tribe’s braves in hot pursuit. Olif (Jimmy Clem), a Viking who has shown himself adept at drowning Indians, starts slipping into a berserker rage, and stays behind to buy time for Majors and crew. That would have been an incredible sequence, and it happens offscreen. I now demand that scene with Iko Uwais’ fight team doing the choreography.

The Norseman is pretty much a displaced Saturday afternoon matinee, looking unsuccessfully for a second feature, probably a Western.

Then it was Dave’s turn, and he opened up Amazon Prime Video to inflict Chatterbox upon us. Alan and I had already seen it, so the damage to us was minimal. This is the tale of Penelope (Candace Rialson) who one night discovers that her vagina can talk. That’s the joke, folks. Tip your waitress.

This of course ruins her love life, as the vocal vagina (named Virginia) criticizes her lover and eventually drives her out on the streets dressed like a hoochie mama to get laid (she eventually has to go to a basketball team for protection, with predictable results). Virginia also has a nice singing voice, so Penelope’s psychiatrist (Larry Gelman) convinces her to go into show business, even getting the FCC to allow her to appear on TV bottomless, so Virginia can sing her hit song, “The Wang Dang Doodle”. Hopefully, you’ll like that song, too, because you’ll hear it a lot. Though not as much as we did, because Dave left the room and then sadistically ran the movie back so he could hear it. Eventually Virginia lands a film deal and it’s during the big opening number “All I Need in the Morning (Is a Little Cock-a-Doodle-Doo)” that Penelope freaks, runs from the studio and decides to kill herself.

Want to know how it ends? Go watch it on Amazon Prime. Alan and I have had to watch it twice, you can manage it once.

There are some bit players worth looking out for, not the least of which is Rip Taylor as Penelope’s boss, and Professor Irwin Corey (I was the only one to recognize Corey, because I hang out with kids). Penelope’s mom is played by Jane Kean – that’s Trixie Norton from The Honeymooners, you heathens! There is a subplot about Penelope/Virginia going on The Dating Game and the resulting date, which for padding, is actually pretty good. Max counted as many as eight jokes during the course of the movie that were not specifically talking vagina-related. This movie is shot by Tak Fujimoto, for God’s sake. And if there is a silver lining to this second viewing, it is that I was able to notice that Candace Rialson is really good in this bizarre role. Pity that she gave up acting a couple of years later.

So now it was my turn, and a return to Crapfest’s roots with Fred Olen Ray’s Bikini Drive-In. The genesis of this choice goes back a few Crapfests, when Dave showed The Great Bikini Off-Road Adventure,  and I started wondering exactly how many movies have “Bikini” in the title (I stopped counting around 115). Most of them seem to follow the formula of a cherished family business in deep financial trouble, which is salvaged through the magic of wearing bikinis with a sprinkling of R-rated nudity. How this formula is applied in something like Bikini Hoedown is beyond me, and I have a lot more movies to watch before I’m going to be tempted to find out.

In this particular case, it’s Kim’s (Ashley Rhey) grandfather’s drive-in theater, left to her after his death. Grandpa believed in family entertainment and only showed G-rated movies, hence the theater is in the hole to the tune of $10,000, due at the Bank after the coming weekend. Local shady businessman J.B. Winston (no less than David F. Friedman himself) wants the land for a mall. His goons (Ross Hagen and Peter Spellos) are more the breaking legs sort than handling financial jiggery-pokery, so Winston’s son Brian (Richard Gabai) gets the job. Too bad Brian is smitten by the plucky Kim, and decides to help her save the drive-in. He has a plan, and it involves bikinis.

It also involves getting a Scream Queen to make a personal appearance – Dyanne Lynn (Michelle Bauer), by telling her the President will there that night. And finding out that the projectionist Paul (Conrad Brooks) had been saving the movies that Grandpa wanted to throw out, which means they’ll have a full evening of potboiler material, climaxing (no pun intended) with Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers (“I love that movie!” Brian exclaims).

That night at the newly-rechristened Bikini Drive-in is the main reason to watch the movie. There are a ton of cameos by which you are going to be able to rank your nerd-dom: Forry Ackerman is easy to spot, as is Gordon Mitchell in a joke trailer for Goliath and the Cheerleaders (mined by Stomp Tokyo for one of their April Fools gags years ago). You’re going to have to be up on your personnel lists to spot David L. Hewitt, Anthony Cardoza, Donald F. Glut, and Jim Wynorski. Fred Olen Ray crops up as a DJ, and John Carradine appears as a picture of Kim’s grandfather. Conrad Brooks, as we all know, was Kelton the Cop in Ed Woods’ Plan 9 trilogy.

Nikki Fritz is in there, too, and had one scene that made me go “Holy Mother of God!” while previewing it for (harrumph) quality:

And it doesn’t end well for him, either

This is the sort of movie where a guy is forced to wear a Syngenor suit  (look it up, non-nerds) and we immediately started a betting pool as to how long it would be before one of the goons wound up wearing it. I think Erik won with ten minutes.

After the movie finished, Dave looked at me and said, “That was a really stupid movie.” Yes, it was, and it was glorious. If I had one complaint, it’s the schizophrenic nature of the flick: the stupid part (my favorite) and the commercial parts, where we have our softcore porn and the movie style suddenly switches into Cinemax slickness for a sex music video. Prior to the opening night sequence we mainly busied ourselves making fun of Kim’s best friend, who was so white she could have been one of the Indians from The Norseman. No fooling, she was so pale that she blew the white balance for any other characters photographed near her. We were really hoping for a Haunted Drive-In subplot, and every time she was in a scene, we could pretend it was The Grudge.

Thank you! Tip your waitress! Again!

The Christmas Spirit is upon me, and so long as the YouTube Gods are, also:

The next day I was going to  have to get up early and drive Max back to college, so I had to squelch the “One more?” urge. Well, wait, there was one thing on my flash drive, labeled “Thanksgiving Treat”, that I knew was only 40 minutes long. We could do that.

And that was how I got Crapfest to watch He-Man & She-Ra: A Christmas Special.

I’ve already gone over that in length, so I’ll direct you there. You only need to know A) Dave does a very good Skeletor, and B) Dave was actively angry that Stinkor did not show up, make of that what you will.

That was actually a fairly typical Crapfest outing, looking back. There wasn’t a real breakout hit (except for my son demanding I turn over every single episode of Magnificent Zubat I possessed), but there wasn’t a soul crusher, either. A fine way to wrap up the year.

Especially since I made the write-up last almost to New Years! See you on the other side!

December 27, 2018
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 2 Comments

I was 26 when He-Man and the Masters of the Universe premiered, meaning I was way out of its target demographic. In fact, the only reason I knew it existed was due to the insert in DC comic books at the time announcing the fact. It didn’t even appeal to the stoner in me; the stories were too simplistic and preachy, the animation style too limited (and oddly peppered with rotoscoping). No, that part of my heart went out to Robotech (even a bowdlerized Macross was pretty damned good) and later Thundercats. But the kids loved He-Man, and that’s cool. Not every piece of entertainment needs my seal of approval to exist.

Somebody noticed that girls liked He-Man, too and thus was He-man’s long-lost twin sister Princess Adora, aka She-Ra, introduced, and the mythology expanded. It turned out Skeletor wasn’t the ultimate evil, it was a literal shadowy figure called Horde Prime, and Skeletor was only one of his/its minions. The other was Hordak, who had taken over Adora’s planet with an army of robots and some toyetic henchmen equally as incompetent as Skeletor’s. The tone of She-Ra‘s adventures seem different as well: her fellows in the resistance are more focussed on helping and supporting each other than punching the enemy, though She-Ra is not adverse to letting loose with an occasional rotoscoped roundhouse kick.

I’m going to have to leave it to someone who is actually female to judge if this was empowering or not. I do find the inclusion nice, though.

“Hey, a floating space wizard! No problem!”

But we’re here to talk about the Christmas Special, aren’t we? Eternia is prepping for a birthday party for our title characters, and I am surprised to find out that Queen Marlena is from Earth, as she reminisces about preparing for Christmas about this time (like I said, I didn’t follow the show. Probably this was common knowledge among fans). Meantime, Man-at-Arms is preparing a new toyetic jet called the Spy Eye, and floating imp Orko (traditionally referred to as Dorko) breaks into it and while futzing around, accidentally breaks the controls and takes off. After He-Man and She-Ra foil Skeletor’s attempt to steal what they think is an unmanned craft, the Spy Eye breaks some barriers and crash lands on Earth. Dorko… um, Orko… actually gets his magic to work to rescue two lost children from an avalanche. The kids are Miguel and Alisha, and they take shelter in the Spy Eye. They pass the time by telling Orko the Christmas story, though Orko’s more interested in Santa Claus and the gifts than some kid in a manger. They also teach him “Jingle Bells”.

“We would TOO have fetched more than 99 cents at Kay-Bee!”

Meantime our pals on Eternia have figured out that Dorko was on the Spy Eye and are trying to get him back, but She-Ra has to perform an impromptu quest to obtain a Water Crystal to power the Transport Beam (why nobody asks Man-at-Arms how he invented such a powerful device that could only powered by something rarer than unobtainium is open to debate). This she does, but only after encountering the Monstroids, giant robots who are obviously failed toy designs, and are quite bitter about it.

The Transport Beam does bring the Spy Eye and Orko back, but also Alisha and Miguel. So it has to be figured out how to get them home in time for Christmas. Luckily, the Water Crystal only has to recharge, no additional bullshit quests are required. However Horde Prime has sensed a tremor in the Force a new force for good in the universe, and sends Hordak and Skeletor to capture it and bring it to him/it. (It’s the kids and their spirit of Christmas, you see).

“At last I have the means to finally conquer – WHAT THE HELL?!?!”

And there, finally, is our plot major. Bow (the She-Ra male counterpart to Teela) writes a new Christmas song with Alisha and Miguel (gaaaaaah) just in time for them to be kidnapped by Hordak, then captured by the Monstroids, so they get involved with the war between them and the equally failed toy concept race, the Manchines. Then they get scooped up by Skeletor, who gets shot out of the sky by Hordak, and now Skeletor is trooping two kids (and a toyetic robot dog) through a snowy landscape. First he creates arctic wear so the kids won’t freeze, and that is the chink in his armor that lets the children’s innate goodness and love of Christmas leak through.

Skeletor: Tell me more about this “Christmas.”

Miguel: Well, it’s a wonderful time of the year. Everyone has lots of fun.

Skeletor: You mean they get in fights?

Miguel: No, no – they have fun!

Skeletor: Fights are fun. I like fights!

Miguel: And you give each other presents.

Skeletor: And when you open them, they explode, right?

Miguel: No! They’re nice gifts.

Skeletor: Nice? Doesn’t sound like much fun to me!

“Now, He-Man, I am going to destr – WHAT THE HELL?!?!”

All leading up to the final battle, where Skeletor gets knocked out, Horde Prime’s ship grabs the kids in a tractor beam, and Skeletor is awakened by the robot dog licking his bony face until he wakes up and shoots down his boss’ ship to save the children, the most bizarre character turnaround since Jaws turned good in Moonraker. The act makes him feel nauseous, But She-Ra and He-Man assure him that Christmas comes only once a year. “Oh, thank goodness!” Skeletor cries. General laughter.

Oh yeah, the kids get back home. The end.

It’s a generally easy way to beat 50 minutes to death. The most interesting thing for me, only sort of conversant with the world, was wondering who the fuck that was and entertaining myself with imagined names. Skeletor had a double-headed henchman that I was sure was called Twoheador but I later found was the more clever Two Bad; Hordak had a similarly lumpy guy with the more prosaic name Multibot, not Doublebodyor.

I was right about Spikor, though.

“And a Merry Christmas to al – WHAT THE HELL?!?!”

The character that actually triggered my research is only in two scenes at the beginning and end, a guy with an elephant’s head and a telescoping trunk . That was Snout Spout. To think I could have died without knowing that!

People endlessly bitch about Filmation’s limited animation, but the truth is they kept a lot of American animators alive when most of the production companies were going to cheaper Asian houses. I see founder and Executive Produce Lou Scheimer credited with branching out the He-Man universe to girls, and later insisting that the main character of the science-fiction series Bravestarr be a Native American. Those are pretty ballsy moves for a kiddie industry, and deserving of some respect. Even if those closing bumpers were always cloying and highly mockable:

Prince Adam: Not everyone celebrates Christmas, but the spirit of the Christmas season is within us all. It’s a season of love and joy and caring.

Orko: And presents!

Prince Adam: Presents are nice, Orko, but Christmas means much more than that.

Orko: I know, Adam. Christmas is a time of peace and caring and happiness.

Prince Adam: That’s right, Orko. And what would make you happiest this Christmas?

Orko: Presents!

Prince Adam: Oh, Orko!

December 13, 2018
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

There was going to be a category in this non-event I was going to call “Christmas-adjacent” but then this one doesn’t quite fit smoothly into that; I mean, it has Christmas right in the title. But what it has to do with Christmas is pretty slight.

You have this idyllic little town in the mountains. Beautiful place, trees all around. It’s apparently Christmas Eve, and the 18th birthday of Jacie (Magda Apanowicz), the daughter of Joseph (Ed Quinn), a local shopkeeper who’s pretty ambivalent toward the building of a MegaDeals mall that will block access to his favorite climbin’ mountain. There’s been some weird weather lately – unseasonal heat waves, mass bird deaths, red water running from the taps. Jacie’s grandmother gives her a ring along with some cryptic utterings that she should have given it to her sooner, that she should have talked to her about it sooner, and then Grandmas gets impaled on the latest climate disaster: Giant icicles falling from the sky like spears. Oh, did I mention Jacie’s donning the ring gave her a tremendous shock and made the weird birthmark on her arm glow?

Grandma! Noooooo!

Let me spare you a lot of exposition – although the unveiling of this berserk mythos is half the fun of the movie, so just stop right here if necessary – this movie likes to trot out the term geomancy quite a bit. Turns out geomantic forces build up over centuries until such time that they can destroy the world unless the Chosen One gathers five rings and stands in exactly the right place at the right time. The last time this happened was during the age of the Mayans, and this is all explained in an ancient picture book with an arcane compass in the cover that will lead our plucky heroes to the rings. And since it is, yes, 2012, it is high time.

“Karen! There’s a cheap CGI tornado right behind you!”

Okay, a visual guide is very handy, but don’t you think the Mayans could have done a bit more in warning us, besides leaving behind calendars that ended in 2012, and spawning a lucrative market of doomsaying literature and cultism? Well, turns out the laugh’s on you, Mayan doubters, because the plucky indigenous Mesoamericans did – by writing “The Twelve Days of Christmas”, a codified explanation of what was going to happen. (Come on, you picked that up from the necessary five golden rings, didn’t you?)

The filmmakers don’t push that agenda too far, because I’m still puzzling over what lyrics are connected to which of the various doom events that unfold. It’s also to their credit that they keep things moving fast enough to minimize thinking too much about what is unspooling before you. To do this, they wind up ripping off a couple of Stephen King tropes, like a force field dome shutting off the area completely from the outside world, and the villainous Mr. Megadeals himself, Kane (Roark Critchlow) getting ahold of the Mayan book and misinterpreting the final image to mean that Jacie has to die to save the world (another thing you should have noticed by now were the Biblical character names).

Pretty much every disaster that comes our way is of the cheap CGI variety that turns you into cheap CGI so you can shatter or dissolve (also: I had no idea electricity could make you explode). They apparently did pay for a life-size icicle spear, though, because they use that one twice. None of this makes a damn lick of sense, but as I said, it moves quickly and the tension-mounting moments are well-executed and exciting. It’s not something that would substitute for an actual Christmas movie, mind, but it’s a far better alternative to treacly Hallmark movies that leave a film of saccharine on your TV set.

December 9, 2018
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 6 Comments