The Wonderful World of Crap | drfreex.com

The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! (1972)

My greatest weakness as a writer, I have found, is that I’m just not very good at titles. I take cold comfort in the fact that I’m not the only one. How many movies are there titled Boiling Point? Maniac? Island of (fill in the blank)? So I get really excited – far too excited, really – when I know I absolutely must see a movie based on the title alone. Such a title – and I’ve been meaning to watch it for years – is The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here!

There is no way I can not watch a movie titled that. It has, admittedly, taken me forty years to do so. I remember back in the dawn of the VHS boom, I saw a copy of it for rent, but I grabbed something else entirely. Maybe The Fantastic Animation Festival. Never regretted that. And now I know why.

Because, of course, the entertainment value of the movie is in inverse proportion to that incredible name.

That title is credited to producer William Mishkin, while the movie is the work of Andy Milligan. Milligan had a strange, troubled life; he entered the world of low-budget movies through his involvement in the off-off Broadway theatrical scene. His first movie was Vapors, a 30 minute gay movie set in a bathhouse. This got Mishkin’s attention, and Milligan was soon making low-budget sexploitation movies for Mishkin’s 42nd street theater connections. He knew where to find actors who’d work cheap and, thanks to his theater experience, knew how to build sets and make costumes.

So, really, I kind of sigh when I consider Milligan; His movies cannot be considered good, but it’s easy to see the aspirations at work. Given more than a few thousand bucks to work with and some support personnel, he might have been pretty good. But even his best work – something like The Body Beneath, say – still bears all the telling shortfalls of a creator wearing too many hats with too few tools at his disposal. Single mike recordings of dialogue, limited lighting, needle-drop music cues that cut off suddenly at scene changes…

But dammit, you see him trying. You see the actors trying. Milligan actually has some pretty good actors working for him… but they are betrayed by their material – almost always, written by Milligan. It is almost always stuff that would be ripe but tolerable on a stage, but on a movie screen, too often the kiss of ennui.

The Rats Are Comingconcerns itself with the Mooney family, in what we are eventually told is 1899 England. The period is a bit slippery here – Milligan’s costumes are serviceable for the period (if not entirely accurate – I’m particularly

Quick now – 1899? or 1972?

skeptical of one of Monica’s hats), but two of his younger actresses are quite obviously wearing 1972 hairstyles and make-up. Not that I mind. 1972 was a good year for me.

The Mooneys are a dreadfully dysfunctional family, something with which Milligan, sadly, had a lot of experience. The aged father of the clan is given to “attacks” whenever his temper is roused, and must be given increasingly frequent injections. The eldest daughter, Phoebe, is running family matters as best she can, aided by eldest brother, Mortimer. Next oldest daughter is Monica, psychotically jealous (or just plain psychotic), and another brother, Malcolm, is best described as “animal-like”. The youngest daughter, Diana, returns to the Mooney estate with a new husband in tow, much to the disdain of Pa. He sent Diana off to medical school so she could help him with his “experiments”. Dian’s husband, Gerald, starts noticing odd things, like dismembered chickens showing up in the halls and Monica jumping out of wardrobes with a knife.

Oh screw it, they’re werewolves, okay? The Mooneys are a bunch of freaking werewolves! It’s right there in the title, for God’s sake. Pa isn’t trying to cure the lycanthropy, though, he’s working on life extension – he, himself is 199 years old! Then everything goes to hell in the last ten minutes due to really bad timing, and the estate becomes werewolf central.

Now, this was the basis for Milligan’s original movie, which was called The Curse of the Full Moon, and ran only 72 minutes. “Not long enough!” yelled Mishkin, and to pad the movie out, they have a subplot where Monica goes into town to buy a new pet from Mr. McHarbor (that’s actually a pretty clever name), who sells her some rats that ate off his left arm and half his face one night when he had too much to drink. Why is there this subplot? Willard was making money at the time. And Mishkin came up with that delicious title.

The title still gets it wrong anyway, because the rats last maybe five minutes at the Mooney household, until Monica is bitten by a rubber rat (what part of “flesh-eating” didn’t you get?) and she returns them to McHarbor, demands her money back, and then sets him on fire. At least I think that’s what happens. The scene is badly lit, and Milligan’s handheld camera tends to go into Swirl-A-Vision during murder scenes. But The Rats Have Come And Gone! The Werewolves Will Be Here Eventually! just doesn’t have the same panache.

And this is what happens when you rely on “ends” for your film stock.

It turns out Monica has a friend, another girl-woman named Rebecca, who is basically a Cockney Monica. Introduced at roughly the one hour mark, the only reason Rebecca exists, besides to give the tooth-grindingly annoying Monica more screen time, is to mention that she’s seen things at the estate that ensure that Monica will hack her up bloodily.

Except. I have the Video Kart DVD of this, paired with Bloodthirsty Butchers, and the scene is scissored into incomprehension, apparently for TV. Good grief, this sort of thing drives me mad. I’ve run into this twice – while writing reviews for Shriek of the Mutilated and I Drink Your Blood – where the available tapes/discs were TV edits. Those movies – and Milligan’s horror movies – are infamous for their gore. This renders judging them on any sort of reasonable basis moot. How am I supposed to judge such an incomplete product? It’s like trying to review a G-rated version of Deep Throat. Uncut versions of the two linked movies above have surfaced on DVD, but I somehow doubt an uncut version of The Rats Are Coming is ever going to appear.

Then again, I should probably count my blessings – according to Wikipedia, the DVD currently resting on my desk does not exist.

At one point in the movie, Diana goes into town to buy a pistol. This leads to a very long scene with a comical old gunsmith who sells her a suspiciously modern-looking automatic pistol and is sweet-talked into melting down a silver crucifix for bullets. Even as you wonder why the hell this scene is taking so long (outside of padding the running time) you find yourself liking the gunsmith, he’s one of the better actors. Then you later find out the gunsmith was Andy Milligan.

Milligan the writer has a problem with circular scripts; in Rats it’s characters that keep almost saying something significant, then saying, “I’ll tell you when the time is right.” But I’ve got to say the one thread running through the movie, and whereby we finally find out what the hell is going on with the Mooneys is very well handled, if somewhat drawn out over a lot of territory; but then, I’ve never run across a truly gothic piece of fiction that I didn’t feel the same about.

At any rate, there’s a reason, I re-discover, that I measure the time between Milligan movies in years, rather than months. I find them interesting to hash out afterwards, but the actual watching… ho, boy, that can be a chore. But why take my word for it? You can download it from The Internet Archive! Not that I necessarily feel you should.

(And dear God, I love that the comments all think this is a British movie, not something shot down the street from the Staten Island Ferry! Good on you, Andy!)

And hey, here’s a trailer that gives away what is supposed to be the final Twilight Zone twist! Now you don’t have to see it!

September 9, 2012
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: andy milligan . Author: drfreex . Comments: 1 Comment

How to Waste A Labor Day Weekend

Ah, Labor Day. You are a welcome surcease, a chance to sleep in a bit, to attend an impromptu lunch honoring a returning comrade, a chance to catch up on this blog. You are also a cancellation of The Show, which I may find tedious, but is a vital part of my patchwork economy in these troubled times. I could moan about that, or I could drown my sorrows in crap cinema, which I did. Rick was the only one of the Four Horsemen brave enough (or, alternately, in town enough – curse you, Final Weekend of Summer!) to attend. I was determined to make a dent on The List of movies I had required myself to see this year, which left us a whoooooooole bunch of leeway in our viewing, as I still had 33 movies to go, 24 on the B-Movie List, 9 on the Quality List. How’d we do? Well, the list is now down to 30, thanks to our valiant efforts. First, though, I put on a DVD-R I had gotten from Something Weird Video. To be precise, I got it for Adventures in Balloonland, but I am saving that in retribution for Strange Beings, which was inflicted on me at the last official Crapfest. No, I went for something Rick had once expressed interest in, even though he will deny it: the unaired pilot for a children’s TV show, Polly Pockets.

The King and Queen of Gloom. There goes the budget.

As the box copy points out, Polly Pockets has nothing to do with the toy line of pocket-size dolls; Polly Pockets is an effervescent brunette with a skirt composed of nothing but pockets, and theoretically anything can be pulled from them. Her accomplice is a Royal Dano-type named Dandy Andy, who is notable for failing at everything in a komedic fashion. At one point, Polly pulls something – an onion? – out of a pocket, reminding her of her trip to the Castle of Gloom, at which point the entire thing turns into a community theater production of Marat/Sade complete with songs. We were especially appreciative of the King and Queen of Gloom, whose crowns were so-very-obviously made of construction paper. The King’s was decorated with Magic Marker, but the Queen’s had some fancy glue-and-glitter detailing. Rick pointed out that the box copy also promised “A Visit to Santa”, and we figured what the hell, we’re here, and proceeded to suffer through the worst damned Christmas themed thing we had endured since The Magic Christmas Tree. Two kids write and ask Santa if they can visit him at the North Pole, and Santa – I’ve seen worse Santa beards, but not many – thinks, “Well, it’s Christmas Eve, my busiest night of the year… but what the hell,” and sends an elf to pick them up and bring them to his split-level ranch living room so they can tour some shopping center Christmas displays. Just when it starts to get really stultifying, apparently Something Weird thought, “Christ, this is boring,” and slapped in a puppet show.

But this is not just any puppet show. No, this is Labor Day weekend, after all, so this is a Union puppet show. I am duty-bound to inform you that I Cannot Make Shit Like This Up. That title card just sort of passed us by, but then we find ourselves confronted by the happy worker puppet, telling us the sammich his wife made was so good, it practically had a beer on top. He is then bedeviled by some sort of boxer with a glass bottle for a body, who claims he is “the champion”, only to be set straight by the Worker, who informs him that the AFL-CIO is the true champion. The scene then changes to a kitchen, where another glass-bottle homunculus tells us how safe he is because he’s sterilized, which gets reallllllllly creepy when the Mom puppet shows up to be told how she needs more sterile men like himself in her life (for instance, she had been buying milk in those horrible opaque paper cartons and last evening, when she discovered it was actually empty, her husband almost left her!) . The camera keeps cutting to an audience of children who must actually be at a Howdy Doody taping or something, because they are not banging at the doors begging to be released. Then it ends, threatening us with “50 TV stations”. I don’t know what that was about, and I sure as hell ain’t going back to find out. Until I spring this on the next Crapfest, anyway, because the workers control the means of production.

Well, enough of our civic duties, it was movie time, We started off with Big Bad Mama, something I had been trying to work into a Crapfest for ages. Pity I never did get it in, because the first bare breast shot is about two minutes into the movie, and the boys of Crapfest dearly love their gratuitous nudity.

Roger Corman had a nice little cottage industry remixing Bonnie and Clyde throughout the early 70s. This time the gang is all-female, Mama (Angie Dickinson) and her two nubile daughters (Susan Sennett and Robbie Lee), trying to make it in 1932 East Texas. If you actually live in East Texas, this will amuse you, as mountainous Southern California is not really a good match. Anyway, the girls wind up helping hapless bank robber Fred Diller (Tom Skerritt) whose heist is going terribly wrong, and thus begin their lives as felons. Mom sleeps with Diller while the girls fume over the unfairness of it all, until Mom runs into William Baxter, a smooth con man who takes Diller’s place in bed, while the two girls share the discarded Diller.

The plot structure owes a lot to Corman’s own Bloody Mama, with stress in the gang finally leading up to a kidnapping that goes wrong. Throughout, you can sense the presence of Corman, doubtless wearing a green visor and holding an open accounting ledger, nudging director Steve Carver and saying, “Excuse me, but we haven’t had a bare boob in almost four minutes.”

Yes, once again we find ourselves ogling Angie Dickinson’s unclad charms, and viewers of a certain age can get a bit of a pleasurable thrill by realizing that this hit the drive-ins just as Police Woman was gearing up on TV. Now a word about Shatner: I have always liked Shatner, even – perhaps especially – when he goes way over the top. There’s not a lot of it here, but I will say this: he doesn’t cheat in his nude scenes. America being what it is, the little Shatner isn’t going to hove into view, but it comes close. By God, if Angie was going to be in the altogether, so was he.

In a less salacious light: there is one scene where, in the foreground, Dickinson and Skerritt are having a yelling, screaming argument. In the background is Shatner, who, with no lines, no blocking, still manages to steal the scene. I have to respect that.

Then came the Blu-Ray (!) of The Exterminator, starring Robert “Paper Chase” Ginty, embarking on his 80s career as an action hero. Exterminator spends a lot of money in its pre-credit sequence, showing Steve James saving Ginty’s life in Vietnam. Then we go to New York, where Steve James again saves Ginty’s ass from a gang called the Ghetto Ghouls. You might think be thinking “Hey, I hope this movie is about Steve James,” but stop thinking like that, because the Ghouls mug James the next day, breaking his neck and paralyzing him for life. Ginty starts thinking positively, tracks down the people responsible, and lets them get eaten by rats.

Hey, good movie, you might say, but no, we are only 20 minutes in. Ginty then goes about stealing money from the local head of the Beef Mafia (the cops refer to them as “meat mobsters”) to take care of James’ family. The meat mobster doesn’t tell Ginty about the trained attack dog at his house, so once Ginty dispatches the dog with an electric carving knife, he feeds the mafioso through an industrial grinding machine.

We still got tons of movie left, so Ginty just sort of starts wandering around, looking for lowlifes who need exterminating. He finds them in great plenitude in 1980 New York. There is also, needless to say, a cop on his trail: no less than Christopher George, who, like Ginty, is going to be going back and forth between USA and Italian sound stages a lot in those years. George’s story is teased out over most of the movie – very slowly teased out because we spend a lot of time on his romance with a doctor played by Samantha Eggar, which slows the plot down to a crawl.

The most interesting bit is when Ginty pulls out what we referred to as his “Vietnam Box”, a case holding a ton of weapons, including grenades, that he supposedly stole from the Army. Later, when he has a solid lead on The Exterminator, George reaches into his locker and pulls out his own Vietnam Box, with a .45 auto and a tactical shotgun.

We also get some political intrigue, which feels rather half-cooked and shoe-horned in. There’s CIA agent demanding information from George because “The Exterminator… is making the incumbent look bad.” Man! Politics! Can’t even get away from it in a crap movie!

I have to say, The Exterminator does deliver on what it promises. If you want a gritty Death Wish type rip-off, you could do a lot worse (I know I have). And that Synapse Blu-Ray is gorgeous.

Next up: a movie my pal Dave has been pestering me to see forever: The Cell.

In The Cell, there is an experimental procedure that allows a child therapist (Jennifer Lopez) to journey into the mindscape of a catatonic boy. The procedure is suddenly, urgently pressed into use to send Lopez into the mind of a comatose serial killer (Vincent D’Onofrio), to attempt to find his latest victim before she is killed in an automated death trap.

This is Tarsem Singh’s first movie, and his penchant for manipulated images serves the trips into mental spaces quite well. Rick tells me this is a pre-nose job Lopez, and I’ll trust him on that. If there were any misgivings about Lopez as an actress, The Cell should have put them away; she does very well. D’Onofrio is, as usual, fantastic, though I think there are a few times that Singh either let him, or directed him to, go too far. Vince Vaughn is the federal agent tracking down D’Onofrio, and it was shocking to see how thin the 2000 Vaughn was.

If I have one problem with the script, it’s that when Vaughn figures out how to find the death box (after he himself has a traumatic trip into D’Onofrio’s mind), the clue that he’s sussed out is so obvious, it could only have been missed by sloppy detective work. Given the number of men working on the scene, it’s pretty unlikely.

If I have two problems with the movie, it’s that it bears some resemblance to a script I wrote back in college. My tragic mistake? I didn’t think to put a serial killer in the plot. What was I thinking?

A good enough movie. I don’t think I would have been more impressed with the visuals in 2000, though. There is just some level that it doesn’t engage me like I feel it should. I don’t delight in the process of discovery, so it fails as mystery (I’ve already bitched about that final clue). It’s not intense enough to qualify as horror, but it does come close a couple of times. It is even too busy trying to tell a touching story as Lopez struggles to save the little boy version of D’Onofrio trapped in his head to qualify as a thriller or a science fiction story. It’s an odd creature, not fish, not fowl, and I can’t find its own terms to meet it on.

But enough of that flighty stuff. We ended the evening with Women in Cages, classy fare if there ever was.

I think this may be at the start of Corman’s Filipino Women In Prison cycle; it’s directed by Gerardo de Leon, an old pro in the Philippine film market – you can thank him, at the very least, for two of the Blood Island movies and Terror Is A Man, a surprisingly effective Island of Dr. Moreau rip-off. So Women in Cages is a well-made, efficient WIP movie, with the usual demeaning work in the sugar cane fields, showers, and catfights.

One of the very few things that sets it apart from its kin is the casting of Pam Grier as a bad guy, the Chief Matron, Alabama, a lesbian who picks her lovers from the convict pool and has a torture chamber stocked with bizarre instruments called “The Playpen”. Alabama – who’s from Harlem, go figure – has issues, to be sure, not the least of which is the immediate assumption that the three Americans under her charge are “racist bitches”.

Alabama gets taken hostage when our heroines, such as they are, escape, and finds herself on the receiving end for a change, then in deep trouble as the savage hunters – whose job it is to bring escapees back dead or alive, usually dead – assume she is also an escapee.

There is hell of backstory here – our main prisoner is only guilty of trusting the wrong man, who is trying to have her killed in prison, and after a while you lose track of who’s double-crossing who, and then we’re back where the movie started, on a floating whorehouse where the same topless dancer has apparently been dancing for the past three months without a break. Some guy who I didn’t know was a cop for most of the movie rescues our heroine, leaving her junkie cellmate (who was the one trying to kill her) to her floating whorehouse duties in a pretty disquieting ending. Serves her right, I guess.

Women in Cages isn’t quite up to the follow-ups, Big Doll House and The Big Bird Cage, both directed by Jack Hill, which had a lot of subversive humor buried in them. Also missing is Vic Diaz. I demand Vic Diaz in all my Filipino movies, because whenever he’s around, I’m sure to be delighted with the results. Diaz retired in 2001, but he’s apparently still alive. If that is indeed so, I hope he’s well, and continues to have a long, happy life.

Vic Diaz! Praise his usefulness! (ululate)

This may be the only place on the Web where you can start out talking about the quantity and quality of boob shots in movies and wind up with a love letter to Vic Diaz. (Actually, I can think of several other places where that could be the case, but never mind that) That is the world of crap cinema in a nutshell, my friends: you often start in one place, then the journey takes you to another, surprising place. The trick is often finding a way to enjoy that journey.

September 3, 2012
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: angie dickinson, big bad mama, christopher george, crapfest, jennifer lopez, polly pockets, robert ginty, roger corman, steve james, tarsem singh, the cell, the exterminator, vic diaz, vincent d'onofrio, william shatner, women in cages . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

Some Odd Bits of Heroism

End of Summer is always a tumultuous time. I’m married to a teacher who runs her own private school, so there’s that madness; though I’m not on faculty, I work at a community college, so there’s that. I’ve finally gotten hallway knowledgeable about where the various classrooms are, and can direct panicking students with a fair degree of certainty. I was unprepared, however, for the woman in the parking lot waving her parking permit at me and shouting that she could not find a parking place. I may look fairly authoritative, but I see nothing about me that implies I can bend the laws of time and space or possibly lift an offending car out of what might be perceived as her God-given slot.

So in also trying to get last week’s Crapfest moving, I was rather lax on the movie-watching front, and when I did actually watch something, it was pretty undemanding.

Undemanding movies have their place.

I started out with Machete, which I have been meaning to watch for a very long time. As you’re probably aware, Machete started out as one of the joke trailers in the Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino Grindhouse. Actually it seems like all those trailers will be getting movies in the long run, so that’s not such a surprising thing. What is surprising is that Machete would have been a better entry in Grindhouse than either Planet Terror or Death Proof, and this is coming from one of the few people who will admit that they enjoyed Death Proof.

Machete puts Danny Trejo’s character from the Spy Kids movies in an entirely different light, as an ex-federale turned indigent day-laborer in Austin. He gets sucked into a complicated plot to ensure ultra-right wing and anti-immigrant politician John McLaughin (Robert De Niro, no less) gets re-elected, ensuring an electrified fence on the US/Mexico border with holes controlled by Mexican drug lord and deadly Machete enemy Torrez (Steven Seagal, again no less).

It’s the casting that gives the movie half its fascination; besides De Niro and Seagal, there’s also Don Johnson, Jessica Alba, Michelle Rodriguez, and Lindsay Lohan as the drugged-out daughter of Jeff Fahey, and Fahey segues us into Rodriguez’s dependable repertory company: Cheech Marin, Tom Savini, and, of course, the redoubtable Danny Trejo, coming full circle from go-to badass villain to badass good guy.

Machete gleefully embraces the drive-in tropes of the movies it emulates. Like Rudy Ray Moore in his movies, the scarred Machete, because he is the title character, automatically becomes the sexiest man alive; no woman can resist him! Trejo, at 66 years of age when this was filmed, had to be pretty damned amused.

The whole subplot about immigration and illegals is actually pretty cogent and about as Ripped From Today’s Headlines as you can get; like Rodriguez, I live in Texas and this script pokes at several sore spots. There is also plentiful violence and some nudity, so like I said: perfect drive-in flick.

This was followed up by Superman vs The Elite, the latest animated movie from DC Universe, which I had put off purchasing until I could find a used copy. It’s an unusual choice for DCU, which tends to hew to origin stories and event comics. This one is apparently based on a single issue of Action Comics: #775, “What’s So Funny about Truth, Justice and The American Way”.

The Elite is a supergroup based on The Authority, a supergroup comic originated by one of my favorite writers, Warren Ellis, and Bryan Hitch. Like Alan Moore’s Miracleman, it was a superhero comic taken to a logical extreme; The Authority operates without directives or ties to anyone but themselves. Started as a Black Ops crew, they went independent when their original organization was defunded by the United Nations, and they are the only group with the skill sets and wherewithal to handle several world-threatening events. They also have no compunctions about killing bad guys.

Mark Millar’s subsequent run on The Authority was ugly and brutish, but still within the comic’s mission of subverting the Justice League/Avengers paradigm. Millar took the book in an increasingly political direction, as The Authority started getting proactive about making the world a better place. I grew disenchanted with the series and left.

Superman vs The Elite compresses that whole thing, and honestly, not too well. The title conflict is pretty well laid out and executed, but the trigger events are cardboard cut-outs. One of the flashier villains, The Atomic Skull, has no apparent plan beyond strolling around Metropolis and reducing people to cigar ash, which he does twice. There’s a war between Bogustan and Upper Faketopia, but a terrorist attack that is The Elite’s first big test seems very vaguely connected.

The main event is fairly well done, and concludes everything, in defiance of comic continuity where The Elite, under new leadership, eventually merged with the JLA for a while. But the main thing I took away from Superman vs The Elite is how much I miss the Superman/Lois Lane marriage jettisoned, like so much else, in DC’s New 52 re-booting. That relationship just worked, with Lois providing a much-needed foil and human perspective, and turning into one of the better, stronger female characters of the early 21^st century.

So: generally entertaining, but empty, and in specific: phooey.

I had gotten Superman vs The Elite at the local Movie Exchange. Not a place that I frequent, though I’ve gotten some good buys there, on occasion. I mainly troll for cheap Criterions, but usually the management is knowledgeable enough to know when they’ve got something special. Out of print movies can be priced as high as a hundred bucks or more.

So I got a couple of discs that were savings, but not huge, but three others that I was really pleased about – the best being the three disc Sherlock Holmes Collection for $5.99. This is all five of the surviving episodes of the 60s BBC Sherlock Holmes TV series, starring Peter Cushing as Holmes. I had two of these episodes as a gift from my friend Parker, who had gotten duplicate discs from Amazon UK back in the day, and they were not interested in him returning the dupe. I have a region-free DVD player, and really enjoyed that R2 disc.

Like I said, Movie Exchange is usually pretty knowledgeable about such things, so the $5.99 price tag was a bit of a surprise. (now that I check on Amazon, that’s pretty typical for used copies) Then I noticed the store-generated label, which read “SHERLOCK HOLMES – MATT FREWER”. Ah, that explains a lot.

I decided to break into the set with its two-part adaptation of “The Hound of the Baskervilles”, a version I had not yet seen. “Hound” has to be the Holmes story most adapted into movie form. No surprise there, as it’s a hell of a great story. But it is also a story in which the supposed main character – Sherlock Holmes – is absent for two-thirds of the story. It’s Watson’s chance to shine, and sometimes he does. Not so much in this case. Nigel Stock is a Watson in the Nigel Bruce mold, though not as weighted toward comedy as was Mr. Bruce. In fact, in the 1939 Hound of the Baskervilles with Basil Rathbone as the Great Detective, Bruce’s Watson becomes a pretty dynamic character, until Holmes shows up, and then the good doctor just sort of deflates. In similar circumstances, Stock’s character remains steady, if a bit petulant .

I’ve grown so familiar with “Hound” over the years that the primary enjoyment for me in watching these adaptations, besides the quality of the Holmes and Watsons on display, is watching how the various versions take apart and rearrange the elements of the story. The BBC version hews closer to Doyle’s original than most, though it cuts the ending short by Holmes revealing the killer twenty minutes before the actual end of the story! I guess that really cuts down on the problem of an exposition-heavy conclusion, but it’s rather disorienting all the same.

Jeremy Brett remains my favorite Holmes, but Cushing is, as you would expect, very good in the role.. There is no feeling of him simply hashing over the Hammer movie version of a few years previous, and if he is not a Homes for the ages, he is a very entertaining one. I look forward to the other four episodes in the set, even the ones I’ve seen before.

My viewing encompasses a very wide range of what we accept as “heroism” in the movies. I’m not sure of how many cartoon bad guys Machete kills, but it’s a lot; Superman, of course, refuses to kill even literal cartoon bad guys, which is the whole point of Superman vs The Elite; and then, of course, we have Holmes, who generally defers to his ex-Army roommate to handle the wetwork (and even then, Watson shoots to wound, unless you’re a Hell Hound). That’s a very wide range of heroics in pretty violent genres, and it is pretty telling that at this point in time, Superman’s noble stance seems as out-of-place as Holmes’ intellectual detachment; like it or not, we’ve been living in the age of Machete for most of my life, and likely yours, as well.

August 31, 2012
Categories: Movies That Do Not Suck, The Wonderful World of Crap . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

Back-to-School Crap

This one had been brewing since July. Busy Summer schedules pushed it into August, when I suggested the last Sunday, August 26th, for the day. Plenty of time! All and sundry concurred. Then, on the blessed day came the apologies, the excuses. Once more, it was down to the Four Horsemen: myself, host Dave, Alan, and Rick.

That’s okay. We know who are the hardcore, the faithful. And who are the cowardly, weak, craven, chicken-hearted, gutless, lily-livered, spineless, yellow-bellied, pusillanimous weak-kneed pigeon-hearted wusses.

Anyway.

Dave started things off with some horrific thing he had found on the Internet, Strange Beings. Let me see if I can adequately describe Strange Beings, though it really requires the literary talent of a Lovecraft. Firstly, you should know that Strange Beings is a Power Point presentation, created before Microsoft ever invented the Great Satan of meeting software. This means that basically it sounds like somebody put a tape recorder in front of their crazy uncle, asked him Tell us about the Little People again, Unca Joe, and then took the resulting droning dissertation and used it as the soundtrack while they pointed a camcorder at books of art and scrapbook clippings. There is no motion in this thing. None. Except where the aging tape is damaged and loses the signal for a moment.

It is also two hours, three minutes, and twenty-three seconds long. That is the exact length of a VHS tape, and our narrator uses every goddamned second of it. In fact, the presentation cuts off in mid-sentence, just as he is about to deliver to us some Great Secret. “We all live in a potential para-” Para what? Paradise? Paramecium? Paratrooper? Paranormal Activity, Part Three?

The entire thing is available on YouTube. In fact, screw you, I don’t trust you, here it is right now:

Be aware: I was nice. I actually tracked down the segment where he starts talking about The Carrot People, which makes the entire endurance test almost worth it. At about the 4:55 mark.

This is apparently the work of Al Fry, about which you can find very little on the Internet, and by you, I mean me. There are other videotapes by him floating around, with titles like Triple Your Intelligence & Memory, How to Find & Keep A Soul Mate, and of course, The Hidden World History, helpfully subtitled on YouTube as “Conspiracy NWO”, which might give you an idea as to the mindset we are dealing with here. It was likely sold through ads in the back of Fate magazine and UFO Monthly. Maybe even Fortean Times. If it ever wound up at your local video store – and mine, for years, bought everything – it was on the 99 cents a night rack.

Dave’s wife, Annie, was dealing with this magnificently, but then, she was off in another room, enjoying Mr. Fry’s soothing tones. She opined that “He sounds like he’s paging through the Golden Book Encyclopedia of Magic and paraphrasing everything he sees.” Me, at about the hour mark, I was finding excuses to not be in the same room with Strange Beings. I was reduced to doing my imitation of Yaphet Kotto in Alien: “I’m asking you to pull the plug.”

Two hours, three minutes, and twenty-three seconds.

Personally, I think Dave had been saving this up ever since I mortally wounded him with Harvey Sid Fisher’s Astrology Songs. It didn’t help that I had said “Sure, why not” to Strange Beings after a glance at a brief description. Finally, with thirty minutes left, Dave took a hint from the torches and pitchforks and put on Jaws: The Revenge.

If you want to make Jaws: The Revenge look like fucking Star Wars, watch it after 90 minutes of Strange Beings.

You may recall that Dave was going to spring this on us several Crapfests ago, only to find that Netflix had unceremoniously dumped it from their streaming service. Rick appreciated this, because it gave him something to whinge about for ages. I finally took it upon myself to solve this situation, because, you know, a used DVD cost like five bucks on Amazon. So. Mea culpa.

I have spent my life making believe that there was only one Jaws movie. One Indiana Jones movie, a couple of Alien movies, and, on a good day, up to three Star Wars movies. So I really have no idea what sort of backstory I am dealing with here, except that apparently Jaws 3-D never happened. There is a subplot about what is apparently the mate of the Great White from the original Jaws tracking down the members of the Brody family no matter where they are, because it is a Psychic Revenge Shark, which someone thought was more realistic than the original idea, a voodoo zombie shark.

I say it is a subplot because most of the movie is taken up by the widow Brody (Lorraine Gary, probably regretting being lured out of retirement) falling under the spell of fast (and constantly) talking pilot Hoagie (Michael Caine, giving me lots of opportunities to trot out my horrible Caine impersonation). This is apparently an attempt to distract us from the fact that this movie is ripping off Orca for its main plot.

The elder Brody son is now an oceanographer studying new ways to blow up hermit crabs, so Mom gets to have a lot of hysterical scenes demanding he toss away years of expensive college to become a desert hobo or something. Did I mention the younger son got eaten by the psychic revenge shark at the opening of the movie? That was when we still thought it was a Jaws movie.

The script does stuff that would get any normal writer fired and his typewriter confiscated. Maybe that did actually happen at some point, because reportedly Mario van Peebles wrote his own lines and came up with his own semi-Jamaican accent, mon. Somebody suddenly remembers this is a shark movie and Mom goes out to sea to face it alone. Hoagie, son and Mario-mon fly out to find her, and Hoagie lands his plane nearby, apparently forgetting it is not a sea plane. Mario gets chomped on by the shark, to the cheers of all present. Then at the end it is revealed he is still alive, embittering us all for life, mon.

I haven’t even gotten to the roaring shark, the incredibly bad parenting, or the fact that the widow Brody’s hydrophobia has a whiplash-causingly rapid, complete and utter turnaround under the spell of Hoagie. If you absolutely must know more, I direct you to the Master of All That Is Bad Ken Begg, and his typically exhaustive write-up. I don’t have the strength anymore.

Why am I so exhausted? Because after Jaws: The Revenge, it was time to fix dinner, so Dave decided we should watch the remainder of Strange Beings while we did this, “Just so we can say we got through it.” This delighted Annie, and horrified me, as Fry’s vampiric tones once again muttered through the speakers. This is, admittedly, the only way I found out about the interrupted secret of the universe. But at what cost?

After not having the promised Secret of the Universe given to us (as promised), it seemed somehow logical that next we should watch Petey Wheatstraw, The Devil’s Son-In-Law.

You might recall at the last Crapfest, we marched joyfully into Rudy Ray Moore’s Avenging Disco Godfather, only to find ourselves in the grip of a message movie. We were hoping for something more classically Rudy Ray n Petey Wheatstraw, and in a lot of ways, we got it.

Watching a Rudy Ray Moore movie is a whole lot like tripping and falling through the looking-glass: you find yourself in a strange alternate dimension where Rudy Ray Moore is the sexiest man alive (the man does pack a ton of charisma, if not a lot of acting talent), and the normal standards of storytelling and filmmaking do not hold. Petey Wheatstraw is pretty ambitious for a Rudy Ray movie, and if you miss the raw fun of the Dolemite movies, you still have to give the man some props.

Firstly, you have a woman giving birth to a watermelon (watermelons are a continuing motif), then a baby who appears to be a five year-old boy. Said boy kicks the doctor’s ass and is given the name “Petey Wheatstraw”. The devil’s son-in-law part comes later.

After rigorous kung fu training (involving watermelons), Petey grows up to be Rudy Ray Moore, doing Rudy Ray Moore’s stage act. This will put him up against the villainous vaudevillians Leroy and Skillet (played by Leroy and Skillet), who, to prevent competition with their new nightclub, have Petey and a whole bunch of other people machine-gunned at a funeral.

Going to remind you here, this is a comedy.

This leads to the Devil offering Petey a deal. If he’ll marry the Devil’s daughter and give Lucifer a grandson, Petey will be returned to Earth and given a shot at revenge. The Devil’s a pretty magnanimous kind of guy, and raises everyone at the funeral from the dead – except the kid in the coffin. So Petey wrecks Leroy and Skillet’s opening night – quite literally, using a magic cane the Devil has given him – so, hey, great movie! Glad I watched i—

Oh, wait, it’s not over yet. Petey spends the rest of the movie performing miracles with his magic cane, to the irritation of the Devil and his daughter. He is also trying to figure out a way to trick the devil and get out of his upcoming nuptials. My favorite part of his schemes is that they involve fooling the Devil just long enough to get out of town, because the Devil seemingly has very limited jurisdiction.

So you can see that Petey Wheatstraw has a good deal more scope than the Dolemite movies, if not the budget to fully realize it. The final scenes where the Devil’s minions, all leotards and dimestore capes and heavy face makeup, keep popping out from various doors, alleyways and other inconvenient places to face down Petey in simply-choreographed kung fu fights, are pretty wonderful in their low-rent let’s-make-this-movie way.

I also always like the way Moore wasn’t shy about slipping his friends’ acts into his flicks. Dammit, I want to see a Leroy and Skillet movie.

Rick was also fascinated by Leroy and Skillet – or, as they seemed to be known in their non-cinematic endeavors, Skillet and Leroy – and sent me the cover to one of their party records:

Finally, it was my turn. I had been kind of nervous, watching the clock get later, and later, that I would get squeezed out, but no, it was early enough – if just barely – for me to put in The Raid: Redemption.

I generally bring the kung fu films, you see. So when I had a chance to parlay that into a Crapfest screening – well. I did it. Don’t think anybody regretted it; we discussed it animatedly in video game terms. “Man, I hope he finds a save point soon.” “Oh, crap! Mini-bosses!”

I’ve already gone on about The Raid, but here’s that preview one more time:

Looking forward to that sequel, let me tell you.

Then we gathered up our traps, and prepared to leave. What was on TV, once we turned off the DVD player? Why, look, it’s Batman and Robin. It’s like they knew.

This led to a discussion of “Why not Batman and Robin? It’s crap!” The answer to that may be as simple as Dave’s “I don’t know if I could face that again.” But now Rick has something new to whinge on about, and balance is maintained in the universe.

August 28, 2012
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: crapfest . Author: drfreex . Comments: 7 Comments

Watching The Detectives

Friday was kind of an odd, time-shifted day for me. There was a special, lunch show for a private party, for which I had taken off work, and then there was no show on Saturday. That played havoc enough on my body clock, but then, during a very late lunch, I found myself reading the delightful live-tweeting of the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony by a feverish Warren Ellis. Then, after an exhausted nap, I watched the same ceremony, time-delayed by NBC, and I was one of thousands who put in at least one tweet imploring Meredith Vieira and Matt Lauer to for God’s sake SHUT THE HELL UP. Then a few hours later the ceremony was broadcast on the West Coast, and the process started all over again.

After the Very Long Ceremony had ended (along with an impressively brisk Parade of Nations, during which our NBC louts informed what was wrong with each nation as they marched), my world consisted of grand spectacle marred by clueless blathering, and time seriously out of joint. I wanted to watch a movie, but I wanted something short and, hopefully undemanding. I really should have reached for one of the low-budget horror movies that used to be my stock in trade, but my eye fell upon a recent acquisition from a Half Price Books run, a movie I had seen on it initial theatrical run in 1975 and hated, a movie I was willing to give a second chance: The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother.

Curse my willingness to give things a second chance.

Released a year after Young Frankenstein and starring three of its major stars, we were expecting more of the same; but Smarter Brother never reaches its predecessors frantic heights, and in trying to do so, simply becomes tiresome. When your pre-credit gag involves an unconvincing physical joke followed by a poorly-dubbed Queen Victoria muttering, “Oh, shit,” you pretty much have your experience laid out before you.

Writer/director Gene Wilder is Sigerson Holmes (an arch nod to the Canon, at least), Holmes’ younger and extremely jealous brother; Marty Feldmann is Orville Sacker, Siggy’s assistant and a man with “photographic hearing”; and Madeline Khan is Jenny Hill, the MacGuffin that walks like a woman. The sublime Leo McKern is Professor Moriarty, and the usually reliable Roy Kinnear is his assistant.

The only thing worse than an unfunny comedy is an unfunny comedy with a cast this good. There is the occasional bit of business that raises a chortle from me, but they are few and far between.

I see that on the IMDb, there is a sizable number of people who love this movie. Well, good. I like everybody involved in this picture, and I’m glad that it found an audience. That audience is simply not me.

For a neck-injuring change of course, the next day I finally got to see The Dark Knight Rises, having managed to avoid all but one major spoiler. And by the time the spoiler would have paid off, I was so involved with the story that it didn’t matter, and the major payoff still caught me by surprise.

I found The Dark Knight Rises to be a very fitting trilogy ender, solid in execution. I prefer The Dark Knight, but then, that is more purely a Batman movie. Batman Begins and Dark Knight Rises are more properly Bruce Wayne movies. I enjoyed the call-backs to the earlier two movies, the unexpected guest shots, and agree with everyone that Anne Hathaway as Catwoman and Tom Hardy as Bane stole the show. Hardy, especially – respect to anyone who manages a performance that good with most of his face obscured.

Now to await the inevitable reboot and hope that it brings back the detective part of the character. The Nolan/Bale Batman was pretty much a ninja-trained reactionary, and we lost the portion of the character that studied criminology in various parts of the world along with the martial arts. Probably a minor fanboy cavil about what has been DC’s only really successful foray into the modern superhero cinema. Probably Nolan’s major achievement with this trilogy is producing a series of comic book movies that did not require much explanation to non-comics reading spouses.

Seeking to continue my Nolan buzz, Sunday night I pulled out my recently-acquired Blu-Ray of Insomnia, Nolan’s 2002 remake of Erik Skjoldbjærg’s 1997 movie of the same name (available on Criterion, no less). In an Internet discussion during the lead-up to Dark Knight Rises premiere, Insomnia was held up as Nolan’s weakest work, along with the rejoinder, “If Insomnia were my weakest work, I could die happy.”

You can, indeed, see why Nolan was drawn to the story. Al Pacino plays Will Dormer, an LA police detective who is sent to the town of Nightmute, Alaska, to help an old friend out on a murder investigation. Tagging along is Dormer’s partner, Hap Eckhart (Martin Donovan). Both men have been hustled out of LA ahead of an Internal Affairs investigation; Eckhart is going to cooperate with IA, but this endangers some of Dormer’s convictions, and, he feels, his very career. The stress of this and the fact that Nightmute is above the Arctic Circle and in its period of “white nights” – 24 hours sunlight – robs Dormer of any chance of sleep.

Dormer sets a wily trap for the murderer that fails due to some unfortunate incompetence on the part of the local police force (who, admittedly, have had to contend with nothing worse than drunks and wife beaters). This leads to a chase through a foggy beachfront which ends with one of the local cops wounded by the killer and Dormer accidentally shooting and killing Eckhart. Realizing that there is no way anyone will believe it was an accident, and finding the killer’s dropped handgun, he begins to manufacture a case that the killer was the culprit… until the killer calls Dormer in his hotel room, revealing that he witnessed Eckhart’s shooting.

Nolan is all about driven protagonists, and conveys Dormer’s increasing desperation and exhaustion very well. Pacino’s eternally haggard expression plays well into this, and I was actually concerned about the method actor’s health for a while. One thing that’s more satisfying in the consideration than in the witnessing is the matchup between Pacino and Robin Williams as the killer (oh, like that’s a spoiler. Who of the two top-billed actors doesn’t show up for a half-hour?). A pure method actor vs. an extreme extrovert.

But there’s not much in the way of pyrotechnics here. I’m always secretly delighted and not a little smug when people seem surprised that comedians are capable of doing a straight dramatic role. The good ones already understand timing and moving emotions, and the great clowns could always make you cry as well as make you laugh. personally, Williams burned me out ages ago, but I still like him in smaller, more restrained doses, like here and Gilliam’s The Fisher King.

Insomnia still has an identity crisis, though – the story’s tenor still feels Norwegian, somehow. That is, when I wasn’t thinking I was seeing an alternate universe’s version of the pilot for Twin Peaks. The fish out of water component of Dormer’s arc doesn’t really work, except when he’s being stymied by the cops of this podunk frontier town turning out to be better cops than anticipated, especially Hillary Swank’s eager Ellie Burr.

So that’s three Oscar winners in a not-bad but not-terrific remake; but as I said, mediocre Nolan is still better than most movies out in the Redbox, these days. It has made me much more interested in the original, bumping it up several tiers in the “To Be Watched” list.

I also suppose I should mention that Wally Pfister’s cinematography is done full justice on the Blu-Ray, as I was several times left gaping at the beauty of Alaska.

Here, have a completely misleading trailer:

July 30, 2012
Categories: Movies That Do Not Suck, The Wonderful World of Crap . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

Movies: Vampire Ronin in Black… 3

In keeping with my tradition of oblique references to current releases: I saw Men in Black 3 last night. It was entertaining, and that’s pretty much the extent of what I took home from it. Josh Brolin’s Tommy Lee Jones imitation is a gas, and overall, it’s a far better Men in Black II than Men in Black II ever thought of being. Also, I guess Will Smith doesn’t do the rap for his own movies anymore? Huh.

Well, after our Memorial Day Crapfest, I continued with my movie watching, but attempting to switch gears to movies of (harrumph) quality wasn’t quite going to happen, so strong was the hangover from Crapfest. (Admittedly, while waiting to come down from my caffeine high that night, I watched Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. at 2:00am, a definite step up in value) My next Kubrick film is Barry Lyndon. It is sitting patiently by my movie-watching chair. I never got to it.

My wife took off to the beach with a friend and fellow teacher, and I settled in to watch one of those movies I had managed to miss for years (and was therefore on The Other List) John Frankenheimer’s Ronin. Man, John Frankenheimer. You watch The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May and Seconds, then watch, say Prophecy and The Challenge and wonder, “What happened?” (Due diligence: I have not yet seen The Island of Dr. Moreau, and so cannot comment on its quality with any veracity). Ronin proved that Frankenheimer still had it, even in 1998.

The Ronin of the title are mercenaries, specialists for hire in the extra-legal landscape of modern Europe. Robert deNiro is Sam, an ex-CIA strategist on the run, Jean Reno is Vincent, a “tour guide” who… appropriates things. Sean Bean is a Irish thug who gets tossed out of the team for being a jackass, which is startling, because I expected him to be killed, what with being Sean Bean and all. Stellan Skarsgard is Gregor, the electronics dude. That’s a solid core for a good cast, topped off by Jonathan Pryce as the man pulling the strings on the team. Their mission is to steal a metal briefcase from a heavily-guarded courier. They don’t need to know what is in the case, but they do know a lot of people, like “The Russians”, want it.

Ronin has a lot of cool espionage planning, supplanted by double and triple crosses, and a number of high-speed chases through crowded European streets. It’s a pity that Frankenheimer never got the chance to direct a Mission: Impossible movie, since Ronin feels like what the MI movies should have been, but rarely were (the return to a team dynamic in Ghost Protocol was, for me, very welcome).

You would think that after that, I would be more inclined to some Kubrick. But no, I felt I had spent long enough without seeing an actual horror movie, so I put a Blu-Ray of long-ago purchasing into the player, Vampire Circus.

Vampire Circus dates from a very troubled time for Hammer, a period where a lot of the movies felt like wheel-spinning. The gothic horror was feeling pretty tired, the dollop of sex appeal that made the 50-60s Hammers so notorious was now also so commonplace in the market that their movies were beginning to wallow in gore and breasts, upping the quantity in desperation.Vampire Circus has some new personnel at the helm – well, new to Hammer, anyway – and the fresh outlook and propensity for boobs and blood creates a perverse minor gem.

Our jerk vampire count this time is Count Mitterhaus, who is sleeping with the local Schoolmaster’s wife. She does unneighborly things like luring little girls into Mitterhaus’ castle so he can extremely creepy toward them and then bite them. This excites Mrs. Schoolmaster into doffing her clothes and bedding the Count. Into this cozy little scene comes the local villagers, who eventually manage to stake the count and burn down his castle, but not until after he cursed the village and the Mrs has run off.

15 years later, the village is being swept by a plague, and the neighboring villages have enacted roadblocks guarded by riflemen to keep the infected within. Nonetheless, a small gypsy circus manages to make it through and sets up to entertain the trapped villagers. If you paid any attention to the movie’s title, you know who populates this circus. The villagers aren’t so smart, though, even when a pair of acrobats keep turning into bats in mid-air.

The only other time I had attempted to watch Vampire Circus was on TV, and only a few minutes was enough to convince me that it had been cut to ribbons for that medium and I would be better off waiting until I could see it uncut; there are several instances of nudity, including the segment that you always see a photo of when reading about this movie: the tiger dance, featuring a woman who is almost completely naked except for green tiger-striped makeup. Since this is the only time we see the dancers in the movie (except for their dead bodies at the end), I have to assume that this was their act in real life. Um, wow.

Well, why break with tradition.

It’s a fun enough movie, one of the off-Dracula Hammer vampire riffs like Kiss of the Vampire combined with a few elements from 7 Faces of Dr. Lao. There are a few familiar faces: David Prowse as the Strongman, of course, and (shockingly) Lalla Ward as one of the vampire acrobats, and not looking very different from her run on Doctor Who as Lady Romana. A few other familiar character faces, and a Shakespearean body count. All the things one would want from a Hammer horror movie.

Well, my wife was back the next day, and found me watching, not Barry Lyndon, but Deadmau5 in concert. This, I think, puzzled her more than anything else.

That’s good. I don’t puzzle her near often enough. Also, my son: “How do you even know who Deadmau5 is?”

Hmph. Punk kids.

May 30, 2012
Categories: Movies That Do Not Suck, The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: deadmau5, hammer, john frankenheimer, ronin, vampire circus . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

Crapfest: Hercules Against Disco Streetfighting Bees

Saturdays off from The Show are not all that uncommon, but prior notice of an upcoming dark night is, so when I found out I was at liberty Memorial Day weekend, I of course set about to bullying my fellows to gathering for a Crapfest. To my surprise, this worked. Saturdays are always easier to gather for these things.

I arrived a bit late – I was still recovering from some major dental work on Thursday, and running the technical end of the graduation exercise for my wife’s school that morning. While waiting for the others to arrive, host Dave, Alan and Rick were playing some Wii golf game that had Tiger Woods in it. Knowing sports video games as I do, I realize that narrows it down to about a hundred and fifty games.

In any case, Paul finally arrived, and the tournament was cut short. I’m reasonably certain Dave was winning, as he had been playing the game obsessively for the last few weeks. While snacks, or the evening meal and so forth were being prepared, I put on what was left of my Tom Jones set.

This lead to some consternation. There is nothing to inflame the crap purist quite like injecting some quality into his evening. I laughed at them, for they did not realize that starting with a bit of quality only makes what comes worse. Like Alan Moore’s flower from the northern bank of Heaven set to bloom in the fields of Hell, it only makes the suffering worse.

Or, you can look at it this way: I like making Paul happy, and as this disc had Tom Jones jamming with Stevie Wonder and Aretha Franklin, he was very happy.

However, jealous forces – and in these tales, there are always jealous forces – were at work, and Dave, finally not able to stand the quality anymore, cut off Aretha in mid-scat and started the first movie of the evening, Mr. Hercules Against Karate.

It is damnably hard to find information on this 1973 wreck. We know it was directed by Antonio Margheriti, which means I got to say things like, “Wow, it’s hard to believe this was by the same guy who did Yor, Hunter from the Future!” What we have here is a couple of Terrence Hill and Bud Spencer clones, who are working on an oil derrick in Australia. The Bud Spencer clone is not and never will be called “Mr. Hercules’ – in fact his name is Percival – but he is outlandishly strong, and wrecks everything he touches, leading to both he and Not Terrence Hill – “Danny” – getting fired, but eventually hired by a Chinese man voiced by Paul Frees to get his ten year-old son back from his wife, who ran away to Hong Kong with a kung fu instructor named Hung Lo.

Yes, Hung Lo. The guy hiring them is named Ha Chu, which will present us with many “Gesundheit!” jokes. These are the jokes, folks, and should give you some idea of what we were subjected to for the next hour and a half.

Percival and Danny destroy things wherever they go, nonchalantly and unapologetically. They are, in fact, massive jerks, and frankly we were rooting for Karate. Unfortunately, Karate is represented by Hung Lo’s henchmen, led by (ahem) Skrew Yu, and they are not up to the task. Which brings us to an odd point: Hung Lo brings in a “Samurai” to equalize things, and he punishes failure by plucking out eyeballs. Kinda gruesome, for a comedy.

Anyway, eventually our “heroes” run out of things to break and asian extras to throw around, they’ve got the kid and the police have Hung Lo and the kid’s mom (who for some reason wears heavy geisha makeup and may have been played by David Bowie), and the movie still goes on for fifteen, twenty years, while Dave wails, “The movie was over! IT WAS OVER! WHY IS IT STILL GOING?”

Incidentally, remember what I said about quality accentuating the pain? Paul’s spirit audibly broke five minutes into Mr. Hercules Against Karate.

There was a call for something featuring actual martial arts afterward. The assembled masses were given a choice: Sonny Chiba or Disco Godfather. They chose Disco Godfather. Given what we had just seen in Mr. Hercules, it was a pretty safe bet that a Rudy Ray Moore movie would have at least a thousand times more, and better, martial arts. There is, in fact that very thing just in the trailer:

The first indication of trouble here arises at the very beginning, the MPAA rating screen, which tells us that his movie is rated PG. Wait a minute… a Rudy Ray Moore movie rated PG??? He never gets to say “motherfucker” even once, which leads one to ask, Can this truly be called a Rudy Ray Moore movie?

Rudy Ray is playing Tucker Williams, a former cop who gave up the force for the glamorous life of a disco owner (and Godfather, needless to say). The crux of the matter here is PCP, especially when a promising young basketball player has a “whack attack” in the disco. It took me three-quarters of the movie to figure out the guy was Tucker’s nephew. This, even though Tucker’s old boss informs us, “There are three things that make Tucker mad. Number one is messing with his family.” He never bothers to tell us what the other two are, so we should just really watch our steps.

Social relevance has a tendency to get in the way of our story here, in that achingly 70s way. There’s a lot of time spent at an anti-PCP rally, and a young girl who’s stuck in psychosis after her whack attack. Her mother, pastor and a bunch of bible-toting parishoners crowd into her room, and will spend most of the movie praying and shaking, and generally making the poor girl feel like she’s in hell. That… doesn’t seem all that helpful, really.

Rudy Ray finally takes the fight to the local angel dust factory, leading to the best scene, where a guy jogging by sees Rudy Ray confronted by a bunch of thugs. ‘They’re runnin’ an angel dust factory here!” says Rudy Ray. “Well, then, let’s kick their asses!” says the man, who proceeds to do so. Luckily that was Howard Jackson, Rudy Ray”s martial arts instructor! What a coincidence! (which seems to happen in every Rudy Ray movie)

Rudy goes ahead of his backup and gets captured, and dosed with PCP, oh no! (The most surprising thing about this turn of events was the discovery that all PCP users have the same hallucination!) The successful local businessman who was running the operations makes the mistake of crossing paths with the whacked-out Rudy, who kills him with his bare hands. The movie ends with the insane Rudy screaming into the camera. (oh, yeah, incidentally: spoiler alert)

Not at all what I expected. Doggonit, I never did get to ask him what I was supposed to put my weight on!

This is, I suppose, Rudy Ray’s serious movie, his message movie. Intriguingly, Rudy is actually pretty good in this venue. You can also see a whole lot of inspiration for Black Dynamite in several scenes. I think we were expecting something more along the lines of say, Dolemite or Petey Whitestraw, but no, this movie is very serious in tone. I wonder if Rudy Ray fans were similarly disappointed, which might explain why the flick got re-released as Avenging Disco Godfather.

Well, enough delays. It was Chiba time. Chiba Fever had been slowly building since the last Crapfest, when the previews for The Bodyguard wowed everybody. I brought both that movie and The Streetfighter, which won the vote thanks to its reputation.

Sonny Chiba is Terry Tsurugi, who was to continue our streak of unlikable badass protagonists and proceed to paint that streak a mile wide. To call Terry mercenary is an understatement. He saves a killer from execution in the very beginning, and when his clients can’t pay the other half of his fee (and the guy half of the pair kills himself trying to beat Tsurugi), our Streetfighter hero sells the girl half of the duo into prostitution. At this point, we decided Tsurugi was perhaps something of a jerk.

Well, the mobsters he sells the girls to (whom we are told are Yakuza, and that the Yakuza run the Triads, and they are all run by the Mafia, which I am sure was surprise to all of them) try to hire Tsurugi to kidnap a girl who just inherited Exxon, or something. He turns down the job, and eventually winds up helping to protect the heiress, because he “hates punks worse than anything!”

Yeah, this movie has the devastating X-ray punch, as seen later in Story of Ricky. Tsurugi does indeed fight dirty as hell, culminating in an episode where the heiress gets kidnapped, and unfortunately finds herself in the care of the single black man in the Yakuza/Triad/Mafia, who is the Vice President in Charge of Rape (“That’s racist!” Rick helpfully informed us.) Tsurugi swings in through the window, and rips off the guy’s member with his bare hands, because if there’s anything he hates worse than punks, it’s a punk’s junk.

There was more than enough carnage on hand (on hand! get it!) to satisfy all, and many were the “Whoas!” and “AAAAAAA!”s uttered in the course of the movie. Stuff like this is why it was such a gas seeing Chiba do comedy in Kill Bill Part 1.

Paul now exercised his Wuss Clause and left. Which is just as well, because he didn’t get to see my charity bite me on the ass. You see, in the e-mail roundabouts preceding the Crapfest, Rick, after enduring the 93rd e-mail beatdown of his crusade to get us to show The Garbage Pail Kids Movie, e-sobbed that his life would be complete if he only had a copy of The Savage Bees.

Flashback: This goes back a few years, when Rick was exclaiming about a movie where bees were covering a volkswagen and it was rolled into the Astrodome, where the cooling system was turned way down and the bees were frozen. This might have happened while we were watching the godforsaken director’s cut of The Swarm. Anyway, like a lot of movies seen in our youth, it was misremembered. That wasn’t the Astrodome, it was the Superdome, and it wasn’t The Swarm, it was The Savage Bees, a made for TV movie.

I had a copy of it. I made Rick a copy of it, so his life would be complete. And after every movie, he would hold up the DVD and say, “Bees! I have a movie with thousands of bees!” until Dave shoved me bodily aside and finally put the DVD in. That will teach me to be charitable.

The horrifying African killer bees (“That’s racist!” Rick helpfully explained) sneak in on a Brazilian Banana Boat (“It’s a bad Brazilian Banana Boat, with bees!” “Balderdash!”) and keep swarming closer and closer to New Orleans during Mardi Gras. I was severely disappointed that no one ever said “We can’t shut down the Mardi Gras!” Now there were some pretty good bee stunts, I will admit. Somehow our heroes get the entire swarm to light on that VW and slowly drive it through New Orleans (“We’re lucky this is Ash Wednesday! It’s the quietest New Orleans will ever get!”) into the Superdome, which is chilled down to 45 degrees, the exact temperature that puts bees to sleep. And that’s the end. What?

Alan decided the general direction given to any scene was “Milk it! Millllllllllllllk it!“, and oh yes, there were more extended takes here than during a Bergman film. Ben Johnson and Michael Parks are our heroes, with Horst Bucholz providing the requisite doomed bee scientist. Good cast, at least. A fairly decent cooldown movie.

And then we sort of disbanded before anything else terrible could be inflicted on us. I’m older and slower, and stood around talking with Dave for a few moments, then, when we opened the door, found Rick there, waiting, arms outstretched, just outside the door. “Willllllllllllllllllliams!!!”

Yeah, I was parked behind him. That moment made it all worthwhile.

May 28, 2012
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: crapfest, disco godfather, hercules against karate, rudy ray moore, savage bees, sonny chiba, the streetfighter . Author: drfreex . Comments: 7 Comments

Movie Catchup, June Edition

A very busy week, made suddenly very complicated by a sudden call to complete a long-delayed dental procedure. That is why I haven’t been around.

Monday, Tuesday: city meetings, where I run audio. Wednesday: story for June video magazine due. Also work all evening doing slide slow for my wife’s graduating class this Saturday. It was urgent I get the damn thing done because it is now Thursday morning, we just finished shooting the stand-ups for the magazine, and in three hours I’m going to be in a dental chair getting four or five damaged, increasingly worthless teeth extracted and an immediate denture slapped in. This is something I have never experienced, and I have no idea what sort of condition I will be in tonight. Soup is almost certainly on the menu.

I have the freaking order of the slideshow done, but was frustrated from roughly 10pm to midnight last night because I could not get any sort of music file to play in it. I’ve been using Open Office for the last couple of years because I couldn’t afford Microsoft Office. Last year I managed this trick just fine in OpenOff’s version of Power Point, Impress. This year I’m suddenly being told that any file format – even the ones specifically mentioned in the Open File dialog – are “not supported”. Surfing around forums proves no help. Turns out if I just tell it to embed, save it to a Power Point show and then use Microsoft’s free Power Point viewer the music plays just fine. A bulky, cumbersome workaround, which means I’m timing blind, and still not finished, so hopefully I won’t be too wrecked tonight. Graduation is Saturday morning.

But yeah, I still managed to watch some movies, somewhere in there. Mainly because my landline shorted out and I was without the Net for three days.

I saw Avengers again, this time with my family. Still amazing, still flawless entertainment. I’m still embittered that every bit that would have made me go woohoo had been spoiled for me by the time I actually saw it – where are the Internet outages when you really need them? – but I got to see my wife and son react to them, so that was cool. Had to spend most of the end credits explaining to my son who… that guy at the end was (I still tread carefully for you, dear reader), and I wonder how many nerds had to explain that to non-nerd companions. I checked, and in my copy ofThe Marvel Encyclopedia, he only gets one-sixth of a page.

In any case, my wife is the very definition of a non-comics nerd, and she thought the movie was amazing. Which it is.

My other movies were at the other end of the scale, budget and amazing-wise. Saturday morning I was up at a Godforsaken hour because that’s what your body does to you, and I watched While the City Sleeps, a Fritz Lang-directed piece of newspaper noir from 1956. Lang is always worth watching, and the layered story here is pretty good. First off, a news media magnate kicks off after insisting that his various outlets sensationalize a murder where the killer left the message “Ask Mother” scrawled in lipstick on a wall. Then, his son (Vincent Price!) arrives to take over, without much of any experience in the trade. He creates a new position, Executive Director, and tells the heads of the three branches: Wire Service, Newspaper, and Photos – that whoever solves the case of the Lipstick Killer gets the job.

The cast is great: George Sanders as the Wire honcho, Ida Lupino as a conniving society columnist, Dana Andrews starring as a Pulitzer-winning TV news analyst who used to work the crime beat, and slowly finds himself sucked into the investigation. Toss in Howard Duff as the detective in charge of the case, and you got your very solid detective thriller cast. Andrews finally tucks into the case with glee, eventually putting his girlfriend in danger; it’s pretty amazing to see so many of the threads of the unsub-killer genres being used at this early date, as Andrews and Duff begin profiling the killer. And even if detective stories with a dollop of soap opera aren’t your thing, who could possibly pass up a chance to see Vincent Price in Bermuda shorts?

I also have to say that seeing a story involving journalistic integrity made me absolutely wistful. Man, fuck NewsCorp.

My viewing of While the City Sleeps was also movie number 15 on The List, so goal achieved on watching half of them before Summer hit. Huzzah.

The other movie seen during the outage was chosen at random, something I’d had for a while: You’ll Find Out, which is a parody of Old Dark House movies starring Kay Kyser (and his College of Musical Knowledge), and three guys named Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, and Peter Lorre.

Kyser is sort of a blip on the landscape these days, but he was pretty darn successful in his day, famous enough that he and Moe-bedecked comedian Ish Kabibble crop up in Looney Tunes. His radio show, a combination variety and game show, was quite popular. It’s unsurprising that he’d make the crossover to movies. It’s also a little unfortunate.

Admittedly, You’ll Find Out is his first movie. Maybe he got more confident, Ish Kabibble less annoying. But I doubt it.

Okay, so Kyser and his band are playing at the 21st birthday party of his manager’s fiancee. Of course, she lives with her eccentric aunt at a creepy old house accessible only by a single bridge, which will mysteriously blow up in the course of the movie. Somebody’s been trying to kill the fiancee, possibly Boris as the old family friend, Bela as the psychic who’s been getting lots of money from the superstitious aunt, or Lorre as a psychic-busting scientist. Or, given that it’s Karloff, Lugosi and Lorre, it’s probably all three. Oh, sorry. Spoiler.

When I was a kid, I was always pissed off that You”ll Find Out kept getting scheduled in the late night horror movie slot. I thought that perhaps now, as an old-timer, I could better appreciate it. Well, nottttttttt really, it turns out. It’s not dreadful, but it’s not a forgotten gem, either. Our big three bad guys act like they’re in a different picture entirely, and I kinda wish I had been watching that movie. The musical numbers are good, but achingly white. I dearly wished Cab Calloway could have dropped by for at least one number. And as I pointed out on Twitter, the final number employs a device used by Lugosi for ghostly voices to make it appear Kyser’s vocalist is singing through the band’s instruments, making it the first instance of auto-tuning, in the year 1940.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go get my jaw ripped out.

May 24, 2012
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant, Movies That Do Not Suck, The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: avengers, bela lugosi, boris karloff, fritz lang, kay kyser, noir, old dark house, peter lorre, while the city sleeps, you'll find out . Author: drfreex . Comments: 2 Comments

The Grapes of Death (1978)

I try to impose a bit of organization on my time, and sometimes it even works. I’m not insane about it, because that would make me insane; I am able to put aside blocks of time for The Show, for the various City functions at which I run audio, interviews and events I am videotaping. Past that, life is too chaotic to plan more than two, maybe three days out, usually in the form of “I will watch Movie A Friday night, and then Movie B on Sunday night.” That gives me some free play during the day, and that is when stuff like this happens.

I check on Instant Watcher occasionally, mainly to see if anything I want to see on Netflix Instant is about to expire and vanish from the realm of possibility. This phenomenon once bit a Crapfest on the ass when Dave’s choice, Jaws: The Revenge suddenly vanished from his queue. So I learned to keep tabs on this sort of thing, which is how I finally saw The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and That Obscure Object of Desire. Not to mention Marwencol, which I didn’t write about, and I find that odd. Hm. “Marwencol is a good, interesting documentary.” There. I feel better now.

The upshot of the last 200 words is that, on Saturday last, I found myself adrift and saw that Jean Rollin’s Grapes of Death (Les raisins de la mort) was expiring on Instant. My sole experience with Rollin to this point was Requiem for a Vampire years ago, and since it was dubbed into English, it was likely one of the alternate versions, like Caged Virgins. I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t find it particularly memorable, either. But Rollin is held up as a minor visionary in the horror field, so I started buffering Grapes.

Okay, so the setup is we have a vineyard in France where the manager is mixing his own pesticides, and it’s making his workers sick. His advice is to wait for the new airtight masks which are arriving tomorrow, and then we’re off to our heroine, Elisabeth, who is traveling by train to meet him at the vineyard. Elisabeth and her friend have the train car all to themselves, as they are “Holidaying in October!” Until the train stops briefly at a station, one guy gets on, starts oozing green pus and blood from facial lesions, and murders Elisabeth’s friend.

Elisabeth pulls the Emergency Stop, which is sort of reasonable, but then engages in what is only the first of a litany of questionable actions she will commit throughout the movie: rather than running to the front of the stopped train, where the engineer and his assistant, at the very least, would be getting off to see what the hell the emergency is – and since Mr. Pus walks toward the back of the train, and doesn’t see her – we can only assume that Elisabeth runs off perpendicular to the train, into the woods. This is, to be sure, standard horror movie protagonist idiocy, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

And that’s what she gets for being blind!

You saw this coming, or read it in the many breathless blurbs about the movie: the pesticide resulted in a tainted batch of wine which was premiered at the local Wine Festival, and everyone who has been drinking it is turning into pus-spewing homicidal maniacs. After escaping from a house lorded over by one such murderous pus-fiend, she lucks onto an entire village of them, in which she commits the second and third of her extraordinary blunders: first, there is a blind girl she finds wandering around outside the village. Entering the village, she refuses to tell the girl what she sees, which is the aftermath of the maniacs killing (I presume) all the non wine-drinkers and beer drinkers. The blind girl, however, can smell burning buildings and keeps putting her hands on bloody faces, quite understandably does not trust this woman who keeps telling her everything is alright, and escapes into the night at her first opportunity. To be messily butchered.

“You’re wondering if I’m normal.”

The third instance is when she finds a woman in a house who is apparently unaffected by the madness (played by Brigette Lahaie, a fixture in French movies involving nudity) and is holed up in the mayor’s house. Elisabeth demands that they escape from the village right freaking now, although it is the middle of the night. Yes, that is the perfect time to get away from roving maniacs: when you can’t see them.

It gets established that the wine affects women more slowly than men, so of course Lahaie is insane, just not spewing pus yet, and throws Elisabeth to the maniacs. She’s rescued by two guys from a local road-building crew who show up with a shotgun and dynamite. They eventually make it to the vineyard, where Elisabeth’s fiance is still holed up, fighting off madness and blaming himself (and rightly so). It all ends up in a downbeat ending that makes you hate everyone involved.

Grapes is usually held up as a novel take on the zombie movie, which it is – if one ignores Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (1974) wherein an ultrasonic pesticide substitute makes the dead rise, or George Romero’s The Crazies (1973) in which a leaked nerve gas turns people into violent maniacs. I also seem to recall that Grapes is regarded as minor Rollin, at best – but I could be misremembering that.

Here’s the thing: Rollin is best known for mixing eroticism with horror. In Grapes this takes the form of exposing a woman’s breasts – in Lahaie’s case, much more than that – and then bloodily doing away with the owner of said breasts. I admit it, I am male, and have the usual male regard for breasts. I like them. I like looking at them. I do not like seeing terrible things happen to, or around breasts. This probably does not make me the ideal target audience for this movie.

Or a whole lot of movies. I don’t like the Ilsa movies, for instance; generally speaking, I have no use for movies that simply function as catalogs of atrocities, but this is likely the true basis of that disdain.

Add to that the fact that I called it quits with zombie movies some ten years ago, and The Grapes of Death was doomed before that first scene even unspooled.

May 3, 2012
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 4 Comments

Movie Ketchup

It seems to be a corollary of my life that every time I manage to get a long weekend, the week after is going to start at an accelerated rate and just continue to speed up from there. How I managed to get last week’s entry on the Good Friday Crapfest is beyond me, but it got done. In this welter of work, the Stanley Kubrick Project may have gone by the wayside, but I did manage to watch five movies, none of which I wrote about here.

I’ll try to not be too wordy.

First off was The Stabilizer, a 1986 Indonesian action flick that pairs boundless enthusiasm with limited skill. New Zealand English teacher-turned-action-star Peter O’Brian, plays Peter Goldson, The Stabilizer. On loan from the FBI, Goldson is that special breed of person who will stabilize the balance between good and evil. He does this by punching and shooting bad guys and driving various vehicles through walls. He’s there to get Greg Rainmaker, international scum, who raped and killed Goldson’s girlfriend by stomping on her with his oversized golf shoes.

If there is one thing The Stabilizer is, it’s action packed, and some of that action is pretty okay. Slow spots are minimized, and you know you’re never more than a few minutes away from another sloppy fight or heavy machinery crashing through a wall. This is accompanied by near-constant unintentional laughs, making this the perfect Crapfest movie. Unfortunately, they won’t let me show it, no matter how many times I point to the box that says, “The Drunken Master’s Grand Theft Auto!” I’m sure Lloyd Kaufmann took the day off after writing that blurb, it’s so perfect.

Yes, Troma distributed the disc here in America, and a gesund on them for doing it. That’s the main reason I’m not allowed to show it, though. There’s an odd, unofficial No Troma rule, apparently, which extends even to stuff they didn’t make, so I might as well not even bring up movies like Sugar Cookies or even a movie Rick has been agitating for, Mad Dog Morgan. Ah well:

This was watched for a Daily Grindhouse podcast, still being edited as I write this. My major contribution was confusing Judd Omen with Jon Cypher, as I mentioned his character at the end of Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, in the prison bus, shouting, “Great movie Pee-Wee! Action-packed!”

Which is really all I can say about The Stabilizer.

Late one night I watched American Grindhouse on Netflix Instant. It purports to be a history of the American Exploitation Movie, narrated by Robert Forster. It starts out very strongly, with clips from silent movies that I had no idea had survived, moving through the talkies up until the last decade (it’s a 2010 movie). Sadly it starts getting sketchy in the 70s, as subgenres start proliferating, and a lot seems glossed over. But it’s never boring, and a good primer for the uninitiated; those of us swimming through this stuff all our lives aren’t going to find much new.

Fittingly, the trailer will suck you right in:

Watching Spartacus had left me wanting more Hollywood epics, if only for comparison’s sake, so it was lucky for me that Daily Grindhouse asked me to review one of the new Twilight Time Blu-Rays, Demetrius and the Gladiators. But that meant I needed to watch The Robe first, as one is the sequel to the other.

For all you heathen dogs: The Robe is the tale of the Roman who won Christ’s clothes in a gambling match held at the foot of the cross. That guy is Marcellus Gallio, a debauched Tribune, played by Richard Burton. Travelling with him in his political exile in Jerusalem is his slave, Demetrius, played by Victor Mature. Demetrius becomes a devout Christian and runs off with The Robe while Marcellus is consumed by guilt over what he’s done. The Roman eventually tracks down the wily Greek, only to find himself converted to Christianity, and eventually martyred for his belief by Caligula, Emperor of Overactors, though that means it’s kind of a crock that there is no Saint Marcellus.

The Robe doesn’t feature a whole lot of budget-gobbling crowd scenes, so a lot of the time it feels like the expanded frame of this new-fangled CinemaScope is going unused, though there are great, painterly moments – the scenes on Golgotha, for instance. There are a couple of action scenes, quoted in that trailer, but they are far outnumbered in screen time by proselytizing. There is definitely more reverence on display than rambunctiousness.

Richard Burton’s taciturn portrayal of Marcellus doesn’t truly sell the character’s conversion (frankly, the script doesn’t do him any favors in this regard), and he’s rather overshadowed by Victor Mature. Michael Rennie is marvelous as Peter, and Jay Robinson’s time as Caligula is thankfully short. Jean Simmons is Jean Simmons. In all, I guess it was a pretty good Easter movie.

And then the Extremely Busy Week started. I survived it somehow. In celebration of that fact, I treated myself to lunch at the Star Cinema Grill and The Cabin in The Woods. I had the theater to myself.

I am going to scrupulously avoid saying anything about this movie except that I loved it. You know how tween girls were about Titanic? That’s me with The Cabin The Woods.

I now see that Lionsgate has scrupulously disabled embedding on all of the YouTube trailers for Cabin. Thanks a lot, guys, I’m not really sure what that accomplishes.

It’s amazing how little that trailer gives away. The Cabin in The Woods has the best blend of horror and comedy that I have seen in ages – since, ironically enough, Evil Dead II – and every serious horror fan who hasn’t seen it already, should see it now.

Yes, I’m aware that there are also people who say it’s stupid and it’s over-hyped and they want that hour and a half of their lives back. These people are big dummy stupidpants.

So then I got to watch Demetrius & the Gladiators, which I found to be one of the few sequels that was better than its predecessor. Better compositions, better balance between sermonizing and sword-slinging, it’s like a mirror image of The Robe. Demetrius’ fall from faith is a lot better handled than Marcellus’ conversion, and you’ve got actors like Ernest Borgnine and William Marshall shoring things up. Susan Hayward deserved a better script, and… oh boy, Jay Robinson gets more screentime.

While I was writing this, I see the review went live, allowing me to see every single mistake I made. Oh, well. Such is life on the Internets.

To top all this off, I finished my story for this week early, and now I’m wrapping this up. So I think it’s time to finally treat myself to The Raid: Redemption. Hi-keeba!

April 18, 2012
Categories: Movies That Do Not Suck, The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: american grindhouse, daily grindhouse, demetrius and the gladiators, jay robinson, peter o'brian, richard burton, the cabin in the woods, the robe, the stabilizer, troma, victor mature . Author: drfreex . Comments: 2 Comments

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