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So. After The Kid With The Golden Arm, Dave decided that he was ready to hurt us, by which I mean he was also drunk enough to not mind too terribly much when the stray shrapnel from his offering hit his chair. And I have to admit that this time he was prepared, for his choice was the infamous Troll 2.

The first remarkable thing about Troll 2 is that the original Troll apparently made enough money to warrant a movie attempting to piggyback on its “success”. The second remarkable thing is common knowledge: there are no actual trolls in Troll 2; they’re all identified as goblins, though one or two have a superficial resemblance to the title character of the first movie.

So this suburban family is taking a vacation by swapping houses with another family for a week. The other family in question live in a town called Nilbog, which is, of course, Spanish for “spider”. Haha, I am kidding of course, Nilbog is actually German for “witch”. Hoho, fooled you again, Nilbog spelled backward is actually “Natures”. No, no, I’m having you on, Nilbog spelled backward is Goblin.

And it takes seeing a street sign backward to cue the kid main character in to that fact. He would also likely be stumped by the genteel foreign chap wearing a cape whose name is “Alucard”. This is the same kid who keeps talking to his dead grandfather, who is apparently also not so good at reversing odd-looking names but knows a hell of a lot about goblins. For instance, if you eat goblin food, you turn into a human-vegetable hybrid, which the goblins will then eat.

There are two incredible acting jobs in Troll 2. One is the store keeper, Don Packard, who looks like Ernest’s more intense older brother. Seems the guy was actually in and out of mental institutions, and when he saw the finished movie, verified that during his scenes he was not having a good day, if you catch my drift.

The other is Deborah Reed as the Goblin Queen, who, in her guise as Hell Librarian, effects the most amazing pseudo-Romanian accent that DRRRRRRRRRRAAAWS out EVVVERRRRRRRRRRRRRY THIRRRRRRRD WORRRRRRRRRRRRD or so. She also turns into a way uglier version and, at one point, into a corn cob wielding hottie. Really.

There is apparently a robust fan community for Troll 2, one big enough to support the making of a documentary, Best Worst Movie:

Well, all you folks who babble about how Troll 2 is the worst movie ever? You are a bunch of fucking dilettantes. Oh, it’s not good by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, anyone who comes to me sniveling about how Tron: Legacy or The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor is “the worst movie ever made” is going to be strapped in a chair and forced to watch a double feature of Troll 2 and Dondi. I am the goddamn bad movie cenobite, and I have such sights to show you, asshole.

Well, I touched a nerve there, didn’t I? I always knew that some day I was going to have to watch Troll 2, and now I have. Not the worst movie I’ve ever seen, by any stretch. But it is amazingly bad.

At this point, as we have come to expect, Paul and Alan wussed out and left. Leaving just me, Rick and the two Daves. Ergo, it was time to watch something with female nudity in it, so we could abuse the two wusses with that knowledge later. We eventually caved to Rick’s whinings and put in my shiny new disc from Warner Archives (a company formed solely to vacuum money out of my wallet): Pretty Maids All In A Row.

My sweet lord.

A major flop in 1971, this sometimes known as the movie that killed Roger Vadim’s career (although Vadim himself seemed unaware of that). Hell of an odd pedigree: Produced and written by Gene Roddenberry. Rock Hudson is a high school guidance counselor/football coach/former football star who seems to spend most of his time screwing the female population of the high school, when he’s not manipulating a new teacher (the ever-toothsome Angie Dickenson) into deflowering his protegé, who most of the time seems to be the only male student in Awesome High School.

The plot gets under way when one of the cheerleaders shows up dead in the boy’s restroom, to be followed by two more in rapid succession. It’s pretty common knowledge among filmgoers that Hudson’s character is the killer – hell, it’s right there in the poster- which is something a pre-Kojak Telly Savalas can’t prove, but the incompetent Sheriff (and Corrupt Authority Figure) Keenan Wynn seems to know, but the coach is just too valuable to arrest.

This is jet-black comedy, the free love movement of the late 60s taken to a ludicrous extreme, violating the taboo against teacher-student sex, and violating it hard. Vadim makes sure every girl in the school wears short-shorts and mini-dresses, and damn few bras. Not only would this movie not be made today, it couldn’t be made today.

As Rick said afterwards, “There are immoral movies and there are amoral movies – and that had to be one of the most totally amoral movies I have ever seen.”

Well, there’s not much I can add to that. Except I would have totally slept with Angie Dickenson while I was a senior in high school. I’m amoral that way.

February 3, 2011
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: crapfest . Author: drfreex . Comments: 6 Comments

This has been the busiest couple of months I’ve had in quite some time. A rational person would point out that I’m working two part-time jobs and am in the middle of a time-sensitive writing contract, which works out to, at best, the equivalent of two full-time jobs. But then the lie to that is that the part-time jobs take more than the hours clocked in, what with research, rehearsing, learning lines, etc. Well, the hell with all that rationalizing and quantifying hoorah. I’ve been busy. I needed a break. i needed crap.

So the last Sunday in January, I was determined to be free and ramrodded a Crapfest into everybody’s schedule. I was not able to attend this year’s B-Fest, neither financially nor time-wise (we opened a show on that Saturday). Just as well, since there was apparently some plague going around, and if the plague did not get you, the scheduled showing of Skidoo would.

So we gathered at Dave’s, who had been largely incommunicado, or at least uncommunicative, due to household projects (and, truthfully, Fallout New Vegas). Most of us made it on time, remarkable for us; with only the Other Dave missing, we started the pizza and, for warm-up, put on one of my recent acquisitions, Raquel Welch’s 1970 TV special, titled, with elegant simplicity, Raquel.

This went a long way toward verifying my discovery of Dave’s Achilles Heel: 70s variety TV. Nobody likes Pink Lady & Jeff, it’s impossible, it’s like saying you like having your gonads repeatedly smashed with a meat tenderizer. No, the real clue was Dave allergic reaction, a few Crapfests ago, to The Paul Lynde Halloween Special, which even (for Pete’s sake) featured KISS, one of Dave’s favorite bands. I do believe this was immediately after Dave tried to harm everyone with Battlefield Earth. Piffle. He was dismayed that I harmed him more with Paul Lynde than he had harmed me with John Travolta (again, piffle). This has begun a fearsome rivalry.

Raquel is shot on film, and they want you to know it was on location all over the world. The first segment is Raquel walking around Paris in a gorgeous red cape and singing California Dreaming. Oddly, the lyrics have been rewritten, and once she stops into a church along the way, she does not get down on her knees and began to pray. Nonetheless, you have a gorgeous woman wearing gorgeous clothes in a gorgeous city, and all Dave can do is groan and bitch. Even when the screen blurs into some odd animation and suddenly things get interesting. Did I say Interesting? I meant awesome:

And what does Dave spend the entirety of the dance number doing? Wondering what the guys are wearing on their heads. “You’re looking at the guys?” is the rational response to that, so that is what I said. By the time Dave had figured out what they were wearing, we were back to Paris and the odd, rewritten California Dreaming, which was cause for more complaints. Not that he wanted to run it back.

This only means that next time I’m bringing my disc of the 1967 Nancy Sinatra special Movin’ With Nancy, complete with RC Cola commercials. It was the taste of a New Generation, you know.

The definite high point of Raquel! is the “Age of Aquarius” number, in which Raquel capers about with various signs of the Zodiac, including Leo, Cancer, Scorpio, Cthulhu, and the Baphomet Demon.

Rick: “Those dancers aren’t moving very much.”

Me: “I don’t think they CAN move.”

Raquel’s a good dancer. Her voice is pleasant but untrained. After the Aquarius number, we watch her try to rock out with Tom Jones (which leads to most of us agreeing that Tom Jones is still amazing 40 years after this twaddle), and then… Raquel teams up with Bob Hope to do “Rocky Raccoon”.”Do” in the sense of “hold it down and make it squeal like a pig.” Raquel had already done a few Beatles songs, but this one, which serves as the final number in the special, brought a special form of agony to the proceedings. Here it is, because I hate you:

(or here it would have been if some joyless a-hole hadn’t taken it down)

You would have noticed that version of the song was longer than the Beatles’ rendition by several years. Lucky, lucky lucky…

I will admit that this special has a special place in my personal history, because along with Diana Rigg in The Avengers, Raquel Welch was responsible for quite a few stirrings in my young loins, and the special was… well, special indeed, in that respect. Dear sweet Lord, that woman was gorgeous, and she is still gorgeous. That’s some good genes, right there.

After this, Dave put on something he’d picked up from TCM or something, a comedy from 1951 called Kentucky Jubilee, starring Jerry Collona. Little comedy and littler Jublilee on display. We finally gave up and watched my new copy of the remastered Kid With the Golden Arm, ’cause who don’t like kung fu?

I love flicks with lots of different weapons. It’s also nice to finally know that the banners that the bad guys keep leaving simply say ” Kill kill kill kill kill kill.”

After that, shit got serious. And the next two movies were so extraordinary, they deserve their own column. I’ve made you suffer enough for today.

Hey! Is Ann-Margaret’s 1968 TV special available? What? Why the hell not?

February 1, 2011
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: crapfest . Author: drfreex . Comments: 7 Comments

Well, this has been a couple of weeks worth of complications, bad choices and horror stories. Life’s Rich Pageant, in other words. Boring to anyone who isn’t me. Though the time a University Professor informed me she couldn’t be interviewed by me unless it had first been cleared through Communications and Legal (when we both work for the same University) is still a show-stopper for me. Literally.

I’m not bitter that bit of blockage made me do a four minute story about a fucking bake sale. Oh no. Not at all.

So. There is no better way to deal with the suffering that life dishes out than to make others suffer. This is a lesson I have learned from the evening news over the years. So it was undeniably time for another Crapfest.

Dave bought a house in the last year, and moved out to the boondocks, if indeed the eternal devouring Houston has a place that can be considered “boondocks”. He’s now ten minutes closer to me, anyway, which is all that matters in my selfish worldview. So I managed to work my way through the very beginning of rush hour traffic to his domain, while the other fools toiled in the guts of Every Person In A Major City Trying To Get Out To The Boondocks On A Friday Afternoon And To Hell With Everyone Else.

The evening’s itinerary had been the subject of much secrecy, but suffice to say, Dave’s desire to see “something cool” had been squandered on the Crapfest that had not occurred in October (illness, sudden emergencies), and he was once again out for blood, and I was complicit in these desires.

Rick arrived with three DVDs of performances from NBC’s The Midnight Special, which served to fill time until everyone arrived. These were from the latter years, 78-80, when I was in college, and likely too busy playing records and getting stoned to watch Midnight Special. Nonetheless, this stuff was a treat. Bands actually playing their instruments – what a concept. Was Steve Perry ever truly that young? Lionel Ritchie just a face in the crowd with the Commodores. Paul arrived, as did The Other Dave, for his first Crapfest.Alan was absent by virtue of being in a show.

We continued to cherry-pick the performances on Midnight Special, until Paul and Rick conspired to choose Peter Allen’s I Go to Rio. As this was during the aforementioned Lost Weekend phase of my college career, I had missed Peter Allen’s attempt to be a big star in America. I hadn’t even realized he was married to Liza Minelli for while, but then there was likely a period when I was married to Liza Minelli that I just don’t recall. I’ll have to admit that Allen is working his ass off on that stage, dry-humping his piano bench and ripping off his shirt to reveal a leather Yor the Hunter from the Future vest thing while he shakes his maracas and blows time on a coach’s whistle. It was also, bar none, the gayest thing I had seen in a long, long time.

Sadly, that performance is not on YouTube. There is, however, the version he sang at Radio City Music Hall, where he was the first male to dance with the Rockettes:

THIS IS A MESSAGE FROM THE FUTURE: In the intervening years, that Peter Allen video was withdrawn from YouTube… but that very same clip from The Midnight Special became available!

After that, the fajitas being cooked, the margaritas being made, we began in earnest. With the movie Dave had urged me to save, Frankenstein Island.

If you’ve known me for a while, you also know that once upon a time, I was one of a million online movie critics (though when I started, there were only thousands), and I was a member of a coalition of B-movie critics called the B-Masters. We did organized roundtables built around common themes, and the like. One of the traditions was the Secret Santa, where names were drawn out of a hat, and we told whoever we drew what movie he or she was going to review. I was asked to step out of retirement this year, I agreed, and was promptly in a deja vu situation, as I found myself int he same arrangement as the last time I participated: I gave Andrew Borntreger The Spirit, and Ken Begg gave me Frankenstein Island.

Ken Begg, of course, is the proprietor of Jabootu’s Bad Movie Dimension, and he likes to break people. He reduced Andrew to a puddle of protoplasm with Sextette, and Andrew survived shelling in Iraq with aplomb. This is the third movie Ken has given me, the rotten bastard. The first two were Doomsday Machine and Jonathan Livingston Seagull. I think he still resents the fact that Seagull did not kill me.

I got the Retromedia DVD for Frankenstein Island from Amazon Markets for, I think, $2.50, which means it cost more to ship it than its actual worth (which is a telling point). Another tip-off to the quality is that the box says “Directed by Jerry Warren”. Another is that when I spot-checked the disc to make sure it played, the first five seconds make me say out loud, “Oh, fuck you, movie.”

As expected, it is a mess. There is an island, and there are cavegirls, and Frankenstein’s great great etc granddaughter owns it, and she’s married to Van Helsing, and there’s an Igor, and turtleneck-and-stocking-cap wearing zombies apparently on leave from the Batman TV series, and the Monster is chained up in a grotto, and the Floating head of John Carradine crops up ever ten minutes to say the same damned thing over and over again and plastic props and vampire teeth from the post-Halloween sale at Walgreens are in evidence and Cameron Mitchell drunkenly quotes Poe forever and ever and

Surprisingly, this did not break our audience. If anything, it was embraced, as we attempted to keep the incredibly ambitious plot straight in spite of the inept delivery. A bit of palate-cleansing was performed by an episode of Super President (which people still don’t believe existed) and it’s companion feature, the infinitely more badass Spy Shadow. These were also well-received.

Not so our second feature.

It is probably due to the fact that, after much anticipation, I had recently seen The Losers, another DC comics adaptation recently, and was incredibly disappointed, but I liked Jonah Hex. Probably not going to see it ever again, but it was okay. Even though I spent most of the time, as the only person in the room who had read the comic book, confirming that “No, that’s not how it is in the book.”

Best running gag: The Other Dave’s “Aw man, that was the building where we stored all our dynamite!” “Aw, man, that’s the train where we stored all our dynamite!” “Aw, man…”

The Other Dave then begged off, pleading an early morning. which meant it was time for our last surprise feature of the evening:

Yes, that is Ron Ormond’s Please Don’t Touch Me, which had been requested long ago by Paul. An “educational” film, it purports to be a case study of hypnosis and its use in psychoanalysis, along with a bit of historical re-enactment and mondo footage for background. In general, it is the story of Vicki, the drool-inducing redhead in the clip, and the fact that she can’t have sex with her husband. Even the non-psychs in the audience can point out that this might be due to the fact that her mother apparently inserts “Too bad you were raped at the age of 15” into every conversation with her.

Of course, the power of hypnosis and the illuminating lantern of psychoanalysis demonstrates that she was not raped – she was assaulted and passed out, but a kindly passer-by interrupted the crime – and has only been going on her mother’s word all this time. And her husband’s wedding ring, of all things, was what set off the association. And all this is accomplished in one session. This guy is the Einstein of psychiatrists.

Of course, the usual excuse for making an educational movie is giving the audience some skin under the protection of the “educational” excuse, which doesn’t quite happen in Please Don’t Touch Me, even when, via hypnosis, we experience Vicki’s wedding night, When The Trouble Began. There’s a naked back, a bit of side-boobage, and a lot of salaciousness, but nothing explicit, which is surprising when you consider Dwain Esper was throwing nudity at audiences in the 30s all in the name of education.

Also, Ruth Blair, who plays Vicki, is the only woman I have ever seen who can make sliding onto a psychiatrist’s couch sexy, with a expertly nonchalant plucking at her skirt to reveal her garter belt. That’s talent.

The evening wound down, and there was only one thing left: I had promised Rick the episode of Pink Lady and Jeff guest-starring Jerry Lewis, and Dave’s earlier glee at inflicting Frankenstein Island and Jonah Hex on his unsuspecting guests turned into agony and horror. This wasn’t just decompressing, this was explosive decompression.

There is not much left to say about Pink Lady and Jeff. The bits with Jerry Lewis actually have some laughs, primarily because Lewis wrote that stuff himself. One of the interminable Art Nouveau salesman bits gets a bit funny when an elephant goes off-script and Jeff Altman, the Antichrist of Comedy, starts yelling that it’s not funny. A sketch about the second inauguration of Abraham Lincoln turning into a Dean Martin style roast yields the racist joke of the night, about plantation workers starting the NBA; Alice Cooper appears on tape to do “Clones”, and the @#$%ing kids I am watching this with ask, “When did Alice Cooper turn into Gary Numan?”

And we set off to our own hovels, secure in the knowledge that a) That was the house where kept all our dynamite; b) Though there was unaccountable longing for a Frankenstein Island sequel, the Jonah Hex sequel ain’t happening; and c) despite Paul’s whining there are still three unseen episodes of Pink Lady and Jeff.

Pleasant dreams.

November 23, 2010
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: crapfest . Author: drfreex . Comments: 5 Comments