crapfest | drfreex.com

The Traditional Back-to-School Crapfest

“Yeah, we’re goin’ to a Crapfest, la la la…”

I’ve been reading through my old stuff lately, and I discovered this actually is something of a tradition. Every year about this time, some of the people in the Show I do each weekend decide they need to have a life or something (Civilians! Bah!). I could mourn the loss of income for that weekend, or I could try to assemble a Crapfest on that Saturday. Thankfully, the response was good, and we gathered for the biggest convocation of self-flagellation since the Black Plague.

The good thing about a Saturday Crapfest is we don’t have that artificial curfew that comes with workaday Monday mornings, and we can get in more movies over a longer period. The bad thing about a Saturday Crapfest is we don’t have that artificial curfew that comes with workaday Monday mornings, and we can get in more movies over a longer period,

It was Paul’s birthday, so I proclaimed that it being such, Paul should get to watch a Dogville short. These make Paul happy, but other Crapfest attendees don’t like them, because they have hateful, shriveled souls. Paul chose “The Big Dog House”, so off we went. (Dave even admitted he was interested in this one, as he was likely hoping for a Sid Haig dog to crop up and then possibly a Pam Grier dog so that oh my God I just creeped myself right the hell out)

In this epic, dogs drive cars, work in department stores, light cigarettes, commit cold blooded murder and frame other dogs for the crime, so they get sent to the hot seat in their stead. They break rocks and have prison riots. They even have machine guns to quell those riots. They also make deathbed confessions in the nick of time, so there can be a hairsbreadth rescue! Why do you monsters hate Dogville so?

Happy Birthday, Paul!

There was still some time needed to prep the dinner fixins, so I dropped Paul’s other birthday present: the 1967 NBC special, Movin’ With Nancy, starring Nancy Sinatra at the exact stage that would elicit throaty growls from her Crapfest audience.

There is no plot here, no comedy sketches, just Nancy in music video after music video, in a time before music videos. Obeying Rat Pack Law, Dean Martin sings a couple of songs and Sammy Davis Jr. comes in for a quickly-shot dance number that ends with an interracial kiss a full year before Star Trek‘s. Daddy eventually shows up and sings, and the Chairman of the Board is still in great voice, baby, lit cigarette in hand. This DVD was released in 2000, which means I’ve been sitting on it for 15 years.

Happy Birthday, Paul!

Whenever I break this out, I always find myself wondering what the hell happened to Lee Hazlewood. He wrote this song and several others on the special, not to mention Nancy’s big hit, Boots. (There was disappointment that Boots wasn’t in the special, but Nancy, in the commentary track, said she had wanted to focus on her other songs. And break our hearts in 2015, also) Hazlewood decided to retire from the music biz in the 70s, came back in the 90s, and passed away just 8 years ago. Man, I loved his voice.

The 5.1 remix on the music is superb, and we really enjoyed ourselves. We even liked the commercials, which were included. Royal Crown Cola had bought the whole hour, and they were going to use it.

Yes, I am old enough to have seen this when it was first broadcast. Yes, I drank a lot of RC Cola, and that is all Nancy’s fault. Come on, it was the Mad, Mad, Mad Mad Cola.

“And now,” I said ominously, “Fun time’s over.”

I guess it depends on how you define fun, as we started with my entry for the evening, Roar. Which may not have been fun, but it was certainly not dull.

Roar is currently making the rounds of the Alamo Drafthouse, who were at the forefront of resurrecting this cinematic freakshow. It is also possible to buy it on DVD from their website. But whichever method you take, you should make sure you see it with an audience. An audience that is not afraid to bellow “Holy shit!” and “What the actual fuck?!?!” at the events unspooling before them.

Do yourself a favor and after you finish reading this, go Google Roar 1981. You are going to find a lot of interesting reading. In the meantime, let’s see if I can boil this down: this is a passion project for Tippi Hedren and her then-husband, Noel Marshall. It comes from the best intentions – they were both animal activists, and had founded a preserve in Southern California (it’s still in operation, but right now I can’t get their website to work). The movie was shot there, though it supposedly takes place in Africa.

“Bad kitty! BAD KITTY!!! You love me TOO MUCH!”

Noel plays an insane man who lives with a bunch of lions, tigers, and other big cats. I think he’s supposed to be a zoologist or game warden, but you honestly lose track of such things while you’re watching a lion gnaw on his obviously bleeding hand while he tells his terrified friend that it’s just demonstrating its love for him. If this is not sufficient proof of his insanity, he regularly breaks up lion fights by throwing his body between them. It’s like somebody decided Grizzly Man didn’t go far enough and went back in time to solve that problem.

“Cut! CUUUUTTTTTTT!!!”

Some game officials or something motorboat up to his compound to complain that he’s exceeding the number of big cats for his deed restrictions, or – hell, for all I know they’re a bunch of Jehovah’s Witnesses, we were still drowning out the soundtrack with our screams of dismay. (A particular favorite was yelling “Cut!” whenever someone disappeared under a ball of fur and claws, because the director sure as hell wasn’t interested in doing it) While Noel is in the house bandaging his bleeding hand, some of the cats get frisky and start gnawing on the Witnesses’ heads, causing more screams from us.

The plot, such as it is, is that Noel’s family (and that really is his family, including Tippi and Melanie Griffith. It’s not like he could have convinced anyone else to be in this demented deathtrap) is coming to join him in this toothy paradise, but they got the arrival time wrong, meaning they hitch a ride to the compound while Dad is coming to get them, two ships passing in the night, as it were. And they come to a house full of animals wondering why these new arrivals are acting like prey, running around, screaming, hiding, that sort of thing.

I think the lion was a fan of The Haunting.

Perhaps the lion was a fan of the original The Haunting.

You see, this is supposed to be a family movie, and this section is supposed to be funny. This is like filming a slapstick comedy on a set made of razor wire and broken glass. The cats are rambunctious because there’s a rogue lion named Togar messing with them, so they’re acting out. In real life, the family knew some of these cats, but not all, and everybody wound up getting stitches at one point or another in its ten-year process. Melanie Griffith had to have facial reconstruction surgery. Jan de Bont, then merely a cameraman, had 120 stitches when a curious lion tore the scalp off the back of his head with one swipe.

Two of the vengeful Witnesses come back to shoot the lions, and supposedly manage to bag a few until Togar has enough of their shit and puts a massive hurt on them. I try not to think about how badly those guys were actually hurt. I’m sure at least some of that blood was fake, at least. Maybe. Hopefully. Anyway, it’s a pretty unnecessary addition to the movie, except that they needed to get some “Hunting is evil!” action in there. Animal activists, remember?

The family manages to survive their night of terror, and it turns out all everybody needed was a good night’s sleep! Even Togar is okay now that he’s had a Snickers and a hunter’s face! Yay, big cats! Yay, we no longer need cringe in terror for these poor fools getting mauled for a questionable idea of entertainment! Yay!

Happy Birthday, Paul!

So after this we were really through being nice, this time we meant it. Dave was being mysterious, as usual, as he put on something called Hell Squad. Judging from the Tweets I was getting back, I am the only person in the world who had never heard of Hell Squad. Well, and all the other people in the room with me. There is no information on this thing, anywhere.

The first thing you have to realize is there is something called an Ultra Neutron Bomb. Ay-rabs kidnap the son of an ambassador (after a chase scene that sets new levels for unexcitement) in order to force the ambassador to give them the formula for the Ultra Neutron Bomb!!! Should he call the cops? The Army? The CIA? No, his assistant has a better idea.

And hops on the next flight to Las Vegas.

There he meets with Jan (Bainbridge Scott), a showgirl who likes to beat the crap out of mashers. She calls a meeting of her bored showgirl troupe and they all board a bus to the desert, where a guy in a drill sergeant hat tells them, “We have ten days to turn you from Las Vegas showgirls to trained commandos.”

There is magic in that statement. Magic that will go largely unfulfilled, but welcome to the world of crap movies. After a training montage (while the ambassador’s son molders in the dungeon for ten days – these are remarkably patient terrorists) Hell Squad is ready to go, journeying to Fake-istan under the guise of a traveling troupe of showgirls.

Okay, that’s Act One. In Act Two, Hell Squad will check into their luxury hotel suite, discover a large bathtub, and because “I read there’s a water shortage,” will take group baths. There isn’t a bubble bath shortage, though. It seems only Bainbridge Scott got the extra nudity money. Their mysterious contact always calls with instructions right after Bainbridge gets in the tub. (I suspected Paul of being the contact.)

The contact sends them on mission after mission in which they easily kill lots of Ay-rabs (why are we spending trillions on bombers when all we need is Las Vegas showgirls with ten day’s training?), and then return for a group bath. Literally: lather, rinse, repeat. Phone call, boobies. They commandeer a tank and drive it fifty feet. Mission accomplished! Bath time!

They finally run out of money for extras so two of the missions are just driving around in the desert. First at night, then during the day. I don’t think they got to take a bath between those two, because we were too busy bitching about the one-note-off-from-the-actual-A-Team-theme-song music that accompanied each. And every. Outing.

All of this doesn’t turn up the Ambassador’s son, and their extraction plane is going to leave with or without them. Luckily, they are captured by a Sheikh (Marvin Miller in his last screen appearance), who, in keeping with the evening’s festivities, gets chewed on by a tiger until he reveals where the son is being held. So it’s time to go take a bath.

CUE THAT A-TEAM MUSIC as the girls drive to a lake and swim thirty feet to the opposite shore where a castle from somebody’s aquarium awaits (thus rendering the bikinis they’re wearing totally justified). They rescue the son, kill some more guys (“Tee hee! Murder is fun!”), and somehow blow up the castle with a trail of gasoline. Lit by an ordinary book of matches that somehow stayed dry in her bathing suit (see below). Then they have to make it home to reveal there’s a mole in the organization.

Who’s the mole? I need to leave you something to find out for yourself. (PROTIP: it ain’t worth the effort) (However, it totally should have been the Boom Mike Operator. That boom mike appears in so many scenes it probably had to get a SAG card.)

Dave presented this in apology for the May Fest’s Galaxy Destroyer, which had neither galaxies or destruction or entertainment. Hell Squad was entertaining, give it that. Dave also provided the one piece of trivia related on the IMDb: Donald F. Glut wrote the script, but held off giving the director the final third until he was paid. So the director, Kenneth Hartford, came up with his own third act, and Glut never got paid anyway. Which explains the lack of dramatic tension and logic and stuff.

Did you know Kenneth Hartford directed three other movies?

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, PAUL!

Erik spotted a great line in the end credits, “Special thanks to the PLO members who played themselves as terrorists.” Uh….

Well spotted, dude.

And that, alas, is the last time I will be able to say anything nice about Erik.

Because he brought the next movie.

And without even a “You remember when we said we were through being nice? This time we absolutely mean it, hand to God.”

And we put in Roller Boogie.

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“It’s love on wheels” she said. “You’ve got to watch it” she said.

It was a year ago that, in a similar Crapfest, we partook of and enjoyed Skatetown USA. It was bizarre and madcap, and while most of the humor was, um, not that funny, if you didn’t like what was going on at any point, you could be sure it would switch to something else in a minute or so.

Roller Boogie does not do this.

Linda Blair is Terry Barkley, a rich kid we are told is a musical genius and about to go to Julliard. But since she is rich, she does not possess the Life Force, and must seek it among the poors of the local Roller Disco. Luckily, Jim Bray, winner of 275 roller skating trophies, is there to provide such for her.

Oh, but it’s not just a love story, you know. Some gangster types (led by Mark Goddard, who Dave pointed out is still pissed off about not getting to kill Dr. Smith) want to take over the Roller Disco, causing the owner to shut it down the night before the all-important Roller Boogie Competition, rather than endanger the kids. Thanks to roller skater “Phones” (Stoney Jackson), there is an accidental tape recording of the gangsters threatening the owner, and somehow the gangsters find out about it. I’m not really sure how, because I was being amused by Paul’s soul-rattling sighs from the back of the room, frequently punctuated by painful groans.

The closest analog I can come up with is when we finally decided to watch Can’t Stop the Music, and discovered that, rather than a non-stop parade of fabulousness, what we had was a fairly tepid update of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland putting on a show at the old barn. Roller Boogie is much the same thing, an old story dressed up in garish new clothes, hoping against hope that this new craze would last long enough for the movie to get out the door. It’s entertaining enough, it’s just not particularly interesting. Especially not after the madness of Skatetown USA, and it’s probably a very good thing that we put a year between those two movies, or Paul’s sighs might have been louder.

There are some good things about the movie. Uhhhhh… like the club’s DJ wasn’t Jeff Altman, as we had feared. The ending is sort of refreshingly downbeat, since Terry quits the Roller Life to go to Julliard, enjoy your 276th trophy, Jim Bray. And really, no one can deny that a certain Earth Wind & Fire song was very welcome.

Erik claimed the disc had been lent to him by someone named “Anita”, and that “Anita” was checking on our progress throughout the night via text. I’m not even sure there really was an “Anita”, that this wasn’t some sort of clever subterfuge. You see, Crapfest isn’t a democracy; you can’t even say it’s a benevolent dictatorship. We run it like a gulag, really, and somehow “Anita”, as Rick aptly put it, “acting as an external agent… managed to completely circumvent all council protocols and infiltrate the agenda with a highly weaponized Roller Disco device, leaving in its wake incomprehensible catatonic agony.”

This “Anita”, if she indeed exists, is highly dangerous. We should alert Matt Helm, Derek Flint, and see if that Bond dude is doing anything at the moment.

I could really go for a “Bike Cop” movie, though.

As it stands, Erik was banned from suggesting movies for a year. This punishment has only been doled out once before, to Rick for the whole Garbage Pail Kids thing. Which happened after he got out of parole for Evilspeak, come to think of it. In any case, we shall mention Roller Boogie no more. If we must mention it, it shall be known instead as “Erik’s Shame“.

Which is complete bullshit because the next thing we put on was Supersoul Brother, a selection from both Rick and myself. I have written about this earlier, so I’ll be brief here: Rudy Ray Moore wannabe Wildman Steve (we are informed it is pronounced Wi-i-i-i-ldman Steve) is a wino who is cleaned up and injected with a formula that will give him super strength, so he can steal a cardboard safe. Trouble is, the formula will kill him in seven days. Hilarity ensues.

No, it doesn’t, this is a terrible, terrible movie, made for one one-thousandth, if not one-millionth, the budget of Erik’s Shame, and at least as entertaining, if not more. It is also almost a half-hour shorter. Just enough enough time to realize that no, that wasn’t surround sound, that was Paul’s moans and sighs echoing every one of the put-upon Wi-i-i-i-ldman Steve’s.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, PAUL. WE HAVE SUCH SIGHTS TO SHOW YOU.

At this point, it was midnight. Paul, feeling his birthday was over, took his leave. Happy birthday, Paul, thanks for spending it with us. Your judgement is questionable.

But we were not finished.

“No, children, it isn’t over yet.”

Hell Squad had not been Dave’s first choice for the evening. And now that we were heading into what we knew was going to be the last movie of the fest, he revived that choice. And although I had seen the American dub again around a year ago, I had never seen the original, Danish version of Reptilicus.

This version had no subtitles, causing Dave to run into his computer room while we provided Ingmar Bergmanesque translations of our own. The plucky oil prospectors at the beginning were plenty concerned about the silence of God in an uncaring universe, you bet you.

Dave returned with some fan subtitles and we got down to business. If you didn’t know, Denmark’s only daikaiju movie discovers the frozen tail of a previously unknown dinosaur while drilling for oil. Like an earthworm, the accidentally thawed tail starts growing a whole new dinosaur, which escapes and proceeds to spread puppet terror across the countryside.

There’s a bunch of stuff that got cut from this for the American dub, and it’s mainly character-driven romance stuff, but there are two really infamous cuts: the first concerns the Odious Comic Relief janitor, played by Dirch Passer, who was a incredibly successful Danish comedian. AIP, for some reason, felt the need to cut a song he sings with some children about Reptilicus:

The other concerns the monster’s bat wings, which in the American dub are never referenced. Not so in the Danish version. I tweeted, “You’ll believe a puppet can fly.”

You won’t, really. I was just being nice.

So all this was excised, most in the cause of getting to the monster scenes sooner. Counterintuitively, this resulted in the travelogue segment in the American version leading up to “Tivoli Nights” to make up for lost time, and the addition of the monster’s acid spit.

Also missing from the Danish cut, which makes me sad.

“Tivoli Nights” does bring up something else. The fan subtitles did a wonderful job of translating the Reptilicus Song, even making it rhyme in English, but had little patience with “Tivoli Nights”, interjecting pleas that someone shoot the translator to stop the pain. Then, when Reptilicus makes his first appearance, his roar is translated as “Rar! I’m a monsta!” which made me so happy.

It still ends the same, though.

At 2am, we wearily went back out into The World, satisfied that there was nothing out there that could possibly hurt us as much as what we had just done to ourselves. Five movies! Five movies and a TV special. Five movies, a TV special, and Dogville.

Can’t wait to do it again.

August 18, 2015
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: crapfest, dirch passer, dogville, erik is even worse than rick, hell squad, movin' with nancy, nancy sinatra, reptilicus, rick is worse than hitler, roar, roller boogie, supersoul brother, wildman steve . Author: drfreex . Comments: 4 Comments

Crap of July: The 80s Strike Back

Once more, I survived working the City’s Independence Day festivities, with only slightly more than usual aches and pains afterwards. It was time for celebration, celebration that required little or no work from yours truly, ie., a Crapfest. (Click here for a visual representation of our gatherings, putting the “odd” back in “odyssey”)

Slightly lower attendance this go-round – Paul had a sibling’s party to attend, The Other Dave was recovering from what he described as “eating like Orson Welles for three days”, leaving us with host The Original Dave, Alan, Rick, Erik and myself. Mrs. Dave excused herself and got the hell out of Dodge. Like all of us, she had lived through the 80s, and unlike all of us, she had the sense to know that once was enough.

You see, there was a motif that, unplanned, began to assert itself as the evening wore on, and past a point we stopped resisting and just went with it. And the 80s came, and had their way with us. Roughly.

Dave’s opening salvo was the motivational classic, Mr. T’s Be Somebody… or Be Somebody’s Fool, a direct-to-video outing from 1984 (the hot middle of the VHS boom, a time when something like this being successful in the video market was a real possibility). The intentions behind this are so good, it’s really kind of hard to be mean to it. If it has any weaknesses, it’s that it tries to cover 14 different topics like Peer Pressure, Shyness, Frustration and Styling (featuring “Zina and Zina from San Bernadina”), so it’s like every PBS morning and Disney kid’s show compressed into 52 minutes.

Oh, stop screaming.

T is very game in this whole enterprise, even if he looks very uncomfortable when visiting a street scene that is basically the Shaolin Temple of breakdancing (he does not make it past the first chamber). Guest stars like New Edition and a very young Fergie keep you watching for other possibly hidden details, and I have to say the rap Ice-T wrote for Mr. T is actually pretty good, delivering the message while playing to T’s vocal strengths. It was a fairly easy way to slide into the horrors of the evening.

Well, “fairly easy” gives way to “Necronomicon-level horror” when whatever file Dave has Mr. T residing in on his hard drive then flips over to the pilot episode of The Lost Saucer, a Sid and Marty Krofft monstrosity hailing from 1975 starring Jim Nabors and Ruth Buzzi as bumbling robots (Nabors is from “the Southern Cosmos”). As it was from 1975, it was purged somewhat speedily, but not before the theme song wormed its way into our brains:

Much easier for us to glom onto than T’s rapping, and it would pop up over and over for the next five hours.

We would need it.

A movie I had been trying to get on the agenda for over a year was The Miami Connection, a strange concoction concerning a group of five orphan tae kwan do black belts who are friends forever, as they will tell us in song. You see, they are also the rock group Dragon Sound, “a new dimension in rock and roll,” the bold new direction being that they dress in karate gis while pretending to play their instruments.

You can be sure that this number was the first time we used The Lost Saucer defensively. The scowling GI Joe with Kung-Fu Grip lookalike who’s so concerned about his sister is the leader of the improv street gang (all their dialogue is obviously – and poorly – improvised), who have some sort of affiliation with the Miami Ninjas, who are taking over the lucrative drug trade. The position of house band in this joint seems more than a paltry paycheck and unlimited well drinks, it must control trade routes from its lofty perch, or something, since the band replaced by Dragon Sound is willing to fight them for it, and when they get tired of having their asses handed to them by Dragon Sound, they employ GI Joe’s Improv Mob to get their asses kicked instead.

None of that synopsis will help you with the horrible line delivery of star/co-director/writer Y.K. Kim, who is a good martial artist but a terrible actor (casting by Y.K. Kim). Two of the band members are similarly good at the kicking, not so hot on the emoting. The other two are the opposite, kind uhhhhhh adequate on the acting, not seen doing much on the fight scenes. They are: the black one (who actually does track down his father, with a shrill “Oh my Godddddd!”) and John Oates. As there is no girl on the band, John Oates is the de facto girl, getting kidnapped and held as bait.

We haven’t even gotten to the biker gang who shows up out of nowhere to provide us with our bare breasts for the R rating. And the final showdown with the Miami Ninjas, in a park that resembles the jungles of Da Nang (Orlando is truly a city of wonders). This movie got kicked around to various distributors, none of whom cared to even give it a video release, and mind you, this was in 1987, when anyfuckingthing could get released on VHS. One guy at Manson International (appropriately) finally agreed to pick it up if they changed the ending (the original, tragic ending required acting, and talk about trying to find water in the middle of a desert…).

Erik had been wanting to see this for a while, and he avowed that it was worth the wait. I was not prepared, however, for how much it hurt Dave, which was a lot. So much that he decided to forego his original planned entry, and also show something horrible and soul-shriveling from the 80s, locking in our course for the evening. And that something terrible was Where the Boys Are 84.

There is a fair amount of demented genius in this choice, mainly because I don’t think there was any way in Hell any of us had seen this movie, unless it was by accident while flipping through cable movie channels.

The premise is: you have four college co-eds (Lisa Hartman, Lorna Luft, Wendy Schaal and Lynn-Holly Johnson), who head to Fort Lauderdale for Spring Break, with no higher mission than to get drunk and laid. Lynn-Holly wants to screw “Conan the Barbarian” – whoever might fit that description – Lisa wants to make time with Camden (Daniel McDonald), the famous classical piano player cousin of the rich Wendy, and Lorna just needs a break from her jealous boyfriend, who will proceed to track her to Lauderdale. Got all that? It’s a sexy madcap romp! Or so we’re told.

It is! It’s a sexy madcap romp!

The movie itself is not too awful, though keeping track of all the subplots is sort of a full-time job (the tequila sunrises Dave kept bringing into the room didn’t help). A hitchhiker the girls pick up on the way is an itinerant musician named Scott (Russell Todd, leading to many unsaid Time Squad riffs), who is going to be Camden’s chief competition for Lisa’s attention. There’s a Stray Cats wannabe group that keeps cropping up – called, rather nakedly, The Rockats – ensuring that every five minutes I could ask, “Is that Brian Setzer?” no matter who walked across the screen.

The first night, when the girls go out to become, as they put it, “shitfaced” rapidly becomes very uncomfortable, especially when Wendy gets drunk and begins to do a striptease in the middle of the bar (to Rockats accompaniment). I swear to you, the scene was two camera setups away from becoming The Accused before Lisa intervenes.

Of course, if you really want uncomfortable, there’s always this scene:

This movie fails the Bechdel Test, fails it repeatedly and fails it hard. So hard there were probably smoking craters all over Lauderdale from repeated attempts. I will further postulate that its very title implies an impressive fail on that point.

Do I really need to tell you how the various plot threads play out? Lorna and her boyfriend will get back together. Conan the Barbarian turns out to be a tiny-dicked hustler. Wendy gets busted for DUI and starts dating the cop who busted her. (Spoiler: he’s married). Scott publicizes the snooty party Wendy’s mother is throwing for Camden’s big concert so he can crash Lisa’s alone time with Camden. The supposedly comic shenanigans that ensue also include the Rockats – of course – staging an impromptu concert of their own, and the string trio that was supposed to be entertaining the posh crowd start jamming with them. I really could have used more of that.

Camden is confessing that he is having trouble finishing his new suite because he can’t find “the proper phrase”. I suggested that the missing phrase might be “…THE LOST SAUCER!” but he ignored me. Scott bursts in and tells him what the phrase should be, saving his rival’s bacon. AS MOVIES TRY TO TELL US OVER AND OVER AGAIN, RICH PEOPLE SUCK AND ONLY POOR PEOPLE HAVE THE LIFE FORCE.

Oh, hey, was that Brian Setzer?

So how do we follow up that slice of drive-in fare (from an era with practically no drive-ins)? Is there any topping that, in a very real way finishing off the evening, like a blow to the head on the killing floor? Why, how about another movie from the 80s I had been trying to shoehorn into a Crapfest forever: Rock ‘N’ Roll Nightmare.

As some of you may be aware, the movie’s original title was The Edge of Hell, which it retains on the Synapse Films disc I was using. This allowed me to pull the “Oh no! I brought the wrong movie!” bit for a while, never mind we had spent the last five minutes grooving to the 5.1 menu song of “Talkin’ ‘Bout Rock”.

So we have a rock group, The Tritonz, setting up shop in a remote (except you kept seeing car headlights on a nearby highway in the numerous night shots) farmhouse, where a family were mysteriously and supernaturally murdered years before. But this is the perfect place to finish our album! We built a state of the art recording studio in the barn! (The state of the art was apparently pretty sad in 1987, especially in Canada.) The Tritonz’ journey to the farmhouse in their non-custom van is pretty much accomplished in real time, the sure mark of a movie that came up short on running time. Interminable love scenes (and slow motion during same) is another clue.

(Speaking of love scenes, here’s some “fun” movie lore: the requisite breasts for an R rating were supposed to be provided by the groupies in one scene. Said breasts are even referenced in the dialogue. Their agent, however, told them to refuse on the day of shooting, and the ladies in the Tritonz were called upon to take up the slack. As it were.)

The leader of the group, John Triton, is, as aficionados of crap cinema know, played by real-life rocker Jon Mikl Thor, who also wrote, produced, and provided the music. I actually like the music – very little LOST SAUCER needed, it provided its own riffs – but the story is plodding and pretty cliche. The drummer is even named Stig, for God’s sake. In any case, the forces of darkness -represented by rubbery cyclops puppets and the occasional decent makeup effect – pick off the band one by one, leading to a closing act that I still refuse to say anything about. It must simply be witnessed, with as little preparation as possible.

All online trailers seem to have gone bye-bye. Well, they all pretty much blew the surprise, anyway. Spoiler alert, and all that.

Another thing learned this evening: most 80s movie scores were written by rummaging through John Carpenter’s trash can.

The best part is I can now threaten Crapfest with the sequel to Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare, Intercessor: Another Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare. But you know what? That is below even me.

With this particular Crapfest, though, it felt like we had finally hit our stride again, after the long time off. Is that a good thing? Or a bad thing? Given the Crapfest experience, it is probably a bad thing. And that’s good.

Right?

Hey… was that Brian Setzer?

July 9, 2015
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: be somebody or be somebody's fool, crapfest, miami connection, mr. t, rock n roll nightmare, where the boys are 84 . Author: drfreex . Comments: 4 Comments

The Memorial Crapfest

It had been six months since the last Crapfest. There are many reasons for that. The holidays, certainly. There was also the fact that I was really tired of the cat-herding involved with setting a date that everyone was available. It was just much easier to find a day to meet with Rick, or Dave, or both, and just quietly watch some movies.

Life, though, has a way of forcing our hands.

A couple of weeks ago, in my semi-annual bitching about my life post, I mentioned that I skipped out on the memorial service of an acquaintance because that evening was the only chance I had to rest, recoup and heal in a physically grueling week. The deceased was Mark, who was responsible for such Crapfest entries as Skyscraper, The Black 6, and Evil Town. It wasn’t a memorial service, but a Celebration of Life (Mark would not have appreciated a moribund memorial service, not at all) and it was apparently crowded, which is to the good.

I’m a simple man, and I memorialized Mark the best way I knew: by inflicting terrible movies upon my fellow man, as he would.

The evening began with host Dave testing out his new AV setup with the first 20 minutes of Pacific Rim. Now, Pacific Rim is not crap. It is, however, quite loud. I sat and stewed that every time I tried to start things out nicely with some vintage Rolling Stones or Tom Jones, I get castigated for daring to put some “quality” into everybody’s precious crap. No one understands that this only makes the scalpel cut deeper. Yet here is Dave, receiving no such complaints while he projects giant robots punching kaiju.

NOT. CRAP.

When you’re the host, you get to do stuff like this.

But you know when nobody complains about “quality” in a Crapfest? When that quality is in the form of cartoons. I curated another set of cartoons, if only because Mark had really enjoyed the Halloween set at the last Crapfest. We start off easy with Feed the Kitty, one of Chuck Jones’ best, followed by Tex Avery’s Bad Luck Blackie, which is its polar opposite: in the first, a bulldog adores a little kitten; in the other, a bulldog continually tries to kill a little kitten.

Tom & Jerry were actually the worst about this.

The next section grew out of a discussion that Dave, Rick and I had after watching Diplomaniacs, about what Dave termed “blackface dynamite” (a scholarly term, to be sure) in cartoons, where an explosion turns everyone onscreen into minstrel show participants. The one instance he could recall with certainty was in Droopy’s Good Deed, which I surprisingly had in its uncensored form… but I still started off with Chew Chew Baby, a 1958 Harveytoon that played semi-regularly in the weekday morning cartoon slot, alongside the Bugs Bunny and Sylvester the Cat cartoons. It terrified me, and in short screwed me up for some time. It was a horrible thing to show a 5 year-old, and once again it is temporarily on YouTube, so look quick:

Oh, all right, here’s the censored Droopy scene in Japanese, which doesn’t make it any better:

Surprisingly, there are some (pretty awful quality) examples of the Betty Boop cartoon I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You, featuring Bimbo and Koko being chased by the giant flying head of Louis Armstrong:

Again, I fully expect all of these to be purged from YouTube in the next week.

I laid out my usual four movies to be voted on. Dave was having none of this voting crap, however (the fascist), and snatched up the recently-released Sorceress DVD. I have gone into Sorceress in far too much detail elsewhere, so let me be brief, and you can visit me twenty years ago at your leisure.

Sorceress is yet another Roger Corman-produced New World Pictures attempt to cash in on the sword and sorcery fad. It was directed by Jack Hill, who has a bunch of good, influential cinema under his belt, like Coffy and Switchblade Sisters. He asked that his name be removed from the movie. It is an intriguing script, full of amazing effects that Corman was not willing to pay for, so what you’re actually watching is a cheap piece of junk. It does feature the Harris twins (Playboy Playmates) and their nudity, Frampton the Barbarian, and for some reason, a Viking and his traveling companion, a satyr. I’m usually pretty forgiving about the acting in these things, but in this one it gets pretty dire.

“And my axe! …except I don’t have one.”

The major heartbreak in all this: Jack Hill wanted Sid Haig to play Pando, the satyr, but Corman wouldn’t pay for that, either. I weep over the loss of this portrayal. And you know what else is not in Sorceress? A sorceress! None. Zip. Zero. Corman apparently took a list of possible titles to a local high school and asked them which movie they’d go see. “Why, the one that gives me a chance to see boobies,” they replied, and so it was.

After this, Alan had brought something. When Alan brings something, it is always horrific. This time, it was, at least, horrific and short. It was the premiere episode of the shortest-lived M*A*S*H* spin-off ever, W*A*L*T*E*R*. Yes, Gary Burghoff’s shot at a show featuring his Radar O’Reilly character.

There are a few points of interest: using one of the best episodes of M*A*S*H* as a springboard – the one featuring a TV crew filming a documentary of the 4077th – a “Where are they now?” special catches us up on what happened to Radar – excuse me, Walter – in the intervening years. He lost the family farm and got abandoned on his wedding day, among other things. So now he is a beat cop in St. Louis.

Now, Walter using his Radar O’Reilly powers to solve crimes is the series I would have tuned in to every week. Instead, what we have here is some gently uplifting comedy about how being a nice guy and having an affinity for animals makes Walter a good cop. Any warm feelings toward the show engendered by having Dick Miller crop up as the manager of a burlesque house besieged by warring strippers is wasted by the fact that Walter’s eventual love interest is played by Victoria Jackson. Possibly before she went insane, but still.

You know what? Screw you. Why should I be the only one to suffer?

There needed to be some filler while dinner was grilled (We were too wrapped up in W*A*L*T*E*R* to attend to such things, it seems), and this fell to me. I had two trailer compilations, labeled “Adventure” and “Satanism” “Satan!” chose Paul, enthusiastically. He would regret that.

There are a lot of movies with “Satan” and “The Devil” in their titles, and the most amazing thing about this is that most of these movies are boring. How is this even possible? They don’t even have enough good stuff in them to make a good trailer, and this is sad.

Rick had prepared a ton of hamburger patties. Dave imperiously strode through the kitchen, proclaiming, “You will have double cheeseburgers! This is the LAW!!!” In a rare gesture of restraint, I only had two double cheeseburgers. I miss those double cheeseburgers. They were good double cheeseburgers.

(Why yes, I did just have my semi-annual visit to my doctor, during which we discussed my weight gain. I told her it was all Rick’s fault. She sighed and scribbled something in the TO BE KILLED column.)

Then Dave put on his choice. It was a choice that would make us miss boring old Satan. Like many of Dave’s choices, it had more names than a petition against closing a local community center. The name it had chosen for the evening was Galaxy Destroyer, but it is apparently better known as simply Galaxy or Battle for the Lost Planet (“uncensored TV version of Kampf um den verlorenen Planeten”) or “Do you even watch these fucking things before you show them?”

SO there’s this thief named Harry Trent (Matt Mitler) who has stolen a very valuable data tape, and hijacks a space shuttle to escape the security guards chasing him. First problem: he damaged the shuttle and can’t maneuver it, so he has to take a comet’s route back to Earth, which will take five years. Luckily (if not realistically) , there is sufficient fuel and food for this. Second problem: he passed a fleet of wannabe Vogons who reduce the Earth to a scorched black ball.

So after five years of komedy, like discovering he also broke the ship’s stove so that the food is crap and drawing a naked woman on a pillow to seduce, Trent returns to an Earth that has regrown into a bunch of B-movie communes, and discovers he has become a legend, because the data tape he stole will operate a mega-weapon that will destroy the pig-faced aliens. He picks up a feisty liberated woman (Denise Coward), runs into space crabs, has to deal with Mad Dog Kelly, the Maddest Mad Man on the Q Morning Zoo… no I’m sorry, he’s Joe Genitissi in a role that should have gone to Frank Stallone, a Mad Max wannabe who thinks all women should willingly be in his harem and Trent fights him to the death AND OH MY GOD WILL YOU JUST END I REALLY MISS BORING SATAN.

Semi-Stallone gets Trent into the Mega-weapon complex and finds out it can kill anybody or anything just as long as the particulars can be programmed into it. Even with the data tape, the surviving scientist (Bill MacGlaughlin) can’t figure out how to program it to kill the aliens. Semi-Stallone says that’s because he’s “too cordial” and he just has to program in human beings and tell the machine to kill everything else. Congratulations, asshole, you just destroyed the biosphere, animals, insects, bacteria and all.

But no, this works, and the aliens dissolve like the demons at the end of the original Evil Dead, but this is deemed so cool that they show many, many instances of it until even that becomes boring. Gaaaah.

This is the work of Brett Piper, who some of you will know from A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell, and you are nodding sagely right now. Some fair stop-motion animation, almost nudity (“MY movie had boobies,” I once again entoned from the back), komedy, and some tiresome social commentary.

Dave sneered that we had lost our “bad movie legs”. See for yourself, the three minutes where the movie almost got exciting:

And lest that make you think you might actually want to watch this, here’s the actual trailer:

The only comment on YouTube:

And you know what else wasn’t in Galaxy Destroyer, besides entertainment value? A galaxy, being destroyed or not.

Sometime during this Paul scapered off into the night, claiming work the next morning (he was lying, he wanted to watch the Rockets game in peace. Incidentally, they lost that night.) and also Erik, claiming a hangover (the veracity of this is unknown). This left Dave, Rick, Alan and myself. “What else you got?” asked Dave. I presented two discs which I knew to be around an hour long. “What else you got?” he asked again, and I realized I was the only person in the room who had to get up for work the next day.

Short sleep rations are a fact of my life. You don’t scare me.

I presented two more movies. And with some sort of hell-spawned wisdom, Dave chose the movie that would be of a fit with the rest of the evening: The Return of the Five Deadly Venoms, which has nothing to do with the earlier movie, Five Deadly Venoms. It is, in fact, a re-titling of Crippled Avengers, because people are idiots.

Chan Kuan-Tai plays To, a famous kung fu hero, whose wife and child are hideously mangled by enemies (To then kills the scumbags with one tiger blow each). His son survives, though his arms have been cut off, and To raises him to be a great fighter with iron arms that have some proto-Tony Stark weaponry in them. They also become colossal jerks, ruling the local village with an iron (ha!) fist, and crippling most of the cast of Five Deadly Venoms for various minor infractions, like talking back or bumping into them on the street.

So, a newly blind man, a deaf-mute, a legless guy, and a brain-damaged hero who tried to help them (but still has excellent kung fu skills in his muscle memory), learn kung fu and come back to rid the world of To and his iron-fisted son. If you need more details, once again you can commune with my younger self.

Chang Cheh’s Venom movies (as they are known) tend to end in spectacular fight scenes that rely more on acrobatic skills than martial artistry, but the fights are so dizzying, like a gymnastic tournament gone ballistic, that it is damned near impossible not be sucked in. Another special shout out goes to Wang Lung Wei as To’s second-in-command, whose battle cry of “Let’s go!” whenever his men were losing, became the quote of the evening.

It washed away the Boring Satan and Boring-er Galaxy Destroyers and ended the night on an up-beat. Nyah nyah on Erik and Paul who have to nurse their delicate psyches through horrid memories of Galaxy Destroyer when they think of this night, and not the exhausting final fight of Crippled Avengers or the ta-tas of the Harris Twins (“My movie had boobies!”)

And rest assured that Mark is laughing at us all, and probably making a joke about an obscure Richard Burton movie.

Looks like I’m back to my cat-herding duties.

May 6, 2015
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: brett piper, chang cheh, crapfest, crippled avengers, galaxy destroyer, gary burghoff, jack hill, sorceress, w*a*l*t*e*r* . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

The Halloween Crapfest

While all that Hubrisween stuff was going on, I suddenly felt the craving for a movie experience much less solitary. A need to inflict suffering on others. I felt the need for an all-horror Crapfest (well, Crapfests are sort of predicated on horror, but that’s a larger issue). By and large, the call was answered.

Except on the day, Paul and the Other David begged off, citing Ebola, because that will never not be hilarious. Alan had a matinee performance -O, cursed work ethic! – which left it down to me, Dave, Rick, Erik and Mark. We brought enough food for the original horde, so there were plenty of leftovers.

We began with a collection of Halloween cartoons curated by yours truly. I’ll make a perfunctory pass through YouTube, but I don’t hold much hope for finding any of them (and if I did, they’d be taken down within a month), so here’s a list:

Bimbo’s Initiation (1931) – a sort of proto-Betty Boop short
Scaredy Cat (1948) – Porky & Sylvester vs murder mice, and not for the last time
The Mad Doctor (1933) – Mickey Mouse. Disney was scarring young minds way before Snow White
Water Water Every Hare (1952) – Mad doctors again, this time with Bugs Bunny
Snow White (1933) – but this time with Betty Boop and Cab Calloway
Have You Got Any Castles (1938) – Musical earworm involving books, included for an appearance by Mr. Hyde, Fu Manchu, the Phantom of the Opera, and Frankenstein’s Monster. And dammit, because I love this cartoon.
The Haunted House (1929) – Mickey Mouse again, and some skeletons who just want to party.
Broomstick Bunny (1956) – Bugs Bunny, obviously, and the debut of Witch Hazel.

Okay, color me corrected (and hopefully these won’t disappear in a few weeks):

(I think I really love Have You Got Any Castles because it assumes a certain amount of cultural awareness on the part of its audience.)

This was before the switch off Daylight Savings Time, so we were still waiting for the sun to go down that the true horror could begin. It was best to go with something short, I thought, so Dwain Esper’s 1934 Maniac got the nod. Here’s the clip everyone recognizes, quoted in It Came From Hollywood:

Now here is something about Crapfest that really, I get my nose rubbed in repeatedly: subtlety is wasted, and this is the first and last time you are going to hear Maniac accused of subtlety. But so much of its charm and outrageousness is dependent on declamatory acting better suited to an 1890 stage, florid dialogue ditto, and shocking 1934 nudity excused on the flimsiest educational intertitles possible – that gets lost in the raucous atmosphere. This always happens, except for Bugs Bunny, who gets reverent silence.

It was now dark enough for the true nastiness to begin, so I trotted out Night Train to Terror. We’ve been here before, you and I, and we know that this movie is a cheapjack Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors made of cut-up versions of two previously released movies and one that was unfinished, so the usual Crapfest cry of “What’s happening?” was totally justified. But outside of the double-casting of Richard Moll giving Rick purchase for a desperate attempt to show Evilspeak again as part of a “Richard Moll Film Festival”, the best part was… well, what I did find on YouTube was an edited version that incorporates all the parts of Night Train to Terror that had Rick shrieking like a little girl:

But God is All-Merciful, except toward haters, so He resurrects the band for one more round of “Dance With Me” for the closing credits. The screams of outrage in the room were incredible.

Dave then put something up on the screen for “the break”. Speaking of lessons never learned during Crapfests, nobody ever takes a break during “the break”. The psychology of this is beyond me, except in this case: I was held spellbound by this; I had no previous idea it existed, and it is absolutely delightful. It’s Music Box With A Secret, a piece of Soviet animation heavily influenced by Yellow Submarine – itself a heavy influence on yours truly as a child – and…

…well, just hit full screen on this. You will not regret it.

Dave, you never get to look at one of my entries and sneer, “This is quality, it has no place here” again, because this is top-notch stuff.

He followed it up with Prisencolinensinainciusol, which I love. If you’ve been under a rock for the last few years (as were, apparently, many of our attendees) this was a song written by Italian performer Adriano Celentano, to demonstrate what a popular English song would sound like to a non-English speaker.

Didn’t get that? Fine. So we watched it again.

(I was nice and advanced it past the Italian introduction. I assure you Dave was not that merciful.) (Videos of this song keep being taken down and put back up. Maybe these two versions will survive more than five minutes)

Then, since no one took “the break”, Dave unspooled his entry, a movie which has as many names as Legion: Dark Eyes, Fury of the Succubus, Demon Rage, Demon Seed, but in this case, Satan’s Mistress, starring Natalie Wood’s sister, Lana Wood, and her Moonpie-sized areola.

This was a case when I was one of the people yelling “What’s going on?”, and it wasn’t because of the vodka, either. It was mainly because there is no there there. Lana is at her beach house with her husband, who does… something for a living. She moves into her own bedroom because she “needs room” and “needs time”, mainly because a dark figure keeps visiting her in the night for salacious purposes. So you’ve got your Satan, and you’ve got a lot of mistress-ing going on, and some dime store divorce drama. And Britt Ekland as a concerned friend who Satan nearly roasts in a hot tub.

Did I mention the beach house has a basement, which for some reason, contains suits of armor and a guillotine? Do beach houses even have basements? In any case, Britt’s hubby winds up afoul of the guillotine, and at his funeral John Carradine jobs in for a day as a priest who urges Britt and Lana’s husband to fight the evil in the beach house but not to “fall prey to their illusions”. Britt falls prey to their illusions and burns for it, but hubby stands strong, and apparently making your saving roll to disbelieve is all it takes to conquer Old Scratch. That’s worth remembering, write it down.

There’s not much video to be found from this flick (which sort of tells the story, right there), but leave it to Mr. Skin to post a NSFW clip of Ms. Wood in the altogether. It did pretty much sum up the production, which is probably why, like Prisencolinensinainciusol, it did not hang around long. So here’s the opening two minutes, complete with public domain scream sound effects…

So I didn’t feel at all bad about concluding the evening with a movie that had been asked for ever since its trailer showed up in a compilation: The Super Inframan. Mark complained that I was really stretching the definition of horror here, but dammit, it’s wall-to-wall monsters. What’s more Halloween than that? The fact that the monsters know kung fu just illustrates why this is known as the finest movie ever made.

“Six million light years beyond believability!” also sort of tells the tale, there.

Well. the holidays beckon. Chances that we will get in another Crapfest this year are pretty slim (even if my venerable VHS of The Magic Christmas Tree keeps trying to claw its way out of the storage box), so this may just have to carry us into the New Year. So long, fellow voyagers on the good ship Crap. It’s been fun.

Next time I’ll bring more Bugs Bunny.

Future Freex Weighs In: Turns out it wasn’t in a storage box at all. It was hiding:

November 7, 2014
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: betty boop, Britt Ekland, bugs bunny, crapfest, dwain esper, lana wood, maniac, Mickey Mouse, night train to terror, Prisencolinensinainciusol, richard moll, satan's mistress, super inframan . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

The Last Crap of Summer

It actually happens, every now and then, that I get a Saturday off. This is a mixed blessing; no work on Saturday means no pay, but it also means that it is possible to throw together a Crapfest WITH NO HOLDS BARRED! IT’S A SATURDAY! ALL BETS ARE OFF! WHAT YOU GOT TO DO ON A SUNDAY, ANYWAY?

(Well, I had to get up at 8am to read at Hippie Church, but why should I get more sleep on a Sunday than I do any other day?)

We had a fairly full roster, with only The Other David absent, as in a mirror image of my plight, he had a show that evening. Host Dave had rearranged the furniture in the Crapfest Room, and we lolled about in spacious luxury as Hell unspooled before our very eyes.

Dave started off with a movie that, like the devil, has many names: the one plastered on the screen as a subtitle was Sex and the Vampire. If you are looking for it on the IMDb, it is better known as Santo and Dracula’s Treasure or Santo en el tesoro de Drácula. In my peculiar little world, El Santo requires no introduction; I find in this world, however, such is not the case. So there was some discussion about lucha libre and pro wrestling, and everybody missed the plot set-up, which is Standard Operating Procedure for a Crapfest. (In lieu of such discussion, I will simply direct you to the Wikipedia page for El Santo)

El Santo, besides being a famous wrestler, crimefighter, and monster-killer, is also an accomplished scientist, it turns out, and has invented a time machine. But it is INCREDIBLY DANGEROUS and has not been tested yet, so the scientists he invited to ooh and ahh at it instead go “Poo-poo!” and march out. The machine will only send a person back to a past incarnation, and for some reason it is safest to send a woman with voluptuous curves into the past, so Santo’s plucky girlfriend Luisa (Noelia Noel) puts on a high-collared silver suit and walks into a very short Time Tunnel.

Wouldn’t you know it, she appears in a household that is being bedeviled by a foreign gent who calls himself Alucard (Aldo Monti), and yes, our local brainiac Professor Van Roth (Fernando Mendoza) has to write that name down and hold it up to a mirror. This version of Dracula, it should be pointed out, has a propensity for taking off women’s clothing, and has a harem of brides who take “clothing optional” very seriously. This convinced Paul that Dracula was the true hero of the movie.

Now, about the time we start wondering “Didn’t this movie used to have El Santo in it?” We see El Santo watching the unfolding Dracula movie on a Time TV; and he’s getting increasingly worried when Luisa’s previous incarnation is vampirized and about to be staked by Van Roth right after he put paid to Dracula. Santo brings her back in the nick of time.

Dracula, Prince of Nudies

Now how, you may wonder, did I know about Santo’s time machine, and the shadowy black figure who is watching Santo watch Time TV? Well, much to my consternation, el tesoro de Dracula is in large part an uncredited remake of Attack of the Aztec Mummy, which I had watched a couple a months ago in preparation for an October roundtable (plug plug). Santo decides that finding Dracula’s resting place, and getting his medallion, which will lead to the titular treasure, will prove to all those scoffers that his time machine works.

There follows a shot-for-shot recreation of the tomb scene in Aztec Mummy, right down to the odious comic relief spotting the villainous Man In Black and mistaking him for a ghost. The only deviation is a fight between Santo and the MiB thugs, after which they find Dracula’s coffin, the stake still in his remarkably preserved body, and they take the medallion. But! Dracula’s ring has the key to decoding the medallion’s map, and the MiB steals the ring, then has his burly henchman Atlas wrestle Santo for it (I was wondering how they were going to work a wrestling ring in, and they promote the match for two weeks). Santo, of course, wins, and the MiB hands over the ring, which you have to admit is kind of classy.

But he then has his thugs take the stake out of Dracula, figuring that the Count will track down his jewelry, and we’re back to Aztec Mummy territory again. Paul said, “Yay! Dracula’s back! Maybe we’ll have boobs again!” (speaking of titular treasure, har de har) Paul is remarkably psychic, as we did indeed, and then Drac goes ahead and revives all his clothing-challenged brides again, to boot. Santo still wins, which in Paul’s book, means that evil (and clothing) won the day.

It was time to start preparing the evening meal, and the folks doing the planning had outdone themselves: Erik had personally hand-wrapped and skewered a small army of shrimp in bacon, and Rick had an assortment of artisan sausages and pork tenderloin. Science and physics were employed to grill this meaty menagerie without making the Crapfest Room any hotter. All these efforts were highly successful, and damn Rick, but you work magic on a grill. In medieval times, you would have been burned at the stake as a sorcerer. I had a meat hangover the next day, and couldn’t look at anything but salad.

But it also fell to me to throw in some filler. We had already been through all my trailer compilations, but I had brought something else, something that could also be turned off at anytime with no loss of story: Miss Nymphet’s Zap-In, which had been offered by Vinegar Syndrome as a free download.

There is nudity in the first scene. There is nudity in every scene following. ‘Why are you being so nice to them?” Dave asked me, dismayed. “Because I know what is to come,” I replied. Zap-In is a blatantly obvious rip-off of Laugh-In. right down to go-go dancers (topless in this case) doing their thing while supposedly humorous text is displayed over their gyrating forms. Every now and then we see the cast walking in a circle as if they were playing musical chairs, until someone off camera throws the signal, they all freeze in different positions and say “ZAP!” One lady keeps falling over, which is the funniest thing in the entire movie.

False advertising, and overpriced, to boot.

You see, this is an H.G. Lewis movie, produced and directed under two of his numerous pseudonyms. And you haven’t lived until you see H.G. Lewis doing comedy. Wait, I should have said you have never experienced a slow, lingering death until you have seen H.G. Lewis doing comedy. So, in a 75 minute movie, at minute 40, I hear a haunted voice from the back of the room moaning, “I never thought I would be tired of seeing tits.” They made it to minute 50 before they begged to shut it off like George C. Scott in Hardcore. I felt like Victor Von Doom after one of his plots against the Cursed Richards had achieved fruition.

All right now, seriously, folks. It was time for a movie I had been trying to force into a Crapfest for months, if not years. The Stabilizer.

It’s the Drunken Master’s Grand Theft Auto! It says so right on the box!

The Stabilizer is an Indonesian action movie from 1986 starring Peter O’Brian, a teacher who was vacationing in Indonesia when filmmakers noticed he looked sorta kinda like Frank Stallone and offered him lots of money to extend his vacation and make a couple of movies. He wound up making five more over the next six years, ending up with Angel of Fury, with Cynthia Rothrock.

O’Brian is Peter Goldson, a CIA guy called The Stabilizer because the CIA likes to nickname guys the opposite of what they do, I guess. He comes to Jakarta to help his old friend Captain Johnny (Harry Capri) find Professor Provost (Kaharudin Sayah) who has invented a “narcotics detector”, and who has been abducted by Goldson’s old enemy, the musically-named Greg Rainmaker, whose supervillain gimmick is big boots with golf cleats.

Both The Stabilizer’s girlfriend and his archenemy have this photo of him. And that’s all you really need to know about this movie.

What follows is pretty much non-stop action with sweet 80’s fashion, all leopard print spandex and triangular pockets with zippers. The only way to respond to this movie is the line from Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure: “Great movie, Pee-Wee! Action-packed!” Seriously: it is quite possible to see the seed of movies like The Raid in this, with a desire to create Raiders of the Lost Ark-style action setpieces without the real talent – or coherent story – to back it up. Whatever else it may be, The Stabilizer is not boring, and is totally committed to insane action. It presents a country where doors are never used when there is a motor vehicle to drive through a wall, and bad guys have maps on their person labeled “Location Map”, causing the heroes to say, “This could lead somewhere.”

ZAP!

When trying to come down from the mind-searing momentum of The Stabilizer (“Situation… stabilized!!!“) Dave determined that the very best way to go was with Pulgasari. Again, a short class was required.

In 1978, Kim Jong-il, then only the son of the ruling despot of North Korea, decided he wanted to make some movies and had one of his favorite directors, the South Korean Shin Sang-ok kidnapped (Shin’s actress ex-wife, Choi Eun-hee, was abducted first, possibly to lure Shin to Hong Kong) to direct his films.

Shin directed seven films for Kim Jong-il, until he and Choi managed to flee to an American Embassy while attending a film festival in Vienna – in 1986, eight years after their abduction. This story is probably better than any Shin was forced to make under orders; I may never know, because Pulgasari seems to be the only one generally available.

Based (of course) on a North Korean fairy tale, Pulgasari starts with the usual despotic King (but it’s okay, because he’s an imperialist despot, not a beloved despot like Kim Il-sung) crushing the peasantry and confiscating all their cookware and farming implements to make weapons. A heroic blacksmith refuses and is tortured and imprisoned. He makes a little figure out of rice and mud before he dies; his daughter pricks her finger while sewing, and a drop of blood falls on the figure, bringing it to life as the metal-eating monster Pulgasari.

The more metal it eats, the bigger it gets, and it is soon helping the rebel army take on the evil forces of the King, despite all the kaiju size deathtraps the army prepares for it. (Kim Jong-Il was also a big Godzilla fan, so it’s really kind of interesting that his kaiju flick owes more to the Daimajin movies than the Big G). Eventually the King gets smished and the people triumph, except that Pulgasari is still hungry and starts eating all the cookware and farming implements (because Pulgy represents unchecked capitalism, you see) until the blacksmith’s daughter sacrifices herself to save the villagers.

Pulgasari has a professional sheen but stolid pace; Jong-il hired technicians from Toho, including Kenpachiro Satsuma, the stunt performer who was operating the Godzilla suit in that period, to play Pulgasari. As I said, very professional, good-looking… and more than a little tedious. As Dave said after the movie was over, “I feel like I was kidnapped by North Korea.”

Something extremely insane was necessary to raise us from the Pulgasari doldrums. There was a small vocal minority that was fomenting for The Apple, to mark the passing of Menahem Golan, but it was noted that none of these people had actually seen that movie, and they were in large part the same people Rick had conned into demonstrating for The Garbage Pail Kids Movie, so they were roundly ignored. After tossing The Apple under the bus, we, for some outlandish reason (I personally blame lots and lots of vodka), went for another movie Rick had been pushing for ages: Skatetown USA.

We must note that Skatetown has never had a legitimate video release, likely because its soundtrack has a lot of really recognizable songs from 1980, marking it as being from the same era as FM and Americathon, when movies were marketing tools for what were hoped to be hot-selling soundtrack albums. Rick’s copy was apparently one of a number of nefarious versions floating around struck from a 16mm print.

This is one of those movies that you can tell was based firmly on the Official Drug of Disco, Cocaine – and that is the only possible excuse for its existence. Roller Disco had come and gone in the time it took to make this movie, much less get it released. But let’s see what sense can be made out of what came from this cauldron of coke and something else beginning with a K sound.

Here is everything wrong with the late 70s, in one picture.

There is this roller disco presided over by a Wizard in a white afro. It’s actually owned by Bill Barty and run by his son, Flip Wilson. Okay, I’ll wait a few minutes while you work the cramps out of your brain. Okay? Halfway through the movie, we’ll discover that Mrs. Barty is Flip Wilson as Geraldine, so that explains THAT.

NOW. There is some sort of contest held every year at the roller disco (in this wizard-run fantasy realm, roller disco has been going great guns for two years), for the best roller disco dance number, and the prize is a thousand dollars and a moped. Scott Baio is training his friend Stan (Greg Bradford) to win the contest, making them the Rocky and Mickey of this movie (Bradford actually has less range and versatility than Stallone). BUT. The fix is on, and the leader of the local gang of disco hooligans, Ace (Patrick Swayze, in his film debut) is sure to win for the second year running.

I really do not miss the days of roving bands of roller disco hooligans.

ALSO. Some illegal drugs have been spilled in a grinder so every body is getting hooked on the Most Delicious Pizza Ever (made by professional fake Avery Schrieber Vic Dunlop), including Ruth Buzzi, who is there as part of a church group to shut down this Den of Iniquity. I’m also told Joe E. Ross is in there, too, going “Ooh, ooh!” but I missed him. Also Dorothy Stratten in a halter top and hot pants. Her I saw (mainly because Rick would scream “Dorothy Stratten!” every time she appeared).

THEN. The competition happens, with Ace’s treacherous band of hooligans sabotaging all the other solo acts, led by Ace’s right hand man, Ron Pallilo as Dark Horshack. One of the contestants is a guy who, for some reason only apparent to the cocainated, is dressed like a Mexican bandito, right down to floppy mustache. He became known to us as “I Love Cocaine Man”, especially after Dark Horshack douses him with itching powder just before his number. Knowing the rest of this movie, it was probably itching cocaine.

DARK. HORSHACK.

Swayze’s entry, partnered with his belt, is actually pretty good (Swayze was a competitive skater, after all). Stan’s entry is even better (we’re told), and goes un-sabotaged when Dark Horshack is ambushed by an over-acting Bill Kirchenbauer. Admittedly, at one point, Stan does ride a skateboard while still wearing roller skates, which is sort of the Platonic ideal for skating. The fix is still on, though, and Ace wins – and it’s time for SUDDEN DEATH OVERDISCO!!!

Marcia! Nooooo!

This is a couples event, so Swayze and his main squeeze – and of course, his belt – smoke up the dance floor while Dark Horshack takes Stan’s partner out parking with a drug pizza. Stan’s partner, incidentally, is Maureen McCormick, better known as Marcia Marcia Marcia Brady on The Brady Bunch, and here, sadly enough, lapsing back into cocaine addiction, given the work environment. She is so out of it, we can’t even call her Dark Marcia, it’s more like Trash Marcia, and I just came through this movie feeling badly for her. Especially since she’s now hooked up with Dark Horshack, thanks to the drug pizza.

Ace’s squeeze defects over to Stan (replacing Marcia Marcia Marcia) and Stan wins, leading to a roller race down a pier resulting in Stan’s saving Ace’s life when a bit of sabotage goes wrong. Everybody now likes and respects everybody else, and we all go back to the roller disco for happy dancing and lots of cocaaaaaaaaaaaaaine.

A Photo of everything ELSE wrong with the late 70s.

Scott Baio says he kept turning this movie down until they offered him a ridiculous amount of money, and he still wound up regretting it, saying “It was just a guy making a film who didn’t know how to make a film,” by which he means William A. Levey, whom we all know from (ack) Blackenstein. Case closed.

And, for all that, Skatetown USA was still accorded to be the highlight of the evening.

“The Greatest Story Ever Rolled” hahahahahaSHOOT ME

Surprisingly, this poster doesn’t lie THAT much…

The rest of the wusses headed out, leaving only Rick, myself and Dave, who then proceeded to tempt me with a movie with which I was unfamiliar. A Philippine flick featuring Vic Diaz and Sid Haig, Wonder Women. “Sold!”

Ross Hagen is Mike Harber, who is hired/blackmailed by Lloyds of London to find a missing jai alai star player, only to find that he has been kidnapped by Dr. Tsu (Nancy Kwan) for spare parts in her organ-legging operation. She offers youthful, strong body parts (and in some cases, total brain transplants) to rich old men to finance her other… stuff, I guess, including her army of mini-skirted murderesses. Harber isn’t shy about mowing them down with his sawed-off shotgun, either, when they shoot at him, which is often.

“Ba-OOGA! Ba-OOGA! Escaped mew-tant alert! Ba-OOGA!”

Vic Diaz, the patron saint of Philippine exploitation movies, plays Lapu Lapu, the driver of a fantastically pimped-out taxi who serves as Harber’s guide. Sid Haig, on the other hand, has a pretty uncommon role, as Dr. Tsu’s lawyer and organ broker, given to suits and shirts with enormous ruffles. Dr. Tsu has some failed experiments in cages (which I immediately dubbed “Mew-tants”), and if you think they’re going to eventually get loose and start roaming the compound, get yourself a cookie from the Crapfest jar (You can’t miss it, it looks like Vic Diaz). There is also a really good chase scene using those tricked out taxis through crowded streets – very Bondian.

Because Dave demanded (and supplied) it: a picture of Dr. Tsu’s operatory, including surgical scrubs by Glad®, all the better to continue showing off their kicky miniskirts and go-go boots:

Past that, though, there isn’t that much to remember. It seems an unnecessary remake of The Million Eyes of Su Muru, but what the hell, badass babes in miniskirts provides a good cooling down period. Oh yeah, Dr. Tsu has invented something called “Brain Sex” so you can also throw in ripping off Barbarella to the list. And the assassination at the cockfight from Man With the Golden Gun. And… oh, never mind, this piece is already too long.

So we woke up Rick (“I tried. I really tried.” “But what? It wasn’t bad enough?”) and went on our weary ways. It was a good Crapfest. You can tell a really good Crapfest by the way it eats holes in your memory, rendering you unable to be totally certain that you really saw what you think you saw. So we leave you with the two things that make the world go ’round:

ZAP!

and

(Dave worked hard on that. Feel free to praise him, or pity him.)

August 13, 2014
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: crapfest, el santo, el santo and dracula's treasure, h.g. lewis, miss nymphet's zap-in, Patrick Swayze, pulgasari, Santo en el tesoro de Drácula, sid haig, skatetown usa, the stabilizer, vic diaz, wonder women . Author: drfreex . Comments: 3 Comments

Crapfest: The Late 70s

If you’ve been with me for any length of time, you are familiar with the phenomenon of the Crapfest. A group of us gathers every two or three months to gasp in wonder at the vast world of the Cinema of Diminished Expectations. Or, ofttimes, to simply gasp.

We had a full complement this time, saving only The Other David, who was healing his voice for an upcoming musical, and felt that shouting in dismay would be counter-productive to that. Fair enough. Break a leg, friend. This left us at myself, Rick, Paul, Alan, Mark, Erik, and your host, Dave.

While planning for this shindig, Host Dave informed us, in the tone usually reserved for doctors telling you to lose weight, that the agenda for this Crapfest had been decided long ago. (Maybe I should have said “In the tone usually reserved for the Lawgiver telling us The Prophecy”, but I’m going to need all my prophecy jokes for later) To that end, he laid out this pre-conceived roster.

I’m going to have to take some blame for the first feature. You see, once upon a time, we tried to limit the scope of a Crapfest to a single luminary in the realm of Crap Cinema. That luminary was Graydon Clark, and that was a mistake of Biblical proportions. Too much of a bad thing, as it were. But at the very beginning, there was a choice to be made, between Angel’s Brigade or Without Warning. The deciding vote came down to Paul, who reasonably enough, deduced that since Rick “Let’s watch Evilspeak again” Mantler had voted for Without Warning, it was only logical to vote for Angel’s Brigade instead. This was wronger than any deduction Dr. Watson had ever made, but I really can’t fault his logic.

So there was this time I bitched that I was still owed a viewing of Without Warning. So that was our opening salvo.

I think I’m not exactly engaging in spoilers when I tell you Without Warning is about an alien coming to Earth and hunting humans with little flying creatures he throws like frisbees, and yes, this was seven years before Predator. The major difference between the two is a) millions of dollars and b) Predator manages to fill its running time pretty well. The Alien spends the first part of the movie knocking off celebrity guests, or at least affordable C-listers of the era, starting with Cameron Mitchell and moving on to Larry Storch, playing the master of a cub scout troop. Storch was only on set half a day, and it seems to play out in real time.

Our protagonists are four teens who ignore the warnings of Professional Harbinger Jack Palance to not go to the lake, there’s trouble there. Half the teens become frisbee kibble fairly quickly, and since one of them is a young David Caruso, the Alien got a standing ovation. The other two (Tarah Nutter and Christopher S. Nelson) try to get help after discovering their pals and several other corpses in a remote shack. They find a believer in Martin Landau, playing a mandatorily shell-shocked veteran called “Sarge”, and, of course, Palance. The bar where they try to get help is notable for featuring Sue Ann Langdon, Neville Brand, and Ralph Meeker (in his last role, no less), none of whom stick around for the big alien fight, such as it is. They leave that to future Oscar winners Landau and Palance.

There is an interminable period at the end of the second act and before the third, sort of an eternal entre acte, where our two teens, on the lam from the increasingly psychotic Landau, break into somebody’s vacation home and set up shop. Nutter keeps waking up screaming and saying things like, “What if this is Sarge’s house?” which allowed us to kill the next ten minutes of filler with panicked questions like “What if snakes can carry knives?” “What if Zamfir really is master of the pan pipes?” and “What if Iron Man had Spider-Man’s powers?”

If there was one takeaway from this, it is that I wanted to make sure I didn’t buy the upcoming blu-ray from Scream Factory out of misguided nostalgia. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

The Alien, incidentally, is played by the 7′ 2″ Kevin Peter Hall, because of course he is. And Hall would also play the title character in Predator. Also, Mr. Hall is not finished with us yet, because we are moving on to Prophecy, for which I must also take some blame. You see, back a year ago or more, I reviewed the French movie Prey, noting that it was basically Prophecy with mutated wild boars instead of a bear. I also mentioned I had never seen Prophecy, because I’d read David O. Seltzer’s novel, and immediately thought, “well, I can miss this one.”

To which Dave was all like whaaaaaaat and you are watching this.

Dammit.

Well, we already know about the mutant bear. Robert Foxworth is a two-fisted doctor concerned with social justice issues (as we find out in an opening scene set in a ghetto with the cleanest, freshest spray-painted graffiti you have ever seen), who is sent to a northern paper mill to investigate charges of pollution. The charges turn out to be true, as the whole region is lousy with mercury, which Foxworth assures us has “mutagenic” qualities. This is going to produce some tension in his wife, Talia Shire, who is pregnant, she just hasn’t bothered to tell Foxworth yet.

Extra risibility is supplied by Richard Dysart as the front man for the paper mill, essaying a cagey mix of Pepperidge Farm spokesman and Edward G. Robinson. And Armand Assante as an Indian.

The most famous scene in the movie was quoted in the TV trailer, when the bear attacks a family campsite and a kid tries to hop away in his sleeping bag, only to be dashed against a rock in a flurry of downy feathers. This also convinced 1979 Me that avoiding this movie was a good idea. There is no way anybody thought that was going to be anything but laughable, right? Especially when you consider the movie is directed by John freaking Frankenheimer.

Frankenheimer would say in later years that the movie would have been better if he hadn’t been at the height of his alcoholism during its shooting. The truly lamentable thing is there are moments in this movie that are superb. Foxworth examining the camp site where the exploding sleeping bag took place, and finding enormous claw marks on a tree, and then realizing that the claw marks go fifteen feet up the tree.

The best sequence for me, though is a bit later. Shire finds some mutant bear cubs in a fishing net nearby. One is still alive, but barely (no pun intended). It’s in recovering this cub that Foxworth spends too long, and his helicopter ride is socked in by a storm. They make it to an Indian hunting village where Foxworth labors to keep the cub alive until Dysart and the Sheriff can come and see proof of the pollution. Trouble is, Mama Bear also shows up and wants the cub back.

This is the second great monster movie sequence, when our name actors (plus one or two more) take refuge in a tunnel under one of the tents to hide from the beast and all they can do is listen to the screams of the men still above ground as the monster kills them. Then, silence. Silence for way too long. But who’s going to look out and check?

So that day on the set, Frankenheimer only had half a bottle of Scotch, or something.

We’re building up to a big showdown with Mama Bear (even the most city-slickerish among us was yelling “Leave the bear cub! PUT IT THE HELL DOWN!” but movie characters never listen), which is… okay, I guess, but has nowhere near the tension it wants to have. It’s kind of like the end of the novel Jaws where the shark suddenly succumbs to all the damage done, but we’re led to believe it’s Foxworth stabbing it with an arrow over and over again. Also, the last shot shows us there’s another mutant bear wandering around, so fuck you, movie.

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that was Kevin Peter Hall in the mutant bear suit. See? Connections are everywhere.

The worst part was when I got hungry and mentioned to Rick it was time to start dinner and I was going to help Rick in the kitchen because it was like my idea, but Dave was like, no, motherfucker, you get in there and you watch this movie.

DAMMIT.

I don’t mind crap monster movies – hell, in a way, those are my life. But crap monster movies with a painfully earnest social relevance angle – those hurt me.

Speaking of hurt, I had been saving hurt up for a long time. The Garbage Pail Kids Movie, Batman and Robin, Highlander II The Goddamn Quickening. I let that all out with something that had been dredged up by the Drive-In Mob: Bob Hope’s 1976 TV special Joys.

Supposedly, someone has lured a bunch of comedians to Bob Hope’s place to murder them all. You see, it’s Joys because Jaws was really big, and… the murderer is… kinda… like a shark? But not? This is about the level of writing here; you have several roomfuls of comedians – just look at that list on the IMDb page – and none of them are allowed to do their schtick, outside of Arte Johnson obviously improvising a few and Don Rickles calling people a hockeypuck. Because that many comedians in one place? That would be hilarious. Too bad what they’re given is the most insipid jokes 1976 could dig up. Most disheartening is Groucho Marx, frail and nearing death, not even bothering to pretend he isn’t reading cue cards and still making me laugh. Though Kevin Peter Hall is not there, Larry Storch is, and we also have to deal with disco era Don Knotts and Don Adams.

And commercials from Texaco, which assured us it was working to keep our trust.

Oh, the hatred that was cast my way! Hatred which I fully deserved, but I felt much better for having given vent to my spleen. And then Dave retaliated magnificently with Playboy’s Roller Disco Pajama Party, which actually aired on ABC in 1979, even though it sounds like an SCTV sketch. I could only look across the room, give him the thumbs up, and say, “Respect.”

Yes, this is a documentary about frolicking in the Playboy Mansion. Richard Dawson is there to make you cringe, and there were lots of astoundingly beautiful women which just about every man in the room had seen naked (I profess admiration of a sort for the guys who could name each and every one of them, even when they weren’t being introduced). Roller skating, and dancing to Village People songs we had never heard.

Rick’s haunted voice came from the back of the room several times, stating, “This isn’t going to get any better, you know. You may think it is, but it ISN’T.” But I was enjoying myself. Pretty women are pretty women, and there were quite a few here.

FILTH!

It had its educational points, too: we’d had no idea that there was a disco version of Pink Floyd’s “Have A Cigar”. Nor did we know that Waylon Flowers had a black version of his Madam puppet. (My reference source for all things gay, long-time theatre friend Rodney Walsworth, informs me the puppet was named Jiffy, and he saw Flowers perform with her at a club). The clip below has a glimpse of Jiffy, but sadly does not seem to have the bit where Flowers attempts to work his sassy black puppet magic on Jim Brown, who is visibly counting to ten several times just to keep from jamming this puppet up this little peckerwood’s ass.

No, here is this hunk of the show – the whole damn thing’s on YouTube, folks, it’s easy enough to find – that has the high point for us. About 13 seconds in, after a Mork and Mindy promo, is the 30 second throw to the local newscast coming on after Roller Disco Pajama Party, and it’s obvious the station has been getting a lot of calls about the show…

We really wanted that guy to come back.

A scene from True Detective, Season 2

You don’t have to watch the whole thing, or maybe you do, because you’ll catch a brief glimpse of Marjoe Gortner at the party (he got applause. I love my homies.), the aforementioned Jiffy, Richard Dawson referring to index cards as he interviews some Playmates, and likely the most skin you’ll see in the whole enterprise. Just enough to make our gathering feel all cheated and hollow inside.

Not me, though. I went home feeling purged, cleansed of all the negativity that had been weighing on me. Such is the power of inflicting crap on your fellow man. This feeling did not survive the light of day, but I slept like a baby that night, and I look forward to the next one, where I can start playing the nice guy again.

Dammit.

July 1, 2014
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: bob hope, crapfest, graydon clark, john frankenheimer, joys, kevin peter hall, larry storch, martin landau, playboy's roller disco pajama party, prophecy, without warning . Author: drfreex . Comments: 2 Comments

Crapfest: The Redemption

There is no doubt that the last Crapfest was scarring, the gom jabbar of the bad movie experience. So when I had an unexpected weekend off, we quickly pulled together. We had to get back on that horse, or we might never get back on it again. This time, we would explore the non-painful world of crap, we would enjoy ourselves.

Nice plan. Too bad they never survive reality.

We started out with a collection of blaxploitation trailers while foodstuffs were arranged and prepared. Turns out nearly two hours of blaxploitation trailers is too much for delicate sensibilities, so I put on something else to soothe the complainers, which naturally produced more outrage: an episode of the Dogville series from 1930, or as the whiners like to call it, “Vintage animal torture shorts”.

My response to all the haters was to point to Paul and say, “But look how happy Paul is!” Paul was indeed very happy with his all-talking all-singing and all-sorta-dancing doggies. Jeez, it’s only ten minutes long. You guys are a bunch of wusses.

The Other David finally arrived, and I had been saving something for him. He had just finished playing Macbeth in the play of that name; one night, in an after-show question-and-answer session, he had pish-toshed the superstitions surrounding that play.

The next day his car was totalled in a freeway crash. He was, thankfully, unharmed. But what came of this was he had never seen the episode of Blackadder the Third – nor any episode of Blackadder, seemingly – involving actors and Macbeth. This was what we refer to in the trade as A Mandate.

Well, that was enough quality. It was time to get underway.

Several weeks before, I had watched the delirious, incoherent, but undeniably exploitive movie Raw Force, aka Kung Fu Cannibals, for the Daily Grindhouse Podcast. That link will take you to that particular episode (with bonus whining from me about the last Crapfest). I found it perfect fodder for a Crapfest.

Basically: the three guys that form the Burbank Karate Club seem to be booked as entertainment on a cheapass cruise liner. The big attraction seems to be some place called Warrior’s Island, where disgraced fighters are buried and some mysterious monks are rumored to be able to raise the dead. To hear the passengers talk, this must be cooler than Disney World. Unfortunately for all involved. Fake Hitler and his gang of Village People rejects are dealing with the monks, trading kidnapped prostitutes for raw jade, and they don’t want anybody messing with their operation.

That is a far more coherent synopsis than the movie ever bothers to give you. Once more, this is a movie where you can quote Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure – “Great movie, Pee-Wee! Action packed!” But the response here went more like “What the hell is going on?” every ten minutes. Among the many one-movie johnnies are a couple of faces you might recognize – Jillian Kesner from Firecracker (aka Naked Fist) or most certainly Cameron Mitchell, who I swear to God is improvising his lines. The mighty Vic Diaz is one of the monks, which immediately makes my evening.

At the end, one of our heroes – the one who can fly a sea plane because he flew a Huey Cobra in the ‘Nam – smiles at the camera, and instead of “The End”, we get a super stating “To Be Continued…” My fellow Crapfesters did not disappoint me, bellowing, “FUCK you!” in chorus.

After that many boobs, fight scenes and Village People jokes, a break was called for while Host Dave fiddled with the technology, setting up his choice for the evening. During this, I found out an interesting thing: you see, I could have gotten Dave to stream Raw Force from YouTube (as far as I know, it’s still there – you can do it, too. I actually recommend it), but I’m all too aware of how such things can turn on us. This is why we had to put off Jaws: The Revenge for several months. So I had bought the Grindhouse Experience movie set from the Amazon Marketplace to get a hard copy, for that is how I roll. (The fact that in a 20 movie set I had only heard of two also intrigued me)

Totally forgot to mention Mexican Nazi Rapist.

The set is a bunch of flipper discs, two movies on each side. It turns out that at the end of each movie, the disc does not go back to the menu, no, it simply goes on to the next movie, which was the Italian mondo movie Savage Man/Savage Beast. I was in the kitchen scooping up delicious spinach dip when screams summoned me back to the viewing room. Something about snakes eating monkeys. “It was hippies wrapped in plastic at fake Cape Cod when I left,” I said “Snake! Monkey! The horror!” was the response. Wusses. I figured out how to turn it off, so I could at least go back to the spinach dip.

Well, at the end of the break, I finally had to go to the bathroom, and while I was in there, I once more heard muffled screams from the viewing room. Perhaps Dave had mischievously returned to the snake-eating-a-monkey footage, I thought. Wusses.

Then I returned to the viewing room. I needed only one line and one frame to identify why people were howling. “You son of a bitch,” I said.

He had put on Highlander II: The Quickening.

I paid money to see this movie. On opening day. That was how much I loved Highlander. Suffice to say this is one of those sequels that takes the original behind the barn, kills it, peels off its skin, wears that skin like a dress and tries to convince you it’s the original, but it did a really bad job of it.

Yep, everything you know about the original is wrong so that the now-mortal Connor MacLeod can be made young again (and Christopher Lambert can stop doing his Marlon Brando in The Godfather imitation), bring back Sean Connery as the world’s only Scottish Spaniard, and give Michael Ironside the chance to act with his teeth. Also: did you know subway trains can go 400 miles per hour?

I literally ran out of curse words to call Dave.

Then we got to something I had mercifully blotted out: Jeff Altman’s cameo. The screams were incredible.

You see, what our newbies did not know, was that earlier in Crapfest history, we had sat through all but one episode of Pink Lady & Jeff. That is the sort of thing that leaves a scar that never really heals, like a morghul blade. We fully expected Pink Lady to step out from behind a curtain and do some painfully phonetic English “joke”. Fortunately, Altman delivered his cheap laugh and left the story within a minute.

Here’s how quickly things go wrong in this movie: “I know! Let’s mix our movie with Dune!”

There is a disc I carry with me. It is my Mutually Assured Destruction Disc. It contains such horror, no one will survive its unleashing. I started carrying it after Dave unleashed Nukie. I almost hauled it out, but there was a mitigating factor: Dave had never seen Highlander II. I could not kill everyone just for sheer ignorance. I had to be satisfied with sitting in the dark, my arms crossed, occasionally huffing, “My movie had boobies.”

So I let Mark deliver the death blow instead.

Mark had begun crowing that he had found a disc that would totally redeem Crapfest, and, to paraphrase The Princess Bride, I do not think that word means what he thinks it means. Because the movie he brought was Skyscraper. PM Entertainment made a lot of straight-to-video action movies, and most of them are not terrible. Not amazing, but not terrible, either. Then they had the brilliant idea to make Anna Nicole Smith an action hero.

Let me repeat that. Anna Nicole Smith. Action hero.

He attempted to sell this with an outtake reel of Smith mangling her lines. I find such stuff painful, and couldn’t get through more than a minute of it.

So Anna Nicole is a helicopter pilot who shuttles her clients around the city; she picks up the wrong clients, a couple of guys who are putting together a suitcase of electronic equipment that must do bad things, but I never could get up the interest to find out what. The leader, Fairfax (Charles Huber) likes to spout inappropriate Shakespeare and end all his conversations by shooting whoever he’s talking to – seriously, I have no idea how he got people to work with him. Anna Nicole has the briefcase, there are hostages, when the cops show up Fairfax pretends to be a terrorist. (Maybe they are terrorists. I can’t say as I really care.) At least, that gives him a chance to do some Michael Ironside teeth acting.

Any attempt to be ironic and say, “So this is like Die Hard, except in a skyscraper,” is met with “Anna Nicole Smith!”

The fact that she’s ridiculously good with a gun is explained away by the fact she’s from Texas (as if her terminally twangy whines to her husband that “I want a BAY-BEE” were not enough to clench her regionalism). There are, as I recall, three sex scenes with La Smith and her storebought wares, one of which brings the main story to a dead halt while Smith has a flashback to happier, sexier times while hiding in one of the offices.

I think the real star of this is the editor, who (judging from those outtakes) worked many late nights and probably burned out two Avids to make the movie as good as it is. Which it isn’t. Which is to say, at least it’s not terrible. I should have sat there with my arms crossed and huffed, “My movie had real boobies,” but I totally blew that opportunity.

We decompressed with the classic 1916 Douglas Fairbanks comedy. The Mystery of the Leaping Fish. That’s the one where Fairbanks plays Coke Ennyday, the Holmes parody who is constantly injecting cocaine, when he is not consuming evidence in the form of entire cans of opium. Johnny Depp or Robert Downey, Jr. are shoo-ins for the remake.

So did we redeem Crapfest? Not totally, but at least this time I didn’t feel like driving off a bridge on the way home. That’s progress.

Right?

March 26, 2014
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: anna nicole smith, blackadder, crapfest, dogville, douglas fairbanks sr., highlander ii: the quickening, mystery of the leaping fish, raw force, skyscraper . Author: drfreex . Comments: 3 Comments

The Crap Is Coming From Inside The House

So look, there was an attempt to do a Crapfest in January, but it was postponed due to plague. That was really regrettable, especially since we had planned to mull apple cider and generously spike it with cheap brandy, a nice combination I re-discovered back in the cold of December (It being Texas, we were back to balmy fake Spring, and more regular, cooling cocktails). A new date was set, which was then postponed for business travel. Other dates were tossed out for various, and to my mind, worthless, reasons, ie., the Super Bowl and the Oscars. (Where are your priorities, people?)

So we finally settled on a Sunday that seemed to have the most people free. The Other Dave was at rehearsal, Alan had a matinee and a set strike, but uh uh, no way, we were doing this. Paul wrote that he had a killer sinus headache and a tough work day on Monday, and begged off. I, personally, think he used a Magic Genie wish and looked into the future at this column, and decided it was best to stay at home. The bastard.

Festivities got well and truly underway when Erik and I arrived at The Original Dave’s house, only to be greeted by a cursing host who informed us we were an hour early. Then Mark arrived, similarly early, just in time to join in on the being cursed-at. Rick arrived an hour later. We still didn’t start a movie until 4:00.

I have what I refer to as the Bag of Tricks. I add and remove movies as needed for Crapfests. My general process involves choosing 5 or 6 from the Bag, and letting people vote. I need to stop doing that.

Because the first movie was Robo Vampire.

Robo Vampire is a Thomas Tang/Godfrey Ho production, which means it is at least three movies stitched together, shot through with electricity, and forced to shamble around for an hour and a half. I covered one of these monsters back in the day and trying to follow the actual plot that supposedly exists in this patch job can cause a brain aneurysm. You’re better off trying to track the individual component movies and what happens in them.

There’s one movie, a Mr. Vampire knock-off, where a gang led by Edgar Allen Poe has hired a Daoist priest to help them ship heroin with hopping vampires. An “Anti-Drug Agent” is killed and then somehow turned into a “robot warrior”, by which we mean he wears silver clothes and armor made of inflatable flotation devices. I managed to get the Festers to shush up for a few seconds by pointing out a female ghost (her boyfriend had been turned into one of the vampires) was wearing a costume made of very sheer material, and not much else.

There is another movie where a female (and caucasian) “anti-drug agent” has been captured and must be rescued, which connects very loosely to a third movie that we just called “The A-Team Movie” that featured a squad of guys killing nogoodniks in the jungle, supposedly to help rescue the agent.

The most entertaining parts belong to the first movie, with our “robot warrior” (those quotes are so heavy with sarcasm they may fall off the page) fighting hopping vampires, and, at one point, getting blowed up REAL GOOD:

Which does not mean it is anywhere approaching a good movie. It is, in fact, crap. Here’s all you need to know:

We didn’t need those two other movies in the mix, anyway. Well, not much of them.

There was apparently some disappointment that there were no ninjas in the Tang/Ho offering, so the second pick was Ninja III: The Domination.

Now Ninja III has its fans; most of this is due to star Lucinda Dickey, who is trying to stretch her image beyond the same year’s Breakin’ and Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo. Some is due to featured Sho Kosugi, playing (surprise, surprise) a badass ninja. I’m probably the only guy there for James Hong.

Ninja III does start off with a bang, or more appropriately, a whoosh, as a super ninja assassinates a top scientist and his bodyguards on a golf course, then kills a bunch of cops. A bunch more cops proceed to play Wild Bunch with him, and still he manages to get away, to transfer his spirit into telephone line(wo)man Lucinda Dickey. His fiercely glowing sword and special effects then cause her to track down the last surviving cops who ventilated the super ninja and kill them. At least two of them deserve it, for thinking that cigars were part of their uniform.

Kosugi is a ninja who has a personal grudge against the super ninja, and who informs us that “Only a ninja can destroy a ninja”, so we know we’re eventually moving to a showdown there. The story wimps out on several intriguing possibilities, because that would have required audiences to, you know, think.

So basically you have a pretty standard Cannon 80’s B-flick very much in keeping with its forebears, Enter the Ninja and Revenge of the Ninja. I’m not a child of the 80s, not a fan. I don’t mind if a ninja is portrayed as an unstoppable killing machine, but I do draw the line at their possessing magical powers, and the super ninja was the ninjitsu version of Pazuzu. I didn’t hate it, but I also didn’t care enough to correct my fellow Festers that singing “Flashdance” whenever Lucinda appeared onscreen was not entirely correct.

There had been a running Crapfest joke, going back years, of Rick requesting The Garbage Pail Kids Movie, and the rest of us going, “Hell no.” Now, Erik and Mark, our new members, were unaware of this running gag, and somehow Rick got to them. I’m not sure if it was money, or drugs or sex, but suddenly we had three people asking for The Garbage Pail Kids Movie.

Oh, God damn it.

(I think Rick’s secret weapon – at least with Mark – was mentioning that Anthony Newley was the marquee value. This intrigued them, but only because they had never seen Can Heironymous Merkin Forget Mercy Hummpe and Find True Happiness? I have.)

Anthony Newley is a kindly eccentric who runs an antique/curiosity shop, in which there is a garbage pail full of horrid, inexpressive puppets with bad habits. There may be some sort of origin story there, but I missed it due to all the howls of dismay as the suckers in the audience began to realize just what Rick had talked them into. But there are these horrific kids, Newley is trying to find the way to get them back into the pail, the Kids are supposedly looking for their lost “friends”, who were apparently incarcerated in the “House of Ugly”. I honestly tried not to pay that much attention.

Since this is – God help us – a kid’s movie, there is a kid protagonist, a young man named … urk … Dodger. We’re never given a backstory or home scene with Dodger, so who knows? He hangs around Newley’s shop, and has eyes for the moll in a bizarre 80s gang who reaaaalllllly hate him. His crush’s name is Tangerine (urk), and she’s the girlfriend of the gang’s leader, Juice.

Tangerine makes her dough by selling clothes she makes at clubs (sometimes literally off her back). The Kids have been making clothes for Dodger, which Tangerine finds will sell very well, and so she begins leading Dodger around by his pubescent dick until she gets enough clothes to have a fashion show, which, of course, the Kids cannot attend, as they are too ugly. Dodger eventually learns a lesson, that all women are evil. No, I mean, that some people are ugly on the inside, and that is what matters. Os something. Jesus.

I managed to make it through because I had an ace up my sleeve: I knew that Tom Parker, an actor I work with every weekend at a murder mystery dinner theater, had a line in this. I held on to that, and waited for that moment, that one shining moment. It was toward the end. It is, in fact, the first thing in this clip:

Oh, yeah, they do sort of find out what happened to the Kids’ friends: they were apparently crushed to death in a garbage truck.

Did I mention this was a kid’s movie?

Paul? Alan? Dave and I took a bullet for you. You owe us, amigos.

Dave was so pissed off after this he carried through on his threat to show Batman and Robin.

Sweet Christmas, it was even worse than I remembered.

There are people who have already covered any ground I might:

The Original Dave has since pointed out that my attempt to avoid any further trauma by the complete avoidance of thinking about Batman and Robin would severely limit the possibility of any healing on my part (Actually, what he said was “You are the cheatingest cheater who ever cheated,” but I’m pretty sure that’s what he meant). Anyway, there are a couple of things gleaned on a personal level past the horrendous crimes exposed in those last two videos.

First, Rick stated that he knew it was bad when he first saw it, lo these many years ago, but not being a comics person, could only judge it on the level of comparative quality. Having since played the Arkham Asylum video games, he had a better grounding in the Batman mythos, and could now understand the righteous anger directed at the movie by the fanbase. How, he wondered, was Joel Schumacher allowed to still make movies, when Salman Rushdie was yet in hiding, fearful of his life? I’m lying about the Rushdie part, but you get my drift.

Second, I was kind of looking forward to that ridiculous motorcycle race segment, remembering some particularly sweet and non-realistic bits. Then i actually saw the race, and realized the moments I was anticipating were actually from one of the Charlie’s Angels movies… Full Throttle, I think… and realized that the movie had found yet another way to jam a stick into my movie watching experience.

So, is Joel Schumacher also responsible for the fact that movies are only shot in two colors these days? Teal and orange? Man, he has a lot to answer for. Almost as much as whoever it was that first asked for Batman and Robin many months ago. I don’t remember who it was. It was probably Rick.

(Rick and I have often stated that we need a cable access movie review show, but we also realize that it would always end in fistfights and screams of “No, you go to hell!!!”)

After this, battered and bruised, we limped out into the night. Later, communicating by e-mail. we commiserated that yes, for some reason, this one hurt. This one, perhaps because of all the delays and postponements, had all the pain of several normal Crapfests concentrated into one. When the high point of your evening was Ninja III…

But at least we don’t have to listen to any of Rick’s requests for another year or so.

February 27, 2014
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: anthony newley, batman and robin, crapfest, garbage pail kids movie, lucinda dickey, ninja III, rick is worse than hitler, robo vampire . Author: drfreex . Comments: 3 Comments

Crapsgiving 2013

Thanksgiving interrupted my steady diet of Zatoichi movies long enough to realize that we had gone a significant amount of time without a Crapfest. Heeeey, we’d been busy! And as it is almost impossible to put one together over the Christmas holidays, it was Thanksgiving or nothing, Thanksgiving being one of the few weekends I can actually wrangle a Saturday off.

But my experience is not the same as others. Alan and Mark both had their weekends stolen away by the dreaded 10-Out-Of-12 tech rehearsals for shows they were in. I wondered aloud who would be so cruel as to schedule 10-Out-Of-12s on Thanksgiving weekend. Darth Vader? Atomic Hitler? Anne Coulter? Perhaps it is best that in large part, I am no longer part of the theatrical world.

Because here I was at Dave’s house, with Rick, Erik and Paul. The room did not feel particularly crowded, and there was a genial ease about the whole thing. A rejuvenating experience I desperately needed. Also, Erik allowed me check off an item on my Bucket List by bringing a bottle of Absinthe, along with the necessary spoon. I admit I had my doubts since I hate licorice, but the Green Fairy won me over. I quite enjoyed it, and promised the Twitterverse that I would let it know immediately if it drove any of us mad. Of course, considering what we usually watch at these things, many felt the “driving” part was a little too late.

While everyone got settled in, Dave started things off with Starship Invasions. If you’ve ever seen Starship Invasions, you know that ignoring most of it is the best course of action. I recall this getting wide release after the success of Star Wars; it’s made by Canadians trying to make an Italian movie – at least it always seemed that way to me. The bad guy is Christopher Lee (of course), who is part of a coalition of alien races who sabotages and murders all the other representatives (and when he guns down the Space Strippers, you know he’s evil), so he can exterminate all Earthlings with his Suicide Ray and repopulate it with his leotarded minions. Luckily, one good guy saucer escapes and enlists UFOlogist Robert Vaughn’s help.

L to R: Space Stripper, Christopher Lee, Egghead

The ships and alien designs were taken from eyewitness reports of close encounters. That’s a cool touch in a movie that seems a lot like The Terrornauts with a slightly better budget.

Really, the best part was Dave reminiscing about how this was yet another movie his father refused to take him to see.

Some time was taken up by going through my Bag of Tricks©, which I curate throughout the year, tossing in discs which I deem Crapfest-worthy. Dave triaged out the candidates he thought best, and Rick howled “No way in hell are we watching Black Devil Doll from Hell!”. He would then return to his periodic pointed mentions of his new “Unedited, Unexpurgated cut of Evilspeak“, which we were pretty certain only meant it was a solid 90 minutes of Clint Howard’s naked ass. We were all pretty laid back that evening, which is the primary reason every one of Rick’s mentions of Evilspeak wasn’t met with, “You know what I hear is pretty cool? Black Devil Doll from Hell!”

Over Dave’s misgivings, I convinced him to start with one of the Dogville shorts, which is high-grade, hallucinatory, what-the-hell-did-I-just-watch material. A series of movie parodies starring dogs in costumes, made from 1929-1931, from the guys who would later direct the Three Stooges shorts. Paul immediately felt this was super-awesome and insured that we would be watching one of these each fest for the foreseeable future. This is what we did with Pink Lady & Jeff, which is a comparison which made Paul re-think this course of action.

What we watched was “Who Killed Rover?” a “Phido Vance” mystery that I appreciate for its refreshingly downbeat ending, but everyone else – save Paul – claimed to be scarred for life by the experience. Paul wanted to immediately continue on to “The Dogway Melody”, but was booed down. In deference to Paul, here is an excerpt from it:

I had brought a metric ton of sausage for our evening meal, and Dave, grillmeister that he is, has an elaborate process for getting the coals just so, which is time-consuming, but I cannot fault the results. So while the charcoal was doing its combustible thing, I put in a disc I had gotten from Diabolik, ModCinema’s ColorScape, Volume One, which is a compilation of movie trailers, commercials, and proto-music videos from the late 60s to early 70s. Or what I like to refer to as “Making the young punks regret they grew up in the 80s”.

Paul and I had a major discussion about how we were lied to as children, and we were certain that adult life was exactly like the scenes unfolding before us: all the grown-ups were swinging (except our parents, who were too old to swing), and every night ended with an orgy. Blake Edwards’ The Party, starring Peter Sellers? That was only a typical Tuesday night. Past that, the experience was mostly wondering why we weren’t watching the movies excerpted in the trailers.

I love damn near all the music on the ColorScape disc, though this was not shared by my compatriots, the heathens. So ha, compatriots! Here’s this one again! Heathens!

After two hours of reveling in 60s hedonism and psychedelic music, the sausages were ready, and so were we – ready for Weng Weng. But we were wrong. Nobody is ready for Weng Weng.

The movie, of course, is the infamous For Y’ur Height Only (why the dropped “o”? I have no idea), starring Weng Weng (actually Ernesto de la Cruz) as “Agent 00”. Weng Weng, at 2′ 9″, is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the shortest man to ever have a lead role in a movie.

In the movie, Dr. Kohler is kidnapped because crimelord Mr. Giant wants his “N-bomb”. What exactly the N-bomb does is never explained, and that doesn’t really matter, because Dr. Kohler is going to vanish for the next 80 minutes, and when he returns at the end, you’re going to ask, “Who’s the Anglo?”, because those 80 minutes are going to be jam-packed with Weng Weng kicking ass and using scaled-down James Bond gadgetry.

Weng Weng was apparently an accomplished martial artist, and is at the correct height to A) be below your peripheral vision, and B) punch you in the nuts. Repeatedly. And when that doesn’t work, his pretty assistant will just pick him up and throw him at you. Weng Weng eventually faces off with Mr. Giant, who is, to no one’s surprise, a dwarf (oh come on, that’s a given!). This fight scene gave rise to one of the better lines of the night, “My kung fu is smaller than yours!” Although I also give props to Dave, who, while watching Weng Weng leap about and traumatize gonads, entoned, “That’s some X-Men shit, right there.”

Look, there are simply not words in the English language to adequately describe how awesome is the mighty Weng Weng. He never made any movies with Chuck Norris or Bruce Willis or Arnold Schwarzenegger because they knew they would be completely upstaged. And, by God, Weng Weng does all his own stunts, because face it: There are not a lot of 2′ 9″ stunt men out there.

Weng Weng’s amazing kung fu skills put us in the mood for more chop-sockey, and what I had in the Bag was Five Element Ninjas, which is not the best of the Chang Cheh/Venom collaborations, but is still pretty great.

There is one of those acrimonious competitions between two clans in the World of Martial Arts, and the current Lord of the World of Martial Arts brings in a ringer – a samurai, who, when he loses his second match, commits hara-kiri, but sends a note to his pal the Ninja Lord, who proceeds to challenge the victorious clan to another contest, but kills all the best fighters using Evil Ninja Tricks.

The Five Elements come in with the various groups of Ninjas and their specialties, Earth, Water, Fire, Wood and Metal. The Metal Ninjas are the least stealthy ninjas ever, dressed in dazzling gold lamé. But the ones we really hated were the Earth Ninjas, who burrow underground and stab upward with nasty hooked spears, which is a trick that even Weng Weng finds too dirty.

(This also leads to the movie’s most infamous scene, where one good guy soldiers on against the Head Ninja, even through multiple Earth Ninja stabbings; in fact, his internal organs are hanging down through his trouser leg. He does pretty well, too, until he trips over his own guts.)

The ninjas attack the fortified Good Guy compound (thanks to Sinji, the cute ninja, masquerading as an orphan waif), leaving just one good guy intact – who escapes, meets up with an old master who knows the ninja arts (which, we are told, originated in China). Then the survivor and the master’s other three students take on the Five Element Ninjas and take them down with spectacularly bloody results. This is good, because the treacherous ninjas had taken over The World of Martial Arts, and we can’t have that.

Sinji (that minx!) in her Ninja Negligee

Five Element Ninjas has a bang-up beginning and end, but a very talky middle, while Sinji works her wiles. Perhaps not ideal Crapfest material, but we did really enjoy seeing the Earth Ninjas get their gory comeuppance.

The Ultimate Bait-and-Switch: a Boris Vallejo poster!

Paul fulfilled his wuss duty at this point and went home, which meant it was time to play the R-rated Titty movie (take that, wuss!), and Dave chose Barbarian Queen.

Barbarian Queen is likely best known for its ill-fated star, Lana Clarkson, who didn’t survive a close encounter with Phil Spector. It’s also fairly infamous for its number of rape scenes. (I may be wrong, but I think Deathstalker beats it in that category. In any case, “Rape scene! Take a drink!” is a dangerous game to play with either one)

Lana’s village is kidnapped by slave traders (the synopsis says “Romans”, but they couldn’t afford Roman costumes), and Clarkson tracks them to the big city where the menfolk are turned into gladiators and the womenfolk into sex slaves for the gladiators. With a setup like that, it’s unsurprising that they plan an uprising while Clarkson basically kegels a torturer to death (since it looks like he has eyebrows glued to his glasses, he pretty much deserved that).

I really miss the days when Roger Corman had Joe Dante and Allan Arkush editing his trailers, you know?

It was late, and though I was still full of caffeinated vim, the hour was getting to most of us. Erik, Rick and I packed our bags and thanked Dave for once again allowing us to pollute the atmosphere in his home. Then we privately met in the front yard, discussing the possibility of a Christmas Crapfest, because, after all, Rick had this fabulous new disc of Evilspeak with all the gore that had previously been cut out intact!

…

PS. No, Rick!!!! Though I hear Black Devil Doll from Hell is pretty cool…

December 3, 2013
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: absinthe, barbarian queen, chang cheh, crapfest, dogville, five element ninjas, for your height only, lana clarkson, modcinema, starship invasions, weng weng . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

The Return of the Crap of July

If you’ve been around me any length of time, you know that every July my Day Job tries to kill me. We cover the City’s Independence Day Festivities; the July 4th Concert, itself, is not so bad – it’s in an air-conditioned auditorium. Ah, but July 3rd, and the Parade – which takes place at 7pm, necessitating setting up equipment and running cable in the heat of a Texas Summer afternoon – that can be perilous. Because of my advanced age, I get reduced duty, but I feel every one of my infirmities at the end of day, and several days afterwards.

So I always celebrate my survival by watching terrible movies at a Crapfest.

I arrived on time, which meant I was practically the last one there. This was to be one of our most well-attended Crapfests, making seating tricky. I, however, had purchased a camp chair earlier in the day for the lordly sum of seven dollars, so I was set.

Host Dave started off with a vintage VHS of the classic days of Night Flight, including an episode of Dynaman, which thrilled me to no end. I followed up with some files culled from Everything is Terrible, with the biggest hit on everyone’s psyche being provided by Philip Michael Thomas’ music video. Hell, Don Johnson did it, why not?

Once again, I found myself leading off the movies. I had spent a goodly amount of time second-guessing myself here; this was soon after the passing of Hong Kong movie legend Lau Kar-leung and I wanted to show one of his movies. I had narrowed it down to Heroes of the East, my personal favorite, and Legendary Weapons of China. Legendary Weapons is more of a traditional kung fu movie, and ends with a king-hell fight between Lau and his younger brother, who were both accomplished martial artists. Heroes of the East gets my vote for best martial arts movie EVAR, but the first 40 minutes or so is character-developing comedy (punctuated by some minor fights), which could be the kiss of death for a rowdy bunch of Crapfestistas.

She’s baaaaack…

The deciding vote in my head was influenced by one thing: Dave had dug up a copy of Witch With Flying Head, a Taiwanese horror movie I had long wanted to see. Taiwanese movies are visually similar to Hong Kong movies, so I tossed out the Lau movies and went with Lady Terminator, which I wrote about recently, doncha know. I knew the mob would appreciate it. It has boobies.

The main subjects during the viewing were: this was not as good a movie as Terminator (“You’re complaining about the quality of a movie at Crapfest?” asks Dave), and the fact that my seven dollar chair folded under me, trapping me in a cheap steel talon of death. Yeah, thanks for helping me out of that, guys. I look forward to standing by while you sink in quicksand some day. Alan very kindly surrendered his seat to me, and Dave wheeled out his office chair for Alan.

Lady Terminator also brought the terms “Vagina snake” and “Wang shot” into our vocabularies, for better or worse.

Next up was another Alan discovery, The Humanoid, which was fortuitous, because I had recently stopped hating Alan for Road to Revenge. The Humanoid is another Italian science-fiction movie produced after the success of Star Wars, but what it has over the venerable Starcrash is that the filmmakers got to actually see the movie they were ripping off before making their version. The Humanoid often has the look down, from Death Star corridor look-a-likes to a villain with a black helmet modeled on Samurai and gladiator armor. This advanced civilization, like Star Wars’ has also advanced beyond the need for things like bras. Just like Starcrash, though,when we finally get a space dogfight, all the models still zoom around in a straight line.

Oh, the plot? Uh… Dark Helmet wants to do bad stuff. He is aided by Barbara Bach as Space Countess Bathory and her pet Mad Scientist, Poor Arthur Kennedy. Poor Arthur Kennedy has some sort of hate-on against Corinne Clery, because she gave him a bad review on Space Yelp or something, and once he uses some nook-you-ler popcorn mixed with an atomic missile to turn Richard Kiel into a “humanoid” with super strength and invulnerability (and give him a shave, to boot), he sends the monster to kill Clery, but she’s the tutor of The Golden Child who uses Zen mysticism to bring the Humanoid back to himself and also there are two albino space elves who crop up to save the Golden Child when necessary.

In other words, I had no damned idea what was going on.

I haven’t even mentioned the robot dog, which is a real 1979 robot – in other words, limited mobility and utility. Most of the time was spent with Dave and I convincing the others that Corinne Clery was O in The Story of O and the darkness punctuated by men desperately using their smartphones to access Google Image Search, and then, once more, cursing that we were not watching another movie.

I don’t usually feel this nice, but here’s Humanoid cut down to ten minutes, almost half of which is the opening credits. Prepare to have your heart broken, as were the hearts of many Crapfest attendees, by the credit, “Music by Ennio Morricone”. Take what comfort you can in the fact that the spoken language is Italian, which means you have to concentrate on the pretty pictures:

Now finally we had Witch With Flying Head, and it turned out my choice of Lady Terminator had given Dave a reverse case of the nerves, because technically the monster in Witch With Flying Head is a penanggalan, an Indonesian monster which is a woman’s head severed from her body, flying around with its guts dangling beneath, as detailed in Mystics in Bali, a movie shown at an earlier Crapfest. Dave was worried about two Indonesian flicks on the same bill – an inverse version of my earlier worries – but this movie was Taiwanese, as earlier stated.

Back in the 90s I watched an awful lot of Chinese laserdiscs with my pal Parker, and a lot of them had the same flaws as this copy: taken from a widescreen master with the telecine set to the absolute middle of the screen, causing the subtitles to drool off the edges of the screen. VHS tracking fuzz at the bottom of the screen, often obscuring the already-blurry subtitles. Those subtitles were often created on the fly, a bi-lingual translator dictating to a typist for whom English was a second language, resulting in very fractured results (which form my most cherished memories of those days). Then the operator shifting the image down to obscure the fuzz, and obliterating the subtitles. No image control on the print, meaning that nighttime scenes – and in a horror movie, there are a LOT of nighttime scenes – that would have alright with a projector bulb behind it, were pitch black.

In other words, welcome to how we had to watch obscure cult movies at the turn of the century, you spoiled brats. Let me tell you about the time I watched Jigoku without subtitles.

Oh God, now you want a plot, don’t you? Okay. So this nice lady gets cursed by a wandering sorcerer who wants to marry her (this actually happens quite a bit in HK horror movies) so that she becomes “the flying evil” – a penanggalan – at night, until she accedes to the wedding. She and her two ladies-in-waiting escape to the country, where she can’t hurt anyone while she’s the Flying Evil – yet she does, anyway, because, you know, movie. A wandering wise man manages to lessen the curse (and number of snakes in her body) so that she will only become the Flying Evil on the 15th of each month, and leaves her friends a spirit box that will trap the Flying Evil on those nights. Until he learns some better mojo and can come back to cure her completely.

But then a Snake Monster sets up shop in the vicinity, seducing men in the night and killing them. Our cursed lady uses the spirit box to trap the Snake Monster, and winds up falling in love with and marrying the man she saved. The women always make hubby leave on the 15th of each month – eventually, taking their child with him – and so it goes. Until the Snake Monster escapes, the original sorcerer shows up, still hot for marriage, and everything comes down to a low-budget monster magic showdown at the end.

Now, I can say I’ve seen it, but I really wish Mondo Macabro or someone would put out a decent print so I can say that I’ve seen it. There is a full-length (and likely illegal) version on YouTube that is un-subtitled, but at least you can see everything. I was pleased to discover that the penanggalan is actually pretty well done.

How do you wrap up an evening like that? There is only one way, prompted by the uncommon attendance of David (Not Dave), and that was Can’t Stop The Music.

Can’t Stop The Music, as if you didn’t know, is the fictionalized story of how The Village People got together in the glory days of the late 70s. I had never gotten more than five minutes into it, because those first five minutes feature Steve Guttenberg, in short shorts, on roller skates. Past that, though, the movie’s a pretty harmless affair, a combination of old showbiz movie cliches and lets-put-on-a-show tropes. Mark kept entoning that shortly after this movie, Valerie Perrine turned into the Sea Hag or something, causing one to think that Perrine had burned Mark’s village to the ground when he was a child.

The other memorable thing is the acting debut of Olympic decathlete Bruce Jenner. Jenner seems to feel that as long as his face is moving, he is acting, and he acts a lot. This leads to many scenes where Steve Guttenberg and Bruce Jenner try to out-mug each other. There is also a scene, just prior to the “YMCA” production number, where Jenner’s costume manages to out-gay The Village People, which is sort of amazing. After the “YMCA” number, every man in the room had turned gay, except for David, who had become supergay. Such is the power of cinema.

Here, you can be gay, too:

So I crossed off a couple of wanna-sees that evening, which is all I ask of a Crapfest. Well, food and folks, of course, but there are few things we enjoy so much as being able to say, “My God, that was really horrible.”

July 21, 2013
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: can't stop the music, crapfest, lady terminator, the humanoid, village people, witch with flying head . Author: drfreex . Comments: 4 Comments

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The Traditional Back-to-School Crapfest

Crap of July: The 80s Strike Back

The Memorial Crapfest

The Halloween Crapfest

The Last Crap of Summer

ZAP!

Crapfest: The Late 70s

Crapfest: The Redemption

The Crap Is Coming From Inside The House

Crapsgiving 2013

The Return of the Crap of July

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