crapfest | drfreex.com

A Break for Crap

Trying to prove that we didn’t actually need to sully a holiday with this month’s Crapfest was perhaps ill-considered. The Sunday before Memorial Day weekend, but not the holiday weekend itself? Well, perhaps it was best to not to mess with anyone’s plans for a three-day weekend. I did not necessarily feel that way Monday morning, though, when I appeared to be suffering from a lack of sleep and some sort of snack hangover.

But I really need my bimonthly Crapfest. Need it badly. Especially this month, consumed by the end of the school year and the Roger Ebert Great Movies Challenge. Like finding that incredibly rare rude Disneyworld employee, Crapfest was a welcome oasis amongst all that oppressive quality.

When I arrived, host Dave was running Varan the Unbelievable off his hard drive, because he’s a tech-head who does things like that. (I may work in video, but that doesn’t mean I like to run cable through walls. Dave does, and my hat is off to him for doing it well) As more people arrived, the conversation grew lively, and Dave’s media player dutifully moved on to the next digital file, the original Earth vs The Spider. How lively was the conversation? It was twenty minutes before we realized the soundtrack was in Spanish. Aieee! Aranya grosso no bueno!

This was taken as a clue that we should start the festivities, and for some reason it usually falls to me to choose the first movie. Maybe it is because I generally try to be a nice guy and come up with something at least entertaining (Things was an exception). Maybe because Dave feels that, therefore, his choice in the second slot will seem even more horrible by comparison. Or it will give him a chance to determine how badly he needs to hurt me in return.

But I had discovered a couple of fests ago, that one of our newbs, Erik, was fairly knowledgeable in the ways of le cinema bad, yet had never seen Starcrash. Neither had the other FNG, Mark. This is what we refer to in the trade as a moral imperative, and so we old-timers settled in for a re-watch.

I feel I have to explain Starcrash, even though, if you are reading this blog, chances are it’s unnecessary. Starcrash is an Italian attempt to capitalize on the success of Star Wars, at a time when Star Wars had not yet opened in Europe. So all Luigi Cozzi had to go on was photos, possibly some imported trailers. It’s pretty obvious that lacking the thing he was imitating, he had to fall back on Euro science fiction movies like Barbarella, Antonio Margheriti’s Gamma I flicks, and, for some reason, Jason and the Argonauts. The cast is Caroline Munro, Marjoe Gortner, Joe Spinell, David Hasselhoff and Christopher Plummer. And a police robot who talks like a Southern sheriff. If you have not yet seen it, all this should have convinced you to rush right out and find it now.

Erik was gobsmacked. “This is horrible,” he said, amazed. I think he may be a bit unaware of the depths we regularlysubject ourselves to at Crapfest – one day he will realize what a sweet, sweet gift we gave to him that day.

It was time to cook up dinner, and I filled the time with a couple of episodes of Ultraman (this would be the 1966 series). I showed the episode with the pearl-eating monster because A) Science Patrol token girl Akiko is really upset that the monster is eating all those lovely pearls; B) Science Patrol gets rid of the monster by literally shoving a rocket up its ass and blasting it into space; C) meaning Ultraman is unneeded, but he shows up anyway. We needed a second episode, and chose “The Rambunctious One from Space” at random, hoping it would be some manner of space biker, not realizing that such weirdness wouldn’t be showing up until the sentai shows started rolling out in the late 70s. No, it’s just another giant monster, or what they refer to in Japan as “Tuesday”.

Dave had been inferring for some time that I wasn’t drunk enough to watch his selection yet. Not that this was ominous, or anything.

Well, yes, yes it was. Because he had decided to show Nukie.

Nukie is an E.T. rip-off made 6 or 7 years after the fact and (deservedly) more obscure than Mac and Me. Apparently of South African origin (with lots of German names, to boot), it didn’t even hit VHS in the US until 1993. I remained blissfully unaware of it until Stomp Tokyo’s 2000 review, and I spent the intervening years not exactly avoiding it, but not seeking it out either. I’m sure that in my inevitable war crimes trial, the day I spent helping the visiting Chris Holland paw through boxes of VHS tapes at my then-favorite used movie store for copies of Nukie that he could inflict on innocent people will be entered in evidence.

So. There is a sort of cartoon comet zooming all over Earth while we hear the voices of two aliens, Nukie and Neeko, argue about how they shouldn’t be doing this. Something goes wrong and Nukie crash lands in Africa, while Neeko touches down in America, where he is promptly captured by the Space Foundation and routinely tortured by scientists. Nukie befriends a couple of outcast native children, and in general tries to find out where this “America” person who is holding Neeko can be found – by asking animals.

Nukie and Neeko have a psychic link, which means that whenever Nukie is finally about to get to sleep, Neeko will get poked and start screaming “NUUUUUUKIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!” in his head, and that also we in the audience will likewise scream “NUUUUUUKIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!” when bored, which was often. Before they can take off to space again, they have to be together, you see. Never mind that we see Nukie turn into a cartoon comet and loop around the Moon once.

Then, in the village where all sorts of skullduggery is afoot, none of it particularly coherent, a chimpanzee wearing a shirt starts talking. This is enough to make us stop screaming “NUUUUUUKIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!” and discuss whether the humans onscreen could hear the chimp or not; in the following scene, Nukie is talking to other primates (the aliens can speak any language once they hear enough of it), but the whole subject of talking monkeys was introduced before this sequence… Then Neeko helps the Space Foundation computer achieve sentience. Well, it actually already sentient, since it can hypnotize aliens and humans – somehow – and laugh like a mad scientist. Neeko just helps it become a better person.

Your star power in Nukie is limited to Glynis Johns as a nun in the Village of Problems (looks like things went to hell for the Banks family after Mary Poppins left, if Mrs. Banks joined a nunnery and is working in Africa), and Steve Railsback as the least effective field agent for a Space Foundation ever – although it has to be admitted that he flies Neeko to Nukie in his helicopter – apparently overnight, from America to Africa! – so the two can get the hell off this mudball and we can put this whole dismal exercise behind us.

The best part of the whole ordeal was Rick fervently making his case that if Dave had chosen Nukie, he had no moral high ground to claim in his steadfast resistance to Rick’s dream entry, The Garbage Pail Kids Movie. I think he may have had a point, there.

No, wait – the best part was where Dave, as we entered the subjective fifth hour of Nukie, began to moan in his chair, “What have I done?” like Col. Nicholson in Bridge on the River Crap.

High ground or no, Dave put on The Yesterday Machine to “give people a chance to go to the bathroom”. Fifteen minutes later, no one had gone to the bathroom and the damned thing was still playing. Unwilling to sit through a 35-minute explanation of how time travel works again, I held a straw poll of the contents of my Crapfest Bag of Tricks and the clear winner was a return to the original fare of the first Crapfests, a New World drive-in programmer by the name of Candy Stripe Nurses.

There are three stories at play in Candy Stripe Nurses as our nubile young not-really nurses try to change the world via nude scenes. More than ever, you can sense Roger Corman with one of those accountant visors and a stop watch nudging the director and murmuring, “I can’t help but notice there hasn’t been any nudity for 7 minutes.” Not fooling – in one of those instances, where there was no way to stop the plot for naked flesh, it was provided by streakers at a basketball game. Not as ideally salacious as you’d want, a bit heavy on the socially-conscious story elements… but at least it wasn’t Nukie. And as is the case with these movies, when you’re not waiting for the next nude scene, you’re waiting to see where Dick Miller will crop up.

Let’s take a moment to thank Joe Dante for cutting together this completely NSFW trailer:

(By the way, whichever of you guys tried to correct me on the director of Candy Stripe Nurses – you were right, it was Allan Holeb. I just got hung up on seeing Barbara Peeters’ name as Second Unit Director. I was wrong.)

There was some sort of problem with Erik’s portable hard drive, so while Dave took it to the back room to diagnose, he ominously said to me, “Figure out what’s next.” I didn’t do the straw poll again. I simply opened the vintage Warner Brothers snapper case and inserted Exorcist II: The Heretic. Enough of this weak-ass stuff. People had been demanding The Heretic for some time.

Mark was a bit apprehensive, unsure if this was truly riff material. Pshaw, said I, and ho boy, was I right. I’m pretty sure there was some exposition going on, but it was drowned out by multiple, simultaneous bad Richard Burton impersonations, which continued for the next two hours. Drunk jokes were the standard fare, but I was astounded and delighted by the variation and lack of repetition. I am especially fond of the section where we switched to using booze as a motivator. “Okay, Mr. Burton, for this scene we’ve put a bottle of scotch on top of this mountain, and… OH GOD ROLL THE CAMERAS! ROLL THEM NOW!!!”

In case you’ve never had the pleasure: Burton is Father Lamont, another exorcist who is having a crisis of faith, yet is sent by the Church to investigate the death of Father Merrin in the first movie. He meets up with the now teenaged Regan, and things sort of fall apart from there. The original audience started laughing the movie out of the theaters with the first sequence involving The Synchronizer, a device that “syncs people up” using biofeedback, a strobe light, and a deep pulsing note. It allows people to share a hypnotic trance and experience each other’s dreams, or something. That sequence is actually pretty effective, if you can get past the dubious science.

Anyway, the best part, past the Richard Burton jokes, is the Ennio Morricone score, which I still have on the original vinyl. Enjoy Ennio rocking out on the trailer:

Actually, the best part was realizing that I was watching the original ending on this disc; Warner tried several different endings to deflect audience derision when the movie opened, and when I saw it, it was the ending where Burton died battling the demon Pazuzu. Offscreen, of course, no need to actually bring him back to shoot new footage. It was shoddy work, and though the original ending is rather ridiculous, it is obviously part of the same movie I just spent two hours scratching my head through.

By then it was midnight, and we had jobs to get to in the morning. We woke Alan up and sent him home. (“Why couldn’t I have nodded off during Nukie? Why?!?”) We also swore undying vengeance against Dave. Which will make the next Crapfest all the more… interesting.

Here’s my Letterboxd profile just prior to this Crapfest:

And here it is after, Can you spot the difference?:

Never mind, it’s back to this, now:

May 24, 2013
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: candy stripe nurses, crapfest, exorcist ii: the heretic, nukie, richard burton, starcrash, ultraman . Author: drfreex . Comments: 3 Comments

Crapfest: Making A Good Friday Bad

There seems to be an ebb and flow in the Universe around these things: I’d had another stressful and exhausting two weeks, the midpoint of which was the Fort Bend International Festival, a nice 11 hour day with only two minor fifteen minute breaks. I should feel lucky – I was totally expecting 12 hours. This was followed by a holiday on the following Friday, Good Friday, but that only meant everything had to be done a day early. I really didn’t feel rested until a week after the Festival, and a day after Crapfest.

Two could not make it – David and Erik – and we added a newb, Mark, who, like me, works at a college but has a much more elevated position than I (realistically, the janitors have a much more elevated position than I). Paul and Alan arrived after their commitments; I had beaten Rick to Dave’s house by mere minutes, giving us sufficient time to curse each other and the screen, because I had burned another compilation of horrible things from the Everything Is Terrible website. Here is one of the least offensive, in case you were ever wondering what happened to Madness after that “Our House” money ran out:

I’m still trying to figure out how to rip that and make it my ringtone. Apparently some memories of this song gave Rick problems in church Sunday morning.

Dave wanted me to go first, but although I had a stack of discs in front of me, I pointed out that we had been promising Paul we would show Sonny Chiba’s The Bodyguard for months. “What? Is it Be Nice To Paul Day?” “Sure, why not?” So we finally watched The Bodyguard, which is, unfortunately, no Streetfighter, but hey – it is Sonny Chiba.

It is quite literally Sonny Chiba, as Sonny Chiba plays a guy named Sonny Chiba who is a world-famous karate instructor. After a gangster is machine-gunned on the steps of St. Patrick’s, Sonny is hired to be the bodyguard for the dead gangster’s (wouldn’t you know it?) Japanese girlfriend. Yes, it’s Sonny Chiba vs the Mafia, and there are lots of broken bones sticking out of arms before the evening is out. The girlfriend is trying to do one last drug deal in the gangster’s honor, or something, and Sonny comes along for the ride as he goes between slapping the crap out of her and falling for her. Mark’s utterance of , “Boy, I hope this ends like Get Carter” is sort of prescient, but only sort of. And Paul sits there with a big grin on his face for most of it.

Our hopes were, however dashed in that Kevin Costner never showed up so Sonny could punch his lights out. Also: I had no idea that Sonny Chiba is in the Book of Ezekiel, but there it is, right at the beginning. This movie was educational, too.

Well, that clip kind of let you hanging, didn’t it? Here, the trailer picks up where that left off, and gives you a glimpse of the Enno Morricone-wannabe soundtrack, which was pretty hot:

After this, I discovered that it was also “Be Nice To Alan Day”, which is where things began to go horribly wrong. Alan had been doing actual research, tracing filmographies of people like Pamela Jean Bryant (Miss April 1977, says resident Playboytologist Paul), mainly known in these parts from H.O.T.S. and Lunch Wagon. And what does his research uncover but this… thing from 1993 called GetEven, re-titled to Road to Revenge, possibly because the original title was too suggestive of what anybody watching it should consider. (Actually, it seems to be the opposite – GETEVEN seems to be the current title)

Here is your set-up: first, realize there is a lawyer named John De Hart (the emphasis is apparently on the “De”). He is also apparently a very successful lawyer. So naturally he decides to become a movie star. He writes, produces, stars and co-directs in an action movie titled Get Even. He also has a musical number. I am not lying about this:

Yes, that is Pamela Bryant at the bar, proving what a good actress she was by looking like she’s enjoying herself. She also should have won awards for the two sex scenes she had with De Hart. Yes, he gave himself two sex scenes with a Playmate. And before you ask, yes, he sings the two songs under the sex scenes. Really awful flashbacks to The Room surfaced under these conditions.

If you were really sharp, you saw Wings Hauser dancing during the clip. Here’s our plot, such as it is: Rick Bode (De Hart) and the unlikely-named Huck Finney (Hauser) were LAPD cops under William Smith (who packs the even more unlikely name of Normad). Normad frames them for drug charges – and about the worst thing to come from that is they lose their jobs – which somehow then makes him a judge. The passage of time in this is oddly (some might say ineptly) fluid, so I guess he got elected to that position somewhere in there. Now, not only is he William Smith, crooked cop and drug-dealing judge, no, that is insufficient for our needs, he is also a baby-killing Satanist. Bryant witnessed a baby sacrifice years before (or maybe it was minutes before), but Smith doesn’t decide to kill her until De Hart marries her. Which of course leads us to our Road to Revenge, perhaps the shortest Road to Revenge ever. Less than a block, or so.

De Hart’s baggy face rarely ever changes expression, though he is really good at looking directly into the camera. Wings Hauser is obviously improvising his dialogue, and it does serve to pad out the running time to feature-length. There is one speaking role – a nun – who is so mind-blowingly awful, she is in the movie twice, just to make De Hart look good. And yes, our hero is guilty of several counts of murder by the time the movie is over, but that’s okay, right?

You, too, can go to geteventhemovie.com and purchase your own copy for a whopping 10 bucks. I do not personally recommend such a thing – but then, when have you ever listened to me?

Paul takes his position as Designated Wuss very seriously, and left, before we put on Mark’s offering: The Black Six, the tale of a motorcycle gang made of six NFL football players. And if you know me and sports, you know I had no real idea what was going on, cast-wise, even though the opening credits were good enough to tell us what team each guy played on. Anyway, the Black Six are traveling the country after serving in Nam, generally being cool except when they are hastled by the man (ie., rednecks stupid enough to mouth off to six black men over six feet tall and in good shape). Until one of them finds out his kid brother was beaten to death by a white motorcycle gang.

That would be Gene Washington, chosen to be the main actor from our other pro players, who get distracted by such frippery as women on the street until they’re needed for backup.

The actual mechanism of Washington receiving this news by General Delivery at a post office during their wanderings led to a spirited discussion of exactly how much money Washington’s mother spent on postage, to send copies of this letter to every post office in America, just to make sure he got it.

Anyway, the Black Six arrive in town, get called “The New Uncle Toms” by Washington’s Angela Davis-lookalike sister, find out the cops cain’t do nothin’, and wind up in a big nighttime showdown with the murderous motorcycle gang, unaware that the spiteful honkies made a deal with an even larger motorcycle gang run by “Thor” (Ben Davidson, who I was helpfully informed was another football player). This is actually a pretty good final scene, as the six gather all the bikes in a circle and fend off onslaught after onslaught, finally ending in a huge explosion and conflagration, leading us to believe the Six are dead, except the titles assure us that everytime a brother is hassled, the Six will be there.

I’m not sure if the Black Six actually “waste 150 motorcycle dudes” – it gets a little hectic there – but it’s a pretty good finish. Up to that point, it’s obvious the Six aren’t martial artists at all, but they’re game, by golly. Matt Cimber directed a bunch of low-rent action flicks and blaxploitation movies, and his experience shows; it certainly had the most comprehensible plot of the evening.

Mark took his leave, his damage done, leaving myself, Dave, Rick and Alan. And while Alan took a nice nap, Dave started up Mission Stardust.

I had meant to see Mission Stardust for years. It’s the Perry Rhodan movie, and when I was a teenager, I read a bunch of Perry Rhodan when Forry Ackerman started importing them here to the states.

Perry Rhodan is a weekly pulp series started in Germany back in 1961. It is pure space opera pulp – two-fisted astronauts, alien races, hairs-breadth escapes – it was glorious to young teen-aged me. Ackerman’s English versions were successful enough to keep the series running in bi-weekly paperback form until the new head of Ace Books decided it was “too juvenile” and cut it off around issue #120. Ackerman did keep it running in a subscription-only model for another twenty issues, but that was pretty much it for America. In Germany it kept going until 2011, when reportedly it got rebooted for a new audience.

So in 1967 Mission Stardust was made (aka 4…3…2…1…Death!) and the fact that no other Perry Rhodan movies were made should clue you in how successful it was amongst Rhodan fans.

Perry Rhodan (Lang Jeffries) is in charge of Earth’s first Moon landing, where the crew of the rocketship Stardust finds a disabled alien ship with two living occupants from the planet Arkon: the elder scientist Arkin (Pinkas Braun), and the ship’s captain, Thora (Essy Persson). Arkin is looking for younger civilizations to freshen up the Arkon’s genetic pool, which means Perry will be sucking face with Thora by movie’s end (Spoiler: it took like 18 books for that to happen) even though she doesn’t like these primitive screwheads. In the meantime, Arkin is suffering from a mysterious disease that turns out to be leukemia.

The thrust of the movie then becomes getting a doctor who has developed a new treatment for leukemia from Mombassa to the Moon without revealing that there are aliens camping out on said Moon. This is accomplished by landing a smaller spacecraft in the desert and hassling all soldiers that come their way.

Rhodan and his sidekick, Mike Bull (really) (Luis Davila) sneak into Mombassa with a handful of diamonds (of course, worthless to the Arkons. Their money is mercury), unaware that a Blofeld-level bad guy has a mole on their ship and is planning to hijack the spacecraft. In other words, in order to escape our run of bad action movies, we blundered right into the arms of a bad action movie.

But it was at least a bad action movie with spaceships and robots. That was different. Sort of.

Here’s Your Scorecard:

Best Fight Scenes: The Bodyguard (which should tell you something about the quality of the others)

Easiest Plot to Follow: The Black Six

Best Score: The Black Six

Best Playmate: Road to Revenge

Best Space Vehicle That Looked Like A Dildo: Mission Stardust

Best Song: Jesus Is My Friend

Lesson Learned: We will never be nice to Paul and Alan ever a-fucking-gain

I was fearsomely buzzed on caffeine and willing to do another movie. But Alan went home halfway through Mission Stardust and Dave and Rick wanted to have lives, or something. So I went home, logged the movies and sent rambling e-mails for the rest of the evening. And at some point, realized I had horribly disfigured my Letterboxd.com profile page with this rogues gallery:

Meaning Jesus God I gotta watch more movies. Stat.

April 2, 2013
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: blaxploitation, crapfest, gene washington, john de hart, mission stardust, perry rhodan, road to revenge, sonny chiba, the black six, the bodyguard, william smith, wings hauser . Author: drfreex . Comments: 6 Comments

Crapsgiving 2012

I actually recovered from a week and a half of Extreme Bizzitude the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Wednesday night was spent brining the turkey, Thursday, of course, was cooking and eating, then eating after a nap, then eating some more. Friday was more restful, as old chum Cabot Parsons was down from Noo Yawk to visit, and we made each other remember stuff from our more youthful days that we had good cause to forget (and then I ate). That was the restful day my body had really needed. And Saturday… ah Saturday… was the rest my soul needed, as I had no Show and therefore bullied everyone into a Thanksgiving Crapfest, or, as it is known, Crapsgiving.

Our Author, ready for action.

I think I actually stuffed myself more at Crapsgiving than I had at Thanksgiving. Host Dave had cooked up some excellent beef-and-venison sausages and sautéed the hell out of a mix of mushrooms and peppers and some dirty rice – nay, filthy rice – to accompany them. As the evening wore on we would also tuck into a huge pepperoni pizza Rick had snagged from Costco – I believe the crust was also made from pepperoni, as were portions of the box. In any case, there was a hell of a lot of pepperoni. Then the usual snacks, and Paul brought supplies for root beer floats. After a year spent losing weight, I am finally back to my fightin’ weight of 500 pounds.

While various people arrived, I played a disc of terrible things from, appropriately, everythingisterrible.com. Alas, the only people to be scarred by this were myself, Dave, Rick and one of two new guys who had arrived early, Erik. Erik brought his A-game, I must say; he came with some movies of his own, about the worst of which (that I had seen, anyway) was The Angry Red Planet, and I love The Angry Red Planet. But I don’t think he was entirely prepared for the brain-blasting awfulness we put ourselves through on a regular basis; though Everything is Terrible should have been a fair intimation.

We started off Crapsgiving Proper with The Big Doll House, Jack Hill’s first Filipino Women In Prison flick for Corman’s new company, New World Pictures. It isn’t the absurd perfection of The Big Bird Cage, but it is still pretty entertaining in its own right. This is apparently Pam Grier’s first big movie role, where Sid Haig is giving her acting tips as the shoot progresses. Their chemistry is damned good, so much so that Hill would pair them again for The Big Bird Cage the following year.

There is really only one plot in these movies: there are women in a hellish Filipino prison, and they want to escape. What sets each apart is the bizarreness of the setpieces. Granted, there must always be at least one shower scene, one wrestling match (usually in mud, if Corman has anything to say about it), and at least one torture scene involving nudity, ideally several. Doll House also has a food fight followed up by a general fire-hosing of the inmates (which, legend says, the inmates didn’t know was coming). This particular prison is also, for some reason, run by female Nazis, though there is also a shadowy hooded military man who seems to operate things behind the scenes, leading Erik to deduce that the prison is actually being run by Cobra Commander. (“I hate you, Joe! Now get undressed!”)

Surprisingly little nudity, given the movie’s ultimate venue was the drive-in, but some little caution was apparently called for in 1971. The next year Deep Throat would put “porno chic” on the cultural map and things would loosen up considerably for a few years, providing the teen-aged me with a short Golden Age at the Drive-In. The Big Doll House’s major problems are a Shakespeare-sized cast list (with an identically Shakespearean body count), getting rid of Pam Grier way too soon, and that there is no Vic Diaz. If I had been Ferdinand Marcos, I would have required every movie made in the Philippines to cast Vic Diaz. Dammit, A Filipino movie without Vic Diaz is like a Women in Prison movie without a shower scene.

Also best line of the night comes from Dave: “Sid Haig is like the Cary Grant of Women in Prison movies.”

Best of all, Big Doll House was one of the movies from The List – I now only have 15 to go before the end of the year (oy). Thank you, gentlemen.

Alan and Paul and the other newb, Joe, sauntered in toward the end of Doll House. Paul might have gotten to see an exposed breast, or two; Alan was not so lucky. Dave called upon me to put something on while he prepared martinis to fortify ourselves against his choice. I put on my new Shazzan disc, but when Dave sneered at it, I huffily withdrew it and substituted something I had promised Paul a long time ago: the very first episode of Hee Haw.

Most of you sneered just then. But then, most people are familiar with Hee Haw from its later, syndicated years, when the bits were old and worn and the writers were desperately pawing through whatever joke books they could find in resale shops to fill up time between country stars. But the first year, all this stuff was new, and the material was smart, surreal and sharp. There was no doubting the musical ability of the visiting stars (in this case Charley Pride and Loretta Lynn, who sang a feminist song about squaws going on warpaths) and there is no gainsaying Buck Owens. No, there is not, because Buck Owens kicks ass. The very first song, on Hee Haw, on the country & western version of Laugh-In, is not a country song. It is “Johnny B. Goode” with Dogpatch-styled go-go dancers.

(You know, when I wrote this, all these things were available on YouTube. I leave this horrid placeholder up by way of protest)

This is your monthly reminder that Buck Owens always disclaimed he played country. “I play American music,” he would say, and go back to rocking out. The twin brothers in the background were the Hager Twins, there for youth appeal. Their songs were likewise good, and I always find myself infected with their “The Gambling Man” for weeks after watching this first episode. Dig the kazoo action:

So despite initial disbelief, the room wound up enjoying Hee Haw. It opened up old memory through-ways and if nothing else, it was a memory you could sing along with:

Then, finally, Dave was ready to spring his horrifying choice of the evening on us. But it was a digital copy, running off a server in a back room, so while it transferred itself to a closer hard drive (honestly, we were one hot chick with short hair shy of a 90s hacker drama), we popped in an emergency disc I had gotten from Warner Archive some time before: Hollywood Party (1934). The trailer will give you some idea of the surrealism packed into its 69 minutes:

Yes, that’s a shockingly young Jimmy Durante going mano a mano with Mickey Mouse, and that is not the weirdest thing on display in this movie. The contents are surprisingly saucy – Hollywood Party just barely slipped out before the Hayes Code started being sternly enforced. This is the sort of movie that gives you some context into older Looney Tunes gags. We never made it to Mickey Mouse, much less The Three Stooges (still shackled to Ted Healey) or Laurel and Hardy. We never had time to ponder the allure of Lupe Velez, the Mexican Spitfire, whose act consisted of combining a spoiled brat with the worst psycho girlfriend you ever had. Hollywood Party was interrupted by the completed transfer of Dave’s choice: Abby (1974).

Abby is William Girdler‘s blaxploitation version of The Exorcist; it was reportedly more successful than Blacula, and one of several Exorcist knock-offs suppressed by Warner Brothers. I was a bit bemused by the other members of our gathering saying, “Abby? Abby? What’s that?” I sometimes forget what a strange little specialized bubble I occupy.

Snappy pith helmet, Bishop. You must be in Africa!

Abby is the fourth of five movies Girdler made in his native Louisville, Kentucky; he was known for making them fast and cheap, even when he moved on to Hollywood. I’m pretty sure most of Abby‘s budget went to paying William Marshall, and that is always a wise investment. Marshall plays Bishop Garnett Williams, who heads off to Nigeria to aid in pestilence and famine relief, but winds up unleashing an ancient demon who possesses his innocent daughter-in-law, the title character, played by Carol Speed. Again, there’s not much budget, so any demonic activity is limited to cursing, flailing around, popping an alka-seltzer into the mouth, renting a fog machine for one night, and scaring white women to death. And, oh yeah, screwing a bunch of men, much to the dismay of her husband, Williams’ son, himself a minister. I guess that’s a valid (and economical) path to take when your possessed character isn’t a schoolgirl.

Well, Pop comes back from Nigeria and after his son and Abby’s brother, a cop, track her down to a local nightclub, Marshall dons his holy dashiki and lays the righteous smack down on the devil. There’s a lot of not-quite subliminal flashes of Speed in some monster makeup (to echo the one in Exorcist) in the lengthy exorcism scene. They even pull out the stage illusion levitation trick, possible because they didn’t have to bother lifting a bed. Genius!

I’ve never been a big fan of The Exorcist, for much the same reason The Omen leaves me cold; I don’t have much in the way of religious roots to shake. So I’m afraid a cheap copy of The Exorcist (and Girdler, whatever his shortcomings, was refreshingly honest about that) isn’t going to do much for me. At least now I can say I’ve seen Abby.

Really, the most frightening thing about it: It has thrown the door open to a viewing of Exorcist II: The Heretic. Which, surprise, surprise, I have just gotten from the Swap A DVD Club.

You can take that earlier phrase “At least now I can say I’ve seen Abby” and use it for our next movie. Its possibility as a Crapfest entry had been danced around for some time, and finally, it seems, it was time to actually experience it.

Sweet Sassy Molassy. We’ve been through a lot at Crapfests. We’ve subjected ourselves to Dondi, Things and Strange Beings. We keep thinking we’ve developed scar tissue. But The Room punched us in places that hadn’t been touched before.

Writer/director/producer Tommy Wiseau also stars as Johnny, who is a saint, I tell you, a saint. His girlfriend, Lisa (Juliette Danielle) lives with him, and he buys her flowers, dresses, a ring, soon a car and a house. They are to be married in a month. Lisa, though, confesses to her Mom and everyone who will listen that she finds Johnny “boring”, doesn’t love him anymore, and isn’t going to marry him. Then she has an affair with Johnny’s best friend, Mark (Greg Sestero).

The Room is like a vanity novel about human relationships written by Martians; they know what relationships look like, but not what they sound like, what truly makes them tick.

Characters keep getting introduced, right up into the third act – at least I think that was the third act – mainly to tell us how awesome Johnny is and how evil Lisa has become. “She’s a sociopath!” Conveniently Introduced Psychologist tells us. Lisa also finishes every conversation with “I don’t want to talk about it!” and we were really sorry we hadn’t known to count those.

There’s a fair piece of your six million dollar budget right there.

There are four sex scenes in The Room. One is simply the first sex scene between Johnny and Lisa played again, with a different fake rock song on the soundtrack. These scenes make you wonder if you haven’t accidentally flipped to Cinemax; in fact, if not for the tragic ending, I would assume this was Wiseau’s audition tape for directing Cinemax flicks.

Wiseau is working through some issues here, and I don’t need a Conveniently Introduced Psychologist to tell me this. Johnny is just a wonderful human being, everybody agrees about this, even Mark while he’s schtupping Johnny’s girlfriend. So after everything is revealed at Johnny’s birthday party, and he makes everyone leave, Johnny tears the place apart (“I saw Orson Welles do this in Citizen Kane and it was awesome!“) and then blows his brains out, leaving Lisa and Mark to boo hoo hoo over their loss and transgression and doubtless the President to declare a day of mourning.

It’s that last scene, the oh-what-have-we-done scene, that leads me to believe that the vanity novel was written by an adolescent Martian. God, how many stories have we constructed in our little hormone-cooked brains where we died and everybody agonized over how badly they’d treated us? That’s what the last scene in The Room is, and the difference is that Wiseau managed to pull together a reported $6 million to make a movie version of it.

I also can’t help but laugh at the last part of that trailer, the “quirky black comedy” part. That’s the part that finally makes it salable, but The Room was not shot as a black comedy. It’s a teenage I’ll-show-them-all put to film, and I’m glad that Wiseau got some catharsis out of this, even if I and everyone who’s seen it has not.

My first encounter with The Room:

It’s the “Oh, Johnny, I didn’t know it was you” followed by “You’re my favorite customer” that still gets me.

Of course, I was live-tweeting the Crapfest, and about three-quarters of the way through The Room, I had to say this:

Little did I know that there is a Room bot out there, and I came home to this:

AAAAHHHHH! Stop haunting me, Tommy Wiseau! STOP HAUNTING MEEEEEEEEEE!

November 26, 2012
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: abby, big doll house, crapfest, hee haw, jack hill, roger corman, the room, tommy wiseau, william girdler . Author: drfreex . Comments: 6 Comments

How to Waste A Labor Day Weekend

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vic Diaz! Praise his usefulness! (ululate)

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

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

Back-to-School Crap

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

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

Anyway.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Going to remind you here, this is a comedy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking forward to that sequel, let me tell you.

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

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

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

Crapfest: Hercules Against Disco Streetfighting Bees

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The First Crap of Spring

So there were a bunch of us who had Good Friday off, for a variety of reasons. Enough of us – back in February, we did it with only four people, and frankly, it has been done with three. At any rate, it was time for an impromptu Crapfest.

We were pretty determined to take it easy, and the first hour – Rick and I arrived at Casa Dave at 3:00 – was spent on the patio, watching Dave grill and smoke these Flintstone-style brontosaurus ribs he had hand-rubbed the day before. Alan made a surprise appearance, having been given the day off at the last minute, and when Paul arrived – his first Crapfest in a while – we began.

How Dave’s ribs tasted: artist’s representation

Well, first, we had some of those ribs. Let me say I am not a great fan of pork ribs, but Dave’s alchemy had wrought magical changes in this meat. The very last scene in Lynch’s Eraserhead, where Henry embraces the Girl in the Radiator in heaven, all white light and one sustained, heavenly note? That was the first bite into these ribs. And every subsequent bite thereafter.

Then we began.

At one of those Crapfests, in the faraway land of 2011, while we were watching 70s variety TV and watching Dave scream with horror, Paul had brought up the subject of Alice Cooper: The Nightmare, an ABC special done in the In Concert time slot. Basically, it’s Alice’s then-current album, Welcome to My Nightmare, done in long video form… in 1975. Well, I dug up a copy – it had ever only been released on VHS – and here is Vincent Price making damned sure the producers got their money’s worth:

(Or rather we would if the YouTube version of Scrooge hadn’t scoured any excerpt from that special off the Innernets. Somebody give me lots of money so I can start hosting videos on my site.)

Shorn of commercials, The Nightmare is only an hour long, and frankly, even then, it comes close to wearing out its welcome (and mind you, this is an Alice Cooper fan talking here). But just when it reaches that point, it ends, so the worst thing that can be said about it is I have been walking around with Alice Cooper music stuck in my head ever since. Not such a bad thing. (again – Alice Cooper fan)

But then, as Dave arose to change discs after the end credits rolled, something happened… somebody had put something on the disc after Alice Cooper. Something horrible. Who could have done such a thing?

*giggle*

Yes, it was the full infomercial for Harvey Sid Fisher’s Astrology Songs, shot with two cameras, a simple video switcher and probably two hours in a studio with three or maybe four interpretive dancers – we kept losing track. Mr. Fisher is still around, and still selling music – give him a shot.

You know, I was expecting the “stop” button to be hit after a couple of minutes, the joke told. But no, you guys surprised me: you stuck it out through the entire zodiac. Respect.

I also suspect that the desire to go through the whole thing was fueled by Dave’s heavy sighs and eye-rollings. And also when his wife, Ann got home and Dave was heard telling her, “No, we are not running it back so you can hear your sign!”

After that… well, the whole thing was so impromptu, we hadn’t really established a battle order. I had brought a stack of DVDs, and Dave had brutally gone through it and arranged them in order of *harrumph* quality (and totally dissed my copy of Wicked World, autographed by Barry “Things” Gillis!). When it was commanded we watch something with “lots of kicking”, it was time for The Magic Blade. Here, have a window-boxed, spoileriffic trailer:

Ti Lung plays Fu Hung-hsieh, a complete badass who may not have been based on The Man With No Name, but he is certainly wearing the only poncho in the World of Martial Arts. He also carries a remarkable custom sword that is a combination of a machete and a tonfa. If that isn’t enough for you, he’s come back to fight Lo Lieh’s character, Yen Nan-fei, a year after their first duel; the rematch gets postponed when somebody tries to kill Yen repeatedly, and Fu as well. As ever, somebody is trying to take over The World of Martial Arts, and is eliminating all competitors in his quest to obtain the legendary Peacock Dart, a sort of martial arts neutron bomb. And he’s doing it with a small army of colorful henchmen, with names like The Wood Devils and Devil Granny.

If, like me, your major exposure to old school Shaw Brothers kung fu flicks had been Chang Cheh’s blood-and-thunder exercises with the Venoms, the films of director Chor Yuen are a bracing breath of fresh air. Largely doing film adaptations of the pulpy wuxia novels by Ku Long, these are like detective novels infused with distilled Chinese martial arts flicks, and they are amazing. I started really getting into Hong Kong martial arts flicks with Chang’s Kid With the Golden Arm, when I realized that, for all intents and purposes, I was watching a comic book made flesh, all superhero battles and internecine conflict; Chor Yuen and Ku Long’s universe embraces that fully, right down to the colorful noms de guerre of the bad guys. Black Pearl, Iron Flute, The 5 Poison Kid, Serpent King… and in my limited time, I can’t find the exact reference, but I recall a villain translated as something like Venomous Eddie, the Stun-Dude.

I am thankful Image Entertainment put out a nice DVD of this using the Celestial Pictures restored print, but with the added option for the English dub. Those old, familiar voices I’ve heard for years. Best of all, if you want to severely injure your friends, use the “But still” drinking game. One of the phrases used by English dubs to fill up lip movement is “But still”, and The Magic Blade has a metric ton of them. Guaranteed alcohol poisoning by the end of the flick.

We had our second wind now, and while Rick warmed up the delicious pulled pork he had brought (which would be enriched by a variety of fruit salsas – amazing stuff) we filled the time with movie trailers from the 42nd Street Forever: Alamo Drafthouse Edition, wherein I discovered that Dave had never seen Message From Space, which I found astounding in someone who had been the Ultimate Star Wars Nerd until the prequels broke him of that behavior – and that Sonny Chiba’s The Bodyguard looks incredible:

Then, our bellies full and far too torpid to make a run for it, Dave decided it was time for his contribution. Keep in mind, now, that Dave is a vengeful monster, probably still smarting over Astrology Songs. Hell, probably still smarting over Things and Darktown Strutters. Therefore, he began the 1997 unsuccessful TV pilot for The Justice League of America. Never shown in America, it was instead shipped over to Europe, because we hate Europe.

(First, HD trailer, my ass, second of all… isn’t that the theme from the infinitely superior animated series?)

If you were smart enough to not click on that, here’s an overview, of sorts. Our licensed DC heroes are The Atom, Flash, Green Lantern, Fire, and Ice – all turned into young twenty-somethings, so it’s a sort of proto-Smallville, though I didn’t hate that series as much as I hate this idea. You see, they’re almost all sharing a house, and there are, therefore, pseudo-Big Brother interludes where the heroes, in their civvies, talk humorously about being superheroes.

Besides the obvious – who are these guys, who supposedly guard their secret identities jealously, making these interview tapes for… well, there’s a plethora of things wrong. The Flash here is Barry Allen, supposedly dead for twelve years in continuity, and chronically unemployed. We never see his origin because that took place on his freaking job as a police forensic scientist. And well, also because they stole his origin for Ice’s origin. A guy trying to get a date with Fire’s secret identity recognizes her as the heroine on TV largely because all she does is smear some makeup under her eyes. Dave, when he wasn’t giggling like the Riddler at our pain, was complaining about the off-model costumes or moaning that Green Lantern was being a dick. That, at least was to expected, because it was Guy Gardner.

Well, not all of us were too stuffed to run away, because Paul and Alan, who are always our designated wusses, slinked out during this. If you are not a Designated Wuss, you can check out the whole heavy-sigh-inducing thing on YouTube. I do not recommend it.

So we remaining three needed a bit of fresh air afterwards, and I convinced Dave to put on Point Blank, because Lee Marvin being a badass can heal many wounds.

I’ll be frank: since the last time I’d seen Point Blank,I’d read the source novel, The Hunter, by Richard Stark aka Donald E. Westlake, and I’d conflated the two; the movie is quite definitely drawn from the book, but the novel is leaner, meaner, more tense. John Boorman directed the movie, and there’s quite a bit of Boorman angst and psychedelic melancholy at play here, way more than I remembered. But it’s a good flick, a good way to decompress, and man, Lee Marvin really does want his money, which became our riff for what was left of the evening. “That guy must really want his money.”

It was late, we started packing up, and Dave found a showing of Mortal Kombat on cable. Rick said goodnight, but I remained through the end. Hey, it was Mortal Kombat, and if you can’t understand that, then I’m afraid you can’t understand Crapfest, either.

April 11, 2012
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: alice cooper, astrology songs, chor yuen, crapfest, harvey sid fisher, john boorman, justice league of america 1997, kung fu, lee marvin, lo lieh, magic blade, point blank, sonny chiba, ti lung, vincent price . Author: drfreex . Comments: 8 Comments

Presidential Pain

This is an Election Year, and I am tempted to just keep that title for the rest of the year, which I’ll likely spend pretending to not be a member of the human race. Have you looked at the paper lately? It’s scary out there.

But this is not about politics. I will freely discuss this morning’s bowel movements before I will discuss politics, and let me be frank here, I will not discuss this morning’s bowel movement. Banging my head repeatedly into a brick wall is preferable to discussing politics, as the brick wall will let me stop, yet the end result is the same.

So now that I’m discussing politics, let me segue smoothly into what this is actually about, which is what I did on President’s Day.

Now, I realize that I am a poor excuse for an American because I did not buy new furniture on President’s Day, which is apparently the traditional method of celebration. No, in a series of mishaps and professional obligations, there had not been a Crapfest in many months. Some of us felt this absence quite keenly, and bemoaned the fact that there was a major project at Main Street Theater that was taking host Dave out of the equation through March.

Then Dave remembered President’s Day.

That was going to be a day off for him, and for Alan, who is another actor who wouldn’t be doing children’s shows on a school holiday. I work at a State college, so I was also free for that day, and the economy had finally caught up with Rick, who was unemployed, or as he put it, “Finally free to find a decent job.” Paul and Jeff had to work, as they are employed by Nazis who care nothing for our great country’s heritage and furniture shopping. The Other Dave had to bow out at the last minute, dealing with a flu epidemic in his household.

So there was just the four of us, the original four. Haha, how we laughed at the others, and indulged in the sudden glut of fabulous junk food that had brought in anticipation of a crowd twice our size. We were the Hardcore of the Apocalypse!

And, judging from the way the evening played out, we were determined to put that to the test.

As we counted coup, doled out the chips and various dips and party trays, the Warner Archive disc of The Mighty Mightor and Moby Dick played in the background. Yes, the glorious days of a caveman superhero and a literary giant reduced to fighting supervillains with two teens named Tom and Tub. You can safely assume Tub was the fat one.

Dave then started the ball rolling with… oh God… with… (just take a deep breath and say it) …Jokes My Folks Never Told Me. You will get nervous during the opening credits when you notice the number of Woolerys involved in this production – not one of which is Chuck. This could generously be called a sketch anthology movie in the vein of Kentucky Fried Movie, though lacking the wit, originality, or energy of that movie. The script for Jokes is apparently taken from one of those “adult” joke books I kept seeing in bus terminals back in the 70s. The reason your folks never told you these jokes were a) your parents likely had some wit and taste, and b) they knew how pathetically ancient the jokes were, and assumed they had long ago been buried in the cornfield.

Actions which – in the source joke, in its original form in that joke book – would be glossed over with a few words, are played out in real time to pad the running time. There are plenty of naked women to make sure you don’t demand your money back, yet not enough to dull the ennui that somehow also cuts like a knife. Here’s a couple of clips. Don’t click on them.

YouTubes of this movie come and go, so let’s see how long these last, especially that NSFW first joke. The second joke is significant, I am told, because the teen is a young Anthony Keidis from The Red Hot Chili Peppers. That is still no reason to click on these clips, which, incidentally, you should not do.

FOOL! I TOLD YOU NOT TO DO THAT! Well, now, imagine this going on for 82 minutes. I also swear that the movie was actually three hours long. In fact, Dave was surprised to discover that the second gorilla sketch was NOT the end of the movie, and that it in fact went on for another twenty minutes/years.

I took this photo of Rick at the very moment his soul left his body, after about the third “Farmer’s Daughter” sketch:

Dave claims he was introduced to this movie at the age of 12 by some hellspawned classmate whose parents had Showtime or something. Dave is also a horrible War Crimes Nazi whose word cannot be trusted in any way, manner or form.

We started doing serious damage to Dave’s vodka supply during this, and decided to cook up the pulled pork Rick had brought to fortify ourselves, and to let scar tissue develop over our raw, bleeding psyches after Jokes My Folks Never Told Me. During this, we played Sh! The Octopus which I was introduced to by Sandy Peterson at the last T-Fest. Sh! is a darned fine parody of Old Dark House movies, made during the heyday of old dark house movies, featuring some jokes the Three Stooges would later rip-off and that odd comedian who goes “Woo hoo hoo! Woo hoo!” during old Looney Tunes. It is also available from Warner Archive, a gesund on them.

It was also apparently too full of quality, as it was pulled off before finishing, even if it is only about an hour long. Too bad, as we never got to the best damned part of the movie. THIS IS A TREMENDOUS SPOILER, so don’t watch it if you ever intend to see Sh! The Octopus or if you have a head full of drugs:

And what did we take Sh! The Octopus off to watch? Things. This is bitter irony at industrial levels of bitter.

There is an alternate timeline in which I never fell in with the Daily Grindhouse guys, and in which I never saw Things. This alternate me is much happier, and does not have the pale, haunted look which I now sport. Things is a Canadian straight-to-video horror movie, from the spectacular salad days of Canadian straight-to-video horror movies. By which I mean a couple of metalhead hosers decided they liked horror movies, so they should make a horror movie. How hard can it be, eh?

Things is made on Super 8, the sound is almost totally dubbed, the music editing is done, charitably, with a hatchet and scotch tape. In order to get some name recognition for the box, they gave porn star Amber Lynn $2500 to play a news anchor and to read some cue cards which get further and further away from the camera. The only bit I can find on YouTube is a mash between one of Lynn’s more lucid news bumpers, and an appearance by star/producer Barry Gillis on actual Canadian TV to pimp the movie:

Thank your lucky stars that there’s no more of Things on YouTube. This movie is maddening. A horror movie plot is set in place, which is then studiously ignored for most of the movie. Excuses like “Dream logic” and “surrealism” are tendered in its defense – and the trouble is you can almost buy that. Why would characters be doing strange, nonsensical things in these circumstances, unless the script meant them to? Is there even really a script? Is this genius, or hackwork?

If I were to go through every bizarre … thing… in Things, we would be here all night. Here’s The Daily Grindhouse podcast that started this misery. Joe Bannerman says I sound defeated throughout. That’s a fair assessment. I can tell you it hit Crapfest like a neutron bomb. Alan’s brain seemed to shut itself down in self-defense. His wife would later ask us what we had done to him. “Destroyed his ability to ever again feel joy” was the answer.

Curse you, Canada. You fight dirty.

There really is no way to follow up Things; everything tastes like ashes. Dave put on possibly the only thing he could, which was Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. This is the short film that traces the professional life of Karen Carpenter and her ultimate death due to anorexia nervosa – and it’s all done with Barbie dolls. Despite that, it’s a serious look at the disorder, and quite sympathetic to Karen, although this is accomplished by making everybody else unsympathetic. The work with the dolls is pretty remarkable, especially the sets. However, filmmaker Todd Haynes didn’t get permission for the umpteen songs used on the soundtrack, lost a copyright infringement suit, and all copies of the movie were ordered destroyed (though apparently MoMA keeps a copy it cannot show). Therefore, WE WERE STRIKING A BLOW FOR LIBERTY ON PRESIDENTS DAY, YO.

Alan excused himself about midway through Superstar; he had early morning shows the next day. He was currently involved in Jackie and Me, which is about Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in baseball, and he was apparently playing Utility Racist #1. Too bad he left early, because we finished up the evening with something Rick had been plugging for a long time, and I finally came over to his side after hearing a Projection Booth podcast on it: Darktown Strutters. If he’d stayed, Alan could have picked up some Racist Tips.

Holy cow.

The Darktown Strutters is a small (four members) female motorcycle gang who all ride trikes and have impressively outre helmets. The leader, Syreena (Trina Parks, who played Thumper in Diamonds are Forever) is looking for her missing mother; she joins up with a street gang/doo-wop gang, finds out the corruption goes deep into the police’s reactionary Alert Squad, and is led by the local philanthropist/food magnate, who is a dead ringer for Colonel Sanders.

That short synopsis sounds like pretty typical blaxploitation fare, but what it does not tell is how bugfuck insane this movie turned out to be. This is basically a human cartoon, complete with sped-up foot chases and comedy sound effects. It is so far removed from reality that at its most racist, it somehow doesn’t seem too mean-spirited, and believe me, this movie is racist against everyone. At one point I opined that this was actually the movie Robert Townsend was in at the climax of Hollywood Shuffle, where the white director is telling him that his pimp character should thrust his butt out because “You know how those people walk.”

It is one bewildering moment after another; The Colonel has the world’s smallest cotton patch in his front yard, faithfully being picked by compliant darkies clad in Antebellum clothing, and numbers among his servants ringers for Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben (in fact, Aunt Jemima hands out huge pancakes to be used as throwing weapons in the final fight scene). Syreena, escaping the extensive dungeons under the mansion, comes upon The Dramatics, in a cell, who proceed to sing a medley of their hit, “What You See Is What You Get”, while Syreena grooves nearby (that particular alarm system certainly stopped her escape). There are Klansmen on motorcycles. The Alert Squad has a light the size of a Volkswagen atop their car. And, of course, the fat cop who is always getting stuck in the back seat of that car (and any doorway he encounters) is named Officer Tubbins, which is surely the best name since Porkins. Or maybe he was meant to be the character from Moby Dick, all grown up.

This is where Darktown Strutters – which was later re-titled Get Down and Boogie when it became apparent that no one wanted to see a movie named after a somewhat racist Ragtime standard – becomes a worthy follow-up to Things: is it a parody of blaxploitation movies? Or merely the worst blaxploitation movie ever made? (I still say that’s Blackenstein, but that’s a discussion for another day – we’re already over 2000 words here).

This movie will WHAT?

After Darktown Strutters, Dave, Rick and I just sat there for a while, silent, stunned. It had been a brutal evening, to be sure. Usually Crapfests are punctuated by at least one movie that is enjoyable and affirming in its own way – the musical version of Jack the Giant Killer, the unfettered mayhem of Shogun Assassin… this time, though, it was three movies that probably shouldn’t exist, for which there is no good reason, and we felt like we had gone ten rounds with Rocky. Dave later said he hadn’t felt that whipped since we had sat through an evening composed of three movies by or featuring Graydon Clark.

I wish to point out that was Dave’s brilliant idea, and everyone regretted it. Except for Rick, who finally got to see Joysticks again.

I felt tired, but it was a good tired. In a lot of ways, it was facing the worst life had to throw at you, and coming out the other side, shaken but alive and triumphant. There will some day be another Crapfest – and hopefully we will have some movies that have actual plots – but when those who did not attend complain about the movies, we will look at them from our battle-scarred heights and intone, “Fuck you. I’ve seen Things,” but only because it would take too long to say “Fuck you, Tinkerbell, I saw Jokes My Folks Never Told Me, Things AND Darktown Strutters all in the same day.“

February 25, 2012
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: barry gillis, crapfest, darktown strutters, get down and boogie, jokes my folks never told me, mighty mightor, moby dick, sh the octopus, things . Author: drfreex . Comments: 5 Comments

The Crap of July

Well, the 4th of July Parade (held on the 3rd of July) was, as predicted, a dreadful ordeal. Setting up cameras in the heat, moving the camera back into the shade so the electronics wouldn’t cook, walking back and forth from the cameras to the air-conditioned control center. At one point when I checked, the heat index was 111 degrees. The nice thing about control being air-conditioned was having that place to retreat. The bad thing about it was it necessitated running a lot of cable. Cable we did not possess or even own, as it turned out. Could have been prevented by moving control out to the heat with the rest of us, but that wasn’t going to happen. By the time the Parade actually began, we had six out of seven cameras online, which was a minor fucking miracle. The Parade itself was rather underwhelming, but the fact that we managed to pull our part off carries with it a certain feeling of accomplishment.

I wasn’t needed for the actual 4th of July broadcast, which was very good, since when I got up Monday morning I couldn’t put any weight on my bum leg. So I spent most of the day with my leg up, searching out episodes of Mythbusters I had not yet seen on Netflix Instant. For America.

I knew it was going to be like that. I knew there was a fairly good chance that the 3rd would be the day that either crippled me permanently or outright killed me. (As I write this, it is the 6th. I was able to come to work without the cane, and I am not dead. I attribute this to my willingness to sit down as much as possible and let the enthusiastic younger employees do all the work) Therefore, I bullied all my compatriots into a Crapfest on July 2nd. I had no shows that weekend, a financial problem but not an emotional one, as I’m also pretty sure I might have murdered or at least maimed a few drunken audience members.

This still almost did not happen; Dave called about 2pm to inform us that he had a clogged drain problem affecting his whole house. A Crapfest canceled by plumbing problems? My irony gland was throbbing. A quick visit by a plumber, though, and we were underway only an hour later than planned.

While we got settled down, food was set up and cooked, I trotted out my three disc This Is Tom Jones set, which was not crap by any means. Tom Jones is a hell of an entertainer and these selections from his 1969-1971 ABC variety series… well, here is a taste:

That is a bare minute and a half out of a set that lasts some fifteen minutes at least. The very first show has The Moody Blues, Mary Hopkins (“Those Were The Days”), Richard Pryor and Peter Sellers. One episode. We went on to episodes featuring The Who, and, as seen above, that luminous appearance by Little Richard. The eps always end with Jones in a concert setting, sweating and singing his heart out.

Well, it’s kind of hard to force yourself to sit through crap after that, so rather than ease us in, I went for the throw-the-patient-into-some-cold-water treatment, and an episode of Chuck Norris: Karate Kommandos, of which there appears to be only five episodes anyway. Enough to run each afternoon for a week, and sell some action figures.

There is a real desire evident to make this the Chuck Norris equivalent of GI Joe; Chuck and his troops have far-ranging authority in his fight against an organization of super terrorists. There is a lot here to work with, and some day I should do a full review.

Food still not ready? Time for some Birdman!

Birdman is one of the lesser Hanna-Barbera superheroes, frankly (I still have no idea who this BIRMAD might be…). He got a complete season DVD set due to the Adult Swim Harvey Birdman Attorney At Law series, and since The Other Dave was a big fan, I brought it. We watched two Birdman stories and one of The Galaxy Trio shorts, and I remember nothing about them. Except Birdman constantly shouting “BIRRRRRRRRRRDMAN!” because he was very conscious of his branding.

Thank God, the fajitas are finally cooked, and now it is time for a movie. Dave was foiled when he discovered that Netflix had removed his choice, Jaws The Revenge, and instead trotted out Jack The Giant Killer. The musical version.

Jack was a fairly infamous attempt to imitate the success of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, right down to hiring its two leads, Kerwin Matthews and Torin Thatcher, and its director, Nathan Juran. Columbia threatened a lawsuit, and in an attempt to recoup their investment somehow, the producers had to change Jack into something 7th Voyage was not: a musical. But not by bringing back the actors and shooting additional footage, noooooo. There was already a leprechaun in a bottle (an ‘imp”, if you believe the script), who spoke in verse; that’s a natural for some music. But the rest…

It is best to simply let this version speak for itself, as it were. Jack is trying to sneak into the evil sorcerer’s castle to rescue the princess:

If anything, we thought this version of Jack needed even more musical numbers. It was very, very bizarre, easily the high point of the evening. Having created and uploaded that clip, I am becoming obsessed with the idea that seems to be Thurl Ravenscroft providing the basso side of that duet.

By now, Rick was positively vibrating to complete the Ginger Trilogy by watching Girls Are For Loving. I have a longer review of it here, but suffice to say: It ain’t no Abductors.

There is a lot more money invested in Girls, and perversely, the movie suffers for it. There is a general bid for respectability; Don Schain (or, as I prefer to think of him, Mr. Cheri Caffaro) really wants to do a Dr. No-style movie, but doesn’t have the chops. The sleazery is there, though not enough to salvage the flick for Ginger fans. Ginger is sluttier than ever – no, that’s not fair. Caffaro is playing a Liberated Woman, 1973-style, and that means being bewilderingly frank about engaging in the carnal act. Yeah, I still miss the 70s. You youngsters missed out on all the good stuff.

As alluded to earlier, Girls is not a very good movie. Not that this is a requirement for Crapfest, but it is largely bad by dint of being boring, which is bad for a Crapfest. Cheri sings in this one – she’s undercover as a lounge act – and sure enough, just as someone says, “I liked her better when she was taking off her clothes,” she switches to a strip-tease number. There is a Ginger movie struggling to get out, but it’s lost in an ill-defined plot by the anti-Ginger to get rich. Even the nudity seems to be somewhat toned down. This must have really frustrated the grindhouse patrons familiar with the Ginger brand.

Finished up with Five Fingers of Death, which Rick and I both claimed we had watched before, but Dave claimed we had not. Not that it matters – it’s a good flick, and I needed some winding down time to sober up for the drive home. Paul and the Other Dave had already wussed out. Wusses.

So I faced the grueling Next Day with something approaching some peace in my heart and a song on my lips. “A spectacle! A spectacle!”

July 6, 2011
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant, The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: crapfest . Author: drfreex . Comments: 3 Comments

Spring Break Leads to Crap

Yeah, I had another one of those weeks, where I had to schedule breathes in advance. The week before Spring Break, when everyone and everything at my Day Job was trying to get everything nailed down before they left for a week. At the final total, three remote shoots, two live remotes, two shows and one story conference. Followed by a week in which I only had one live remote and two story conferences, and time to actually do something, which of course meant I didn’t do very much. I did spend a lot of time on research for the writing contract, though, and now know more about tongue biopsies than I ever wanted to know.

The end of my Spring Break week, though, yielded another Crapfest, though not as well-attended as the others. It was only myself, Host Dave, Rick and Alan, who had a fortuitous weekend off from his rehearsal schedule. There had been a general muttering about the Crapfests straying from their original intended purpose, which was watching as many trashy R-rated movies with exposed breasts as possible, so this night’s schedule was dubbed Sleaze-O-Rama, and as this seemed to lead to a reduced audience, I can only assume we are returning to G-rated fare for the remainder of the year.

While waiting for the others to arrive – I had casually ignored Dave’s sudden plea to move the beginning up an hour – I convinced him to put on Dark and Stormy Night, which is Larry (Lost Skeleton of Cadavra) Blamire’s tribute/pastiche of black-and-white Old Dark House Movies. I love it, and I knew Dave was one of the few people conversant enough with the tropes of that genre to also appreciate it.

Rick arrived at the halfway mark and enjoyed it too, so there. We have now penciled in Lost Skeleton for a future Crapfest. Alan arrived, and we could finally cook the carnitas, eat, and begin the proceedings. And, at long last, I would watch Scorchy.

Scorchy is Connie Stevens’ exploitation movie. There may be more, but the lady’s filmography is so full of TV movies and episodes that it tends to stand out as the only one.

Scorchy led to a lot of head-scratching, not the least of which is because nobody ever refers to Stevens’ character as “Scorchy”. She’s Jackie Parker, a police detective who’s been working undercover to bust a heroin ring. This means posing as a jet-setter type on the taxpayer’s dime – for a year and a half – while ingratiating herself to the wife of the head of the ring, played by Cesare DeNova.

The second instance of head-scratching comes at the expense of the poster above, which, surprise surprise, lies. Ms. Stevens only makes love once, and doesn’t make with the killin’ until the end of the picture, which certainly doesn’t fit into one evening.

Scorchy is basically an over-long episode of Police Woman with occasional – pretty darn occasional – nudity. Ms. Stevens allows us to observe her (admittedly nice) ta-tas three times, and one peripheral character gets an expanded role in the final drug deal, just so she can change clothes and provide us with the required full-frontal nudity.

So Scorchy is not an ideal drive-in movie experience. We were also confused by the soundtrack, which is an electronic-percussion heavy monster more fitting in a 1980s movie, not a 1976 offering like Scorchy. Dave did some research and found it was, indeed, a re-scored version – though no reason was given. (why would anyone fight over the rights to the score of a movie like Scorchy?) There’s also a bizarre bit of re-editing at the end where (SPOILER ALERT) DeNova outfoxes our heroine, and shoots her in the uterus with her own gun (I’m not kidding, the placement of that squib is very specific). He then tries to get away, but Stevens gets out her second hidden pistol and shoots him dead. Then there is a freeze-frame of the bloodied Stevens. It’s a very kung-fu way to end a movie, and according to Dave, in the original version (ANOTHER SPOILER ALERT) she flat out dies.

Still, we allowed as how this was a fair entre into the world of sleaze, if a bit… lacking. So when Rick “I Love White Slavery” began demanding The Abductors as the next flick, there was little dissension.

The Abductors is a Ginger movie, which means it can be counted on to put the “sleaze” into Sleaze-O-Rama. In the epic inaugural Crapfest in Dave’s new home, we had watched the first movie, Ginger. Although, if you only watch one Ginger movie, it should be The Abductors, because star Cheri Caffaro is a lot more comfortable in her role, and there is a little more money in the budget, though not enough to really blunt the sleazery.

The link above will take you to my old review of the flick, but to make it brief: Ginger is a bored jet-setter who likes to style herself as “the female James Bond”. Some insidious organization is kidnapping beauty queens and cheerleaders and selling them to rich white dudes as “mistresses in bondage”. Ginger and a young protegé will, of course, offer themselves up as bait and wind up tied up and in various states of undress. Of course, Ginger, the older, wilier Ginger will employ the powers of Applied Sluttiness to get out of her predicament (as Dave observed, “We really are that stupid, aren’t we?”), while the protegé proves that all you have to do to get a woman to talk is not to torture her, but get her hot and bothered.

Dave also earns extra sleaze points for knowing that the main henchman also appeared in Young Lady Chatterly.

Rick is now a confirmed Cheri Caffaro fanatic, which means a screening of the final Ginger movie, Girls Are For Loving, is in the future. To further your fledgling love for the lady, here is the musical number from The Abductors:

After that, Alan set up his Rock Band equipment, and we played that on into the night. I know bupkiss about playing musical instruments, so I can manage a decent success rate on a bass guitar set at Easy, but that’s the extent of my skill at the game. Still, some fun was had, even if we had said farewell to boobies for the evening.

March 24, 2011
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: cheri caffaro, crapfest, scorchy, the abductors . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

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