So. After The Kid With The Golden Arm, Dave decided that he was ready to hurt us, by which I mean he was also drunk enough to not mind too terribly much when the stray shrapnel from his offering hit his chair. And I have to admit that this time he was prepared, for his choice was the infamous Troll 2.
The first remarkable thing about Troll 2 is that the original Troll apparently made enough money to warrant a movie attempting to piggyback on its “success”. The second remarkable thing is common knowledge: there are no actual trolls in Troll 2; they’re all identified as goblins, though one or two have a superficial resemblance to the title character of the first movie.
So this suburban family is taking a vacation by swapping houses with another family for a week. The other family in question live in a town called Nilbog, which is, of course, Spanish for “spider”. Haha, I am kidding of course, Nilbog is actually German for “witch”. Hoho, fooled you again, Nilbog spelled backward is actually “Natures”. No, no, I’m having you on, Nilbog spelled backward is Goblin.
And it takes seeing a street sign backward to cue the kid main character in to that fact. He would also likely be stumped by the genteel foreign chap wearing a cape whose name is “Alucard”. This is the same kid who keeps talking to his dead grandfather, who is apparently also not so good at reversing odd-looking names but knows a hell of a lot about goblins. For instance, if you eat goblin food, you turn into a human-vegetable hybrid, which the goblins will then eat.
There are two incredible acting jobs in Troll 2. One is the store keeper, Don Packard, who looks like Ernest’s more intense older brother. Seems the guy was actually in and out of mental institutions, and when he saw the finished movie, verified that during his scenes he was not having a good day, if you catch my drift.
The other is Deborah Reed as the Goblin Queen, who, in her guise as Hell Librarian, effects the most amazing pseudo-Romanian accent that DRRRRRRRRRRAAAWS out EVVVERRRRRRRRRRRRRY THIRRRRRRRD WORRRRRRRRRRRRD or so. She also turns into a way uglier version and, at one point, into a corn cob wielding hottie. Really.
There is apparently a robust fan community for Troll 2, one big enough to support the making of a documentary, Best Worst Movie:
Well, all you folks who babble about how Troll 2 is the worst movie ever? You are a bunch of fucking dilettantes. Oh, it’s not good by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, anyone who comes to me sniveling about how Tron: Legacy or The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor is “the worst movie ever made” is going to be strapped in a chair and forced to watch a double feature of Troll 2 and Dondi. I am the goddamn bad movie cenobite, and I have such sights to show you, asshole.
Well, I touched a nerve there, didn’t I? I always knew that some day I was going to have to watch Troll 2, and now I have. Not the worst movie I’ve ever seen, by any stretch. But it is amazingly bad.
At this point, as we have come to expect, Paul and Alan wussed out and left. Leaving just me, Rick and the two Daves. Ergo, it was time to watch something with female nudity in it, so we could abuse the two wusses with that knowledge later. We eventually caved to Rick’s whinings and put in my shiny new disc from Warner Archives (a company formed solely to vacuum money out of my wallet): Pretty Maids All In A Row.
My sweet lord.
A major flop in 1971, this sometimes known as the movie that killed Roger Vadim’s career (although Vadim himself seemed unaware of that). Hell of an odd pedigree: Produced and written by Gene Roddenberry. Rock Hudson is a high school guidance counselor/football coach/former football star who seems to spend most of his time screwing the female population of the high school, when he’s not manipulating a new teacher (the ever-toothsome Angie Dickenson) into deflowering his protegé, who most of the time seems to be the only male student in Awesome High School.
The plot gets under way when one of the cheerleaders shows up dead in the boy’s restroom, to be followed by two more in rapid succession. It’s pretty common knowledge among filmgoers that Hudson’s character is the killer – hell, it’s right there in the poster- which is something a pre-Kojak Telly Savalas can’t prove, but the incompetent Sheriff (and Corrupt Authority Figure) Keenan Wynn seems to know, but the coach is just too valuable to arrest.
This is jet-black comedy, the free love movement of the late 60s taken to a ludicrous extreme, violating the taboo against teacher-student sex, and violating it hard. Vadim makes sure every girl in the school wears short-shorts and mini-dresses, and damn few bras. Not only would this movie not be made today, it couldn’t be made today.
As Rick said afterwards, “There are immoral movies and there are amoral movies – and that had to be one of the most totally amoral movies I have ever seen.”
Well, there’s not much I can add to that. Except I would have totally slept with Angie Dickenson while I was a senior in high school. I’m amoral that way.
This has been the busiest couple of months I’ve had in quite some time. A rational person would point out that I’m working two part-time jobs and am in the middle of a time-sensitive writing contract, which works out to, at best, the equivalent of two full-time jobs. But then the lie to that is that the part-time jobs take more than the hours clocked in, what with research, rehearsing, learning lines, etc. Well, the hell with all that rationalizing and quantifying hoorah. I’ve been busy. I needed a break. i needed crap.
So the last Sunday in January, I was determined to be free and ramrodded a Crapfest into everybody’s schedule. I was not able to attend this year’s B-Fest, neither financially nor time-wise (we opened a show on that Saturday). Just as well, since there was apparently some plague going around, and if the plague did not get you, the scheduled showing of Skidoo would.
So we gathered at Dave’s, who had been largely incommunicado, or at least uncommunicative, due to household projects (and, truthfully, Fallout New Vegas). Most of us made it on time, remarkable for us; with only the Other Dave missing, we started the pizza and, for warm-up, put on one of my recent acquisitions, Raquel Welch’s 1970 TV special, titled, with elegant simplicity, Raquel.
This went a long way toward verifying my discovery of Dave’s Achilles Heel: 70s variety TV. Nobody likesPink Lady & Jeff, it’s impossible, it’s like saying you like having your gonads repeatedly smashed with a meat tenderizer. No, the real clue was Dave allergic reaction, a few Crapfests ago, to The Paul Lynde Halloween Special, which even (for Pete’s sake) featured KISS, one of Dave’s favorite bands. I do believe this was immediately after Dave tried to harm everyone with Battlefield Earth. Piffle. He was dismayed that I harmed him more with Paul Lynde than he had harmed me with John Travolta (again, piffle). This has begun a fearsome rivalry.
Raquel is shot on film, and they want you to know it was on location all over the world. The first segment is Raquel walking around Paris in a gorgeous red cape and singing California Dreaming. Oddly, the lyrics have been rewritten, and once she stops into a church along the way, she does not get down on her knees and began to pray. Nonetheless, you have a gorgeous woman wearing gorgeous clothes in a gorgeous city, and all Dave can do is groan and bitch. Even when the screen blurs into some odd animation and suddenly things get interesting. Did I say Interesting? I meant awesome:
And what does Dave spend the entirety of the dance number doing? Wondering what the guys are wearing on their heads. “You’re looking at the guys?” is the rational response to that, so that is what I said. By the time Dave had figured out what they were wearing, we were back to Paris and the odd, rewritten California Dreaming, which was cause for more complaints. Not that he wanted to run it back.
This only means that next time I’m bringing my disc of the 1967 Nancy Sinatra special Movin’ With Nancy, complete with RC Cola commercials. It was the taste of a New Generation, you know.
The definite high point of Raquel! is the “Age of Aquarius” number, in which Raquel capers about with various signs of the Zodiac, including Leo, Cancer, Scorpio, Cthulhu, and the Baphomet Demon.
Rick: “Those dancers aren’t moving very much.”
Me: “I don’t think they CAN move.”
Raquel’s a good dancer. Her voice is pleasant but untrained. After the Aquarius number, we watch her try to rock out with Tom Jones (which leads to most of us agreeing that Tom Jones is still amazing 40 years after this twaddle), and then… Raquel teams up with Bob Hope to do “Rocky Raccoon”.”Do” in the sense of “hold it down and make it squeal like a pig.” Raquel had already done a few Beatles songs, but this one, which serves as the final number in the special, brought a special form of agony to the proceedings. Here it is, because I hate you:
(or here it would have been if some joyless a-hole hadn’t taken it down)
You would have noticed that version of the song was longer than the Beatles’ rendition by several years. Lucky, lucky lucky…
I will admit that this special has a special place in my personal history, because along with Diana Rigg in The Avengers, Raquel Welch was responsible for quite a few stirrings in my young loins, and the special was… well, special indeed, in that respect. Dear sweet Lord, that woman was gorgeous, and she is still gorgeous. That’s some good genes, right there.
After this, Dave put on something he’d picked up from TCM or something, a comedy from 1951 called Kentucky Jubilee, starring Jerry Collona. Little comedy and littler Jublilee on display. We finally gave up and watched my new copy of the remastered Kid With the Golden Arm, ’cause who don’t like kung fu?
I love flicks with lots of different weapons. It’s also nice to finally know that the banners that the bad guys keep leaving simply say ” Kill kill kill kill kill kill.”
After that, shit got serious. And the next two movies were so extraordinary, they deserve their own column. I’ve made you suffer enough for today.
Hey! Is Ann-Margaret’s 1968 TV special available? What? Why the hell not?
Well, this has been a couple of weeks worth of complications, bad choices and horror stories. Life’s Rich Pageant, in other words. Boring to anyone who isn’t me. Though the time a University Professor informed me she couldn’t be interviewed by me unless it had first been cleared through Communications and Legal (when we both work for the same University) is still a show-stopper for me. Literally.
I’m not bitter that bit of blockage made me do a four minute story about a fucking bake sale. Oh no. Not at all.
So. There is no better way to deal with the suffering that life dishes out than to make others suffer. This is a lesson I have learned from the evening news over the years. So it was undeniably time for another Crapfest.
Dave bought a house in the last year, and moved out to the boondocks, if indeed the eternal devouring Houston has a place that can be considered “boondocks”. He’s now ten minutes closer to me, anyway, which is all that matters in my selfish worldview. So I managed to work my way through the very beginning of rush hour traffic to his domain, while the other fools toiled in the guts of Every Person In A Major City Trying To Get Out To The Boondocks On A Friday Afternoon And To Hell With Everyone Else.
The evening’s itinerary had been the subject of much secrecy, but suffice to say, Dave’s desire to see “something cool” had been squandered on the Crapfest that had not occurred in October (illness, sudden emergencies), and he was once again out for blood, and I was complicit in these desires.
Rick arrived with three DVDs of performances from NBC’s The Midnight Special, which served to fill time until everyone arrived. These were from the latter years, 78-80, when I was in college, and likely too busy playing records and getting stoned to watch Midnight Special. Nonetheless, this stuff was a treat. Bands actually playing their instruments – what a concept. Was Steve Perry ever truly that young? Lionel Ritchie just a face in the crowd with the Commodores. Paul arrived, as did The Other Dave, for his first Crapfest.Alan was absent by virtue of being in a show.
We continued to cherry-pick the performances on Midnight Special, until Paul and Rick conspired to choose Peter Allen’s I Go to Rio. As this was during the aforementioned Lost Weekend phase of my college career, I had missed Peter Allen’s attempt to be a big star in America. I hadn’t even realized he was married to Liza Minelli for while, but then there was likely a period when I was married to Liza Minelli that I just don’t recall. I’ll have to admit that Allen is working his ass off on that stage, dry-humping his piano bench and ripping off his shirt to reveal a leather Yor the Hunter from the Future vest thing while he shakes his maracas and blows time on a coach’s whistle. It was also, bar none, the gayest thing I had seen in a long, long time.
Sadly, that performance is not on YouTube. There is, however, the version he sang at Radio City Music Hall, where he was the first male to dance with the Rockettes:
THIS IS A MESSAGE FROM THE FUTURE: In the intervening years, that Peter Allen video was withdrawn from YouTube… but that very same clip from The Midnight Special became available!
After that, the fajitas being cooked, the margaritas being made, we began in earnest. With the movie Dave had urged me to save, Frankenstein Island.
If you’ve known me for a while, you also know that once upon a time, I was one of a million online movie critics (though when I started, there were only thousands), and I was a member of a coalition of B-movie critics called the B-Masters. We did organized roundtables built around common themes, and the like. One of the traditions was the Secret Santa, where names were drawn out of a hat, and we told whoever we drew what movie he or she was going to review. I was asked to step out of retirement this year, I agreed, and was promptly in a deja vu situation, as I found myself int he same arrangement as the last time I participated: I gave Andrew Borntreger The Spirit, and Ken Begg gave me Frankenstein Island.
Ken Begg, of course, is the proprietor of Jabootu’s Bad Movie Dimension, and he likes to break people. He reduced Andrew to a puddle of protoplasm with Sextette, and Andrew survived shelling in Iraq with aplomb. This is the third movie Ken has given me, the rotten bastard. The first two were Doomsday Machine and Jonathan Livingston Seagull. I think he still resents the fact that Seagull did not kill me.
I got the Retromedia DVD for Frankenstein Island from Amazon Markets for, I think, $2.50, which means it cost more to ship it than its actual worth (which is a telling point). Another tip-off to the quality is that the box says “Directed by Jerry Warren”. Another is that when I spot-checked the disc to make sure it played, the first five seconds make me say out loud, “Oh, fuck you, movie.”
As expected, it is a mess. There is an island, and there are cavegirls, and Frankenstein’s great great etc granddaughter owns it, and she’s married to Van Helsing, and there’s an Igor, and turtleneck-and-stocking-cap wearing zombies apparently on leave from the Batman TV series, and the Monster is chained up in a grotto, and the Floating head of John Carradine crops up ever ten minutes to say the same damned thing over and over again and plastic props and vampire teeth from the post-Halloween sale at Walgreens are in evidence and Cameron Mitchell drunkenly quotes Poe forever and ever and
Surprisingly, this did not break our audience. If anything, it was embraced, as we attempted to keep the incredibly ambitious plot straight in spite of the inept delivery. A bit of palate-cleansing was performed by an episode of Super President (which people still don’t believe existed) and it’s companion feature, the infinitely more badass Spy Shadow. These were also well-received.
Not so our second feature.
It is probably due to the fact that, after much anticipation, I had recently seen The Losers, another DC comics adaptation recently, and was incredibly disappointed, but I liked Jonah Hex. Probably not going to see it ever again, but it was okay. Even though I spent most of the time, as the only person in the room who had read the comic book, confirming that “No, that’s not how it is in the book.”
Best running gag: The Other Dave’s “Aw man, that was the building where we stored all our dynamite!” “Aw, man, that’s the train where we stored all our dynamite!” “Aw, man…”
The Other Dave then begged off, pleading an early morning. which meant it was time for our last surprise feature of the evening:
Yes, that is Ron Ormond’s Please Don’t Touch Me, which had been requested long ago by Paul. An “educational” film, it purports to be a case study of hypnosis and its use in psychoanalysis, along with a bit of historical re-enactment and mondo footage for background. In general, it is the story of Vicki, the drool-inducing redhead in the clip, and the fact that she can’t have sex with her husband. Even the non-psychs in the audience can point out that this might be due to the fact that her mother apparently inserts “Too bad you were raped at the age of 15” into every conversation with her.
Of course, the power of hypnosis and the illuminating lantern of psychoanalysis demonstrates that she was not raped – she was assaulted and passed out, but a kindly passer-by interrupted the crime – and has only been going on her mother’s word all this time. And her husband’s wedding ring, of all things, was what set off the association. And all this is accomplished in one session. This guy is the Einstein of psychiatrists.
Of course, the usual excuse for making an educational movie is giving the audience some skin under the protection of the “educational” excuse, which doesn’t quite happen in Please Don’t Touch Me, even when, via hypnosis, we experience Vicki’s wedding night, When The Trouble Began. There’s a naked back, a bit of side-boobage, and a lot of salaciousness, but nothing explicit, which is surprising when you consider Dwain Esper was throwing nudity at audiences in the 30s all in the name of education.
Also, Ruth Blair, who plays Vicki, is the only woman I have ever seen who can make sliding onto a psychiatrist’s couch sexy, with a expertly nonchalant plucking at her skirt to reveal her garter belt. That’s talent.
The evening wound down, and there was only one thing left: I had promised Rick the episode of Pink Lady and Jeff guest-starring Jerry Lewis, and Dave’s earlier glee at inflicting Frankenstein Island and Jonah Hex on his unsuspecting guests turned into agony and horror. This wasn’t just decompressing, this was explosive decompression.
There is not much left to say about Pink Lady and Jeff. The bits with Jerry Lewis actually have some laughs, primarily because Lewis wrote that stuff himself. One of the interminable Art Nouveau salesman bits gets a bit funny when an elephant goes off-script and Jeff Altman, the Antichrist of Comedy, starts yelling that it’s not funny. A sketch about the second inauguration of Abraham Lincoln turning into a Dean Martin style roast yields the racist joke of the night, about plantation workers starting the NBA; Alice Cooper appears on tape to do “Clones”, and the @#$%ing kids I am watching this with ask, “When did Alice Cooper turn into Gary Numan?”
And we set off to our own hovels, secure in the knowledge that a) That was the house where kept all our dynamite; b) Though there was unaccountable longing for a Frankenstein Island sequel, the Jonah Hex sequel ain’t happening; and c) despite Paul’s whining there are still three unseen episodes of Pink Lady and Jeff.
Finished my Faculty Art Show story, if just barely. Slept till my alarm clock this morning. Something disastrously horrible must be waiting in the wings.
One of the VHS tapes I did not toss out int he VHS purge was my Super President bootleg, duh. I was also delighted to find my legit Here Comes the Grump tape, a show that was meant for the kids, sure, but the kinda warped little kids, with some designs inspired by Yellow Submarine, I’m sure. It has a goofy psychedelic-lite vibe going for it. There are also entire episodes on YouTube, but the commies have requested that embedding be disabled. Jerks.
So you just have to be happy with watching the extraordinary opening for Super President one more time.
WordPress found a way around the non-embed? Have some brain-wrecking cartoons:
After a day of attempting to recover from Friday’s debauchery – a day which included a show of my own and the realization that I wasn’t really hungry until 4PM – We casually drifted together again at Dave’s. The rest of the sausages and pork tenderloin were cooked, as Dave remembered something he had realized Friday night: Rick had never seen Mortal Kombat.
Well, now I guess you don’t need to see the movie. Rick’s screams were remarkably similar to those produced during GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra.
I think Paul W.S. Anderson get s a raw deal, personally. If I made lists, I wouldn’t be putting his movies in the Top Ten, but they always entertain me, and frankly, that’s all I ask of a movie: enlightenment or edification would be nice, certainly, but I’m largely there to forget my cares for a while. And Mortal Kombat is a not-so-guilty pleasure; Anderson was asked to make a movie out of a video game that is pretty much different flavors of punching and kicking and pulling out spines, and little else. Mortal Kombat is pretty much what would happen if a bunch of kids got together and decided to play Mortal Kombat even though they didn’t have any consoles. You know, play-acting, like I did with my friends when we played WWII decades before Castle Wolfenstein was invented. Rules for the tournament that comprise the movie are improvised on the spot, as required by the plot – which is also improvised on the spot.
So Mortal Kombat is essentially a spiritual companion to GI Joe: a big-budget, loud, but essentially empty visualization of an adolescent/childish pursuit. Prime material for this sort of gathering.
In retaliation Rick insisted on more Pink Lady & Jeff. Did I mention Paul finally made it tot he fest? Paul finally made it to the fest. He was in time for me to hit my 20 minute limit on Jeff Altman, and for Dave to start his next shot across our bows. He admitted that he had never seen it, then hit play, fading back to relish what he hoped would be our cries of dismay and agony.
Oh yeah, the only time Nancy and Ronnie actually made a movie together. Unlike what you may have been told, Hellcats of the Navy isn’t a bad movie. It’s not a particularly good one, but it’s no Dondi. Ronnie plays a WWII sub commander who makes a tough call and leaves a man behind during a mission. As luck would have it, the luckless sap was dating Ronnie’s ex-girlfriend (Nancy) which makes his demise suspicious, to say the least. So he spends the rest of the movie trying to regain the respect of his second, Arthur Franz (as usual, playing a non-commissioned dick), disobeying orders to win the war, blah blah blah. Paul and I were actually enjoying it, but it does get very talky and long-winded in the second act, and Dave actually asked for the return of Pink Lady & Jeff. Yes, he regretted that.
Our actor contingent finally made the scene after their Sunday matinée, and lucky, lucky them, they were there for the return of Mie and Kei and (shudder) Jeff. I had been asked to put on the episode guest-starring Jerry Lewis (double shudder), but I screwed up under the tender ministrations of Dr. Vodka and instead put on the un-aired sixth episode, which featured Sid Caesar, Red Buttons (both on their second eps) and for music, Bobby Vinton and Roy Orbison. Oh, and Byron Allen. This was C-list heaven.
There was a hypnotic awfulness about the show that held people spellbound, and we actually got through the entire episode. Paul had started out lobbying for a “70s TV Night”, which he quickly reneged upon, especially after the Bobby Vinton Medley of His Hits. The casual racist humor which runs through the series absolutely blossoms during a sketch in which Sid Caesar plays Pink Lady’s father, complete with gibberish Japanese. One wonders what the girls thought of this, though they handle it like pros. Frankly, after only a week of this crap, they were probably just trying to make it through their six eps and get back to their sold-out stadiums.
This was really bewildering to those of us – well, only Dave and I, perhaps – who liked Caesar and knew he was funny:
The other amazing thing is, that, I believe alone of all the featured hot musical guests, Roy Orbison is actually onstage with Pink Lady. Most of the others – Alice Cooper, Cheap Trick, Blondie – will give you a blank stare if you ask them about the time they appeared on Pink Lady & Jeff. It usually came down to Mie and Kei struggling through “An naow – Cheepu Trikka!” aaaaaand we cut to a video. Which wasn’t too bad, except that you usually saw the same thing on The Midnight Special a week or two earlier.
After watching this episode, many bitter tears and recriminations – and Rick whining “But what about the Jerry Lewis episode?”, it was decided to spend the rest of the night playing Beatles Rock Band, moving eventually to Rock Band 2 and Dave’s neighbors asking him to turn that crap down. I eventually get talked into picking up the bass guitar for a few songs (though only on the Beatles and only on easy – the playlist on Rock Band 2 is a litany of “who?”s from me)(weirdly, I think i would have done better on DJ Hero, but I’m probably fooling myself), and that’s how the evening wound down. Alan actually outlasted me for stick-around-itude when I leave around 1:30.
I’m going to be shooting at the Houston Hot Sauce Festival tomorrow, so I took Monday off, allowing myself a bit of a sleep-in. Next time, of course, we won’t be pretending that we’re younger and able to pull off such feats as this; Mrs. Dave will be back, with a concurrent return to reason, I presume. I am also going to enjoy pointing out for some time that there was a marked lack of R-rated naughty flicks during this golden opportunity. Ronnie Reagan indeed!
And there’s still that Jerry Lewis episode of Pink Lady & Jeff, just waiting out there in the dark, like Jason at Camp Crystal Lake.
So. After the drawn-out dismal debauchery of Starcrash II, aka Escape from Galaxy 3, aka Dear Sweet Lord What Is This Crap, Rick decided it was finally time for him to experience Ginger. Dave left the room for a moment, and since we were unable to switch his coffee for Folger’s Crystals at that late hour, we instead switched his low-budget sleaze for Pink Lady & Jeff.
How best to preface this? Pink Lady & Jeff is one of those legendarily awful shows that is usually lumped in with stuff like Turn On (a half-hour Laugh-In clone that was canceled after one episode) and You’re In The Picture (a Jackie Gleason-hosted game show which also lasted one episode). The thing is, Pink Lady & Jeff ran for five complete episodes, out of the six it had shot. NBC kept this thing limping along for five weeks.
Pink Lady were Mie and Kei, a Japanese singing duo that were filling stadiums in their native land at the time. So bring them over for a fast six episodes probably sounded like a good gamble, if you ignore one fact: the girls did not speak English. And the producers – oh yes, Sid and Marty Krofft – decided that they would only sing in English, and say their lines phonetically in their “comedy” banter with so-star Jeff Altman.
Jeff Altman is the Antichrist of comedy. He is the only comedian I have ever seen bomb – and bomb miserably, even the crickets were silent – on The Tonight Show. And since the headliners spoke no English, their duties were minimized to lip-synching their earlier recorded English songs, dancing, and the occasional line during the sketches – and every single comedy sketch stars Jeff Altman. Altman was still doing Nixon jokes in 1980, which gives you some idea of the quality of the material on display here, and even the guest stars are drawn into the whirlpool of despair that is Pink Lady & Jeff.
A pre-Ernest Jim Varney is on the regular cast, always playing straight man to Altman, an appalling waste of talent second only to all the times I was not cast as Hamlet. I’ll be honest: I can only stand Pink Lady & Jeff in 20 minute doses. So I took pity on Dave – and myself – and put on Ginger. Here’s some of the very small amount they’ll let you put on YouTube:
(Allow me to intrude from the future. In the intervening years, someone has taken down the tame clip I originally posted, but now there’s a totally sleazy and extremely NSFW trailer. Go figure. Be wise about where you click this:)
Ginger is a rich girl who is – for reasons unknown to everyone with a smidgen of gray matter – recruited to take on a crime ring in some Jersey suburb. Well, the reason seems to be she volunteered, and everyone else the detective agency sent in got killed. Anyway, Ginger uses her powers of Applied Sluttiness to break things up, and turns out to be a complete psychopath working through every trauma in her life. This includes committing murder twice, castrating some poor bastard, having lesbian sex and engaging in the Citizen Kane of catfight scenes. I did a full review, back in the day, if you’re interested. I haven’t broken the news yet that there are two sequels, but given that were enthusiastic in joining in with the thug Jimmy’s demands for “Hot. White ASS!!!!” I guess it was enjoyed.
It was, by now, 3AM, and we were all feeling the effect of accumulated crap weighing on our brains. So we agreed to meet again Sunday, and continue this pointless mangling of our formerly beautiful minds.
And you know what that means: more Pink Lady & Jeff.
So my pal Dave had always hosted the crapfests. Dave is an inveterate tinker; starting with a fairly primitive LCD projector we snagged from a failed business venture, he eventually worked his way up to better model, a nice big screen that unfurled from his ceiling, a nice sound system, a media computer platform – all on the cheap, all in an apartment. So when he and his wife finally bought a house, we expected… well, I have no real idea what we expected. But this time he had an opportunity to rig something from the ground up, instead of gradual layers.
So, with his wife out of the country for a week, we decided to break things in with the first crapfest in a while. Of course, there had to be a period while they settled into their new house. Dave is a handy guy, and was performing repairs while also setting up his system in a very oddly shaped room, employing SCIENCE! We were also out of practice in planning the damned things, apparently. Wires got crossed, schemes went awry, blah blah blah.
A goodly portion of our core group was involved in a production of Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma at Main Street Theater, and would be absent for most of the event. Reveling in his newfound freedom, Dave had decided it was to be a Marathon of Mediocrity. My own personal scheduling woes dictated my attendance Friday and Sunday only; Paul interpreted that as Sunday only.
Hearing that Dave now had a back porch on which to operate his grill, Rick went nuts – or to use his terminology, “batshit” – and hauled in enough meat to feed a small army – or, really, just the three of us to bursting. Not to mention his housewarming gift to Dave of a case of Mexican Cokes, the types with actual sugar instead of high fructose corn crap. Dave spent the next fifteen minutes hugging the case and doing his imitation of Daffy Duck in that Ali Baba cartoon.
Okay, bit of a trip to get to the reference there, but as with all things Daffy, totally worth it.
My first selection was to be the final fight scene of the Thai action movie Chocolate, but again, wires got crossed, and there was a lot of going in and out to tend the charcoal in the grill anyway. Somehow, everyone managed to be in the room during the fight scenes, which are amazing. Particularly that last one, conducted across four floors’ worth of exterior ledges and an elevated train trestle. Just stunning stuff.
As the food was finally prepared, Dave decided he really needed to have a movie that went boom to work out his sound system. He’d already done this for me a few weeks prior with an impromptu double feature of Shoot-Em-Up and Tropic Thunder, but Rick had not yet experienced this. Being who we are, we also had to torment Rick, and so we put in GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra. Dave was the only one who hadn’t seen it. I had been lucky enough to see it with a 12 year-old. Rick had seen it alone, and hated it. Having it be ten times louder did not change his opinion. The screams were incredible.
Dave’s final verdict: “I didn’t hate it.” Rick’s: “Why? WHYYYYYYYYYYYYY??!!”. Dave also pointed out that, unrealistic as the action scenes were, they were also how they would have played out on the bedroom floor with the action figures.
Having applied some painkilling drugs to ourselves in the form of Dr. Vodka, Dave decided it was time to unleash his choice for the evening. He made us hide our eyes while he loaded it. And what unfurls before our eyes but something that claims to be Starcrash II. The veracity of this claim is immediately put in doubt when we note that title is not in the same font as the rest of the credits. In fact, it appears to have been literally made with a Dyna-Tape Label Maker.
I wish I was joking about that.
The movie’s major claim to that name is the fact that they seem to have bought all the spaceship FX from the actual Starcrash and are determined to use it all. The plot is about a princess named Belle Star who is escaping some bad guy whose name I’ve totally forgotten because I named him Disco Beard.
Eventually I give up and poke around the IMDb on my smartphone and determine that what we are watching is actually something called Escape from Galaxy 3. Belle Star and the Fake Marjoe escape Disco Beard and are supposed to search the universe for something to defeat the bad guy… I think… because they stop on some primitive out-of-the-way planet to effect repairs on their ship. Of course that planet happens to be Earth. I was fearful they were going to land here in the year 1980, just ahead of the Cylons, but no, there’s been an atomic war and everyone’s back to tribalism and wearing Greco-Roman disco clothes.
This is also the Cinemax planet, as BellStar and the Fake Marjoe learn how to make love on this planet. We slowly find out they’re immortal and don’t know about things like sex, drinking or eating. They also develop superpowers, without warning, at convenient times. Disco Beard is defeated by such powers in less than a second – though this seems to have something to do with the fact that BellStar and Fake Marjoe now know how to make the Beast With Two Backs. Cripes, I don’t know. They go back to Planet Cinemax, to live out their now-mortal lives. Which, considering that the natives alternated between loving them and wanting to burn them at the stake, probably won’t be too long.
My major contribution is pointing out that every time BellStar and the Fake Marjoe exit their craft, they are shown walking down the trail leading from it – that’s across the entire screen one and a half times – in real time. And they do it a lot. That probably added five minutes to the total running time.
And that’s a thousand words. I’ll inflict more of our adventures into awfulness on you tomorrow. And trust me – we haven’t hit the low point yet.
It had been way, way too long since our last get-together. A little over a month ago Rick and I forced the issue and there was a small gathering, a mini-gathering as it were, Dave and Rick and myself; it could not truly be called a crapfest because the movies watched that night were Primer, The Loved One and The Kid With the Golden Arm. These break no one, and in some cases were quality entertainment.
But now host Dave was off his beneficent kick, during which we were watching other movies of a non-painful quality. Shogun Assassin, Marjoe, Master of the Flying Guillotine, Starcrash Okay, Starcrash is actually quite painful, but Caroline Munro soothes a lot of pain.
No, this time Dave was threatening us with “the nuclear option”. He wanted us to hurt, and hurt badly. I personally feel this was his lashing out after the finale of Lost, but there is no solid evidence for this. Except for those discussions in the kitchen where each sentence from Dave began with the words, “So you’re telling me that…”
During the arrival portion of the evening, he put on the 1994 version of Fantastic Four. You know, the version that Roger Corman produced so Fox could keep their hands on the FF movie license. This movie is damn cheap, and damn stupid, but you cannot fault its intentions. Roger Corman probably got a lot of people to work on this dirt cheap, if not for free, simply because it was a Fantastic Four movie. And having watched the two big budget abominations that were eventually released, I now feel much more kindly toward this version. If nothing else, this one got Doctor Doom right, and if you get Doctor Doom right, half the battle is won.
Am I right? is that Battle Beyond the Stars music that I’m hearing? And only the finest Video Toaster graphics? Nice John Byrne era costumes, too.
After that, Dave put on the first few minutes of Dondi, because he is a complete and utter bastard. He was not satisfied until Paul burst into tears, and then he finally felt he could unleash his “nuclear option”: Battlefield Earth.
Well, sort of like Godzilla, I’ve seen the nuclear option up close a few times, and impressively though it may suck, it holds little terror for me. Luckily, I was in a room of Battlefield Earth virgins, so I got to feed off their exquisite agony like some Marvel villain. First, I amused myself by claiming I was going to spend the whole movie tilting my head one way or another, so the picture onscreen would actually appear level. This is, of course, a mug’s game and cannot be won. You will hurt yourself if you try.
So after a while, we just fell to playing my favorite Battlefield Earth game, Laugh With The Psychlos. The Psychlos really enjoy their work. Dave himself had not seen the abomination he had set out before us, but I like to think that if he had, it would have been much like what I saw in the living room: Dave standing in the middle of an empty theater, shaking both fists at the screen and bellowing as if the movie could hear him.. I understand he exhibited the same behavior during the Lost finale.
Laugh with John Travolta – won’t you?
Then Dave put on Dondi again, and went outside for a cigarette. “I brought you here to make you suffer!” I could have walked over to his media computer and turned it off, but it’s best not to show weakness in such circumstances.
My turn. First, the only episode of the Japanese TV series Spider-Man that I possess. More appropriately perhaps, Supaidaman. At only about 25 minutes, quite painless, and though people bitched endlessly about the lack of subtitles, there was no need. Supaidaman helps some guy from Interpol fight a bunch of aliens (the faceless cannon fodder dog soldiers distinguished in this series by having duck-like beaks, unlike the faceless cannon fodder dog soldiers in a million other similar Japanese TV series) and their swordfish-headed monster, who spits torpedoes out his mouth.
Supaidaman is out of costume perhaps a minute in this episode, and spends most of rest of the time sticking to walls and kicking bad guys in the beak. Until the monster gets rambunctious (and large) around some fuel tanks and Supaidaman calls in his giant robot.
He’s the Japanese Spider-Man. Of course he has a giant robot.
It was held that the Parker Stevenson American TV version could learn much from the Japanese ratio of kicks to the beak versus talky civilian scenes. I personally like to think of what American comics could learn from this. “Now you will face the wrath of — DOCTOR OCTOPUS!!!” “Now you will face the foot of – my giant robot!” SPLAT!
Here is a clip with subtitles, so it is already apparent I like you more than my movie-watching mates:
Oh, didn’t I mention the subtitles are in French? Foolish man-animals! HAHAHAHAHA
I think it was about this time, during between-movie trips to the snack table, that I was informed Art Linkletter had died too far away from the Gary Coleman epicenter, and could not be considered one of “The Three”, so therefore there was another celebrity death on the way, hopefully one that would be more comfortable sharing a motorcycle with Gary Coleman and Dennis Hopper.
Then it was time to address a certain lacking in our evenings. One that had grown worse, tellingly enough, with the rise of the more *harrumph* quality entertainments, and that… was the lack of boobies.
Yes, these things started with a hideous marathon of movies like Beach Girls and Surf 2: The Movie, leading into Joysticks, H.O.T.S. and Evilspeak. All delights to the adolescent male just discovering cable TV, because of one thing – well, often, two things – boobies.
I was just getting ready to go to college when HBO came to our town. This was the days of the set-top box with one button, the red one for HBO and the black one for regular cable. The young punks I hang with had all sorts of flavors to choose from, Cinemax, Showtime. Punks. I had to make do with drive-ins.
The very first R-rated drive-in booby movie I saw was The Student Teachers, and I had been attempting to get it shown ever since I’d found a copy. Well, tonight was the night. A 1973 movie, I must have seen it in ‘74, and man does it take place in the early 70s. A new teacher at Valley High starts to have “rap sessions” with her kids about sex, which totally riles the squares in charge (Dick Miller included!), especially when some rapist wearing a clown mask starts plying his trade, which is obviously the fault of the sex-ed classes. (Talk about “ripped from today’s headlines”…)
Uh, there’s also some alternative school going on, that needs money, so they’re doing some sort of complicated scam to rip off the local drug ring. It was pointed out that Rube Goldberg would have found the scheme overly complicated, but that it was still more believable than any plan in Battlefield Earth. (“And it makes more sense than the finale of Lost!” Dave complained. “Hush,” said we, “there’s boobies.”)
Besides. The “plot” is merely the mortar that fills the gaps in between topless scenes, and they are plentiful. The movie opens with one, even. There’s only one suspect for the rapist, they don’t even bother with any red herrings. (okay, okay, it’s Dick Miller. You knew that the minute I mentioned him, right?) Look fast in the karate class at the alternative school. That’s Chuck Norris instructing.
The next was mine, too: The Paul Lynde Halloween Special. Man-animals are so simple. All I had to do was say. “KISS is in it.” Well, Alan helped, as he had forced his parents to watch it with him when it was first broadcast, and he assured us that at one point Gene Simmons spit blood or blew fire or balanced his checkbook or something equally awesome.
I didn’t see this the one and only time it aired, October of 1976. That would be my first semester as a Theater Major (Our motto: “Your ass is ours from 2pm until Midnight”). But. It is hard to imagine there was a time when Paul Lynde was a bona fide cultural treasure, doing variety specials every year… then I look at what passes for celebrity today, and suddenly, it’s not so hard.
The plot is almost as lucid as Student Teachers, something about Paul’s housekeeper (Margaret Hamilton) being a witch – fancy that – and witches want Paul to mastermind a way for people to realize that witches are fun people. She is helped in this by Billie Hayes in her Pufnstuf Witchiepoo character, causing the first of many Dave screams of horror.
The witches grant Lynde three wishes, which will result in comedy sketches and songs (yes, Lynde sings), and more screams from Dave, when folks like Betty White and Pinky Tuscadero show up. As Dave also points out, this special is a window to a very narrow period of time; Pinky shows up in Lynde’s first wish, which is to be a trucker with a CB radio and an Elvis jumpsuit. Yes, this is the period in 76-77 when truckers were heroes and people knew who the hell Pinky Tuscadero was.
I realize that’s not her real name, but I defy anyone to tell me her real name without using the Internet. Come on. I dare you. (Alright, it’s Roz “Pinky Tuscadero” Kelly. There.)
Tim Conway gets off the one line, obviously ad-libbed, that makes Dave laugh. Florence Henderson appears (hot as hell in a black sequin dress, I might add) and sings a disco version of “That Old Black Magic”, making Dave scream. And KISS actually do three songs (the last one being Lynde’s last wish). When song #2 appears, it is “Beth”, because it is 1976, and that makes all the KISS fans in the room scream. But I tell you what: you could have heard a pin drop during the other two KISS songs. The Florence Henderson song did not receive such reverence.
Okay, I realize that clip was 85% Pinky Tuscadero and 0% KISS. Here:
Our Paul (not Lynde, but the one sitting on the couch next to me) seemed to truly enjoy the Special just as much as Dave reacted to it like a bulldog chewing on a rabid wasp. I think Dave was more peeved that I had hurt him instead of vice versa, or as I said in my worst Sean Connery, “It’s the Chicago way! They Battlefield Earth one of yours, you Paul Lynde Halloween Special them!” Dave was using words like “kill” “get you”and “you’ll pay for this”, so, yeah… mission accomplished.
The evening wound down with Shriek of the Mutilated, which is a perfect winding-down movie as it plods like a mammoth on its way to bed, enormous nightshirt and cap, with a candle held in its trunk. Where was I? Oh yes. Shriek.
Dave played his old version of it, the one with Hot Butter’s “Popcorn” on the soundtrack. Then he switched to the recent DVD release, with all the gore scenes restored (but the rights to “Popcorn” deemed too expensive). I hadn’t seen this version, I’d only seen the TV print, and their inclusion does aid the movie a bit, if only because their omission was really glaring before, edited out with a cub scout pocketknife and a dull spoon.
Still Shriek of the Mutilated is a movie where the story is advanced by people giving long, detailed speeches about things that have happened offscreen. This is bad enough, but by the time the movie is starting to shamble toward the finish line, people are giving long detailed speeches about stuff that we actually saw happen.
It was a wonderful, wonderful evening though. I hurt Dave more than he hurt me. He was muttering about the Star Wars Holiday Special when I left, which is one Alan always brings up, but that is only because they haven’t seen it. Like having a red-hot wire shoved up your ureter, there is no way to actually know until you have experienced it. Still, I admit that I am amused. I have seen it. It holds no terror for me. But the man-animals think that by showing it, they will hurt me.
This could be fun.
Incidentally, Alan and Paul left right after Shriek started. That might have opened up a couch seat for Rick, but they are total wusses, and that should go on the record.
Another more-than-a-month passed, and our little clique thought itself ready once more for another evening of terrible, terrible cinema. The Greeks had a word for this: hubris. At least, as these things have continued, our choices in food for the evening have gotten better. We started with chips and dip, and have added more and more, until this night: a selection of fajitas, beef and chicken. Host Dave is a very good cook.
Last time, a surprise hit was the Christploitation flick, If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?, in which Southern preacher Estus Pirkle and reformed filmmaker Ron (Please Don’t Touch Me) Ormond showed us how Commies would take over a Godless America and proceed to torture and execute Christians, all with a cast composed of Pirkle’s congregation and a few actors from Ormond’s more heathen days.
In case you forgot that combination of bad acting and bargain-basement gore:
So of course we felt behooved to check out the next picture on the sadly small Pirkle/Ormond ouvre, The Burning Hell, which concerns, unsurprisingly, Hell. This one’s got some money behind it, as apparently Pirkle, Ormond and crew actually went to the Holy Land to shoot some footage; the Biblical sections, in which backgrounds of actual antiquity are cut against painted backdrops that would cause high school theatricals to shake their heads sadly, are quite astonishing. Pale-skinned Beduoins argue with each other in Southern accents, while gentlemen wearing buck-fifty Santa beards pontificate.
Then, of course, there is the Rev. Pirkle’s hyperbole:
The mod fellow looking uncomfortable is Ormond’s son, Tim; in the story that moves our atrocity footage forward, his friend (the one dressed in denim), just got his head ripped off in a motorcycle accident some twenty minutes earlier. Pirkle comforts Tim with the words, “Right now, your friend is burning in Hell.” Oh, yes, this is a scare film in every sense of the word, as every syllable is bent toward expressing how being in Hell sucks, heck, it supersucks. The makeup in the Hell sequences have a sort of raw effectiveness, but all the fearmongering and outright hatefulness get very wearing after a while.
Everyone then decided we were through with Mr. Pirkle forever, but when has that ever stopped me? Apparently Pirkle and Ormond had a bit of a falling out, and Pirkle’s next movie, The Believer’s Heaven was done partly or wholly without Ormond. Turns out Believer’s Heaven was excerpted in Diane Keaton’s excellent documentary, Heaven (The Ultimate Coming Attraction), which explains why I found Pirkle so eerily familiar:
Though it’s good to see that Pirkle had a non-yelly, even gracious side, I still wonder where he’s getting his numbers, especially since it seems Heaven should be infinite in size. Or perhaps not, as it appears, in this cosmology, that only a small percentage of people ever make the cut for Divine Residency. Ormond went on to make a couple more movies, the most notable being The Grim Reaper, in which it takes Jack Van Impe and Jerry Falwell combined to make one Estus Pirkle. YouTube appears to be sadly lacking in clips, but there is one photo I’ve tracked down:
Oh, my, yes. That must be Hell. And isn’t that Alan Cumming on the right?
We plunged into secular Hell after that, also known as Night Warning, or originally Butcher Baker Nightmare Maker. This was infamous, at the time, for starring Kristy MacNicol’s younger brother Jimmy, and for having some rather disturbing undertones. Susan Tyrrell plays a woman who’s raised her sister’s son son from a toddler after a (harrumph) suspicious auto accident. Now the boy is preparing to go to college, and she’s starting to unravel, plotting ways to keep him with her forever.
Psycho pictures like this are not my cup of tea, but I was kept entertained by a superb performance by Susan Tyrrell, a lady who never got the acclaim she deserved. Also impressive: Julia Duffy plays Jimmy’s teenage love interest (creatively named Julia). Yes, there is a nude scene. And she was 30 at the time. We had no idea until we started poking around in the IMDb and doing math.
And then we came to the corker of the evening. You see, one of our group – we’ll call him Rick – is the hand on the tiller of our torment. Somehow, he manages to choose one movie per outing, and somehow we still let him. He is the one who inflicted Dondi upon us. He is responsible for the psych-scarring Naked Ass of Clint Howard in Evilspeak; yet, somehow, when he sent a group e-mail that said, “I wanna see Myra Breckinridge!”, we did not hit the “delete” button as a man.
I had never seen Myra before, so my hand was complicit in its screening (not to mention that it was my DVD). This is an odd movie – I mean, look at that hat on John Huston – yet the surrealism never totally takes hold. Old movie scenes are cut into the action, possibly the first time that was tried in a major Hollywood flick. But really… this is not a very good movie. Had it been confident enough to be as brash as it wanted to be, it might have been much better; as it is…
Paul slinked out before Myra began, muttering something about an early morning. He was branded with the epithet “wuss”. Later, I’m sure he was envied. Rick kept up a constant barrage of pseudo-intellectual claptrap about the symbolism that was unspooling before us, possibly to maintain his fragile sanity, but more likely to keep an increasingly enraged Dave at bay. Finally, we reached a point at which Dave asked, “Now, what does that represent?” and I answered, “Rusty represents the audience, and Myra is about to represent the movie.” A look of slow-dawning horror. “No! NOOOOOOOOO!”
Ah, yes. The infamous dildo-rape scene, which supposedly ended the career of actor Roger Herren. Neither as explicit nor as shocking as you’ve been led to believe (you never even see the strap-on Myra uses on the jock). Farrah Fawcett and Tom Selleck’s careers survived, though, and Mae West went on to make Sextette, with which I have threatened our little group.
Here’s Raquel talking about Myra Breckinridge on the Dick Cavett show, and referring to it as a “smash”, at about the two-minute mark. Bonus: Janis Joplin.
About ten minutes from the end of Myra, Dave announced, “This movie has not broken me. I still have power. Do you have power?” I allowed that I did, and we set to looking through his collection. And that is how we came to end the evening with Robot Holocaust.
Robot Holocaust is bad. It is very very very very bad. It is legendarily bad. Post-apocalypse robots rule everything, the air is poison (except when it’s not), and some warriors fight the power that be. This YouTube compilation has boobies, and it’s still four and a half minutes of your life you’ll never get back.
And now, because dammit, I deserve it – and so do you – More Raquel:
I’ve been away from the movies for a while., concentrating my nerdlight elsewhere. I reveled in the world of crap cinema for quite some time, and in fact got a small amount of notoriety from it. But after a certain amount of time rubbing your own nose in a highly questionable pursuit, you start asking yourself questions. Hateful, hurtful questions like, Why am I doing this to myself? Wouldn’t I rather be watching something good? What am I doing with my life?
So, yeah. You try to distance yourself from the once- defining pursuit that has become toxic. You try to watch those movies you think you should be watching, but even then you steer away from Bergman and Fellini, no, you watch Key Largo and Kiss Me Deadly and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. Eventually, though, you just need your entertainment in a different form. In my case, you start reading. And even then, if you’ve looked at the past few entries, you’ll know it wasn’t what the world at large would define as “real” reading.
The last week, however, I ran to the precipice and did a cannonball back into the world of the crap cineaste. My pal Dave did one of his Bad Movie Nights on Sunday, and the following Saturday was the fifth iteration of T-Fest, a small semi-official gathering started by three of the B-Masters and a gaming legend. But let us take this in order.
Dave began this odyssey of ordure with the classic If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? It was not one of the scheduled entries, but at 58 minutes or so, it was a …”pleasant” surprise, a movie I had only heard of, but had never seen. Exploitation filmmaker Ron Ormond, legend has it, walked away unscathed from an airplane crash and found Jesus waiting for him, which is a very understandable conversion experience. Ormond then fell in with Baptist preacher Estus W. Pirkle, who was having quite a bit of success with a sermon of the same name, already turned into a book and one of them fancy long-playing records the kids like.
In the sermon – of which the movie is basically an illuminated version – Pirkle warns of what will happen if America as a whole does not turn to Jesus in the next 7 years, which is that horse-riding Communists will take over the country. And it is all the fault of TV, Saturday morning cartoons (which apparently encourage fornication – I was watching the wrong damn cartoons, let me tell you), sex education, dancing and beer.
Now where Ormond’s exploitation chops come in is during the depictions of the various atrocities which are visited upon the god-fearing folks by those damn Commies. Low-budget gore abounds, as well as some Sunday school acting.
This is crap cinema at its finest. You actually feel the trap door open underneath you and you find yourself in Pirkleland, a land of starched dogma and crazed horror movie tropes. Highly recommended.
This was followed by Evil Town, which is not so highly recommended. Evil Town is constructed, Frankenstein-like, from at least two unfinished movies (some claim three or even four). One stars James Keach and a post-stroke Dean Jagger, and is about a town of old people who waylay unsuspecting travelers to harvest their pituitary glands to extend their own lives. The other movie features Lynda Wiesmeier’s boobies, and that’s about the only notable thing (or two, actually). The experience was made more tolerable by trying to keep track of what movie was what (made easier by the difference between 70s and 80s car models and fashions) and the expectation of the return of Ms. Wiesmeier’s ta-tas (in which we were disappointed).
The evening closed with Dondi. Yes, the escapee from one of the Medved’s Fifty Worst books. Based on a comic strip which ran from the 50s through the 80s, about an Italian WWII orphan who is semi-adopted by an Army unit, and who then stows away to America. Oh, yes, it is supposed to be charming, cute and heart-warming. And we all know how badly that can turn out.
David Janssen stars, about six years before The Fugitive, and appears to be drunk in every scene. Arnold Stang is in the unit, but as there are already two over-acting goofballs in the barracks, Stang elects to underplay everything. The kid who plays Dondi was the result of a nationwide talent search, and appears to have an eternally stuffed nose, because that’s cute.
You know, the last B-Fest I attended showed what was theoretically a Lassie movie, but was actually three episodes of the TV series strung together (and the reels in the wrong order, to boot). I think I was the only one in the auditorium during that; it was refreshing to find myself in an irony-free zone.
Dondi would love to be irony-free, but it had the misfortune to be directed by Albert Zugsmith. Anyone who has seen Sex Kittens Go To College knows what that man does to comedy. Now apply the same ham fist to family-friendly fare. My God, what an inferno.
But at least at T-Fest I was able to say, “Suffer, bitches! I’ve seen Dondi!”
T-Fest was held at SMU’s legendary Guildhall, where Sandy Petersen is currently teaching Game Design, and interested students swelled the attendance to a record 50 or so. Not bad for a bunch of friends who wanted to get together in the Summer and create something to replace the late, lamented New Orleans Worst Film Festival.
Things kicked off before the coffee had totally kicked in with Hausu, a 1977 Japanese movie chosen by Sandy.
Hausu is about some Japanese schoolgirls spending the holiday at one girl’s auntie’s country home. Alas, auntie is still waiting for her beau to come back from World War II, and has become a demon, and her house has a tendency to eat young ladies in the most bizarre ways. Actually, I probably could have just stopped at “It’s Japanese”.
If there is one thing I learned from Hausu, it is that if you are confronted by demon disguised as a roadside fruit vendor who demands to know, “Do you like melons?”, answering, “No, I like bananas!” will reduce him to a smoldering heap of bones. Unfortunately, you will then turn into a pile of bananas.
Like I said: Japanese.
This was followed by Ken Begg’s choice, R.O.T.O.R. Anyone who has known Ken for any length of time could have picked that one out of a lineup; Ken has a perverse love for all things R.O.T.O.R., and this time it was especially apt, since R.O.T.O.R. was made in Dallas.
Generally R.O.T.O.R. is referred to as a Robocop wannabe, as the story concerns an attempt at constructing a robot policeman; but since the prototype is accidentally activated and proceeds to shoot a man for speeding (and attempting to offer him a measly $20 bribe), and then spend the rest of the movie chasing his girlfriend, it is more appropriately a Terminator wannabe.
R.O.T.O.R. ain’t terrible, but it’s not particularly good, either. The budget is definitely low, and there’s plenty of touches guaranteed to trigger audience hoots (an earlier comic relief robot, a “Sensor Recall” mode that allows R.O.T.O.R. to see event that transpired when he actually wasn’t there, and an incidental character that defines the term “muscle bitch”). Ken was hopeful of looking up the director while he was in town and encouraging him to produce R.O.T.O.R. II. The sick bastard.
Then, to everyone’s dismay, came my first choice: the 1932 Island of Lost Souls, which I had ripped from my laserdisc, since for some reason it has never been given a DVD release. Heads crane to quizzically look at me. “What a minute… isn’t this supposed to be a good movie?” What can I say? I’m a nice guy.
Charles Laughton’s Dr. Moreau effortlessly upstages everyone else in the cast, and the presence of The Panther Woman (Kathleen Burke, though the credits don’t seem to want you to know that) guarantees many furry/catgirl jokes. Good times, good times.
Then the first of Chris Holland’s choices: Big Man Japan. Chris had intended to substitute another film, but apparently the kvetching about another of his choices – two years ago! – the utterly bizarre and frequently disturbing Funky Forest, convinced him to go with his first choice.
Japanese comedy is, I suspect, an acquired taste, and I don’t think the audience was interested in acquiring it. The buildup to the monster fights were protracted interview scenes, which provoked much shuffling and some unfortunate remarks about not enough bombs being used in World War II. Overall, like Funky Forest and Titanic, I’m glad I saw it, but won’t be revisiting it.
Somewhere around here, there was a horror movie trivia test. I only missed two, and won a DVD of Weasels Rip My Flesh. I think that was a win.
After dinner was supposed to be my second choice, an Indonesian horror movie called Mystics in Bali (“If you see only one movie about the penanggalen this year, make sure it’s Mystics in Bali!). But the disc wouldn’t work, so we used my fallback movie instead: the 1974 blaxploitation zombie flick Sugar Hill. Another flick that’s evaded DVD (though one is rumored in the works) I had a nice widescreen print pulled off Turner Classic Movies.
I’ve always considered Sugar Hill a fun but somewhat middling horror movie; its major plus is Don Pedro Colley’s turn as the voodoo god Baron Samedi, a death god who reaaaaaaaally enjoys his work. The fact that former Playmate Marki Bey as Sugar is hella cute and Robert Quarry is, as usual, wasted are icing on the cake. As is the fact that the movie became a crowd favorite by not causing any suffering. Like I said, I’m a nice guy.
I returned from the restroom to find a familiar sight upon the screen: it was a short film about Lapland, which can be found on the Something Weird DVD for Attack of the Animal People. A bunch of young, attractive Laplanders, dressed in traditional attire, herd up the reindeer for the yearly ritual. We are told that “Some will be slaughtered, some will be bred, and some will be castrated in the traditional way.” And we are then treated in the traditional way, which is handled by the Lap women, using their teeth.
Chris, mad genius that he is, was at the front of the room, taping with his iPhone:
And I still feel the best part of this whole folderol is that we expected to believe that the men then lasso the woman of their choice, magically causing them to be married, and these young folks then take to the hills to fornicate madly even though the men know that these gals just bit off a reindeer’s wang.
Things were running long, and Ken sacrificed his second movie, Cat Women on the Moon, so that we could, alas, watch Sandy’s second choice, Nightmare City, which is an Umberto Lenzi Italian zombie movie. Which should tell you all you need to know about it.
Yeah, a plane disgorges a bunch of zombies that either do or do not infect you when they suck your blood (see, they’re not total cannibals. That would be derivative!) Society collapses, a journalist and his panicky girlfriend try to get out of town, nobody seems to notice that the only time the zombies stay down is when they get shot in the head, and in the end the journalist wakes up and it was all only a dream.
Yes, you read that right. In the end the journalist wakes up and it was all only a dream. Then he goes to the airport and it all starts over again. I believe a petition began circulating to prevent Sandy from ever choosing a movie again. I’m not certain, as the document was likely suppressed. Especially after what came next.
You see, it is traditional that every year, T-Fest end with a movie featuring a Tyrannosaurus, or something close (the “T” stands not only for Texas, but Tyrannosaurus). It was apparently Chris’ turn to choose the end film, and what he came up with was Theodore Rex. You remember Theodore Rex, doen’t you? Here, let me jog your memory:
Apparently the most expensive movie ever released direct to video at the time. Any movie that begins with a text screen detailing the plot is going to hurt. In the future, some genetic genius has managed to revive dinosaurs, but instead of opening a park, he’s given them intelligence and turned them into muppets. One gets murdered because it gets wind of the plot – I guess it read that opening text – and Teddy Rex and Whoopi – who is some sort of cyborg cop – get the case.
Theodore Rex is one of those movies where you wonder why somebody didn’t pull the plug on it sooner, like in the script stage. When a movie makes me think fondly of Howard the Duck, you know you’re in trouble.
So that was my week. In closing, just let me say: suffer, bitches. I’ve seen Dondi!
knows a hell of a lot about goblins. For instance, if you eat goblin food, you turn into a human-vegetable hybrid, which the goblins will then eat.
The other is Deborah Reed as the Goblin Queen, who, in her guise as Hell Librarian, effects the most amazing pseudo-Romanian accent that DRRRRRRRRRRAAAWS out EVVVERRRRRRRRRRRRRY THIRRRRRRRD WORRRRRRRRRRRRD or so. She also turns into a way uglier version and, at one point, into a corn cob wielding hottie. Really.
A major flop in 1971, this sometimes known as the movie that killed Roger Vadim’s career (although Vadim himself seemed unaware of that). Hell of an odd pedigree: Produced and written by Gene Roddenberry. Rock Hudson is a high school guidance counselor/football coach/former football star who seems to spend most of his time screwing the female population of the high school, when he’s not manipulating a new teacher (the ever-toothsome Angie Dickenson) into deflowering his protegé, who most of the time seems to be the only male student in Awesome High School.
The plot gets under way when one of the cheerleaders shows up dead in the boy’s restroom, to be followed by two more in rapid succession. It’s pretty common knowledge among filmgoers that Hudson’s character is the killer – hell, it’s right there in the poster- which is something a pre-Kojak Telly Savalas can’t prove, but the incompetent Sheriff (and Corrupt Authority Figure) Keenan Wynn seems to know, but the coach is just too valuable to arrest.
drfreex.com 