JACKIE COLLINS MEMORIAL FILM FESTIVAL: Part 3 - THE BITCH

I have a couple of fairly reliable rules of cinema - bellwethers one might say - that let you know you are probably in for a real stinker.  The first is Eight Word Title.  If there are eight or more words in the title, look out.  The second is TBC - Tits Before Credits.  If you see 'em before they roll the title and opening credits, you are probably seeing the best part of the movie right there.  My first rule clearly does not apply to The Bitch (1979), Joan Collins' second appearance as her sister Jackie's character Fontaine Khaled.  The second rule is applicable beyond all expectation, as she is in a naked sex scene in the shower before the credits.

The Bitch is a shabby sexploitation flick and nothing more.  The previous films in this exercise were competently enough made that I never even wondered who was responsible for their existence, and the screenplays were by Jackie Collins herself so they at least had a little sharpness to them.  When I saw how poor this production was I determined it was either from very early in a filmmaker's brief and unsuccessful career, or it was made by someone with a decades-long string of cheap mediocrities attached to his name.  The latter proved to be the case. Look it up if you like - his career is a remarkably consistent pattern of shoddy crap, ending with one of the saddest, poorest mummy movies in the history of the cinema.  He wrote the incoherent and inconclusive screenplay and I nearly feel motivated to try to read the book just to see what a botch he made of the original story.  Plotwise, after her brief temporary comeuppance in The Stud, the protagonist is left to her own resources to get her failing disco back on top of the scene again.  There is some guy with a stolen diamond.  Stuff happens.  She wears this dreadful metallic ensemble.

Everything is pretty much in a long medium shot - most of the time you see everyone from the waist up, whether they are yelling at each other on a disco dance floor or walking down the street. The lifelessness of the filming is noteworthy.  The disco scenes are made tedious by there being two basic shots - the medium shot and the camera on a skateboard looking up shot.  The sex scenes are longer than the disco scenes and are meant to be erotica as they involve a lot of writhing around in darkness.  The peak of decadence comes at a pool party with extensive underwater shots reminiscent of the cheap nudies of Doris Wishman, one of the most consistently shoddy directors of all time who nonetheless was able to make her nudies moderately interesting.  The Bitch is not.  This morning I could hardly remember anything about it.  I remembered this though.

Yes, the thing I remembered most clearly about this sex and disco movie is the crappiness of this driving scene.  That is her in a car.  I always enjoy those brief amateurish film reviews that go, "This is the WORST MOVIE EVER MADE.  Whatever you do, DO NOT WATCH THIS MOVIE."  Of course there is no such thing as the worst movie ever made.  This, however is a piece of crap and a complete waste of time.  There are not drugs enough in this world to make it enjoyable or interesting. 

This concludes the Jackie Collins Memorial Film Festival.  Judging by the first two, I got a good idea of the kind of story she wrote, and if you like that kind of trashy lurid sex novel then she is just the stuff.  Harold Robbins for the ladies.  Her job here is finished, and so is mine.  I thank you.

MOVIES

The Rift a.k.a. Endless Descent (1990) is a fairly entertaining submarine/cavemonster tale.  A submarine is sent to find out what happened to the previous submarine and they discover an underwater cave system with a secret DNA acceleration laboratory cranking out crazy cave monsters.  The submarine crew is a zany agglomeration of cliches - Tightass Commander who forces people to do things which will endanger everyone, because what he says goes; Disgraced Hero with something to prove; a Spaniard, a Frenchman and a German; Happy Swede and Angry Swede, a Woman and an Angry Woman (actually the other woman is also angry but she is only angry at Disgraced Hero), and a streetwise gentleman of African descent whose primary purpose is to occasionally remind everyone that they are all white, and he is black, and to exclaim "Sheeit!" and "Aw, May-un!" with monotonous regularity.  Look, here he is ogling the shapely posterior of Angry Woman:

Isn't he TOO outrageous?  Anyway, the monsters are pretty good, mostly because there are a bunch of different kinds that you only see enough of to be able to say what the hell was that, except for the crazy supermonster in the big cave that sends a giant tentacle mouth out to glom down on you while you stand there shooting at it.  Like any good submarine this one has a self destruct panel with a red LED countdown display but it only gives you two minutes to get into the escape pod which makes it really exciting since of course you have to stand there arguing for about a minute and a half. It mostly looks pretty cheap and it is mostly kind of stupid, the kind of stupid where someone says "Take this and don't lose it because if you do you will be trapped in the monster cave forever," and then they don't clip it to their belt or anything, they just carry it in their hand until they come to the first fuming crevasse and then guess what happens.  And yet it is really not too bad though I can't give it more than a 5/10.  It won't kill you to watch it.

On the other hand, Creature a.k.a Titan Find  (1985) is a shameless, no a shameful ripoff of both Alien and The Thing.  A bunch of people are stuck on a planet with a monster that not only has a drooly-toothed monster part it also has these blood slugs that take over your brain so your friends don't know you are also a monster.  Unless you inexplicably get all zombie looking and start going Graaar! The good thing is the blood slug makes Nude Scene Woman entirely disrobe for no discernable purpose, which is reason enough to root for the monster.  There is lots of '80s hair, over-illuminated plywood sets, and everyone basically seems like next week they will be doing a bit part on The Love Boat.  Except for Klaus Kinski in his "I won't say no to anything" period, the only interesting person in the movie. The print I have is about five minutes shorter than the standard runtime which explains why sometimes a monster scene would end with me not knowing what happened or people would go OH MY GOD and you would never see what was so awful.  They must have cut out some gnawing scenes or something.  You don't really see the monster suit well but that is a good thing because they must have said, "We need a suit just like the one in that Alien movie except our guy is five feet tall and weighs 180 pounds.  Make it so all he can do is shuffle slowly."  So shameful is the ripping-off of The Thing that when they are trying to figure out how to kill the monster suit one of them actually says, "I saw this movie once ... etc."  Shame on you, William Malone and Alan Reed.  Shame on you.  The scene where they finally blow up the monster suit, rather than being the best scene in the movie as it should be, was by far the stupidest and most embarrassing scene, and it has a bomb with a red LED countdown in it too.  For what it is worth the space ship model work, what you get of it, is not bad.  There is only one reason to see this movie, my reason, which is to see every science fiction movie ever made before I die.  I am getting to the dregs.  Deep, deep into the dregs.  Happy Halloween.

MOVIES

When I was looking for 1980s post-apocalyptic movies to watch I discovered there were a bunch of 1980s SF movies I hadn't seen.  I think I saw fewer movies in the 1980s because I didn't have a car and it wasn't as easy to go all the way across town to see something at a dollar movie, and impossible to go to any of the dozen drive-ins scattered around Denver at the time. I know that I saw fewer SF movies then because, although I always loved cheap Star Wars ripoffs, I disliked cheap Alien ripoffs because it's just a monster movie; whether it is supposed to be on another planet like in Galaxy of Terror  or on the bottom of the ocean like Leviathan  or Deepstar Six; it's just Ten Little Indians with tentacles and drooling fangs.

Moontrap (1989) is a pretty creative cheap independently produced SF movie in which it is discovered that there is a 14 thousand year old killer robot base on the moon.  They start out as buglike pods that open up and grab any scrap or machinery nearby and build themselves into big death ray killer robots.  They don't mind using organic components either, so they are kind of zombie killer robots.  The star of  it is Walter Koenig who had name recognition from having been in Star Trek on TV, but that didn't give him any real acting talent.  They show him thinking a lot.  The other big name is cult film star Bruce Campbell - cult film star means he was in a lot of movies but none of them very good ones.  They go to the14 thousand year old killer robot moon base and find a 14 thousand year old space babe in suspended animation, and the good part is she gets her shirt off at one point but not nearly enough time was spent on that.  I would have cut a few minutes of Koenig thinking and replaced it with shirtless space babe.  But that's just me. They did a pretty good job with sets, props, models and effects, especially with sets considering what is involved in a moonscape set, and the story is not just a string of cliches.   The least convincing effect in the whole movie was Koenig's hairpiece.  Hairpiece technology has advanced greatly in the intervening years. I learned one important fact - that a NASA moon lander, like all good movie spacecraft, contains a self-destruct panel with a beeping five minute red-LED countdown. Moontrap is not a total piece of crap and I will even give it a rating - 6/10

Unlike Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn (1983) which I remember making a conscious choice not to go see at the time and I am glad now I did that because I would have felt cheated even if I saw it as part of a double feature at a dollar movie.  It was directed by Charles Band, and I had ridden a bus half way across town to see a couple of his earlier movies, The End of the World and Laserblast and it looked like  Metalstorm was going to be even crappier.  I remember one guy shot me some pretty nasty looks for laughing so hard at Laserblast.  I remember also on the bus ride home I was sitting up at the front where the seats face the aisle and across from me was some kind of oddball with a bag of groceries who had a package of frozen fish sticks that he opened up and he'd stick his face down in it and take a big whiff of it, then grin around crazily at the other passengers, and repeat.  This drew chuckles from a few of the onlookers, but beside me was a sensitive young man who seemed to take their chuckles as a personal affront.  He glared angrily at the other passengers and took it upon himself to humanize the Fish Stick Whiffer by means of sympathetic communication.  He started asking the guy questions like, "Are you ANGRY?"  "Do you ever feel like you want to SCREAM?" Fish Stick Whiffer didn't seem to recognize that he was being spoken to and kept grinning away and enjoying the wonderful fish stick sensation.  Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn is an idiotic, incoherent half assed piece of crap. What is worse is that it was one of the few entries in the failed 3D craze of the day so it is full of shots of people needlessly pointing things right at the camera.  It was filmed almost entirely in an old sand quarry and at Vasquez Rocks, the default location for any cheap-ass cowboy movie which is all this is - a 1930s cheap ass cowboy movie and Road Warrior ripoff which should have been included in my post-apocalyptic series except for the sole fact that there is no introductory narrative telling how many years it has been since the fall of civilisation or the oil wars or the radiation wars or the cabbage patch kids wars or some other fake assed wars that made it possible to make such a stupid lousy movie.  The unshaven leather-clad loner is some kind of lawman looking for a bad hombre who is stirring up the natives who in this case are bald headed cyclops guys who have their right eye covered with wrinkly flesh.  There is a blonde girl in it who gets captured but she never gets her shirt off so what is the point.  There is lots of footage of driving around in the old sand pits, lots and lots of it, showing the crapped up dune buggies or the hero's goony cubemobile driving around, or thrilling point of view shots from the front bumper of driving between shrubs on an old sand quarry road, or of the driver jolting back and forth in a faked up cockpit.  Then there is lots of footage of people walking around in the old sand quarry, with something sending up a plume of smoke every twenty feet or so just so there is something happening on screen while they walk and walk and walk in the old sand pits. There is also a surprising amount of footage of the lawman just looking at something.  Like twenty seconds at a time of  a shot of his face, looking at something.  You can't even call it a reaction shot - he is just looking at something like the director said, "Okay now act like you are looking at it!  Perfect!  Cut!  It's a take!" When it comes to the big midnight showdown between the unshaven leatherclad lawman and the bad hombre with the huge black leather boobs on his costume, the lawman abruptly dashes over to a skycycle and suddenly it is a broad daylight skycycle chase with the bad guy Jared-Syn who always looks as stupid as his name, in a completely different costume and man are the blue-screen effects crappy.  I am going to ruin the entire movie for you right here and I don't care, but this shows just how incredibly lousy and stupid this movie is - not only is there nothing that could possibly be called a metalstorm in this movie, Jared-Syn is NEVER DESTROYED.  He GETS AWAY.  Total bullshit.  The only thing worth seeing in this entire half-assed piece of crappy bullshit garbage is this shot of the cubemobile jumping over a couple of dune buggies:

You have been warned.

MOVIES

 2019: After the Fall of New York (1983) was a fitting conclusion to my postapoc binge, as it stunk enough that it doesn't merit a full review.  A surly leatherclad loner is recruited to go into the ruins of  NYC and rescue the last fertile woman on Earth to take her away on a rocket ship to Alpha Centauri and humanity's New Start.  It is an Escape from New York ripoff and not a Road Warrior ripoff  so it only has a couple of cars, but I would hate for my handful of occasional readers to miss seeing these great things driving around in the same old quarry put to such good use in Warrior of the Lost World.  1983 was a good year for that quarry.

 

The only other notable features about the movie are a big model of NYC in ruins, which I always like to see, and the fact that about eight minutes of film time were shot in Monument Valley, meaning they actually flew the star and a crew over from Italy just for that.  Amazing.  Oh yeah, they also use some props and costumes from Starcrash, but that doesn't help much.

MOVIES

I don't even know why I started this postapoc film festival but if I didn't still have another one slowly downloading, this one would bring it to an end.  Warrior of the Lost World (1983), Unlike BATTLETRUCK, is a cheap exploitation spectacle and nothing more.  According to IMDB the director was hired and brought to Italy where he was shown a poster and told to make a film to go with it.  The misspelled and mispunctuated opening narrative crawl (this is the first time I have ever seen misuse of the apostrophe in film credits) says it takes place "generations after the radioactive wars" in a "new age of tyranny."  Luckily there is an anonymous hero on a Supersonic Speedcycle (their term, not mine, but it is a good one) which is named Einstein because like the famous physicist it communicates by repeating brief, slightly sarcastic phrases three times in a grating squeak-doll voice, simultaneously flashing the same words on a little TV screen with a continuous star-zoom screen saver behind them.  This is the most irritating talking motorcycle ever created, and it gives the driver the opportunity to make weak sardonic retorts. The hero is recruited to rescue the female lead's professor father from the fascist overlord but while they rescue the professor the girl gets left behind so they have to rescue her too by gathering a ragtag group of rebels to overthrow the government.  If I were making a movie with Lost World in the title I would try to get some dinosaurs in there.  This movie has much in common with the previously reviewed Endgame, the hero being leatherclad, unshaven and pudgyfaced with no perceptible acting ability, the female lead being a non-actress of swarthy semi-asian extraction - in Endgame it was Laura Gemser of the Emmanuelle movies so at least she got her shirt off once but it was no big deal, and in this it's Persis Khambatta whose big talent was having a shaved head in a Star Trek movie.  Here she lacks even that.  The best thing the two have in common though is this helmet:

I couldn't get a good shot showing the spike on top but it is there.  Note that the W.O.T.L.W. photo is taken in the old quarry. They had a pretty good budget for cars and there are half a dozen of them, some goofy crapped up Volkswagens and a couple of these police cars with big spikes stuck on the front:

When they crash into something the spikes just fall off and scatter all over the road.  There are also a couple of big trucks, one of which gets exploded during the running gun battle down a tree-lined road, mysteriously transported in a flash to the old quarry to crash into an inexplicable pyramid of highly explosive oil drums.  The police cars suffer from a uniquely exploitation-cinematic technical flaw, in that when they start to go over a cliff, even a tiny bit, they explode right away in a huge ball of fire and plunge down into the old quarry in flaming fragments instead of waiting until they hit the bottom like other movie cars do.  In reality cars almost never explode which is why sometimes people just disappear and their car is found a couple of years later at the bottom of a ravine unexploded.  This movie also has a couple of helicopters but there isn't much you can do to crap up a helicopter, except paint it black like they did with everything else that moves.  They actually explode one of the helicopters, and the exploding helicopter is a classic mark of film quality but this one is done so abruptly and briefly it has little impact.  What does have a little impact though, and the high point in the movie for me, is when they encounter a BATTLETRUCK!

It's a costumed dump truck with a flamethrower, but they didn't have enough money to blow it up so it just grinds to a feeble halt, though it does run over that stupid motorcycle, to my extreme delight.  There are lots of good locations in this, the fascist government being ensconced in what looks like an unfinished resort hotel and their science center looks like a brewery.  The cast includes Fred Williamson who doesn't have much to do compared to his role in Warriors of the Wasteland, and Donald Pleasence as the Fascist Overlord, obviously the only actor in the entire production.  This is by far the stupidest entry into this brief festival and unless 2019: After the Fall of New York really pulls something great out of its leopard print helmet I will have to recommend this one as the postapoc film to see.

MOVIES

Sometimes a guy just needs to see some Post-Road-Warrior crap. Good thing there are so many of them, because they were so easy to make.  You need some old cars with a bunch of funky crap tacked onto them, an abandoned industrial site, an old quarry, and for costumes some leftover Roman stuff mixed up with football shoulder, knee and elbow pads painted black.

 Wheels of Fire (1985) was created by Filipino genre hack Cirio Santiago.  It had a good enough budget to have some decent cars and a couple hundred uniformed extras in the big battle scene at the old gravel pit.  Some of it was filmed in an old fortress of some kind that still has big cannons in it.  It's a cowboy movie where there are these bandits and the good guy has to rescue his sister from them.  The good thing is that the sister is played by Lynda Wiesmeier whose big skill was having her big old tits out flopping around, and she spends most of her screen time doing just that, but unfortunately most of the time she is also tied up or getting slapped around or raped which I am not that big on.  I don't mind a little bondage but beating and raping is where I draw the line.  There is also another female car driver provided for romantic attachment but she only gets her shirt off for the brief love scene. You have to realize that it's the goofy cars and the boobs that make these stupid things watchable.There's lots of chasing around, and they actually crash the cars together real good and blow them up.  There are also some subterranean albino mutants thrown in, and some kind of incoherent aborigine dwarf and a telepathic girl who can communicate with him, and a rocket cult that is supposedly going to blast off into space in their stupid looking hand built rocket if the bandits don't come kill them all and blow it up first, which guess what - they do come kill them all and blow it up.  *Spoiler alert* Sorry.  Lots of bad guys get shot and so do some good guys and the lone stranger drives on. Here are a couple of the pretty decent looking cars driving around the old quarry with a topless babe strapped to the hood of one.  I just thought, "Man that would get really hot being strapped onto the hood half naked like that, not sexy hot but ouch hot."

This Trailer has everything in the entire movie that's worth seeing.

Endgame (1983) is by Italian genre hack Joe D'Amato, and in it the winner of the Running Man game gets recruited to take a telepathic kid across the mutant wasteland, so you get a Running Man ripoff for about half an hour and then the rest of it is Road Warrior with the requisite goofy cars driving around in the old quarry. [Hold on there!  The Running Man wasn't made until 1987!  So this is a Road Warrior style Tenth Victim ripoff, or somebody actually read Robert Sheckley!]  The in-jokey thing about this is that the Italian title was Endgame: Bronx lotto finale (Bronx final fight) which I assume is an attempt to latch onto the brand identification of another, marginally better Post-Road-Warrior movie, 1990: The Bronx Warriors (1982) which was actually filmed in the pre-apocalyptic Bronx.  Which is kind of interesting that you could do that, film a post-apocalyptic fantasy in the actual location because it is already so broke down and crummy it looks like an atom bomb went off there. This one though is in the future where normal people look like extras from a Flock of Seagulls video or rejects from Purple Rain, and tough guys paint stupid crap around their eyes to look cool.  The cars in this one are incredibly great and had me laughing louder than I have at anything in weeks.  Look at this idiotic thing:

That red dome on the hood is a flamethrower but I think you already guessed that.  There are only three funked up cars in this and they just stripped off most of the body, then tacked some wire mesh and pointy crap and a couple of oil drums on.  Since they didn't have a lot of cars, the wagon train runs into the Mutant Motocross Army, with about a hundred dirt bikes which the mutants customize by putting a ratty animal pelt on the gas tank and seat. The good thing is that even though the mutants only have two cars they put topless slave babes on them.  Nothing says future like topless chicks on a crapped up old junker driven by a fish man.  

They do blow up a couple of the cars but it is the kind of  blowing up where they just cut it together so it is supposed to look like they crashed but you can see the cars are just sitting there when they blow up.  Lots and lots of guys get shot off of motorcycles though so if you like seeing guys fall off motorcycles this is good for that. This movie also has the benefit of a Rhodes Synthesizer soundtrack, one guy at a keyboard going eedle deedle deedle deedle - oodle doodle doodle doodle for an hour and a half, which really adds a lot to a post-apocalyptic fantasy. Of the two I thought this was more hilarious, which is the major value of these.  I know you are wondering so I will tell you that of all the films of this genre which I have seen, and I have seen a lot, many of them when they came out in the theater, my favorite is Warriors of the Wasteland (1983) even though it doesn't have any women with their  shirts off, the cars have plastic domes and duct pipes stuck on them, and there are LOTS of them.  Plus the bad guys are extra ridiculous looking and there is a buttraping Knights Templar angle which you might think goes against what I said about rape and I guess it does.  Buttraping Post-Apocalyptic Knights Templar are, in my opinion, a socially redeeming plot element.

MOVIES

I have been watching nothing but dispiriting crap for the past couple of weeks.  Sometimes intentionally, mostly by accident.  Sorry.

Movies

Law of the Jungle (1942) is a Monogram soundstage cheapie hacked together in a few days and is crude and flat even for that.  Arline Judge was not a great actress but a good worker when she had something to work with, and a more watchable example of that is Sensation Hunters (1933).  I thought she seemed a bit unfeminine and was surprised to learn she held a Hollywood record for eight marriages long before it was fashionable.  In this thing everyone stands around waiting for a cue and chokes out their lines like they just saw the script for the first time a minute ago.  The leading man could be replaced by a hat rack and even Mantan is reduced to doing pratfalls.  If Mantan can't save a movie, nobody can.  The one item of interest is the appearance of Arthur O'Connell as a greasy traitor with a phony British accent, long before he became known for his kindly grey moustache. 3/10

Movies

Genius at Work (1946) stars obscure comedy duo Wally Brown and Alan Carney, and it is a real puzzle how these guys got over half a dozen starring vehicles.  They have no schtick, no outstanding features of any kind except that one of them is not jewish.  Here they are - now you will remember them forever.

This is alleged to be a re-make of the Wheeler and Woolsey movie The Nitwits - I will watch it to find out, and I won't mind because Wheeler and Woolsey can actually be funny sometimes.  Most people don't even know who W&W are nowadays and here are Wally Brown (R) and Alan Carney (L) eating off of their table. Not even enough of a team to be called Brown and Carney.  They are supposed to be a couple of radio announcers who do a crime program and fall afoul of a Master Fiend called The Cobra who baffles the police with his nefariousness.  Studio villain Lionel Atwill is hauled in for that role and Lugosi is reduced to henchman status.  The only really notable thing in the movie is pictured below - Lugosi in spectacles and phony beard, Atwill in granny drag, in a wheelchair, using a poison needle blowgun to commit his shocking murders.  The less said about that the better.  This is a flat factory-made bill-filler cranked out to fill time, not seats, and of no conceivable interest to anyone, not even me.

Movies

I use the term "Exploding Robot Movie" to denote a particularly crappy type of modern cinema of excess. Since a new Exploding Robot Movie was just released, I have been seeing a lot of references to the previous one, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009), specifically references to how bad it was, so bad that Attention Deficit Director Michael Bay felt he had to pick it out of his so far mercifully short career to apologize for. That sort of thing is a red flag for me, of the bull-baiting variety, so despite my vow after enduring The Island that I would avoid his movies (I almost said films) in the future I buckled down and sat through it. If he really cared about our feelings he would have retired. I want to tie that guy in a swivel chair and spin him around in it for two and a half hours, banging trash can lids together and yelling HOW DO YOU LIKE IT, HUH?? Thank god they put ten minutes of credits at the end of movies nowadays, it is like getting out early. Not even rating this - the nearly tolerable first half was undermined by the nearly unendurable second half making it all a net loss. And yet, it was not as stupid as Steelyard Blues.

Movies

I can't think of a movie I have seen lately that was as stupid as Steelyard Blues (1973), and I tend to seek out stupid movies. A movie like Private Snuffy Smith or Queen Kong is lousy, horrible and half-assed in any number of ways, but they all seem excusable compared to the intense stupidity of Steelyard Blues. Donald Sutherland is a guy who is supposed to be cool because he is such a jerk and loser, and is defacto head of a bunch of other unlovable losers who can't play by society's rules and they band together to fix up an old seaplane to fly off to "a place where there ain't no jails." I have never been drunk, stoned and brain damaged enough all at one time to think this movie is not the stupidest thing I can remember seeing since I don't know when. I guess it is probably on permanent rotation in the DVD player at any number of biker clubhouses and other establishments where gather folks who dream of facing down a hundred flashing police cars and going out in a blaze of glory and I thank god I never go places like that or know that sort of people. I got this with some early Jane Fonda movies and she is the only woman in the movie, so of course she is a hundred dollar hooker. Stupid. The only redeeming feature was getting to see Howard Hesseman as the strait-laced brother beating the crap out of Sutherland. I wanted to see all those jerks get beat up the whole time. 2/10

Yeah, that's right. STRAIT laced.

Movies

I have stopped reviewing every single movie I see, because I got tired of thinking about how I was going to describe a movie while I was watching it. I just want to watch them sometimes. I still watch one or two movies every day but a lot of it is fairly unremarkable, or for sociological research. When I do a write-up it is because I find something exceptionally unusual.

When I read about Passion Play (2011) I knew I had to see it. It was so poorly received on its film festival debut that they despaired of distribution and went direct to video. The few reviews I read were pretty harsh, calling it a "sub-lynchean fantasy." Those reviewers were just showing their ignorance because in fact it is a sub-jodorowskian fantasy. Mickey Rourke is a jazz trumpeter who incurs the wrath of a gangster (Bill Murray) and is taken out to the desert to be killed. He is mysteriously rescued by a band of white-clad indians and walks all night until he finds a carnival in the middle of nowhere, where he meets and falls in love with a winged woman. Then lots of other stuff happens. I can see why people who have to see a lot of movies might not like this, but it has a quality I really enjoy in a movie - it makes a break from reality early on and stays away from it for the whole movie. That's a common feature in all the movies I am writing up today, along with the fact that they were all flops. When Passion Play winds down to its punchline, laughable but in a kindly happy way, it explains everything about why the movie is so crazy and weird, which I suppose could make a lot of people angry, but I thought it was okay. I'm not recommending it, but I kind of liked it. It's mystically good/bad in the same way as Jodorowsky's lesser works, kind of half-assedly impressive. The one thing completely unbelievable about it is Mickey Rourke's facelift. Bad choice.

Since I was determined to go on a flop binge I figured I should see Gigli (2003), another one I had been wanting to see for a long time Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez are mismatched gangsters who have to babysit the kidnapped autistic brother of a local district attorney. Utterly ridiculous premise, carried out with complete sincerity, and I honestly don't know why people dislike it so much. It dragged a few things out a bit long, but I really kind of liked it. Not a whole lot, but it was entertaining, funny and interesting, and had ideas you don't normally see in a movie. I guess it was too weird for most people.

Catwoman (2004), on the other hand, deserves all the bad stuff ever said about it. It's terrible. What's worse it suffers from an especially bad case of Editing Room Syndrome in that every time things get a bit active or exciting, they try to "amp it up" by making five jump cuts a second, like waving their hands in front of your face so you can't see what's happening. It is significant that no one person wants to take credit for the editing, instead hiding behind assistant editor titles. Cowards.

All About Steve (2009) is a picaresque absurdity in which Sandra Bullock portrays a creator of crossword puzzles who believes she has been invited by her failed blind date, a news cameraman, to follow him around the country. Her character is a total assburger who drives everybody crazy by constantly babbling unnecessary information at them, but Bullock does an amazing job of being a complete she-dork who is accidentally cute and sexy. Nothing about it makes sense or is reasonable in any way, and it gets so stupid and ridiculous that it's kind of fun. Might make a good double feature with Pee Wee's Big Adventure.

No flop-fest would be complete without Hudson Hawk (1991). Understand that I am 100% gay for Bruce Willis in a completely non-sexual way. I will watch pretty near anything that he is in but I like him better in non-comedies. This one here is a comedy that he co-wrote the story on. He plays a cat burglar who is forced by insane super-criminals to steal the fragments of the alchemical crystal of Leonardo da Vinci from the Vatican and other places. If that was the genuine Vatican City postal subway they were filming in, that was really impressive. I was amazed at how much money they must have spent on this painfully pretentious idiocy. It put me in mind of the self-congratulatory smarminess of the Rat Pack - Dean Martin, Peter Lawford and Sammy Davis Jr. in particular, with lots of mugging and leaden wisecracks. I admit the "falling out the back of an ambulance on a gurney" sequence had me going, but most of the rest of it was just a chore to endure. I just wanted to kick the guy. If you really wanted to be mean to someone you would pair this up with Bill Cosby's Leonard Part 6.

So there you go. Back to watching anything that has Mantan Moreland in it (except Charlie Chan).

Movies

I have been trying this week to watch some recent movies, of the sort normal people like, but am not having a lot of luck. I choose things which have elements I find appealing - fantasy or animation. I was unable to watch more than 20 minutes of most of them, simply because they are STUPID, and compounded entirely of cliches punctuated by huge things rushing toward the viewer. Alice in Wonderland is especially painful in that there wasn't a single person associated with the production with sense enough to go to Tim Burton and tell him that Jabberwocky was the name of the poem, not the creature; that the creature was a jabberwock, not a jabberwocky. Also painful was the fact that Danny Elfman has fallen asleep with his head on the keyboard of his mellotron and needs someone to kick the damn stool out from under him. Apparently that one trick of having a crowd of women all saying ah is enough of a creative challenge for him. I'd like to tie them together and dangle them over a shark pit, exclaiming "Gothfag your way out of THAT you pussy-assed bastards!" Clash of the Titans appears to be deliberately compounded of the worst aspects of modern film technique - for god's sake never let the camera rest in one place for even a moment - keep it constantly swooping through and around CG landscapes and cities, craning across sets the exact shape and size of a soundstage, or dancing around in closeup faux cinema verite. How to Train Your Dragon is a Dreamworks animation so you know that cool thing they do in all the other movies? Let's do that because that would be cool. Plus let's give our vikings irish accents. Because vikings are from Ireland, right? Or someplace like that. Made it through ten minutes of that crap. Strangely it was Salt, essentially a video game in which Angelina Jolie is an unstoppable superspy, that I actually found watchable. It was just intelligent enough in concept and structure to gloss over its fundamentally moronic basis and make a fairly entertaining experience, though the shooting and fighting were so broken up into microshots that it was impossible to follow the blur of activity - maybe that made it more tolerable. I guess I should try one of those movies where a bunch of women learn truths of life and love, or maybe one of those football movies.

Movies

Goin' Coconuts (1978) The Donny and Marie Osmond movie. I never thought anything would make me want Donny and Marie to sing more, but the rest of this movie did. Only a few musical numbers, but they are the high point of a story that I think Donny and Marie wrote themselves, and simply ad-libbed without a script - it's that poor. Herb Adelman is Sid the Manager - I've seen him make some pretty bad material look good, but this was too much even for him. Directed by Howard Morris, one of the pioneering TV comedians of Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows, and familiar TV voice and face for decades thereafter - and he shouldn't have done it. When the kids are performing, they are great, and they do some pretty challenging things without faking it - Donny did know all the lyrics to Hawaiian War Chant, and the dance too. When they are trying to keep the villains from getting the necklace that's the key to mystery, it's awful. What the hell did I expect? 3/10

Movies

The Shape of Things to Come (1979) Titled onscreen as H. G. Wells' The Shape etc., this bears no resemblance to anything Wells ever wrote, but is Canada's entry into the Crummy Star Wars Ripoff genre. There isn't much in this that couldn't have been done twenty or thirty years earlier, except for the shots of the Toronto geodesic dome. Jack Palance in a purple cape is the evil Robot Master who wants to conquer the moon, with Carol Lynley as the rebel leader sitting around a campfire in the old quarry. John Ireland also got roped into it. The evil robots are walking trashcans that wave their flexible ductwork arms up and down when they waddle. There is a good robot too for comedy relief and when it shows the good guys that it can teleport, violating the very laws of physics and reason, they react with mild interest as if it had shown them a dance step, proving this was written by people who don't know anything about anything, but that can be deciphered from the first scene. A load of half assed crap and I don't think even taking drugs could make it enjoyable. 3/10

Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise as The Magnificent Two (1966) It's a case of mistaken identity that makes Eric leader of a victorious revolution and new Presidente of Parazuella. Moderately amusing at times. The women of the revolutionary army are all bikini models and eventually find an excuse to charge into battle in their matching red underwear. M&W only made three movies together so now I am done. 5.5/10

Movies

Garuda (2004) I thought a Thai monster movie might be interesting but I was wrong. The intense mediocrity of every part of the production was startling. Every shot is made unconvincing by identically formulaic horizontal lighting which has no relation to situation or circumstances - yellow light from the front quarter, blue-white backlight on the other side. No actors were involved, just one college age girl and a lot of macho poseurs who look like gay underwear models. Looks like one of the cheaper U.S. TV crime shows where they stand around a table with a light inside it looking at a bone, only for fourteen year old boys. Sixteen year old boys would have required the girl to at least get wet. Plot consisted entirely of cliches treated as if they were major emotional moments. Mid-sized CG flying monster. Half an hour was all I could watch. 1/10 for educational value only.

Movies

Speed Racer (2008) For two hours I thought this was one of the stupidest movies ever made. Then for the last seven minutes I thought it was one of the greatest movies ever made. Not a good ratio. 3/10

Movies

Can't Stop the Music (1980) The Village People's faux Origin Story. My friend Seth uses this movie to torture people with, but has never actually watched it all. I wanted to prove what a macho hotshot I am by sitting through the whole thing, and believe me it was a challenge. I had to do it in pieces over a few days. It's amazing to see a whole movie with not one moment of acting in it. This is an exercise in masochism. Steve Guttenberg as the composer and "inventor" of the Village People is sheer agony to watch - a dopey puppy in human form, with a constant goofball glee and astonishment at everything, punctuated by occasional moments of feebly feigned sorrow at minor setbacks. On the whole I have never seen so much poorly faked enthusiasm from so many non-actors. The Construction Worker's solo performance of Love You To Death pushes the pain factor to the absolute limit, but the rest of the movie is like a continuous beating with a telephone directory - one dull thud after another. The worst part of all is when there are jokes and people being funny. Ghastly and horrendous to see - worst thing I have experienced since Supertrain. My next target: Spice World! 2/10

Movies

Trog (1970) Joan Crawford's last film - a nonsensical missing link tale. What really impressed me was how clear it was that she was the best actor in the film. She handed a wind-up doll to a guy in a gorilla mask with the same sincerity that she would have put into Lady Macbeth washing the blood off her hands. I was also delighted with how bizarre the story got - after showing the zillion-year-old troglodyte a slide show of dinosaur bones he goes into a great stop-motion dinosaur flashback which somehow gives him the ability to squeak out a few vague words. Michael Gough really gnaws the hell out of the scenery as the Reactionary Opponent of science and reason. 8/10 for Crawford - a pro to the end, 3/10 for the rest of it.

Graffiti Bridge (1990) Prince's sequel to Purple Rain, written by Prince, directed by Prince, starring Prince, music by Prince. It's a Prince movie. Kind of idiotic to the point of near-greatness. So pompous and inane it's almost pretty cool. I always liked Morris Day and The Time better than Prince, and they nearly penetrate my hard outer shell of a thousand generations of White Man to find the tiny flake of Funk hidden deep within. Lots of bright colors and drifting smoke, filmed mostly on a big street corner soundstage set that looks like a trenchcoat cyborg is just about to start shooting it up with his big metal arm-gun, striking sparks off every whirling ventilation fan in sight. Not as lame as Under the Cherry Moon, but then what is? Prince proves that it takes a real man to look totally gay. Really makes me want to see Good Times, the Sonny and Cher movie, again. 6/10

Movies

Humanity's End (2009) I learned of this from looking at the pictures on the front of a dollar-a-night DVD machine at the grocery store and began to wonder what a direct to DVD scifi cheapy looks like these days now that CG effects are probably the least expensive part of a movie. Unfortunately you still need to have a good script, competent direction and a certain amount of just plain making sense, even if you can fill the sky with exploding spaceships. It started with seven minutes of unintelligible narration needlessly explaining the elaborate back-story, illustrated with imagery made "old-timey" looking by the addition of both fake video scanlines and fake film blotches and specks. That's what they used their advanced technology for in this - to simulate film and video effects on their all-CG space model shots - camera motion, blurry jerky in-and-out zooms etc. Nonsensical and needless stylistic muddle. It was great that they could make so many spaceships explode but it seemed at times they just cut them in at random and I kept wondering what was happening, and whose spaceship that was that just blew up. That's not how you want your scifi movie to go, with people wondering what's going on. The dialog was equal parts plot exposition and snappy retorts, and after half an hour I said "I just want to see ONE MINUTE with nothing stupid in it." But I didn't so I quit. I really said that, and that is not what you want people to say about your movie.