Star War The Third Gathers: Backstroke Of The West [2005]

[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]

There were two things on the night's agenda. First up was a pre-movie called "Change" staring Kenpo Grand Master Larry Tatum wandering around and trying to get change so he can get a Coke from a machine. Everyone is weirdly ornery about this simple request until he meets a woman who is initially terrified of him and threatens him with her karate skills but then offers $0.95 on the dollar which he gratefully accepts. Then she has her keys stolen so he beats up the thieves for her. He drops the punchline ("I know a little karate too" followed by the sounds of heavenly angels in awe) and then finally enjoys the refreshing taste of Coca-Cola. It is a very strange ad. I think.

The main event was the movie "Star War The Third Gathers: Backstroke Of The West," a version of "Star Wars III: Revenge Of The Sith" with awkward English subtitles translated from Chinese. On YouTube someone has done God's work by actually, quite impressively, dubbing the whole movie with these subtitles and it is a delight. Of course, if you've seen "Revenge Of The Sith" you are already familiar with the tragic story of how Allah Gold turned away from the hopeless situations by following the black influence of Speaker D but it is still worth another go if you really want to feel the emotion; especially at the final scene when Allah Gold tragically shouts out, "Do not want!" sparking internet memes that have lasted years and years longer than most memes. George Lucas should be very proud.

Spoon Ratings: 5 for "Change." 8 for "Star War."

Monster A Go-Go! [1965]

[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]

It's probably taken us way too long to get to this one. "Monster A Go-Go!" is widely considered one of the worst movies ever made and it doesn't take you too long into the movie to see why. Putting aside the silly, conventional, and dragging plot of the thing, it is a technical nightmare to try to decode. This movie makes Ed Wood's directing look masterful in comparison. Yes, I said it.

If you really want to know what it's about, I researched it for you. Let me again point out that I said "researched it." Sarah, our expert plot follower, turned to me when the movie was almost over and said dejectedly, "You're going to have to Wikipedia this one." This seemed reasonable to me as I had spaced out halfway through the film and never fully focused back in on it. Usually Sarah has a way of unravelling even the most obscure of plots but what happened here was not a case of convolution but of a failure in sound editing. Almost all of the dialogue in the movie is hard to hear and at least a quarter of it is completely incomprehensible. The film makers clearly had only one microphone and it was probably attached to the camera itself. I guess what happens is that an astronaut falls to Earth but they can't find his body in the unreasonably tiny capsule he was supposed to be traveling in because he has been turned into a giant space monster by radiation. A bunch of scientists wander around trying to find a cure and the monster at one point kills some teens necking in a parked car (who left a party where beach pop was playing; the only possible explanation for the title). In the end they capture the monster, "Thing From Another World" style but it disappears and it turns out the astronaut was not the monster and had been found somewhere else. So it was a sequel set-up! I mean, alien!

Aside from the spectacularly bad sound editing that would have been even more of a nightmare had it not been for an overdramatic voiceover explaining portions of the plot and the simple story that still managed to be hard to follow, the film was weirdly shot with an occasional fish-eye effect or the look that the camera is being held by a drunk person. This effect is especially dizzying when a bunch of firetrucks appear and anyone prone to epileptic fits may want to close their eyes. There are a bunch of characters who seem to change halfway through and the flow from one scene to another is basically nonexistent. Watching this movie is like watching a very slow explosion from a distance: destructive and only fascinating at first because then it's just the same thing going on for a long time.

After the movie we watched an after school special I won't be doing a full write up on called, "Mr. T's Be Somebody or Be Somebody's Fool." It's a lot of terrible songs and Mr. T spouting wisdom to kids about how to live a good life. For example, to the start of a segment on personal style, Mr.  T says, "Everybody gotta wear clothes or else you get arrested." Words to live by. We highly recommend it.

Quotes:

"The capsule came back."

"But what about him?"

"He looks worse than the other ones."

Spoon Rating: 5.

Adam's Grandma's Review: "It was terrible. Bad, bad movie."

Bride Of The Monster [1955]

[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]

It's been a while since we watched a film by Edward D. Wood Jr. Early on we made a point to do a double feature of "Plan 9 From Outer Space" and Tim Burton's "Ed Wood" and back in early 2014 we watched his curiously unsympathetic movie about crossdressing, "Glen or Glenda," but we haven't really revisited him since. This movie is actually kind of different from those two in that the plot almost makes sense and the budget was clearly high enough to have multiple indoor sets. This doesn't mean the direction is any better and it certainly doesn't mean an improvement in the writing but what more could you hope for with the Ed Wood stamp of approval?

The Wikipedia description of the plot is actually crazy long for such a simple seeming movie so I'm going to break this down as easily as possible. First of all, the movie is called "Bride Of The Monster" but it was really hard to figure out why there had to be a bride for this monster. The movie starts with two guys finding a creepy house that is lived in by Bela Lugosi, a scientist who wants to use atomic radiation to create a race of supermen, his mute strongman servent he kidnapped from Tibet, Tor Johnson, and their giant octopus. These two guys' deaths by mollusk lead to three independent investigations by cops, a scientist hired by the homicide department, and a determined reporter. Reporter crashes her car and gets taken to Lugosi's lab. Cops ditch to go get coffee but when they come back one one decides to leave for coffee again and the other, reporter's fiance, gets taken to the lab. The scientist turns out to be a contemporary of Lugosi who thinks he's nuts and gets killed. Our final showdown happens when Lugosi curiously dresses the reporter in a wedding gown because she is going to be the "bride of the atom" and puts her in his machine to try to turn her into an ubermensch. His plan is thwarted by Tor Johnson who doesn't want to be a slave anymore and a stupidly long fight ensues. Ultimately, Lugosi beats Johnson, the reporter and her fiance escape, and Lugosi uses the machine on himself and manages to become super powerful. Until he literally blows up in a mushroom cloud. A cop who had arrived on the scene delivers the final observation: "He tampered in god's domain."

It's worth noting that the alternative title for this movie is "Bride Of The Atom" and that the atomic element was really indicative of what was popular at the time. And also that Ed Wood seemed to want a monster element too and only managed to come up with a giant octopus that was incredibly fake looking. Like "Plan 9" this movie can't decide if it wants to be a monster movie or a sci-fi movie so it decides to be both. Other than that, the movie lacks the crazy lines of "Glen or Glenda" or the plot twists of "Plan 9" but it was still fairly enjoyable. 

Quotes:
"There's no such thing as monsters! This is the 20th century!"
"Don't count on it!"

Spoon Raiting: 6.

Adam's Grandma's Review:
"Grandma, did you like the monster movie?"
"No."

Escape From Hell [2000]

[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]

We at Bad Movie Night have only dabbled in the genre of Christian movies, often in the form of PSAs from both the 1950s and the present. However, one of our favorite Bad Movie Hall of Fame movies is the totally bananas "Saving Christmas", so exploring the genre more seemed like it would be worth our time. At some point Adam acquired last Monday's film, the "Christian horror" movie "Escape From Hell", to help expand our knowledge and it was a trip.

The plot revolves around a clinically depressed doctor who had a strained relationship with his father who abandoned him. His father comes back into his life looking for forgiveness after becoming a Born Again Christian and he rejects him. Meanwhile at work, a man with heart problems has a near death experience that is brought to the attention of a psychologist specializing in the genre who is looking for more and more proof of an afterlife. The psychologist had put a light up sign on the roof of the hospital so she could put phrases on it that could be repeated by people who have floated out of their bodies and this man managed to recite the phrase "Ducks be not proud" as proof. The doctor and the psychologist go out to dinner in someone's living room and then she shows him videos of testimonies as foreplay. The doctor's father dies and he has nightmares that his father is in hell and suddenly feels guilty enough about not forgiving him to plan a temporary suicide. He sets up a makeshift emergency room in the basement of the hospital and calls his doctor friend and the psychologist to tell them what he's done. He initially goes to heaven through the "Doctor Who" credits but gets rejected and goes to hell, which is essentially Mordor, where he can't find his heaven-bound father but does see the man with the heart condition whose good deeds were not enough to get him into heaven because he was not saved/born again. When the doctor is revived he runs straight to a church and the reverend there zealously saves him and gets him to accept Christ.

Like "Saving Christmas" this movie has a clear Christian goal but goes about it in the weirdest way possible. Not only does it maintain that being a good person means nothing without strong religious conviction, it also has the main character accepting Christ pretty much out of a combo of fear of going back to hell and the desire to see his father again. The ends justify the means, I guess. Aside from the muddled theme, the movie is poorly acted and bland. There were some hilariously bad special effects and some great line reads but overall it dragged a bit and would have probably been more enjoyable if it had been more . . . Jesus-y.

Quotes:
Opening Credit: "Dedicated to the glory of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ."

Blind Woman: "It was like nothing I had ever seen!"

"I just took a cocktail of potassium chloride. Wanna join me?"
"But THAT'LL KILL YOU."

Spoon Rating: 5

Adam's Grandma's Review: "It was kinda complicated."

Masters Of The Universe [1987]

[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]

So, it's no secret that Dolph Lundgren is very well liked among the members of the Bad Movie Night crew. We ended one night by watching this video of him and if you don't happen to think he is awesome, I advise you to read through his IMDb biography or his Wikipedia page and then report back to me. Because of this, it made a lot of sense for us to watch "Masters Of The Universe", one of his earlier films and a live action adaption of "He-Man" which sounds like a terrible enough idea without even knowing any of the details. "He-Man", for those who don't know, is a totally ridiculous superhero/fantasy cartoon where the main character wears barely any clothes and that is mostly known now for its homosexual undertones. Our expectations were high.

Unfortunately, this movie, while kind of campy, was really bogged down by one of the worst scripts we've encountered in a while. The movie pretty much starts with no introduction. Things start happening right away with no reason as if you are already thirty minutes into. Skeletor, the bad guy, has kidnapped Sorceress, a good guy, to steal her power and He-Man and his two friends need to save her. Instead, for some reason, they instead end up meeting this dwarf whose name changes depending on who's saying it (Squirldor? Grimdor? Mordor?) who has made a magic key that can get you into anywhere. Skeletor wants that key but they end up using it to transport them to the modern world for some contrived reason. In the real world, the four of them meet Courtney Cox and her boyfriend, not-Benedict Cumberbatch, and the humans essentially make things difficult for the heroes when Skeletor comes to town. At one point Skeletor captures He-Man and whips him and we finally got some of the kinky, gay content we were hoping for but most of the time we were just really confused about what was going on and why anything was happening.

Skeletor was fairly campy and Dolph Lundgren was actually unusually inarticulate but overall this movie really didn't have the comedy we were looking for. The script was nonsensical and alienating for anyone who didn't know the He-Man story while also clearly not delivering for any fans who may watch it. The idea of going into the modern world was particularly silly and overplayed and the movie didn't even give us any memorable quotes worth noting. Also, isn't He-Man supposed to be the leader? The movie really didn't put the kind of emphasis on him that it probably should have. It was kind of easy to forget he was there aside from him being half naked and greasy (which has its merits but still). By the power of Greyskull, just don't bother.

Spoon Rating: 2.

REWATCH: To Catch A Yeti (1993)

[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]

While Kay was still overseas, the rest of the Bad Movie Crew did a rewatch of "To Catch A Yeti" since Adam's nieces came over. When asked what they thought of the movie, Adam said, "They were afraid of Meatloaf." This seems reasonable since, after all, Meatloaf really was the scariest, most peculiar thing about that movie. I mean, there wasn't anything else about that movie that really reached such astronomical levels of uncanniness and unrealisticness and just genuine nightmare fuel as Meatloaf's performance as a yeti hunter who is very oh-god-call-the-police in his interactions with the children in the movie. What could possibly top that in terms of things likely to disturb children . . .

Right. Click here to see the original write-up.