[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.] Christian horror is apparently a thing but it's hard to find the difference between this movie and you typical 70s horror a la Grindhouse. Although there is a religious character who ultimately plays a role in the first and final act, all the Jesus is pushed aside for gory violence. It's a little hard to get the Christian message when you are distracted by fake blood and paper-mache bird heads but I guess they tried. If nothing else this movie managed to earn itself an X rating for violence although X ratings were a lot easier to come by in the 70s than they are nowadays where everyone is desensitized and I think that rating is only used for actual porn. In spite of the poster saying this is like a Dracula movie, it's actually closer to the painfully dumb Thankskilling. A biker named Herschell helps a girl, Angel, with a flat tire and she brings him to a drug den where her sister, Anne, is a user. Angel isn't though. Angel is a Christian in the shortest of shorts and she's here to try to reason with the druggies about turning to God. Herschell is indifferent about both the drugs and the God but is soon taken in by Anne and her cartoon character makeup. She convinces him to try some drugs and what follows is a sex scene that reminded us a lot of Samurai Cop. The girls' father asks Herschell to help out on his turkey farm and the scientists there offer him money and drugs to taste test a chemically enhanced turkey. Herschell accepts, eats it, seizures, and then emerges from his fit with the head of a turkey and a lust for druggie blood. Anne is relatively unconcerned about her boyfriend's new turkey head. Herschell writes her some letters and then goes out killing. At first it seems like he's only killing young, attractive druggies but then we realized they they're in Florida so he can afford to be picky. Some rando tries to rape Anne so Turkey!Herschell cuts off his leg and drinks his blood too. Finally Herschell is tracked down and his head is chopped off which leads to cut scenes of an actual decapitated turkey. This was easily the most traumatizing part of the movie. Then Herschell wakes up. It was all a dream and he's ready to give up drugs and accept God. Also, throughout the film, there is narration by the director who is constantly smoking and blatantly looking down at a script in front of him. He is the best character. This movie is incompetent. The sound is so bad we had it at maximum volume and still struggled a lot to hear the dialogue, the lighting was often too dark to be sure what's going on, the camera was never steady, and, again, paper-mache turkey head that seemed to be lined with a feather boa. It was the Zaat-level of monster quality. There were some overly long scenes that didn't keep our interest but there were also a few moments when we laughed out loud at the bad effects. You could often see the tubing used to spray blood out of the victims. And the turkey head. Can't mention the turkey head enough. On the plus side, the DVD had a bunch of trailers for other 70s horror movies so you may soon being seeing posts about The Blood-Splattered Bride or Night Of The Bloody Apes. BMN Quotes (about the main character's name): Adam: Herschell wants to do your taxes. Kay: Herschell is going to help you sue your neighbor. Adam: Herschell really understands the metric system. Kay: Herschell wants to sell you a gently used Toyota. Herschell goes golfing on the weekends and might get wild by having a beer with lunch. Quotes (that sounds like a come-on): "I need a husky man like you to help on my poultry farm." Adam's Grandma's review: "It was good." Spoon Rating: 4
[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.] We have delved into the genre of family friendly films but it's been a little while since Theodore Rex and even longer since Undercover Blues. I think in those few family-free months we had forgotten how utterly insufferable family films can be. They are the essence of the idea that a compromise leaves everyone unhappy. Who really is the demographic for a film like this? Babies, while apparently psychologically intrigued by seeing their own faces, have no need for a plot. Children are often looking towards teen or adult figures who have more freedom and opportunity for adventure (which is why many people see Star Wars for the first time when they are 6-8 years old). Teens are well beyond caring about anything like this. Similar to teens, childless adults can only be unnerved by the uncanny valley babies talking, annoyed by the childish hijinks, and unfocused because there are no jokes or plot complexity to appeal to someone whose age is in the double digits. Adults with kids only really care about the cuteness of their own kids and not some random other babies. This live action cartoon movie is for no one. In the world of the movie, baby babble is actually a fully developed language and some babies are actually geniuses who have complex conversations in this language, in spite of all lingustic logic which indicates that baby babble is the first stage of developing a real language. Instead of doing something fairly easy and not aesthetically strange like subtitling real babies speaking, they decided to dub the babies in English with creepy CGI lip movements. Knowing this bit of body horror, does the plot really matter? Well, a legendary figure known as the Big Kahuna, who is a 70-year-old genetically superior guy stuck with the body and interests of an eight-year-old, comes to town to try to stop a television executive (I think) who is manipulating people through a children's program. I can't really be more specific than that because everything that happens is just nonsense. Jon Voight is a Nazi with a terrible German accent. Scott Baio apparently got a paycheck. Big Kahuna lives in a Willy Wonka room that's made of toys instead of candy. He also floats and backflips a lot. An orphaned teen boy works for him and has a romance with the teen babysitter. The babies are not actually babies but two year olds who somehow haven't learn to speak yet. They also get transformed into superheroes at random times. Things happen and it's awful. At the end the teen boy's mom came back and somehow all of us expect Sarah missed the point that he was orphaned so we woke her up to explain how this was a conclusion to a dangling plot point. I recommend this movie to people who really like to suffer and not in the glamorous existential way. Quotes: "I am too many and two powerful." [on inspection of Big Kahuna's room] "A little candy cane for my tastes but then I'm an adult." Baby Bottle Rating: 2
[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]
This movie was not without its amusing moments but the plot was so dry (unlike its main character who is quite slick), I immediately took to Wikipedia before writing this post to see if there was anything of interest. It turns out this film was originally supposed to be a horror comedy but at the last second they decided to go straight up horror and oh boy, does the movie suffer for it. Three astronauts go on a mission to Saturn and two are burned up while the third is just severely burned. At no point do we get any explanation as to how the ship makes it back to Earth but he's here now and he's mostly okay . . . until he wakes up, rips off his bandages, and freaks out at the sight that is. He goes on a killing spree while slowly losing a lot of gooey mucus and the occasional body part. He takes out a nurse, a fisherman, an older couple who stopped to steal some lemons, and, tangentally, unintentionally stops a sexual assault. He's basically a zombie who needs to feed in order to sustain life. There's a whole main plot surrounding the melting man's scientist friend who is incapable of showing sincere emotions and some truely irrelevant subplot going on regarding his wife's propensity for miscarriages. The scientist tries to track down his drippy friend and manages to prove that Melt Man still has some human in him before the scientist is gunned down by incompetent police. After lots of hardcore melting action and apparently not enough manflesh, Melty goes into an alley and reaches his inevitable state of sticky puddle. A janitor cleans him up off the street but will never clean up our souls after seeing this.
This movie is just weak. It was not without its funny moments, mostly to be found in curious facial expressions and lines, but overall the weak plot and slow pace mostly just makes you want to put Dissolving Dude under a heat lamp to speed up the process. Quotes: "He seems to be getting stronger as he melts!" Spoon Rating: 3
[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]
It's been a long time since I made a post. it's not that we haven't been doing Bad Movie Night the last two weeks but the two movies we watched I have nothing more to say about: "Saving Christmas" and "Birdemic." Two classics I have talked about enough. However, this week we are back to watching things we've never seen before and we came back with a bang. Literally. I wouldn't even call this movie bad. It's like "Inhuman Resources" which we all loved so much: it's a movie that knows what it wants to be and is well aware of its ridiculousness and doesn't care. This movie knows no boundaries. On a scale of one to ten it is pretty much always operating at an eleven and never drops below a nine. After this, it's pretty much a gurantee that there will be more Bollywood movies at bad movie night because it was so damn fun. None of us had even seen a Bollywood action movie before (Indian movies in general, yes, but not like this) and Adam described it well with, "This is like old school Hollywood. You're here for a show and godamnit we're going to entertain you." In a rapid prologue of Dutch angles and flashbacks we get the story of a Goa city cop named Rakesh Kadem who killed himself after being framed by the city's top gangster, Jaikart Shikre, who has the whole police force bending to his whim. Kadem's widow knows he only killed himself because of the pressure but on him by Shikre and wants to clear his name of corruption charges. Suddenly, the story changes entirely as a man emerges from a giant pool as if summed by the gods and we are treated to the first of three musical numbers. With lyrics saying, "The heart races. The body trembles when you know he's coming. Singham!" you know what's up. Singham is a cop, the perfect cop actually (Indian Chuck Norris, really), in a small town outside of Goa. Everyone loves him. He literally sends men flying up into the air by tapping them on the head. Cars flip over in his presence. He's basically the Jesus of fist fighting who ends his battles by whipping his opponents with his belt. Among this mad display of manliness we are treated to a silly comedic side story about how his friend's daughter falls in love with him and pretty much demands marriage. We get another musical interlude. He says he loves her so I guess they're engaged. Everything is swell until Shikre is given conditional bail and must travel to Singham's village every day to sign in. Initially he sends some goons but Singham is not having it and embarrasses Shikre into complying. Shikre gets revenge by having Singham transfered to Goa where he can make his life hell with the goal of driving him to suicide as well. Singham is frustrated with the state of Goa and how none of the other cops will help him try to take down Shikre because they're all afraid of him. Singham almost gives up and goes home. There's another song break between Singham and his girlfriend. He is inspired then to try to turn everything around after meeting Kadem's widow and remembering the true meaning of taking down the bad guy. He arrests Shikre's top lieutenant by framing him but Shikre gets revenge by kidnapping Singham's girlfriend's sister. Then Singham decides to beat up more bad guys in public and give rousing speeches to the police officiers about their duties. They agree to band together to take down Shikre. Which they do. By killing him. And making it look like a suicide. No chill. And Kadem gets cleared of all charges and his widow is personally apologized to by her husband's coworkers. Explaining the plot of this movie does little to get to the meat of why this movie is such an experience. It's so hard to describe the most over the top fight scenes you will ever witness juxtaposed with essentially pop music videos (which you can watch on YouTube by the way). And the sound effects! Sound effects dissimilar from any you have heard in the known world! Oh, and every time Singham is being really badass, his theme plays. Or at least the part that says his name. And we will be singing it for all eternity. SINGHAM!
BMN Quotes: Adam: "This is the film equivalent of an eight minute Metallica solo." Kay: "This is the film equivalent of pounding Red Bull." Adam: "This is the Dragonforce of cinema." Spoon Rating: 9
Christian horror is apparently a thing but it's hard to find the difference between this movie and you typical 70s horror a la Grindhouse. Although there is a religious character who ultimately plays a role in the first and final act, all the Jesus is pushed aside for gory violence. It's a little hard to get the Christian message when you are distracted by fake blood and paper-mache bird heads but I guess they tried. If nothing else this movie managed to earn itself an X rating for violence although X ratings were a lot easier to come by in the 70s than they are nowadays where everyone is desensitized and I think that rating is only used for actual porn. 
