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Episode 15 Voodoo Black Exorcist It would seem that, in 1973, there were no black people in the entire country of Spain. However, that was not going to stop director Miguel Cano from filming a blaxploitation film. Little things like that can be easily solved by putting the happy couple in black face before they're attacked by the only used car dealer on Voodoo Black Island. Well, naturally, since he's a used car dealer, he must be killed, which means that there is only one thing to be done: the woman must be beheaded and the man must be danced over by topless natives. This is Grindhouse at its finest. We cut from voodoo ceremonies to the Apollo landing. So I can only assume that the rest of this movie takes place on the moon. Which explains all the ocean and bikinis. I swear this write up makes exactly as much sense as the movie. Fortunately this movie chooses to voice over all its expository dialogue against shots of a fire eater in a bikini, which is an improvement over most of these movies that just sit and talk at the audience for half an hour. Anyway, the zombie wakes up, because what better punishment for a murder than to let him become an unstoppable killing machine in 1000 years. Not to mention suddenly white. Hey, blackface is expensive, you can't use it for the whole film. So...I guess this is actually a whitesploitation film, which really kind of defeats the purpose of this being Voodoo BLACK Exorcist. In fact, everyone who was in black face earlier is now white and on the same cruise ship. Because... ....because...... I guess just because black face is expensive. Anyway, that means that the zombie's lover is alive and Spanish on the boat. So he gives her head. Wait, he gives her A head. Always a good courtship ritual. The movie then complete diverges as it becomes just the voodoo zombie discussing the ontological and existential nature of being a voodoo zombie. Turns out he's quite pleasant and well spoken when he's white, and is only choppin' off heads to give to Spanish women while black. That's the kind of positive racial messages this movie looks to deliver. It's all very progressive and forward thinking, the message being that black people can also be monsters. In the end, there's no exorcist, and the zombie is Iberian much more than black, and late in the movie is subdued by a fire hose. Because that's the kind of positive film this is. God bless the 70s. In the end a random flame thrower out of nowhere kills the zombie and the woman that they trying to save. Oops. I guess there's a lesson in there for us all. Tags: wdiwt
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Episode 14 Leeches! Have you ever watched the movies that come on the Sci-Fi channel at 9pm on a Saturday? You know, the really bad ones with crappy CGI and usually some monster that is nothing more than an excuse to showcase the really crappy CGI? Movies that feature things like radioactive nazis or giant bulletproof kimodo dragons? Well...that's the kind of stuff they show on a weekend at prime time. Ever wonder what they show in the middle of the week at 3am? They show Leeches! The first thing that stands out about Leeches!, besides how excited the movie is about the titular blood suckers, is that the director is gay. I don't mean that as a perjorative, his biography on wikipedia very clearly reveals this fact. Which you wouldn't otherwise guess by the long and loving shots of buff guys wearing Speedos climbing out of the water in slow motion while some sort of camera-flash special effect is going on. That's the first ten minutes of the movie. Nothing else, just guys in Speedoes and fake camera flashes. The budget for shirts in this movie couldn't have exceeded $15. And the rest of the movie was about $90 beyond that. In slow motion. Oh god the slow motion. The movie is probably no more than 30 minutes long if the film was run at-speed. But no. This uses more slow motion than the typical episode of Baywatch. Panning up and down buff guys as they swim, undress, and lounge about. And, ya know, even if you think you'd enjoy buff guys undressing, swiming, and lounging, this is not the movie for you. This is not the movie for anyone. And then...there's the leech. See, it's a giant monster leech. Why? Because all the buff swimteam guys are taking steroids, and the leeches drank all their super steroid blood, until they become two feet long, phallic, and made of what appears to be Jell-O. They also enter your body through the mouth in a way that's not in the least bit suggestive. No. Not at all. Beyond the leeches, this is some sort of morality movie about the evils of steroids and peer pressure. Not that the plot matters at all. The steroids? The leeches? All just a linking device between shots of shirtless man meat. I've really gotta stop TiVoing 3am movies on SciFi. "This team is not a democracy, and I'm the president of the United States of YOUR ASS!" Tags: wdiwt
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One thing that we decided when we were in Boston at the beginning of the Summer is that we had to come back again. We had extra incentive to do so, since we had tickets for whale watching thanks to a see-a-whale guaranteed made by the New England Aquarium. Seriously, they're top notch people there, and if you want to go see whales in Boston, go through them.
First thing's first. We did not go out whale watching. The weekend featured weather too rough to go out in. However, they did issue us new rain checks good for any day NEXT whale watching season. So rock on.
What we did instead.
Well, on Friday we had planned to spend a good chunk of the day at the Museum of Science in Boston. It's an interesting museum, trying to squeeze most of the Smithsonian institute museums into one building. Primarily we were there to see Body Works, the travelling exhibit of plastnated bodies, but the whole of the museum was interesting. It has, among other things, the biggest Van Der Graaf generator in the world. Unfortunately we weren't able to see one of their lightening shows, as it was going on at the same time as our Body Work entry tickets.
After the museum, we wanted some dinner. This is how our vacations go: We were staying near the Fleet Center, which meant in the middle of Sports Bar Headquarters there in Boston. We decided to wander around the block, just see what sounded good. The first place we thought about turned out to be just a bar without any sit down restaurant part, so we went next door to a place called The Fours. I proceeded to have the best buffalo chicken sammich I've ever tasted with a great pot of baked beans and for desert an evilly wonderful lemony thing. On our way out, we saw why everything was so good. Apparently The Fours was designated by Sports Illustrated as the best sports bar in the COUNTRY. That's just how our vacations go.
Saturday was going to be whale watching, but that got vetod by a driving rain. So, we tried to find something else to do in Boston. What did we find? We found the travelling version of teh 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Not only that, but we must have stumbled across Ticketmaster just as they released some seats, as we landed ourselves 5th row center. That's just how our vacations go.
That night, we went to something called Spooky World. It's...well, it's too big to be called just a haunted house, it's to small to really be called a theme park, it's somewhere in the middle. It has three haunted houses, each trying to top the others with people leaping out of hidden places and yelling at guests, and a decent wax museum of horror movie characters. Also, some food, some carnival stuff, and ambiguously gay magicians. Good time.
Sunday, whale watching fell through again, so we went to the Aquarium for awhile, took in an IMAX movie, lunch at the Legal Seafood on the wharf, a trolly tou of the city, and wandered through a nice market area down near the water. Then...we had a flight home that really should not be recounted, because it would spoil the positive term of this post.
Great weekend. And now I can say I've been to Boston in the fall.
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This is an interestin year with Nanowrimo, as I'm working rather the opposite of how I normally do. Normally I have a great start and a vague conclusion, but this time I've got a very certain place that I'm going, but the start is going slow. So, since that's where my characters always go when I don't know what's happening in the story, my two main characters are drinking in a bar, and it's only chapter 4. Oh well. Still enjoying it. And, of course, it's November, which means it's time to find ways to NOT be writing. Thus it is that we now have an aquarium sitting on the endtable next to the sofa. No fish yet, because the aquarium is supposed to sit for a few days, but they'll be coming in a few days. And what happens when you get two horror writers living in one apartment? You get red and black gravel, a fake jaguar skull (best I could find) and fish that'll probably be named after various Deep Ones. 6000 words written. 44000 to go.
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Episode 14 BAMM Part 3 Manos: The Hands of Fate This is it. Thanks to MST3K, this is the movie that really replaced Plan Nine as the definition of a bad movie. It's #20 on the imdb bottom 100. Yet something keeps people coming back to it. There's something there in the movie. And here it is, here's the big secret: I've been watching bad movies for the better part of a few months now. I've seen Hercules. I've seen James Earl Jones punch apart mellons. I've seen movies from the 1990s that have worse special effects than several movies from the 1970s. And after all of this, there's one thing that I realized while watching Manos today. It's really quite a bit more enjoyable than many of the movies that I've watched. Now this means one of two things. It means that either it's better than a lot of the bad stuff that's out there, or that something has been seriously broken in my brain over the last few days of bad movie watching. Hard to say, really. But here's the thing. It manages to not get distracted. It's a very tight movie, taking less than 70 minutes to tell more plot than some movies I've seen stretched out into 90+. At some level it actually feels like someone cared about the movie. That's not to say they didn't fall afield, and that's not to say it even approaches good, but I'm not sure it should be quite the paradigm of badness that MST3K made it out to be. I guess the one benefit of all of it, though, is that none of us would have ever heard of the movie if it weren't for Joel and the Bots. Which is great, because people did actually care about this movie. Ya know, if I were given money from a studio and told to make any movie I wanted, tell any true story there is to tell, I think I'd want to tell the story of the filming of Manos. Everything was going against the movie, and it's probably a small mirale that it's even as good as it is. And there's such tragedy in the story, with the actor who played Torgo killing himself not long after the movie was made. It's hard to know what to really say about this movie. I'm...I'm actually glad I watched it, and it's a shame that the transfer was so shitty on my copy (all the color was shifted down). I think that something might be seriously wrong with me. Maybe this marathon was a bad idea. But I actually am glad I watched Manos. I'm scared. Tags: wdiwt
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Episode 13 BUMM Part Two Eegah! Three words that strike fear in my heart: Arch Hall Junior. Actually, that's not entirely fair. I shouldn't be unfairly tarnishing the word "Junior" since Arch Hall Senior is also a thoroughly terrifying thought. Maybe worse. Arch Hall Sr, afterall, is the person who decided to make a movie starting his squinty eyed son who can't really sing as the singing heart throb, his...um...secretary as the leggy female lead, and none other than himself as the doting father. To be fair, however, he did manage to do a good job casting an awkward 7'2 guy to play an awkward 7'2 caveman. In particular, he cast a gentleman who would later become much more famous playing Jaws in the James Bond series. There are entirely more connections between Eegah and Mitchell than you would expect. They both have a primary actor who would go on to become a recurring Bond character. They both feature unnecessarily long dune buggy scenes. And they're both better than I remember them, now that I have things like Blood Tide to compare them to. However, Eegah is much worse. Overly long shots that don't have anything to do with the plot, awkward attempts to create exposition early in the movie, and a focus on desert wildlife that...really makes me kind of wonder. There are long, loving shots of desert creatures skittering about, and occasionally having some lizard lovin'. Considering the alternative is for another Arch Hall Junior song to get wrenched into the plot, though...I've got to say I'd rather stick with the skinks and horned toads. I mean...there's a reason that he could only ever get parts in his daddy's movies. Nepotism at its finest. And what's scarier is that, in one of my other 50-packs of movies, there lurks another Arch Hall Jr movie where he plays a sadistic serial killer. I fear what that will be like. On a more personal touch, I'm feeling a little light headed, and am having a hard time catching my breath at times. I think it's good that I'm holding off on the last part of this mini marathon until tomorrow, as I'm not entirely sure the human body is meant to withstand this kind of cinematic torture. Remember, I'm an untrained amateur bad movie watcher. You shouldn't undertake anything like this movie marathon without having consulted with a trained physician, or at least Dr. Nick. Tags: wdiwt
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State of the mental report. So far I'm doing better than I expected. But then again, so far I haven't subjected myself to more bad movie than I normally would. My pulse is normal, my pupils are dilating properly, my neck is a lot stiff and sore, but that was how I started the day, so no worries that it's an ill effect of the movies. I've also discovered a little hole in the wall Chinese place where I least expected to find one that is damn good. They steam a good dumpling and make a great beef and broccoli. Not only that, but I just opened my fortune cookie, and it was a double cookie, which I understand is doubly fortunate. Or, at least, such I'm choosing to believe. Fortune: Share your joys and sorrows with your family. That's kind of freaky, might cause me a little poor mental health thinking how the cookie knew I was in the process of sharing my cinematic sorrows with my internet family. Now: Iron Chef America. Next: Eegah. Tomorrow: Manos. Shudder. Tags: wdiwt
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Episode 12 BUMM Part One Mitchell The real challenge of watching Mitchell is not the movie itself, but thinking about what to say about the movie. First off, I know that anyone reading this who has any kind of interest in bad movies has a certain acquaintence with the movie. It is, afterall, probably one of the top five classic episodes of Mystery Science Theater. And rightfully so. The episode is a great combination of semi-historic (being Joel's last), a great movie for riffing on, and a great job of riffing. However, this is not about MST3K, this is about my own experiences with these movies. Mitchell actually provides a great opportunity to explain just how bad some of these movies are. Mitchell is perhaps one of the better movies that I've included as part of my WDIWT series of posts. That doesn't make it a good movies. I'd like to point out that my tastes in movies hasn't been that atrophied by my current quest to watch some of the worst movies that have been put to film. So, I'm going to look at a few of the obvious questions that any rational person would have while watching this movie. Or, at least, questions that I had. My rationality obviously can't be taken as a given, since I am the one who voluntarily just watch Mitchell. Why God why? Okay, that's not really a good question to start with, since it really emcompasses several aspects at once. So to continue... Why Joe Don Baker? Baker is just one of those actors who is just always kind of there. He's perfectly servicable for certain kinds of roles. He's turned a pair of performances as Bond's CIA connection Jack Wade, and has even gotten a quartet of acting nominations for various award shows (though not, it should be pointed out, Oscars). Mostly, though, for supporting acting. And therein lies the rub. He's perfectly well suited for certain roles, but those roles are supporting roles. He's Jack Wade. He's never supposed to be James Bond. As the lead detective in a movie, there's just entirely too much Joe Don Baker, especially when he's rolling around between the sheets. What was this movie meant to be? Perhaps I just don't understand enough about 70s movie making culture. Was this the kind of thing that people went to the theaters expecting? The problem is that none of the chase scenes really seem to go anywhere, the investigative plotline never quite makes sense, and the "romantic" subplot really just makes me feel kind of grimey and dirty. BABY OIL?? NOOOO!! What's with the music? Come on. You've seen it. The music just does not fit. Oh, the dramatic score is alright, except that it keeps trying to sample the unnecessarily bad Love Theme From Mitchell (My My My My Mitchell). But the movie also hired singer Hoyt Axton to perform a pair of just oddly out of place semi-folk songs, one of which just fails for being entirely too self aware and meta. Hoyt Axton, if you're curious, is more famous for writing the song "Joy To The World" for Three Dog Night. Here's the thing. First, this has been entirely too serious of a review for a movie that perhaps doesn't deserve it, which is also hurting WDIWT's street cred as a comedy series. Second, though, this movie just had a few major flaws, but could have actually been something interesting. Giving it to an actor who has the chops to be a heroic lead. Giving the movie to one more writer to clean up. Perhaps getting someone who could have directed action scenes a little better. I think it just comes down to if everything had been done differently, it might have been a decent movie. That's not asking too much. Is it? Coming later tonight: Eegah. Right now, I'm clensing my pallate by watching the Transformers movie. Tags: wdiwt
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