I have seen several thousand films in my life, and many of them were terrible. It's not that I have trouble spotting a turkey beforehand, only that I tend to pursue them with glee. There have been only a handful of movies I've seen where the awfulness snuck up on me ( I'm looking at you, Godzilla and Armageddon). In my quest to lay witness to the worst movies ever made, I have certainly seen many that qualify. These include the Billy Ray Cyrus action pic Radical Jack (in which the audience must endure a scene where he pours water over himself and his mullet in slow motion), the Italian/Mexican/Spanish zombie movie City of the Walking Dead (where the end of the movie is just the first 15 minutes of the beginning repeated), the 80s horror movie The Invisible Maniac (his escape scene in particular), 1970s free love movie Feeling Up (in which a man climbs over top of the camera sans underwear), and of course, Ed Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space, labeled by many as the worst movie ever made. Until yesterday, I would have agreed. But then I saw Wood's other infamous movie, Glen or Glenda. The mind reels.
I'm not even sure if I can adequately describe what I watched last night. It almost defies description. One could describe the movie as Wood's call for tolerance for transvestitism, something he found within himself. Yet that description doesn't describe probably 50% of the movie, as much of it seems to have nothing to do with anything.
The first six or seven minutes is just stock footage of traffic moving along a highway and people walking up and down city streets, intercut with, or superimposed over, shots of Bela Lugosi as "The Scientist," reciting lines such as "People...all going somewhere...all with their own thoughts...with their own ideas...with their own personalities." He also takes the time to mix a few beakers of liquid in his laboratory, and exclaims "The source of all life," as smoke rolls out of one. These things, however, seem normal in comparison to what unfolds later.
The actual "story" begins as police are called to the scene of a suicide of a transvestite. In an attempt to understand where this person was coming from, the police inspector visits a psychiatrist familiar with the condition. The inspector is supposed to be sympathetic to the victim, but at one point refers to them as "a four time loser." Anyway, the psychiatrist then tells the story of Glen, who also dresses like a woman and is called Glenda. Glen is played by none other than Wood himself, for whom the role was semi-autobiographical. His conundrum is whether or not to tell his fiance about his habits before the marriage or after.
It's at this point when the movie ceases to be comprehensible. The stock footage of traffic is repeatedly shown, along with Lugosi reciting lines such as "Pull the string! Pull the string!" all while superimposed over shots of stampeding buffalo. Then it gets really weird. What follows is easily the most bizarre stuff I've seen this side of a David Lynch movie. It's easier to just show you than to try and describe it.
To top it all off, the last 10 minutes or so is another story entirely, although still narrated by the psychiatrist. Wood still manages to include massive amounts of stock footage, only this time it's WWII instead of heavy traffic.
Plan 9 From Outer Space may still be the worst acted movie, and possibly the most unintentionally funny, but Glen or Glenda is far more convoluted and strange. If it were any other director, I might accept that these devices were intentional, an internal mechanism to echo Wood's own struggles with transvestitism. But this is Ed Wood, full of earnestness and desire to make great movies, yet lacking in almost any skill to actually create them. Yet what is great about his movies, besides the "so bad it's good" quality, is that his earnestness is so very palpable on the screen. If only we all had the courage to strive for greatness, even if we know we may never attain it.
Oh, and by the way, this has to be one of the creepiest things I've ever seen.
So yesterday I rewatched another movie that I found amusing as a twelve-year-old boy, Moving Violations. Released in 1985, it was written and directed by the same man who did Police Academy. While this should tell you everything you need to know, I will nonetheless continue. The movie "stars" John Murray (Bill's younger brother), who does more mugging for the camera than a group of thugs working a corner bus stop. He, along with a group of other 1980s familiar faces, including Brian Backer (Mark Ratner from Fast Times), Wendie Jo Sperber (Michael J. Fox's sister in BTTF), and Nedra Volz, the housekeeper from Diff'rent Strokes (not Mrs. Garrett or the fat, manly one who looked at everyone like they were a piece of chocolate cake), all find themselves in traffic school for, you guessed it, moving violations. In said traffic school, they of course face off with a nasty police officer who has been demoted to this position in part because of the antics of Murray. Murray is supposed to be mischievious but funny, but instead he just comes across as a dick (think his brother Bill's turn as Bob, but without the psychosis). He is easily the least funny part in a movie that struggles enough for laughs. You know you're sailing in dangerous waters when the funniest part comes late in the movie, as Nedra Volz's character tells everyone they should "rip his nuts off," referring to their unscrupulous instructor. If you are having a hard time picturing her, here is a photo. Clara Pellar, of "Where's the beef?" fame, has a cameo as Volz's friend or sister. Her main scene includes what is either an on-screen heart attack by Pellar or the world's most painful (and disturbing) orgasm. Not even Fred Willard can make this a good movie, his talents wasted by the fact his biggest laugh is supposed to come from hypochondriac Sperber mistaking him for a doctor when he is in fact a mechanic, and she winds up nude on a car lift in his garage.
Overlooked in this movie is the fact that most of these people really shouldn't be driving. Hell, Volz's character mistakes a dog for Pellar, her eyesight is so bad. To make it even more ludicrous, the postscript in the movie indicates that Murray's character had to attend traffic school 5 more times, and that in frustration, the city made him the instructor!! And now, nobody fails! I'd love to see the accident statistics in that city. Anyway, I feel that I have taken another bullet for the viewing public out there who may have been tempted to watch this movie. If I haven't persuaded you yet, maybe the actual trailer for the movie will.
PS - If I never have to see Sally Kellerman in a leather bondage outfit again, it will be too soon.
Saturday night I found myself in the eye of a very surreal hurricane. A friend of mine had come for a visit, and after several hours and an unmeasurable amount of alcohol, he was hammered, shit faced, blotto, 3 sheets to the wind, and every other conceivable expression for being drunk off your ass. This particular friend is already prone to outrageous, crude, and off-color remarks, even when he is sober, but get him worked up, and watch his ability to internalize comments play out like the little Dutch boy. What better activity to engage him in than making him watch The Villain, that 1979 ode to live action pratfalls and stiffer acting than one would have thought humanly possible. Featuring an all-star cast of Kirk Douglas, Ann-Margaret, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, this "comedy"-western really only has one redeeming quality, and that is the cleavage of Ann-Margaret. To call this movie a tragedy would be a disservice to movies that actually aspire to be so. You know when Paul Lynde is playing a Native American chief, you're in trouble. (I should add a caveat here. It is possible that this movie was made for a younger audience, as it plays like a Roadrunner-Coyote live-action cartoon, only with less plausibility. If that is the case, perhaps the movie works on some base level, although it does not explain the constant close-ups of Ann-Margaret's barely contained breasts.)
Anyway, my friend quickly lost interest in the plot (admittedly easy to do), and simply became transfixed by Ann-Margaret's heaving bosom. With his eyes swimming in booze, he repeatedly inquired as to when she would be disrobing and showing her "tits." I tried to explain to him that it was rated PG, but his altered state allowed for no explanations. Finally, in an attempt to get him to possibly switch gears, I pointed out that she also had very pretty hair, to which he simply replied, "You can't fuck hair." His focus remained unchanged.
At some point during the movie, he did mention 'Nanerpuss, an inexplicably bizarre character from a Denny's commercial that likely sends druggies who witness it while tripping the light fantastic to hurl themselves from atop the tallest building they can find. We spent a good thirty minutes watching this video on youtube, as well as many of its remixes. Through it all, my friend would alternate between shouting "'Nanerpuss!" and "I wanna see some tits!"
Nothing quite says Saturday night like an evening with a socially unabashed individual drunk out of his mind, a singing banana, and Arnold Schwarzenegger in a powder blue cowboy outfit. On a side note, "Nanerpuss reminded me of an album cover I came across a few months ago. The band is called Head East, and the album was called Flat as a Pancake. There are no words for the back cover.
Last night I gave my brain a vacation and watched Meatballs 4. I have no real excuse other than the fact I happen to enjoy summer camp movies, probably because camp always looked like fun and I never got to go as a kid. This movie, however, was as removed from other summer camp movies as possible. In fact, the camp is actually a ski resort camp, not a traditional summer camp. All of this is made moot by the incredibly bad acting, wretched dialog, and extremely tired plot. Here is an example of the dialog: Woman clearly not a teenager but playing a teenager asks the old man running the camp - "Are you checking IDs?" Old man probably 3 times her age responds while gazing at her breasts - "No." Woman clearly not a teenager but playing a teenager replies - "Good, because all I brought was my IUD." I'm pretty sure Quentin Tarantino wrote that witty piece of dialog.
Now I will fully admit that I don't mind female nudity in a movie, no matter how gratuitous. That teenage boy in me has never quite completely gone away. Yet when that is all your movie has going for it, you're in trouble, unless of course you are making porn. There are numerous scenes where flimsy excuses require several of the female campers to be topless, and without these scenes, the movie is probably 35 minutes long, tops. If this were a sitcom, there would be no laugh track, because there are no discernible funny cues in the entire movie.
Corey Feldman is the "star" of the movie, and many would say that should be the first clue to the craptasticness of the film. While I certainly do not think he is a great actor, I did really enjoy him in The Goonies, Gremlins, and The burbs. Not so much in this movie. I don't know what was worse, watching him dance to a terrible instrumental version of Michael Jackson's Black or White, or trying to emote. Here is an example of the latter.
I could go on, but I will leave it to you to discover the other subtle nuances of Meatballs 4. If you do watch, try explaining to me why Feldman's character is in love with the ugliest girl at camp, or why the villain of the movie would accept a wager to pay off the debt of the camp when all she had to do was wait a few more days and buy the camp when it foreclosed. Surely we can get some stimulus money for a commission to explain these things. As a side note, Feldman breaks the fourth wall at the end of the movie, mentioning that he was in The Goonies. That's more self-awareness than this movie can handle.
One of the funniest movies of all-time has to be This is Spinal Tap. This faux documentary follows the tour of Spinal Tap, a heavy metal band whose members never seem to be able to distinguish the line between "clever and stupid." Despite its outlandish situations and inconceivably bad songs, it is ackingly close to home for many of the real metal bands it mocks. Let's take a look at a few of the songs.
First up we have Sex Farm, with lyrics like "Scratching in your hen house, Sniffing at your feedbag, Slipping out your back door, Leaving my spray." Now lets compare this to Let Me Put My Love Into You, by AC/DC. An excerpt from this song, "Let me put my love into you, babe. Let me cut your cake with my knife." Ah, terrible double entendres abound.
Next we have Big Bottom, containing the oh so sensitive line "My baby fits me like a flesh tuxedo. I'd like to sink her with my pink torpedo." Kiss released the song Fits Me Like a Glove the same year, containing such gems as "My snake's alive and it's ready to bite," and "Oh baby, babe, fits like a glove...Cause when I go through her it's just like a hot knife through butter." Fantastically bad.
Finally we have Stonehenge, Spinal Tap's attempt at grandeur. This song holds some very thought-provoking and mind bending lyrics, such as "Stonehenge...where the banshees live, and they do live well," and "We'll go back in time to that mystic land, where the dew drops cry and the cat's meow." Iron Maiden set brains ablaze with Quest For Fire, which begins with "In a time when dinosaurs walked the earth, when the land was swamp and caves were home, in an age where prize possession was fire, to search for landscapes men would roam."
Apparently many of the events of the film also hit close to home for real heavy metal bands. Several bands acknowledged getting lost in the concourses of arenas, complaining unreasonably about backstage provisions, and receiving critical reviews which may have been more clever than the works they were covering. In particular, a scene in the movie depicts a mistake during Spinal Tap's performance of Stonehenge, in which a life size model is supposed to descend from the ceiling, and be danced around by a group of dwarves representing Druid children. The model turns out to only be a foot and a half tall, because the dimwitted guitarist didn't know the difference between feet and inches. Apparently this really happened to Black Sabbath, except their model was converted into meters, and so was three times too large. Magnificent.
Anyway, check out this film, but don't laugh too hard, because if you choke they can't dust for vomit.
So I just finished watching this old black and white sci-fi movie, King Dinosaur, and it was pretty spectacular. Another planet appears orbiting around the Sun, and the U.S. decides to send a rocket to it with three scientists, whose jobs are to collect data on the habitability of the planet, and also a doctor, who is along for treating diseases and for "treating a fatality." At this point, the movie is already fantastic, and they haven't even blasted off into space yet. How a planet just "appears" is beyond me, as the movie makes clear that it was not always there but had somehow escaped discovery. Also, how do you treat a fatality? I briefly thought the movie was rather progressive for the 1950s, in that two of the scientists are women. Any steps forward for women's lib however, are soon reversed once things begin to go amok on the new planet, dubbed "Nova."
Upon landing, two of the people emerge in plastic fish bowl helmets to test the atmosphere. You'd think that both of them would be scientists, but alas, no. For some reason the doctor is performing tests. Once the all clear is given the other two emerge and they begin to explore their surroundings. It is discovered that this planet is teeming with vegetation and wildlife, which the scientists (or hell, people) seem oblivious to the fact that they bear uncanny resemblances to those found on Earth. They even take time to laugh at a bear cub climbing up a tree, but make no observation about its species. The geologist of the group takes a rock sample and determines that the planet is quite young, and that it is in the "prehistoric era." I'm no scientist myself, but doesn't prehistoric pretty much refer to Earth eras alone.
After a few hours of in depth science, they begin to make their way back to their ship, but get lost along the way. Apparently none of them are survivalists. Forced to make camp for the night, they somehow manage to make a relatively large shelter in the dark without the benefit of lanterns, flashlights, or even torches. This movie just kept getting better.
Of course during the night when the doctor is supposed to be keeping watch, one of the female scientists awakens, and they both wander off together to do some canoodling. The doctor trips in the dark, falling down a hill right on top of an alligator, which he wrestles like Tarzan. He manages to kill it, but not before he is seriously, but vaguely hurt. All the while, the woman stands on top of the hill screaming, even though she has a pistol on her belt. It is becoming evident that these women are very delicate.
As she stays behind to nurse the doctor back to health, the other two explore an island that seems different than the surrounding environment. There they discover the namesake of the film, a "dinosaur" that the dude scientist claims bears a striking resemblance to Tyrannosaurus Rex, but in actuality is really an iguana made to look large. I don't know what sort of natural history museums this guy has been visiting, but there is no more resemblance between those two species than between me and George Clooney. Of course it traps them in a cave, giving the woman plenty of time to scream and cry and the man to scowl and shove her around.
At this point the centerpiece of the film takes place, when the "dinosaur" fights another large creature, an alligator. No comment is made on whether or not it resembles a Triceratops. As these two titans clash, a gila monster looks on with interest. No word yet if this was actually a Brachiosaurus. The two trapped in a cave are able to use the distraction to reach the other two, who have come to rescue them, and to bring along a little something extra. It seems the little black box they've been totting is actually an atomic bomb. For some reason it makes perfect sense to detonate it on the island. Luckily, they make it back to the other shore, where the half mile between them and the blast is more than enough to keep them safe. The movie ends with a close-up of the mushroom cloud, and for some reason, with uplifiting music to accompany it.
While they still make movies this bad, few of them are made with the same earnestness. So do yourself a favor some Saturday afternoon, and watch King Dinosaur or any of the numerous bad sci-fi films of the fifties. You'll get a kick out of it.
Incredibly, I found the trailer for this movie on youtube. Awesome.
At the top of the list is "Dirty" Harry Callahan, the iconic character played by Clint Eastwood. I have seen all 5 of the Dirty Harry movies, although it has been several years. So a month or so ago, I rewatched the original film, surprisingly enough titled Dirty Harry. I had forgotten just how great that character is. Nothing beats the looks of disdain on Harry's face when he has to deal with red tape, or the look of satisfaction when he has just cornered his perp.
This first film is loosely based on the events surrounding the investigation of the real Zodiac Killer, renamed Scorpio here. Scorpio is played by Andrew Robinson, and this guy will really give you the creeps.
Anyway, do yourself a favor and check out the #1 movie badass of all-time.
Music - Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Queen, The Flaming Lips, Silversun Pickups, Modest Mouse, Sparklehorse, Stars, The Monkees, Vampire Weekend, The Killers, The Zutons, Funkadelic, Chris Isaak, The Moody Blues, AC/DC, Fleet Foxes, Willie Nelson, Cornershop, Gin Blossoms, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, The Beatles, Unknown Hinson, The Cure, Jane's Addiction
Movies - Star Wars (original trilogy), The Big Lebowski, Tremors, The burbs, Alien, Aliens, Brotherhood of the Wolf, This is Spinal Tap, Dumb and Dumber, Dodgeball, Superbad, Walk Hard, Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Grandma's Boy, Wet Hot American Summer, The Goonies, E.T., Indiana Jones (original three, not the abomination of cinema that was the 4th one), Pulp Fiction, State and Main, Happy Texas
TV - Lost, Twin Peaks, Northern Exposure, The X-Files, The Simpsons, Freaks and Geeks, Undeclared, The Office, 30 Rock, Seinfeld, Magnum P.I., Eureka, The Prisoner, Arrested Development, Tremors: The Series, Family Guy,
