2024/12/26
These movies are bad. No, they're not so bad that they're good or fun or unworthy for escape. They're bad. They are whale-flensingly bad. If you're looking for frolicly or enjoyably bad movies, you'll have to wait for tomorrow, because these are simply and superlatively bad. Really, these movies are potentially a boozily swung chair broken over the my friend's mom's back of your brain. If you expected to read about any of A24's movies, I'm really very sorry but I couldn't be bothered to watch any preciously or pretentiously shallow, hazily desaturated crap this year. I promise that I'll spearhead the backlash against that naked emperor next year, maybe.
Some directors who were hired to helm following flicks of a franchise ride the coattails of another, but a more fitting analogy would be that Damiano Damiani hijacked the enduring popularity of The Exorcist to create a prequel to The Amityville Horror that's nearly as senseless and considerably more distasteful than John Boorman's own fatuous sequel, The Heretic. As a dramatization of the DeFeo murders and Hanz Holzer's novel Murder in Amityville, its script (by Dardano Sacchetti and Carpenter's mentee Tommy Lee Wallace) disregards actuality and fictionalized continuity alike by depicting the famous familicide in a manner that's stagily, scarelessly plodding. Worse, Sacchetti and Wallace can't be blamed for scenes that Damiani penned and interpolated, wherein the troubled Italian family's abusive patriarch (Burt Young) anally rapes his wife (Rutanya Alda), and his demonically possessed son (Jack Magner) seduces his sister (frequent punching bag/love interest Diane Franklin). Viewers rightly deplored these heavily truncated scenes as revolting rather than frightning, but they're not as aggravating as a sympathetic priest (James Olson), whose gross idiocy and ineptitude eclipse those of the brainless hieratic assassins in The Final Conflict, and forestall a properly administered exorcism. Glaring plagiarization of Williams Blatty's and Friedkin's classic abound, esp. during an inconclusive ending. Amityville was a typical American International Picture: a cheap production elevated by its top-flight directorial, auctorial, histrionic, and compositional talent, the efficient exploitation of which yielded remarkable revenue. Ira N. Smith and Stephen R. Greenwald didn't skimp on everyone assembled for their Mexican-American production: the cast is quite good (except Alda, who shriekingly overplays her traumatized housewife); Lalo Schifrin's score echoes that of his first, but has its own character; editing by Sam O'Steen is as unindulgently deliberate as possible. Had Smith and Greenwald jettisoned Wallace's and Sacchetti's screenplay and commissioned another, and replaced Damiani for a director who wasn't pointlessly perverse and qualitatively erratic, their movie would've surely enjoyed far more than a modest success that it didn't deserve.
Most fans who sniffed at the higher production values and fluffier tone of Basket Case's sequel were probably fed up with Frank Hennenlotter for his goofy, gory trilogy's third picture, in which hapless, half-mad Duane (Kevin Van Hentenryck) struggles to reconcile with his malformed mutant twin Belial while their benefactor Granny Ruth (Annie Ross) conducts them and all of the other freaks of her shelter to a small southern town, where her ex-husband (Dan Biggers) is prepared to help Belial's similarly misshapen ladylove give birth. Trouble ensues when impetuous deputies (Jackson Faw, Jim Grimshaw) subordinate to the town's initially sympathetic sheriff (Gil Roper) spy their new visitors in the hope of securing a reward for the formerly conjoined fugitives. A handful of truly funny moments can't offset twice as many that fall flat in the course of a story that treads water for 90 minutes of a plot that could've been dramatized in 40. Henenlotter's to be commended for his ruthless willingness to terminate characters and the imaginatively multifarious designs of his anomalous gaggle, but his movie is too much a showcase for the latter than a medium for an interesting story. If Ross's hammy personation of her cutthroat philanthropist was merely irritating in the prior pic, she's certainly worn out her welcome with lordly fatuity and an insufferable performance of Personality that'll leave anyone who's allergic to theater kids aghast.
=]=:< <"Wow, is this stupid. It's like watching Phantasms 3 and 5 -- you can't help but wonder, did he make this with his preteen kids as creative consultants? Those babies are so ugly and toxic, even I don't wanna eat 'em. Gross."
Spoiled sons (James Fox, John Alderton) of a haughty industrialist (James Mason) decide to ransack cash from a freighter owned by daddy with the support of their slutty girlfriend (Susannah York) and a trendy career criminal (James Coburn), whose ingenious plan requires surreptitiousness to which they're unaccustomed. This sounds fun, and might've been were it not one of Hollywood's embarrassing exploitations of moronic hippy subculture, for which script doctors Harry Joe Brown Jr. and Pierre de la Salle unbearably farced Donald Cammell's slightly clever caper as a bloated, gratingly garish "happening, an action, mahn" packed with pointless digressions and godawful pop art. As cruelly squandered as Mason, Coburn does what little he can with mortifying dialog for his fee of $500K, which is more than can be said for his co-stars; York doesn't even try to render her seductress at all personable. One hundred and one minutes have seldom seemed so long; this is so stupid, considering that excision of its many unfunny asides, groovy gibberish, and dumbest characters could've resulted in a tight, exciting heist of 80-odd minutes.
Some guileless idiots (Roberta Collins, William Finley, et al.) are pitchforked by the unhinged proprietor (Neville Brand) of a backwater flophouse and fed to his Nile crocodile. A lusk sheriff (Stuart Whitman) does little to investigate these disappearances. Badly co-written by his Texas Chainsaw collaborator Kim Henkel, Tobe Hooper's third and worst film hasn't much more story than that, and substitutes lots of wearisome, suspenseless running, flailing, and grappling for plot. Whitman, energetic young Robert Englund, and longsuffering Marilyn Burns are largely wasted in one of the worst horror pictures of the '70s: an ugly, inane, despondent, glaringly artificial waste of 90 minutes. Hooper directed no few bad movies that are actually fun to watch, so why have so many fans convinced themselves that this isn't horrendous?
=]=:< <"OK, I'm gonna call bullshit on this one. Sure, this movie is garbage in every way, but there's nothing better than watching this many people get eaten by one of my cousins! Yeah, I know that it's made of rubber and plexiglass or whatever because Clyde wasn't available because he gnawed some hillbilly's leg off and got shot and now he's five pairs of boots, but this movie is fucking great! Munch, munch! Too bad they didn't feed the little girl to the croc, but hey -- nobody's perfect. Kudos to Tobe Hooper for making a movie when he was virtually comatose on weed."
During a mercifully brief dream, a little boy garbed only in gold lame shorts befriends a parade's parabolic balloons and numerous bipedal monstrosities as he converses with their voice actor and narrator, who screams at him across a poorly-dressed warehouse. Subsequently, a second narrator declares everything gay while drunkenly commenting on a fourth-rate parade staged to celebrate Thanksgiving Day along Philadelphia's Benjamin Franklin Parkway, circa '65. Culturally banal yet surreally horrible, intentionally wholesome yet creepily actualized, this atrociously shot and scripted dreck is even shoddier than the balloons, floats, and performers filmed therefor. It's a landmark of cheap, celebratory cinema that may melt your brain if viewed without RiffTrax's commentary.
It's not the worst of his abysmal post-'80s output, but Argento's horror-thriller about a jaundiced serial killer (Adrien Brody) who abducts, mutilates, and dispatches attractive women is indisputably awful for Jim Agnew's, Sean Keller's, and Argento's shopworn, sophomoric script and Frederic Fasano's unsightly photography. The sister (Emmanuelle Seigner) of a model (Elsa Pataky) captured by the xanthous antagonist pairs with an American detective (also Brody) to apprehend the killer before he can repeat his usual depredations. His smoothly tracking and probing camerawork is one of Argento's few remaining hallmarks. How he evoked performances from Brody and Seigner that are as horrible as those of their most negligible co-stars is anyone's guess.
Only morons who frequent Reddit enjoyed this flopped French slasher badly helmed and plagiarized (from Dean Koontz's novel Intensity) by ridiculous auteur manque Alexandre Aja, in which two friends (ordinarily lovely and likable Cécile de France at her most butch and irksome, persistently monstrous trashbeast Maïwenn Le Besco) are assaulted at the rural home of one's family by a hulking serial murderer who just turns out to be de France's waif during psychotic episodes. Even in an era when footage is regularly ruined with hideous grading, one won't readily witness cinematography uglier than Maxime Alexandre's here, or day for night that's less convincing. Aja supplies gratuitious gore only because he hasn't the talent to cultivate any genuine suspense, and the results are boring, almost forgettable in their much-touted extremity. Avoid.
=]=:< <"What is with everybody's faces in this?! God, French people are fucking deformed."
Musicians (country singer Ferlin Husky, sometime model Joi Lansing) frequently break into song when they and their twitchy manager (Don Bowman) aren't menaced by illusory monsters, the international spies (Basil Rathbone, John Carradine, Linda Ho, Lon Chaney Jr.) who control them, and their requisite gorilla (George Barrows). It's as dumb and unfunny as reputed, but also tragic as Rathbone's penultimate picture, and Merle Haggard's inauspicious screen debut as a country band's singer. RiffTrax's treatment of these tedious hijinks confers to them a modicum of actual humor.
In the aftermath of their parents' untimely deaths, a teenager (Manuela Martelli) broods aimlessly and plies a trade as a hairstylist while her moronic baby brother (Luigi Ciardo) invites two sleazy bodybuilders (Nicolas Vaporidis, Alessandro Giallocosta) to cohabitate with them. Their brilliant plan: she'll prostitute herself to a blind, cloistered, former bodybuilder, model, and actor (Rutger Hauer) so that she can locate and steal his hidden cash. An Italo-Chilean production that's as languidly pointless as most filmic Eurotrash and philosophically pretentious as the average Chilean drama, Alicia Scherson's screenplay adapted from Roberto Bolaño's novel squanders her admittedly effective direction and fine cast on a story that hasn't an interesting burden or conclusion. If you care to watch a pretty Italian girl sulk for 80+ minutes or indefatiguably sublime Hauer breathing some tacit depth into a humdrum character by dint of crudely graded photography that's stupidly enhanced with cheap CG, this may be for you.
Fred Walton is a filmmaker whose attention to tone and composition significantly exceeds that of gimmicky, sub-Hitchcockian William Castle, but his second adaptation of Ursula Curtiss's Out of the Dark is nathless inferior to Castle's, largely for Cynthia Cidre's almost unmanageably mindless screenplay. Teenagers (Shawnee Smith, Tammy Lauren) who are babysitting a little sister (Candace Cameron) ease their boredom by prank calling numerous people, one of whom is a recently unemployed psychopath (Robert Carradine) who's tidying up after murdering his girlfriend (Jo Anderson). Repeated calls and their visit to the killer's home are as sensible and credible as his violent interactions with his suspicious brother (David Carradine). Plots of the worst horrors and thrillers are often contingent on the mind-boggling stupidity of their protagonists and deuteragonists; Cidre actually simplifies and cretinizes Curtiss's clever story to accomodate that imbecility. Several striking shots through the umbratile lenses of DP Woody Omens frame quietly creepy moments, but Walton can't work miracles with either Cidre's brain-dead narrative reduction or the Carradine brothers' wooden acting.
If her esteemed father (George Grizzard) would just stop raping kids, a housewife (Joanna Kerns) and her obnoctious sister (Shelley Hack) might be willing to accept their reemergent memories of his abuse, but grandpa's durative lust extends to her kids, so viewers must slog with her through dull recollection, anticlimactic confrontations, worthless excursus, and obtuse denial by her mother (Dina Merrill). Presumably, screenwriters Michael Love, Martín Salinas, and Joe Cacaci assumed that boring psychotheraputic sessions (in which Tony Roberts is criminally underutilized as a therapist) and circuitous tedium was preferable to any sort of judicial resolution, or merely the arrest of Grizzard's pedophile. Nope! Only a conciliatory conversation culminating in an unintentionally hilarious reveal/punchline are proffered. Yes, this would be better were it more gratuitous: audiences want sordid details and vengeance, not some facade of tastefulness.
=]=:< <"Obviously, grampa pedo should've fallen into a lake and been eaten by an alligator. Women's movies on TV are for losers."
Irradiated silt begets a rubbery biped (Win Condict) who bloodily slays brain-dead residents and homeless of Venice Beach in this shitty shlocker. Incompetence and idiocy of its many characters correspond to that of its cast and crew: the professorial protagonist (Alan Blanchard) who's seeking the monster mostly whines and wanders about before teaming with a fisherman (arrantly adorable theater kid Mello Alexandria) to catch it as clumsily as possible. Hamminess of Alejandro Voss and J.C. Claire respectively playing a police detective and deformed researcher is entertaining, but most of the movie's trying, plodding proceedings involve characters who'd easily escape the lumbering, amphibious abomination if they only knew how to stop talking and simply walk away from it.
=]=:< <"What a waste of resources on a movie that should've been about (another) killer crocodile. Just take a few steps back and torch it. Duh."
Occasional laughs and colorfully gloopy SFX that illustrate how dirty derelicts dissolve into caustic glop after sipping toxic hooch peddled by an unwitting liquor store's proprietor (M. D'Jango Krunch) can't redeem this intolerably stupid, grimy, revolting farrago of subplots concerning homeless lunatics and their bloody predation of police, civilians, and criminals. If its runtime was trimmed from 102 to 70-odd minutes, its script episodically restructured and shorn of abounding nonfunny incidents, and aggravating Torgo-alike star Mike Lackey were cut altogether, this would almost be watchable.
=]=:< <"Fun fact: I regurgitated a partially-digested lamb while watching this. Gross, huh? Ha ha!"
© 2024 Robert Buchanan