Lilo and Stitch

2002 Disney flick

Rating: 14/20

Plot: A destructive extraterrestrial escapes a death sentence and winds up in Hawaii. He hides at a dog pound where he's adopted by Lilo, a lonely girl living a troubled life with her older sister. As they try to prove to a social worker (an African American!) that their living conditions are acceptable, strange alien thugs try to figure out a way to capture Stitch.

I never loved this one despite appreciating Disney's efforts to work outside of the folklore canon and come up with an original story like with the dreadful Treasure Planet, The Emperor's New Groove (or is this based on a folk tale?), the dreadful Home on the Range, and the dreadfully dull Brother Bear. Oh, and the dreadful Atlantis. Maybe they should have just stuck to princess movies. Or finally adapt Baba Yaga to the big screen! The humor in this doesn't work for me, and the music, instead of going for their flashy theatrical musical thing they'd been unleashing with inconsistent results, seems to be written in to pander to tweens. I'm not sure I've ever actually seen a Hawaiian. If they look like these characters, I'd probably remember. I like the Stitch character fine, probably because he reminds me of my penis for reasons I won't get into here. I've got to keep this PG-13 after all. This hammers a message about acceptance and unconditional love and family into your noggin until you're ready to puke blood, but the story and characters are colorful and fun enough to keep it entertaining. It's not upper-echelon Disney, but the kids will probably like it. Unfortunately, it might have the undesired residual effect of causing youngsters to jump on the furniture, chew on banisters, and tear out the pages of library books.

If I start a "Do a version of Baba Yaga, Disney!" petition, will you sign it? If I can get everybody on this blog to sign, I can mail that son of a bitch off with five and a half names on it!

Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones

2002 sequel

Rating: 15/20 (Dylan: 10/20)

Plot: Well, they'd already committed to making three of these things, and although nobody really liked the first one (Star Wars Episode I: Darth Vader Was Once a Little Kid) despite lovable new characters like Wotto, the fish-faced guys, and Jar Jar Binks; two lightsaber fights, including one extended one with three guys, that blow away anything in the original trilogy; Natalie Portman; and a really cool space battle that is only somewhat ruined by a little kid's presence, they couldn't just not make Episode II. So George Lucas and his pals, mostly puppets, had a barbecue at the Star Wars ranch (you haven''t had barbecue until you've had barbecued Gungan, by the way) and figured out ways to fix the franchise. They came up with the following list:

1) Less of the maligned (unfairly?) Jar Jar Binks
2) Replace the comic relief Jar Jar Binks provided with more scenes featuring the lovable robot duo of R2-D2 and C3PO. Everybody loves them! And everybody loves puns!
3) Bring on Boba Fett. Star Wars nerds love that guy, so they will naturally love to see him as a little kid.
4) More romance. The first trilogy had some romance, including a developing love affair between a guy with his own sister. And the characters in that original trilogy have to be conceived at some point, right?
5) A lot of political mumbo-jumbo, and numerous scenes taking place in a big room with outer space senators. After all, people love watching C-SPAN. They'd surely love C-SPAN in space!
6) Christopher Lee. That guy makes everything better.
7) A scene with a scantily-clad Natalie Portman chained to an obese, slimy green thing.
8) Give Obi-Wan a freakin' beard! He's got one in the original Star Wars, and it might confuse people when he doesn't have one in the prequels.

And from George Lucas's original notes and stick figure drawings, they penned a script in under an hour (Rocky time!), called up John Williams to see if he could compose the exact same music he'd already composed for the other movies, found some random guy working in a deli who really knew how to slice meat and sounded vaguely Jedi-like when he said, "Hello, my name is Hayden. How can I help you today?", and made the magic happen.

This movie loses points every time C3PO has a line. What the hell were they thinking? "I'm beside myself"? "This is such a drag"? Come on. I don't think that idiom is going to survive a long, long time or make any sense in most galaxies that are far, far away. And I don't think a distressed robot would say something like that. It's unbelievably stupid and probably represents what almost all original trilogy fans hate about this next generation of Star Wars movies.

However, this movie is a lot of fun, and I honestly can't understand why it wouldn't appeal to fans of the original trilogy. It's a bridge movie, much like The Empire Strikes Back, so it doesn't complete a story. It's got a saggy middle weighted down with politics and the romantic developments on Naboo between dopey Anakin and his not-very-sandlike love interest. But let's take a look at what it does have:

--my favorite shot from any of the Star Wars movies not featuring Akbar or his fish-faced friend when Portman's scratched by one of those Harryhausen-inspired monsters and the trade federation guy does this little celebration
--those Harryhausen-inspired monsters in that ridiculous arena scene
--a really cool chase scene through the Fifth Element-esque city planet "streets"
--pretty funny rapport between the great Ewan McGregor (and he's nearly as good as the great Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan) and Hayden
--a cool new bounty hunter
--Boba Fett's daddy, who looks like a shinier version of the Boba Fett we all know in love but who does a helluva lot more than his son did in Episodes V and VI
--a terrific and intense fight on the rainy planet between Jango Fett and Obi-Wan
--explanations for things in the original trilogy, like where Stormtroopers come from
--Obi-Wan slinking around like a noir movie detective sans fedora
--Christopher Lee as a Sith bad guy, classy and evil
--parallels between future-Vader and his son Luke
--Yoda yielding a lightsaber, hopping around like a banshee. Are you kidding me? I literally urinated in my movie theater seat when I saw that on the big screen.
--more lightsabers at once than you can count, slicing and dicing robots and those waspy-looking things
--some great new settings (the aforementioned rainy planet and the waspy-looking things planet) along with the beautiful Naboo

If you travelled back in time to before the prequels were made, found a diehard Star Wars fan, and told him that George Lucas was going to make more movies with those things in them, that Star Wars fan's nipple would harden. And it's all presented with the groundbreaking special effects you'd expect from a Star Wars movie. Is the story clunky? Probably. Is some of the acting really bad? Yes, and I'm looking straight at you, Hayden. Should Anthony Daniels have stopped the director and said, "Wait a second, boss. I'm not so sure C3PO would ever say this"? Maybe. But despite the film's flaws, this episode, like the other two in the trilogy, were fun enough to make me feel like a kid again, and I loved being able to experience the Star Wars universe with my own kids.

The Curious Dr. Hummp

1969 raunchy sci-fi horror B-movie

Rating: 7/20

Plot: A crazy scientist, under the direction of something that sort of resembles a brain that is kept in a glass jar, sends ghoulish thugs out to kidnap people having sex. Then, using some rock-solid science, he's able to use their orgasms to prolong his life or something. Reporter George and stripper Rachel, with the help of a scorned nurse, try to escape before they have to have sex in the presence of a zombie guy with a ukulele.

At one point, Dr. Hummp, a guy with a superfluous M in his name, says that he wants to create "veritable screwing machines." Sure, Dr. Hummp is using others to benefit himself and make the brain-in-a-jar happy. He's selfish and, with that whole using zombies to kidnap people thing, probably evil. Say what you want about evil and selfish scientists, but would being kidnapped and forced to have sex all the time be all that bad? I'm not sure these people have much to complain about. Honestly, I wouldn't mind being a veritable screwing machine myself. This is no-budget, poorly written and even more poorly dubbed, and exploitative. You can almost imagine the producers watching an early cut and having this conversation:

"Oh, man. Our movie sucks and is way too short."

"Yeah, I thought the monster guys would look more menacing. They just kind of stand around or approach their victims very slowly."

"I'm not really sure this plot makes any sense, fellas."

"Well, it's back to the drawing board. We can't release a forty-two minute movie. Especially one that nobody would want to watch five minutes of."

"I've got a way we can fix both problems--the short time and the suckiness."

"Oh yeah? How's that?"

"Let's add forty-five minutes of nudity!"

"That's a brilliant idea!"

The naked starts early and never really goes away. You get a lengthy depravity montage featuring strippers, lesbians, heterosexual couples, a woman pleasuring herself, and a guy in a striped shirt who was probably supposed to be a homosexual, all who unfortunately are about to be pervknapped by a slow-footed goon with a chloroform-drenched napkin. Then, you get a little plot. It's not enough to distract from all the naked people, of course, but it's enough so that the back of the dvd box can say something other than "There's a mad scientist doing some stuff and a lot of naked people!" Don't let the image of the top goon holding a ukulele below fool you into thinking this is one of those B-movies that's actually good. Yeah, that's a pretty awesome shot, and there's another scene where the goon plays his instrument, but this is not a movie that is worth seeking out.

And I'm adding "veritable screwing machine" to my resume.

Heavy Metal

1981 science fiction cartoon

Rating: 12/20

Plot: A space sphere of throbbing green light disintegrates an astronaut and then tells his daughter a few stories. It rocks pretty hard!

I'm not the audience for this. A white suburban teenager who is angry with his parents for no real reason and who can't wait to bust out of his pants, a guy with a goat's head in his closet and a bunch of missing socks--he's the audience. This is an episodic collection of animated sci-fi shenanigans, definitely a hit 'n' miss affair, but at least half of them contain the imagery you'd expect to see in a fantasy geek's wettest dream. All the cartoon women are gifted mammararily and plot developments give plenty of excuses to allow the nipples to make appearances. There's even a scene with robot-on-human sex if you're into that sort of thing. I know you are which is why I'm mentioning it. I'm not a fan of the music although it was good to hear Devo and even see a really cool alien depiction of them. I liked the weird-looking creatures that inhabited these stories, almost like cast-offs from the Mos Eisley cantina, and I really liked the opening shots of an astronaut driving his hot rod home after a hard day's work. Air Force zombies, a Hulkish figure with the great name of Hanover Fiste, a bit of sci-fi noir with ugly animation to match an ugly Robert Crumb-esque New York, and chunks of the otherwise-dull climactic story featured on the above poster are high points. The stories are animated in slightly different styles which gives it some variety, but after a while, enough's enough. You get frustrated that it doesn't make a lot of sense, and you don't even care about seeing any more animated nudity because you've already shot your wad. So to speak. There's enough here to make a teenage boy say the word badass multiple times by whatever the middle schooler equivalent of a water cooler, so I guess you almost have to look at it as a success.

Zontar, the Thing from Venus

1966 remake

Rating: 3/20

Plot: Dr. Taylor befriends what he believes is a friendly alien from Venus and helps him figure out a way to come to earth to solve all of our problems and make us as technologically advanced and wonderful as his planet. But Zontar turns out to be a mean "thing" and actually has other plans, plans involving mind control and mayhem! Arrgh! Zontar!

So somebody at Azealea Pictures decided that it would be a good idea to remake a Roger Corman B-science fiction flick (It Conquered the World) with a worse director. See that poster there with the menacing "thing" that looks like it could be straight from the sketchbook of a possibly schizophrenic child? That's actually a fairly accurate visual. The "thing" doesn't look much better than that. I swear, by the way, that I've seen that exact screaming woman in the exact same pose on a poster for another movie. This is just as bad (just as good if your glass is half full) as Larry Buchanan's other movies (see Attack of the the Eye Creatures [sic] or It's Alive [the proud Manos Award winner for my blog two years ago]) which means it's fun enough to watch at least seven times and has this mystical quality that almost makes it worth basing a religion on. This is stuffed with some juicy dialogue, philosophically insightful stuff about good and evil. There's a lengthy quote at the end about how man needs to find the answers within as opposed to without and about how "war, misery, and strife have always been with us and we shall always strive to overcome them." I'm not 100% sure, but I think it was plagiarized from The Diary of Anne Frank. Oh, and the reason the thing is called Zontar? That explanation is priceless. There's also some really unfortunate attempts at comedy, mostly courtesy of a pair of soldiers. One of them says "I saw a funny-lookin' boid" about six times (because it's funny?) and once, my response (an "Ehhh" like I'd been punched hypogastrically) was the exact same as one of the characters. Zontar, as I mentioned, looks ridiculous, like a greasy owlish swamp thing with pterodactyl wings. When Larry Buchanan makes that thing fly though? That, ladies and gentlemen, is movie magic. Well, assuming seeing funny-lookin' boids is magical. My favorite scene: panic in the streets; a woman stops a policeman to ask a question about manually operating an iron lung. What the hell? The fact that she yells "Stop!" while standing face to face with the policeman adds another level of greatness.

I have to go. I have more Larry Buchanan movies to watch. God bless America!

Avatar

2009 cartoon

Rating: 13/20 (Dylan: 12/20)

Plot: Gargamel and his crew of marines have found their way on Pandora, a planet that needed its name changed during the Avatar script's rewrite. They want to use their clunky robots and and hibernation tubes to harvest some fairy juice from the rhizoids of Pandora's foliage. Unfortunately, the blue bipeds, scantily-clad hippies, who inhabit the planet use that same fairy juice to get high, an activity that takes up the majority of their time. The Navajo of Pandora ain't giving up their fairy juice easily! Gargamel develops a plan involving the most expensive Halloween costumes in the history of the holiday, and a few marines, including one nondescript guy who is only on the mission because his twin brother died, dress up as Navajo in order to befriend the real Navajo and abscond with the fairy juice. "Shove it all down the front of your pants if you have to," Gargamel ordered. "Me and Chuck'll still smoke it!" When it seems that the Navajo has no interest in cooperation, the marines decide they're going to have to take over forcefully and even, if push comes to shove, knock down their giant tree and, just to show them who's boss, piss all over their fiberoptic weeping willow. But the Navajo, as feisty as Ewoks, have a few tricks up their blue sleeves, including holding a three-day music festival with Country Joe and the Fish, Sha Na Na, and Joan Baez. Brown acid is taken, hair is plugged into freaky-looking horse tails, and the Navajo reach a higher level of consciousness, unfortunately making us all a little bit dumber in the process. How's about an explosion? How's about one in 3D?

I enjoyed watching this for a couple reasons: 1) Dylan and I, along with a couple of our robot friends, found it fairly easy to make fun of with the predictable plot, the hamfisted political message, and especially the inane dialogue, and making fun of things is how my family feels better about themselves. 2) It was pretty. It's the type of movie that distracts me with thoughts about how much it costs to make something this big and sparkly and how many pairs of leather pants that would have bought me when I was a fourth grader. Because when I was a fourth grader, I wanted to be a movie like Avatar. I wanted be clad in leather pants and a Michael Jackson jacket and just be able to walk into my classroom, saunter up to the gal I happened to like that week, and point with both hands in an exaggerated way at my crotch. Maybe thrust a bit, possibly spin depending on my mood. The gal, I'd imagine, would have been understandably impressed, with or without the 3D glasses. And then I could have pointed in that cool way I always wanted to point (like a finger gun, thumb waggling) but couldn't because I didn't have the leather pants to do it. Would I have any substance? Possibly not, but that's not what fourth graders cared about anyway. Avatar is a movie that brazenly waggles its thumb in the air, thrusting its leathery hips willy-nilly, splashing hos with bucketfuls of colors that probably don't even really exist. It all looks pretty good, expensively good. My tiny screen (Dylan and I watched this on an Ipod touch that we propped up against a Sparky Anderson statue that we got at Great American Ballpark recently, by the way) was soaked in all these gorgeous colors, and I was impressed with the creativity that went into designing these lush surrealistic landscapes. Pandora's a lovely place to visit. I wasn't as impressed with the interaction between its characters/wildlife and the setting. Things in Pandora looked too shiny and plastic. But it's a quibble because I enjoyed nearly everything on the screen that wasn't terrible blue-screen acting or laughable dialogue. I thought the robot things that mimicked the movements of their drivers were really goofy. I'd like to have one though, just because I think it would be funny for people to see me and a robot in which I'm riding simultaneously point at their crotches with two hands. Unfortunately for the King of the World, cardboard cutout characters added to a story that feels derivative adds up to a pretty boring eight hours of movie if you take away all those pretty visuals. Which I'm sure is close to what all my love interests in fourth grade would have thought about me, too. "Yeah, he's got a pair of leather pants and can do a pretty mean centipede on the cardboard during recess, but I really can't stand the guy. And why's he point at his crotch so much?" To me, there's very little difference between this movie and Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, a movie I watched while wearing a welder's mask.

Samurai Jack

2003 television cartoon movie

Rating: 16/20 (Abbey: 18/20)

Plot: An evil, polymorphous sorcerer named Aku takes over the world. A child is sent far away from the villain to be trained as a samurai for the sole purpose of returning some day to bring order back to the world. And with his magic sword, he's nearly successful until Aku opens a portal and sends him to the future where he is dubbed Samurai Jack. The future's not bright as Aku rules and robots run rampant. Jack has to search for a way to get back to the past so that he can defeat Aku and save the world. Watch out!

Abbey picked this out, and I'm always in the mood for a little Samurai Jack action. This "movie" is really the first three episodes that set up the rest of the series. It's in three parts, and the three parts have the samurai cinema homages, the playful humor, and the fantastic action sequences that make the show one of my favorites. In part one, we meet Aku and have an montage where our young hero is being trained in different martial arts and other skills. In the second, he's flung to the future, so we get that science fiction twist on the samurai story. And some funny talking dogs. And in the third, we get a brilliant battle between the protagonist and a bunch of robot spiders. Consistently creative with artful fight scenes, a hodgepodge of eccentric characters, superb music, and simple but wonderful animation by Clone Wars guy Genndy Tartakovsky, the series is addictive and epic. And this movie kicks things off great. Tartakovsky seems to be influenced by the same exact stuff I love (samurai movies, Star Wars, Alice in Wonderland, spaghetti westerns) and the creative "camera angles," ever-changing assortments of sceneries, and the use of split screen during the action scenes keep things fresh. Watching Samurai Jack kick ass is all fine and dandy, but the humor injected into the storylines and the quiet moments are really what makes this all special. I love the use of sound effects, too. But those fight scenes! Like the rest of the series, you have violence in this that would make it completely inappropriate for children if the victims were human. You'd have limbs all over the place! But other than Jack getting scratched and bruised occasionally (and he isn't the type of hero who is completely invincible) and Aku who is just a black shape that sort of tears, the antagonists being cut down are machines. Robots don't bleed. Well, unless you count oil. And if you do and are disgusted by a little oil in your cartoons, the climax of the robot spider fight scene probably isn't for you as it makes the House of Blue Leaves scene in Kill Bill look like the violence in your typical Tom and Jerry cartoon. Actually, now that I think about it, those Tom and Jerry cartoons were exceptionally violent. Out of all the things I love, Samurai Jack is the one that makes me feel most geeky. But I'm not ashamed to admit that the news about an upcoming theatrically released Samurai Jack movie to finish off the story made me clap my hands and giggle and proclaim that I would probably dress up as a character to see it opening night. Samurai Jack makes me feel like a kid again, likely because I still rock the Samurai Jack pajamas (with the feet) when I want to have a more exciting night of sleep. And this kid, if his mother would let him, would call the premiere movie bitchin'.

Planet 51

2009 pedestrian cartoon

Rating: 9/20 (Dylan: 6/20; Emma: 8/20; Abbey: 15/20)

Plot: It's an alien invasion! Only instead of the little green guys invading our world, it's Earthlings doing the invading. American Chuck Baker, a less-than-heroic astronaut hero, comes in peace, but he isn't exactly given a welcoming reception and has to find a way to retrieve his confiscated space ship and escape the titular planet.

OK, I'm officially tired of these CGI things that try to appeal to both children and adults and end up failing to appeal to either. The forced pop culture references in this (Thanks, Shrek) are cringe worthy, and the characters are as flat or personality-free as characters can get. The aliens, not helped by the fact that they all looked the same (apologies if that sounds racist), were indistinguishable, and the 1950's Americana influence for the setting was an idea that probably worked on paper a lot better than it ended up on the screen. It didn't take very long at all for me to completely lose interest in everything that was going on here. But my biggest problem, something that bothered me on multiple levels--a penis joke. "That's a funny place for an antenna." C'mon, Ilion Animation Studios. That's not necessary and unfunny on any planet.

The Eye Creatures

1965 Larry Buchanan sci-fi remake

Rating: 3/20

Plot: Titular eye creatures (see below) invade earth and interrupt necking teens. One of the teens, a thirty-year-old one named Stan, hits one of them with his car because he's driving without his headlights on. He and his girlfriend try desperately to get the police to believe their story, but he's arrested for hitting a drifter instead. They return to the scene of the accident to look for evidence of aliens. Or maybe just to make out again.

Larry Buchanan, director of the Manos Award winning It's Alive, sure knew how to make bad movies. The silliest thing about this Z-movie is the whole night/day continuity error thing. The story takes place during a single night; however, half the scenes are being filmed in obvious daylight. It almost seems like every other scene switches from day to night or back again, and if I didn't know better, I'd think they did it on purpose to be funny. Or maybe the silliest thing about this is the acting. Lots of Torgo contenders here. The guy who plays "Jim" is really great, especially that moment when he spots a wildly spinning UFB (unidentified flying hubcap) and spitting out, "This one was green!" with far too much excitement. The old man who, although he only gets one line (essentially "Get off my lawn, kids!"), gets to say it over a thousand times. The pair of Peeping Tom surveillance dudes were also impressive. I can't find any of these thespians names because the cast list doesn't show that the characters even have names. But I know that guy's name was Jim! The scene where Stan hits one of the aliens with his car should be used as a "how not to" in an editing course in film school. The girl screams, Stan looks over at her, there's a screech, the girl says, "Oh no!" or something, and then there's a thud, all with this comical choppiness. The alien monsters themselves, eye creatures apparently, were obviously dudes in hastily-assembled costumes. Here's what they look like:


Not quite as embarrassing as the monster in It's Alive, of course, but still pretty dopey. Watching one of their severed rubber arms prowl around was about as embarrassing though.

Here's my favorite tidbit about this movie though:

Apparently, this was shown on television and the producers wanted to jazz up the title a bit by adding "attack" in the title. I guess it makes it seem more menacing. Problem is, as you can see above, they didn't bother proofreading their work and ended up with Attack of the the Eye Creatures as the title. That is awesome. And so is Larry Buchanan who, as I examine more of his work, might have a body of work that is more inept than even the great Ed Wood.

Nightbeast

1982 sci-fi horror movie

Rating: 4/20

Plot: An alien crashes in the woods, and some guys camping hear it. They investigate and are immediately lazered into oblivion. Who is going to stop the Nightbeast, a being impervious to bullets and seemingly unstoppable? Oh, and there's a Bad Fonzi character running around raping people. Somebody's also got to stop him.

Director Don Dohler directed The Alien Factor in 1978, but he apparently wasn't happy with it and thought he could do better. So just four years later, he remade the story as Nightbeast. If this movie actually is better, I wonder how bad The Alien Factor is. The first half of the movie is jam-packed with repetitive action scenes involving the monster shooting people and them disappearing with some graphics that look like something I could have seen while playing Atari as a kid. The spaceship scenes at the beginning were cheaply artistic. I was all ready to give the guy who played Uncle Dave the Torgo award for the year until I noticed that every single performer in this movie is almost as bad. I'm not sure I've seen a worst ensemble cast. Don Leifert played Bad Fonzi (actually, Drago) with a low-budget intensity that gave me chills, and I'm guessing, since a quick glance at his short resume shows that he only acts in movies from this same director, that he was either a good buddy of Don Dohler or they were both in some club for people named Don. And who do we get to be the big action hero who will eventually save the day? This guy:

That guy! He, by the way, only acted in one other movie--The Alien Factor. But Tom Griffith sure nailed this one, rocking that salt and pepper afro and shooting an insane amount of bullets at the monster during several scenes despite knowing that it has no effect. And to top it all off, he gets himself a sex scene! That's right. You get to see that guy's ass. If I made a top-ten list of awkward sex scenes, this would be in there somewhere. I have to give credit to Dohler for his ability to shock though. Along with that shocking sex scene, there are some pretty gruesome deaths. Well, after the thirty minutes of lazerin'. Intestines make a cameo appearance, and there's a nifty decapitation. Hell hath no fury like a rubber-faced alien scorned, I guess. If you like bad movies, this isn't a bad way to spend eighty minutes. Or three hundred and eighty minutes if you have to rewind and rewatch that sex scene a bunch of times like I did.

Repo! The Genetic Opera

2008 genetic opera

Rating: 8/20 (Anonymous: 12/20)

Plot: It's the year 2056, and folks organs aren't working too well anymore. Luckily, there's GeneCo, a company that helps the needy get transplants. And if the patient can't make make his or her payments? Well, the organs are repossessed violently by a masked singing repo man. A girl with a mysterious illness, her dad, a grave robber, the president of GeneCo, and his idiot children all sing about it.

Apparently, there are a ton of posters for this one. One of them even clearly says at the top "From the producers of Saw" and a little bit lower "Paris Hilton" but that didn't stop my brother from grabbing this and inviting me over to watch it with him. For the most part, Repo! The Genetic Opera looks and feels just like something made by the producers of Saw that happens to have Paris Hilton in it would. For a musical to work, the music has to be good, and the throbbing gothic industrial shit in this is not, lyrically or sonically. Musically and visually, this is pretty gross. I was surprised that this movie had the budget it did. The sets were elaborate, and the dark future the makers of this envisioned is fully realized although it suffers from some CGI-ugliness. The concept is clever enough to deserve a decent budget, I suppose, but it's so poorly executed. The acting is bad universally, and strangely, a lot of the performers don't sing very well. I suppose it would be hard to have to sing such poorly written lines while trying to keep from laughing though. Perhaps that was the situation with actor Bill Moseley, a guy who's had a lengthy career doing small bits in horror movies including Army of Darkness. Nearly every time he was given screen time, I wanted to laugh, and I'm not sure that was the intention. When the producers of Saw tried to inject a little dark humor into the proceedings--a few bad puns here and there, some gross-out stuff--it didn't work at all. Repo! The Genetic Musical ends up nothing more than an attempt to make the next Rocky Horror Picture Show. I don't like that movie at all either but wouldn't even recommend this to people who do. For those out there who happen to enjoy this sort of thing, it sets up nicely for a sequel. Anonymous and I will be there opening night, probably dressed up as Blind Mag and Luigi Largo respectively.

Paris Hilton, by the way, plays a character whose face falls off. I thought for sure I was watching a Carl's Jr.'s commercial during that scene.

Santa Claus Conquers the Martians

1964 holiday classic

Rating: 5/20

Plot: Martian children have become obsessed with earth television, specifically any show that features Santa Claus. Martian parents decide to send a ship to earth to locate and kidnap Santa. But Santa's holly-jolliness and cheer corrupts the Martians because apparently Christmas spirit is communicable. The Martians force Santa and the two American children they also kidnapped to set up a workshop and start making toys for the Martian children. A Scrooge of a Martian named Voldar conspires to do away with the jolly elf once and for all though. Can Santa escape and get back to earth in time for Christmas?

A true holiday classic. I can't figure out why the theme song ("Hoo-ray for Santy Claus") hasn't become a Christmas standard. This movie doesn't exactly look like it had a lot of money dumped into it, but it's not the cheapest production I've ever seen. The sets aren't bad, and heck, they got three little people to play elves (three more than the Mexican Santa Claus [Conquers the Devil] movie had). There's even a bitchin' robot, and the funniest polar bear you're likely to see in a movie! The bitchin' robot isn't around for long because Santa Claus refers to him as a toy which apparently causes him to malfunction. There's also some great Martian gun effects. They make a small popping sound and cause their victims to freeze and slightly wobble. The acting in this isn't awful, and the guy who plays the 800-year-old prophet who sounds like he's whining is terrific. I'd try to figure out his name, but the characters are named Kimar, Voldar, Droppo, Harpo, Momar, Gilmar, Bomar, Rigna, Winky, Stobo, Lomas, and Shim. I think it might be Chochem though, and Carl Don played him. He also played Von Green in this. The Martians are cheesy, green-suited and in green face. My favorite Martian, probably because I'm a bit of a Grinch myself, is Voldar played by Vincent Beck, an actor who did a lot of television work. All his lines are barked out in this grouchy tone, so most of what he says is funny. His reaction to one of Santa Claus's jokes ("Martian Mallow!") was hilarious, and I loved hearing him say things like, "They have a secret device and his name is Billy Foster!" or "Soon all of Mars will be blithering idiots!" This interaction was my favorite though:

Earth Kids: What are those things on your head?
Martian: Antenna.
Earth Kids: Are you a television set?
Most Martians: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
Voldar (barking): That's a stupid question! We want our children to be like these nincompoops?

It all leads up to what can only be described as a demented final fight between Santa/children and Voldar. It's a great, uplifting Christmas story, but I wonder if there's something deeper going on here. I wonder if maybe Voldar is the real hero of this story and whether the producers of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians are trying to warn viewers that Christmas may turn us all into blithering idiots or what will happen as people lose touch with the real values of the holiday and things become more automated. In some ways, this movie is eerily prescient.

Gentlemen Broncos

2009 comedy

Rating: 14/20

Plot: Young Benjamin's worked hard on Yeast Lords,
a sci-fi novel with a hero partially inspired by a father who is no longer around. His mother sends him to a writer's camp where he meets his author/hero Ronald Chevalier and a boob-obsessed teen filmmaker who has made over eighty movies although some of those are just trailers. Benjamin throws his Yeast Lords into a pile for a contest and is rewarded for his hard work by having Chevalier, currently struggling with his own ideas, steal his work and have it published. Around the same time, the filmmaker gives him five hundred dollars for the right to adapt Yeast Lords into a feature film. Problems occur when Chevalier finds out because there's nothing he hates worse than plagiarism.

On the poster, they advertise this as being from the director (Jared Hess) of Napoleon Dynamite. A lot of times, that sort of thing can be misleading. Not here. It's entirely appropriate, either as a threat for those who think Napoleon Dynamite is the stupidest thing they've ever seen, or as a promise to anybody who happens to like that movie. I personally liked Napoleon Dynamite, so I suppose I'm the audience for this sort of thing even though I can see how large chunks of Gentlemen Broncos might even be too wacky for Napoleon's fans. Hess is the type of director who knows how strange people really are and uses his films to magnify eccentricities into wildly comic proportions. Nothing about these characters or the worlds they inhabit are exactly realistic. Our protagonist, played by Michael Angarano, acts as a kind of straight man here, but in every other movie, he'd easily be the weirdo. Jermaine Clement (from Flight of the Conchords and Eagle vs. Shark) and Jennifer Coolidge (lots of stupid movies) really steal the show, and they get so many hilarious lines to say. Honestly, I'm not sure how they can say some of the things they say without erupting into a painful fit of giggles, but I guess that's why they make all the money. I'm also not sure how Hector Jimenez can contort his face into such goofy expressions, but I almost laughed every time he was on the screen. A scene involving a hand massage and Jimenez's horrifying moaning was probably the goofiest thing I've seen all year. There are some really dopey soundtrack choices, kind of like Hess swung for Wes Anderson's fences and missed, but there's some great set design and art work. A lot of the set details in the places these characters frequent seems to have been picked up at rummage sales (butterfly decor, Jesus portraits), but there are some originals that the characters painted that are pretty sweet. The science fiction covers used during the opening credits, whether they're real or originals, are also cool. A lot of the stuff going on in the movies-within-the-movie was a bit much and there were far too many boob and gonad references. Then again, gonad humor almost always works. Heh. Gonads.

I looked up Napoleon Dynamite to link this to that and was surprised to see that I apparently haven't watched that movie in the last three years. Odd since it seems like I've watched Napoleon Dynamite over a hundred times.

The Wasp Woman

1959 Roger Corman sci-fi monster movie

Rating: 5/20

Plot: Janice Starlin, the owner and face of a cosmetics company, worries about declining profits and her waning beauty. Lucky for her, she meets Dr. Zinthrop at exactly the right time. He's discovered a fountain of youth only its not a fountain at all but a "powerful royal jelly" extracted from wasp jism or something. It works on rats, then on cats, and finally on Janice Starlin. Starlin becomes obsessed with her refound beauty. But are there side effects she doesn't know about? Like turning into a wasp woman and biting people? Oh, snap!

This starts really strong with what seems like a poorly-shot documentary on beekeepers. Yeah, this thing hits you with a barrage of cheapness from shot one and doesn't let up. You get one of those wonderful character-wrestling-with-something-stuffed scenes (a cat, in this instance) that I've grown to love, the same art work hanging on walls in two different settings (an office and an apartment), and one of the goofiest monster costumes you'll ever see. There's a lot of pseudo-technical jibber-jabber that confounded. Most confounding, however, were a pair of scenes where I couldn't figure out what the hell was going on. In one [SPOILER ALERT], the scientist, right after he's been attacked by a stuffed cat, staggers off a sidewalk and gets struck by a car. Why does getting attacked by a cat make a person forget to look both ways before crossing a street? The other scene is when the scientist is showing off his creation to Susan Cabot's character. He injects a rat, puts it in a cage, and then talks for a while so that the audience can't see the rat. When the camera shows the rat again, it's a little bit smaller. Later, it's even smaller. I couldn't figure out what that meant. Does the royal jelly injection lead to youth or dimunitiveness? There are a handful of scenes that make this kind of fun, but a completely maddening soundtrack that makes it almost painful in chunks. It would also be painful to anybody bothered by poor editing and storytelling, of course. And anybody who, like me, is left with a desire to have a sexual encounter with the wasp woman, a desire you know will lead to numerous sleepless nights. Susan Cabot made for an attractive wasp woman. Still, I wouldn't have been able to control my own royal jelly if Sebastian Cabot had starred as the wasp woman.

Trail of the Screaming Forehead

2007 B-movie homage/comedy

Rating: 7/20

Plot: Body-snatching alien foreheads invade earth.

I watched and enjoyed Larry Blamire's The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, another intentionally bad homage to 50's low-budget movies complete with anachronism and continuity errors. That, for the most part, was an enjoyable experience. Screaming Forehead, despite a title that might make you think you're about to watch the next Citizen Kane (or Eraserhead), just doesn't work. I think it's a case where everybody is just trying too hard, and although Cadavra also struggled with that at times, it at least had some more subtle and quietly clever moments that made it worthwhile. I never felt happy that I was watching this one though. This movie's in color, probably the grossest color that a movie can be in. There's a ridiculously over-the-top theme song that I kind of liked, like Burt Bacharach on a bad trip. Ray Harryhausen is given a production credit, but I've not been able to find any evidence that he had anything at all to do with this.

Teenagers from Outer Space

1959 alien movie

Rating: 2/20

Plot: Some aliens, who don't really look like teenagers if we're being completely honest here, are scouting the galaxy to find a planet where their giant lobsters can thrive. They use the lobsters for food. Unfortunately, their food can kill them, and they decide our planet (earth) would be a good giant lobster farm. One of the aliens named Derek, a teenager who also coincidentally happens to be the son of their leader, has second thoughts after they disintegrate a dog. He runs off to find the dog's owners and falls for young Betty. Meanwhile, fellow alien Thor causes wreaks havoc as he searches for Derek.

I lost the notes I took for this one. Suffice it to say that this is a bad movie, but it's definitely more in the "good bad" category than it is the Wild Women of Wongo category. The acting is uniformly bad, especially Harvey B. Dunn as Gramps. Mr. Dunn's resume includes work in a couple Ed Wood Jr. movies--Bride of the Monster and Night of the Ghouls. Their acting seems even worse with this ineffectual dubbing, but aside from that, there aren't a lot of movies where the actors stand this stiffly. David Love, the guy who plays the lead, probably does the best job, but this is the only movie role he had. The dialogue's laughable, and the alien costumes (bulky white spaceman boots and jumpsuits with what appears to be masking tape on them) are very nice. But the biggest thrills from Teenagers from Outer Space come from the brilliant special effects. Seeing what I assume is the same skeleton used over and over again when Thor is on his rampage is bad enough, but when you finally get to see the giant lobsters, this reaches a new level of bad. This is the type of movie that is made so cheaply that you don't get an actual giant lobster. Nope. You get to see a shadow of a lobster! They couldn't even hold a normal-sized lobster close the camera for this one? I'm so happy that movies like this exist, and I'm proud to say that I own a copy of this bad boy.

First Men on the Moon

1964 documentary

Rating: 15/20

Plot: International lunar landers touch down at the same exact spot on the moon where they'll find a piece of paper and a withered flag proving that people had actually already visited the moon seventy years before. Back on earth, they visit the elderly and likely cuckoo former writer/amatuer astronaut to get the scoop. The scoop turns out to be really silly!

Here's a movie featuring Ray Harryhausen's effects where the effects don't completely steal the show. The effects you'd see and say, "Oh, that's Harryhausen alright," are even more of a distraction than anything else. At times, the moon beings, anthropoids with bee features, are animated but most of the time they're costumed people. Kind of weird. You also get a skeleton and a pair of monstrous centipede things. With the latter, it's almost like Harryhausen said, "Hey, I still have some time. Let me throw another creature in there." Now, the space effects and the moon atmospherics are impressive. I really like this version of the moon, one that would no doubt annoy the type of person who looks for scientific accuracy in their sci-fi films. I really enjoyed the set design though. This is better acted and written than your typical B-picture, dialogue peppered with some humor and good characterization. Edward Judd and Martha Hyer bust out of what could have been pretty generic roles as a pair of lovers, and Lionel Jeffries is very good as a crazed scientist character, very reminiscent of Back to the Future's Dr. Brown actually. I figured I'd mention him since I'm seeing Back to the Future references everywhere these days. I like the story despite the goofiness (Jeffries' character has created an anti-gravity paste which he applies to a metallic bulb in order to travel to the moon; the characters wear diving outfits for the trip), and it's only a big moment and a much better ending away from being really good. That ending, which just sort of grabs you and jerks you out of the story before throwing a "The End" on the screen, really is a stinker. Definitely worth checking out for fans of Harryhausen, H.G. Wells, and creatively preposterous science fiction movies.

Howard the Duck

1986 box office sensation

Rating: n/r (I couldn't finish it.)

Plot: A duck named Howard and his recliner is yanked from his planet and ends up in an alley somewhere in Cleveland. He meets a punk rock girl who takes him to a janitor to help him get back home. There's probably a bad guy later on, and I'm sure Howard has to try to phone home with a mouth full of Reece's. It's just another one of those cases where somebody has ripped off the plot of E.T. and managed to make an even more disagreeable movie.

The only movie I can think of that might be worse than a trip to Cleveland, Ohio. I watched this for three reasons:

1) I didn't think it could possibly be as bad as I remembered or as everybody seems to think.

2) If it is as bad as I remember or as everybody seems to think, it might fall into "good-bad" territory, and I could point and laugh at it.

3) I wanted to use a "quacking up" pun on the blog.

Unfortunately, it's not either of the first two. It's a terrible movie--poor writing, embarrassing effects, a main character who is impossible to like, auxiliary characters who aren't any better, an incoherent plot, dozens of details that date it--but it's nowhere near entertaining. It's excruciating, so excruciating that I gave up on it after Tim Robbins' second appearance. Like the majority of decisions in my life, the decision to watch Howard the Duck was a bad one, leaving me depressed and very unlikely to quack up any time soon.

Back to the Future III

1990 sequel

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Marty has to travel back in time to 1885 in order to save Doc Brown from being shot in the back by an outlaw. Unfortunately, the Delorean is damaged, so getting back to 1985 is a problem. But who would want to live in 1985 anyway? The music isn't as good, and Huey Lewis's penis hasn't even been invented yet.

Ah, a return to form. I love the Western/sci-fi mash-up here. The performers are all likable again, the meanness and general suckiness of the second installment is gone, and the story feels original again. This references its predecessors quite a bit, mostly in ways that are kind of funny or just neat (the bell tower connections), and I also liked allusions to some classic Westerns, most humorously with Marty telling everybody that his name is Clint Eastwood. I also like some of the anachronisms this new context for the characters allows--moonwalking, Frisbees, and the hilarious cowboy garb that the Doc insists are what men actually wore in the Old West. Thomas F. Wilson returns, and he not only gets a great character to work with in Mad Dog Tannen, but he absolutely nails it. Whereas the second movie in the trilogy looked like somebody had eaten too many helpings of special effects and vomited all over the movie, this goes for a less plastic approach. It also lacks the jarring frenetic quality of the second movie, instead sticking to a simple story told simply. There is some creative camera work, however. I really like some of the transitions in this, scenes where you have characters talking in the foreground while a new action is introduced in the background. I do think the final twenty minutes are a little goofy. I didn't care for the climax/denouement, probably because the return of the hover board from the second movie reminded me of how much that one stunk. Overall though, this is a fun ride.

I was talked into seeing this movie in the theater before I saw the second one. It was one of the most important moments of my life.

Back to the Future II

1989 sequel

Rating: 11/20

Plot: Doc Brown and Marty have to travel into the future to save the latter's kid from making a terrible mistake. While there, Biff steals the Delorean and travels back to 1955 to give his younger self a sports almanac. Biff's then able to build a fortune and make life really miserable in 2015 despite everybody getting the chance to fly around on hover boards. So the time travelling duo has to travel back to 1955 to fix things. And it all somehow pisses Crispin Glover off!

Me, minutes ago: "And it's only the first part of a trilogy. I'm sure the next one has to be great, too!"

Whoops! This one stinks! It can all be explained with a simple mathematical equation, the Glover Theorem:

Good movie with Crispin Glover - Crispin Glover = stinky movie

This is a complete mess from the get-go and gets my vote for most dissatisfying sequel of all time. The performers I enjoyed so much in the first movie are so over-the-top and sickeningly silly. Fox and Wilson have multiple roles, and instead of being clever like Zemeckis probably thinks it all is, it's just plain stupid. I was embarrassed for everyone involved. Of course, Zemeckis is also the same guy who gave us that creepy Polar Express garbage (possibly one of the worst movies ever made and so far the only movie that has made me wish the plane I was on would crash into a mountain) and who apparently thinks a remake of Yellow Submarine is necessary. The future whatever-town-that-is looks ridiculous, the special effects get in the way of the storytelling, and we're rushed through the fairly bizarre first-half story in a way that convinced me it was scribbled down furiously by either a coke addict, Robin Williams, or both instead of being written. The second half of the film is a little better, and things are almost salvaged with all the clever back to the past in Back to the Future moments, stuff that people who get off on time travel can really get excited about. But it's unfortunately too little, too late and nothing can save this from being gross.

Speaking of gross--I forgot to mention this in the Back to the Future write-up, but these movies have to have some sort of record for most product placement. Geez Louise! There aren't many scenes in these two movies that you can watch without seeing an advertisement for something.

Oh well. At least Crispin Glover made a wad of dough from this movie without having to do an ounce of work. I'm giving the movie a bonus point just for that.