Entry #17: Howard The Duck

Release Date: August 1, 1986
Budget: $37,000,000

It has been 2,039 days since my last drink.  It has also been 2,039 days since the last time I puked.  Several things recently have threatened that streak (the not-puking streak, not the not-drinking streak): 1) a rocky day on a cruise ship; 2) returning to land after being on a cruise ship for a week; and 3) watching Howard The Duck.  There is something about this movie that made me nauseous: maybe it was the anthropomorphic duck breasts, or when Beverly starts jokingly macking on an anthropomorphic duck, or the overblown 30-minute chase scene, or Tim Robbins' acting...   

In summary, Howard The Duck is a duck-like being from another planet, just trying to make his way in the world after his music career flames out (welcome to the club, buddy).  On earth, some scientists made a really big laser that misfired and sucked Howard through the universe to Earth.  Before they can send Howard back, a dark overlord disguised as Jeffrey Jones also comes through the portal and tries to take over the Earth.  LUCKILY, Howard, Beverly (played by Lea Thompson), and Phil (Tim Robbins) stop the Dark Overlord and win. 

Unfortunately for the viewer, what I just described to you in one paragraph took Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck 111 minutes to accomplish.  It is an rambling 111 minutes filled with corny drama, slapstick, and the chase scene that ruins chase scenes.  The final fight scene is pretty painful to watch as well with a computer generated dark overlord that has not aged well and Howard and Phil running around an airplane hangar trying to destroy it.

Some of my favorite fun facts about Howard The Duck:

• Howard The Duck was the first Marvel character to get its own feature film.  They've come a long way; 
• This was one of Tim Robbins first films and luckily he honed his craft before Shawshank.  If Howard The Duck is what it took to get there, I guess I can accept it; 
• George Lucas wanted this movie to be animated, but animation skills and technology had not yet advanced far enough to make his dream come true.  This left the production team to create a complex duck suit to interact with the human world and leaving this movie to languish somewhere between a live-action flop and a wannabe comic flop; 
• Howard The Duck's failure at the box office ($15M in the U.S. vs its budget of $37M) contributed to big shakeups at Universal, including the resignation of movie chairman Frank Price.

This movie is so bad that there aren't even enough dumb things about it to write in a blog post.  It just meanders through nearly two hours of boring mediocrity.  At points, I found myself even caring about Howard and Beverly, which isn't normal for this blog.  Just when I started caring, the movie's script would take back over and I would start hating it again.  

I give Howard The Duck a -4 for its massed produced, big budget terribleness.  With a $37M budget, it really should have delivered more but, much like me, it was caught up being awkward in the mid-80's.  Howard's big budget also mean that a lot of people saw this disaster and thus it ends up on a lot of "worst movie" lists.  It just doesn't have the laughable terribleness of Troll 2 or The Room, and it doesn't have the glorious plot and stellar acting of Gigli.  It's this kind of middling terribleness that makes this project so frustrating.

My streak is still in tact, but if I have to puke in the near future I wouldn't mind doing it all over Howard The Duck. 

Entry #16: The Room

Release Date: June 27, 2003
Budget: $6,000,000

What is there to be said about The Room that hasn't already been said?  It has a book about its making, a movie based on the book about its making, a "where are they now" mockumentary, and a documentary about it's making currently held up in the courts thanks to a lawsuit filed by The Room writer and director, Tommy Wiseau.  (Room Full of Spoons, if you are interested in following).  It even now has a cult following complete with midnight showings across the country, costumes, and spoons thrown at the screen in unison by an adoring audience.

I am late to the party.

If YOU haven't seen the room, you owe it to yourself to watch it because it is quickly becoming part of our cultural lexicon.  The next time you're out with friends and someone glibly says "oh hi Mark" or yells "where's my FUCKING money, Denny?!?" or laments "you're TEARING me apart, Lisa!!"... you'll kick yourself for being out of the loop.  Unfortunately, cultural relevance is all you will get from The Room because it sucks.

For all of its faults, The Room made me think.  It made me think about what truly makes a bad movie.  I no longer believe that you can  truly have a bad movie if you are not trying to make a good movie: in other words, if you are just slapping something together for a quick release to the drive-ins or to take advantage of some craze like talking babies, everyone knows it and won't fault you for your pathetic dialogue, unsynchronized audio, and terrible special effects.  If, on the other hand, you set out to make an academy award winning movie, spend six million dollars, and 15 years after your movie bombs at the box office, you still think you have a  cinematic gem on your hands, you might qualify for the worst movie of all time... like The Room.

Let's put things into perspective: Napoleon Dynamite was made for $400,000.  Granted, it was no On The Waterfront, but it was well written, well acted, it looked like a real movie, the audio was synchronized with the pictures, and it was intentionally funny!  The Room had none of those things:

•  The love scenes are soooo bad that they made me uncomfortable to watch with my wife.  I felt like Mike Pence watching the Miss America swimsuit competition; 
• About 25% of the dialogue is easily heard and matches the pictures on the screen, the rest is clearly awkward retakes or Wiseau mumbling lines; 
• I had an epiphany watching football on Sunday that Aaron Rogers is a better actor in those dumb State Farm commercials than Wiseau ever will be;
• The script is so bad that you can't help but feel bad for everyone else involved in this movie, especially after you know the rest of the story;
• I have no idea what this is about.  I think it's about how about how terrible people are, but that friends are important and fun to play football with, and not to get caught up in drugs, and that women are really good for nothing more than ordering you a pizza after a long day at work, but that your best friend is probably fucking your fiancée anyway, and, finally, in the end love just isn't worth the headache so you should probably just not bother.  

In summary, I just don't think movies like Creeping Terror or Plan 9 will ever compare to Battlefield Earth or The Room, because No One ever expected them to be good.  It is when a person sets out to make a good movie with a sizeable budget and still delivers a mess that all the faults are amplified by factors of 10 and the product enters the rarified air of truly bad cinema. The Room sets the standard for faults amplified by a factor of 10. 

I give The Room a -10 for delivering the whole package of bad movie requirements: undiscernible plot, worst actor I've ever seen (Wiseau), shitty sets poorly filmed, awkward unsynchronized dialogue, horrifically uncomfortable sex scenes complete with recycled footage, and a director who truly thought this would be in the running for an academy award. 

(throw spoons now) 

 

 

Entry #15: Manos: The Hands of Fate

Release Date: November 15, 1966
Budget: $19,000

Rumor has it that Manos: The Hands of Fate was conceived as a bet by insurance salesman, Hal Warren, at a local El Paso cafe that he could make a horror movie because it was so easy.  Although previous movies reviewed on this blog might indicate that making a horror movie does indeed require very little money, story, or talent, Manos proves that some bets should be left at their origin to die as nothing more than male bravado.

Hal Warren wrote and directed Manos and starred as the misogynistic Michael, who drags his young family deep into desert in search of a vacation lodge only to get lost (horror film style) and agrees to stay the night at a ramshackle adobe home overseen by Torgo, who "looks after the place while the Master is away."  Things go down hill after that for poor Michael and family: first, their dog Peppy gets eaten by the darkness (or so it seems because of the extremely poor lighting for outside shots); second, Torgo wakes his Master who worships the god, Manos, and Manos directs the Master and his brood of wives to capture and enslave the family; finally, the family bumbles through the desert but are ultimately ensnared by the Master and doomed to a life of serving him and looking after the house.... because Torgo gets killed along the way.

It is a trite horror story that is made worse by the extremely poor filming, lighting, and acting.  To Warren's credit, the voices are well dubbed, but that is the only thing I have nice to say about this film.  I can't quite put my finger on what makes this movie so bad and so much worse than the rest of the 60's movies of this ilk, but here is my best guess: 1) Warren, as Michael, is hard to watch.  He takes prototypical 60's male condescension and turns up to 11.  There are numerous scenes where the family's world is falling apart (dog is killed, car won't start, daughter disappears, trapped with a satanic cult, etc..) and Michael's go-to response to his poor wife is 'quit overreacting, I'll handle it'... ugh... fuck you, Mike; and 2) There are so many painfully shot scenes that are extended by Warren, presumably to meet a run time goal, where I felt like he was intentionally wasting my time, sort of like waiting for a child who is goofing off when we are already late for school.

Manos has become a cult classic of late because its horridness and because it has several points of comic relief, although for me they weren't enough to keep me from hating this movie:

• Torgo is costumed to look like a satyr, but looks like a fat legged hobo.  He does get his own theme music, which I love, and which you can listen to right here;
• There are two policemen who wander about the film making a very poor effort to help people.  The elder police officer delivers two of my favorite lines in the movie:

1. To Michael and his family after pulling them over: "If you're running late, you should've started earlier"; 
2. To two poor teens just trying to make out in a car in the desert: "Whatever is you're not doing, go don't do it somewhere else." 

• After the Master wakes his harem of wives, they immediately start to bicker (so typical) and then get in a brawl in the sand that lasts for way to long with no discernible winner.  Two minutes for pulling hair, eh. 
• I swear that Michael is supposed to be dead 3 or 4 times and Torgo at least 2 and yet they keep coming back into the movie.  These false endings killed me, emotionally.  

Of course, Michael tries to shoot the Master with his gun who doesn't die.  Then we see two young women driving up the road, getting lost, and finding Michael at the door, "taking care of the place while the Master is away."

There is just something about Hands: the Hands of Fate that made it worse than the most of the other B drive-in horror films I've watched.  Perhaps its the arrogance of both Hal Warren as a writer, director, producer and as Michael that kept reminding me of Dazed & Confused Mike's apt description of Clint: "Dominant Male Monkey Motherfucker."  Perhaps its the painfully long scenes where nothing happens except bad lighting.  Perhaps its the extremely poor execution despite an ample budget for the time ($143,000 in today's dollars) to make something at least watchable.  Perhaps it's all three. 

I give Manos: The Hands of Fate -9 stars.  I'm glad Michael died; there, I said it.  

Entry #14: Eegah

Release Date: April 1, 1965
Budget: $15,000

The first thing I noticed about Eegah was that it was shot in color: not so dazzling hues of pink and green.  The director must have spent nearly half of the budget on this extravagance.  It neither hurts nor helps this movie, but it is a nice change of pace from other movies shot in this time period.

The plot is unique and dumb: young woman, Roxy, stumbles across a prehistoric man in modern times and her father, a noted writer, goes looking for this crazy creature in hopes of a plot for a new book.  Eegah, the prehistoric man kept young by the sulfur spring in his cave (I think), eventually takes the woman and her dad hostage.  Roxy's boyfriend, Tommy, with the help of his rad dune buggy, saves the pair but not before Eegah has time to develop an unquenchable lust for the beautiful young heroine.  The caveman then goes on a rampage in town looking for his new love, but is ultimately shot by the police and killed by modern society. 

The lesson we learn is that cavemen just don't fit in today's face paced world.  Sorry to spoil it for you but remember, I watch them so you don't have to.

Some of my favorite (read: ridiculous) parts of Eegah are:

• Tommy is dashing young hero with a fine quaff of hair that doesn't change regardless of whether he goes swimming, sleeps in the desert, or fights cavemen;
• Tommy is also a fine guitar player.  So fine that whenever he picks up his guitar a full band starts playing behind him complete with backup singers and a bass guitar even if he is strumming alone by the pool or playing an acoustic in the MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING DESERT;  
• Eegah's beard is so fake that it makes the Creeping Terror look believable.  They should have spent some of the budget money on wardrobe and left this thing in black and white; 
• The dune buggy spends so much time on screen and plays such an integral part that it should have been credited with a role.  It almost makes me wonder if the Director didn't own this hot rod and was so proud of it that he insisted it be in half of the movie (you know how guys can be with cars); 
• After Tommy saves Roxy and her dad and is tearing out of the desert, he turns to Eegah and delivers the most memorable line of the movie: "So long highpockets!"  I can only imagine that "highpockets" was a very derogatory term in the 1960's, but I love it and aim to bring it back.

If Eegah had ended with Tommy's decree, it probably wouldn't even have made this list.  It's the last 30 minutes of Eegah stumbling about town, half scaring the bumbling townsfolk, and looking for Roxy that is truly painful.  The acting gets significantly worse, the action scenes seem to acted in slow motion, and plot really thins out (if that's possible).   

The bar has been set pretty low so far in this project so I have to break these movies down into their basic components to see how they compare: 1) The first hour of Eegah is mildly interesting, with chase scenes, love, and suspense. 2) the video and audio quality are tolerable, at points even seemingly like a big-boy movie; and 3) there are no strings visible over styrofoam UFOs.  Sure it's dumb, too long, and 1960's corny, but it isn't as dumb, poorly filmed, and corny as other movies of the genre (i.e. super low budget, shitty 60's movies). 

I give Eegah -7 stars.  Truthfully, if it had ended after 60 minutes, It would probably be in the -1 or -2 range.  I think I actually enjoyed the first 60 minutes, which makes me worried that I might be suffering from the bad movie version of Stockholm Syndrome. 

So long highpockets!  (get it trending among your friends)

Entry #13: The Beast of Yucca Flats

Release Date: May 2, 1961
Budget: $34,000

After watching The Beast of Yucca Flats and Eegah this weekend, I did some housekeeping on the list and realized that I've only made it through 13 of 25 movies: I'M JUST HALF WAY DONE.  It feels like I've been working on this project for 7 years and several lifetimes now. 

The Beast of Yucca Flats.  It's not an overly complicated movie: a "noted" Russian scientist, Joseph Javorsky, comes to America to continue his work for humanity and just so happens to be chased onto Yucca Flats at the time of an atomic bomb testing.  Dang the luck.  Of course Jovorsky is turned into a monster and proceeds to wander the flats senselessly killing all those in his path... that he can catch. 

I didn't hate this movie.  For one, it was short with a running time of just 54 minutes and, two: the Director understood going into this that he didn't have a significant budget to try to make this into a real movie (just $34,000 compared to Plan 9's $475,000) so didn't even attempt special effects or on-screen dialogue.  So where other movies of this genre suffer from mismatched and poor audio quality, The Beast's audio is clearly just dubbed in later and the "actors" always turn away or cover their mouths when lines are delivered.  Also, because no dialogue is actually delivered on screen, the acting doesn't appear nearly as terrible as it otherwise might have been.  

Also because of the lack of on screen dialogue, a lot of the plot is revealed and advanced by a beat poet of a narrator in a slam style.  When trying to explain why the hell Javorsky is being chased by two soviet agents, he delivers this gem: 

Flag on the moon

How did it get there

Secret data: pictures of the moon

Secret data: never before outside of the Kremlin

Man's first rocket to the moon

Also, the plot is so simple that it's tough to put holes in it: man gets turned into a monster by an atomic bomb and must be stopped by two desert patrolmen, Jim Archer and Joe Dobson.  Sure, there are really dumb scenes like Jim mistakenly trying to shoot a poor dad, who is just looking for his lost kids, from an airplane for about 5 minutes., but the whole thing wraps up quite nicely when Joe and Jim shoot the Beast just as he is about to nearly almost catch those two dumb little kids. The Beast spends his last breath trying to kill a wayward rabbit. 

In summary, The Beast of Yucca Flats is short, simple, and the Director's attempt at turning it artsy due to a lack of a budget almost works... almost.  I give it a -5 stars.  There are way worse movies in this genre.  

Entry #12: Alligator

Release Date: July 1980
Budget: $1,500,000

As you may have read in Entry #11, Alligator is a bonus entry to take the place of all Bill Cosby related contestants.  About a month ago, a friend (who is a die hard Florida Gators fan) regaled me with a story of a gigantic animatronic alligator that was donated to the University of Florida by a movie director as a tax write-off.  The alligator was the star of bad horror movie trying to ride the coattails of Jaws.  The original plan was use the alligator in a series of movies, but the alligator failed on the set and the movie failed at the box office, so the gigantic prop was dumped on the University of Florida to use as a mascot at football games.  Unfortunately, the alligator was so glitchy that it made only one appearance for the university, unceremoniously driven out on the field atop a modified golf cart much to the displeasure of the student section who bombarded the gator with both ridicule and beer glasses.

With such a wonderful back story, I took a shot and bought Alligator on a whim.  It's one of those dvds that comes with Korean packaging and you have to change the language to English and turn off subtitles, which should tell you a lot.  Fortunately or unfortunately for Alligator, it falls into a gigantic middle ground of movies that are neither very good nor extremely terrible: unfortunate in that probably killed a few careers and fortunate in that it won't win in my little competition.  The animatronic alligator story was just too interesting to let this one pass without a viewing.

Because I know you won't be watching this, I'll sum it up for you.  A little girl goes to Florida on vacation with her family and sees a gator wrestling show.  She buys a baby alligator and brings it back to Chicago, where her dad proceeds to flush it down the toilet to get it out of the house.  Fortunately for the plot line, a sinister corporation is doing genetic testing on dogs at the same time and dumping the carcasses into the sewer.  Baby alligator, named "Ramon" by the little girl, feeds on the genetically mutated dead dogs, grows huge, wreaks havoc on the city.  I just saved you one hour and 27 minutes.

Some things that made me chuckle in Alligator:

•  the tension filled music leading up to Ramon's attacks seem to be a direct rip-off of the Jaws music, but maybe with the notes reversed similar to the way Vanilla Ice so adeptly rearranged Under Pressure;
• THE POLICE CHIEF YELLS EVERY SINGLE LINE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!;
• This 36 foot alligator seems to move about downtown Chicago without being seen, and this was before people had their faces stuck to their phones;
• The final scene (after Forster blows Ramon to alligator hell) is back in the sewer to show another baby alligator flushed down the toilet, thus setting up the sequel that never happened because Ramon is now somewhere in a University of Florida maintenance shed covered with tarps and old paint cans. 

Alligator falls short in several categories (and by "falls short", I mean "succeeds" in the context of this blog): First, Robert Forster, as our hero David Madison, along with his go-to reptile guru Melissa Kendall, played by Robin Riker, are actually good actors and since they are in most scenes, the bulk of the movie isn't painful to watch as has been the case for most of the first 11 entries.  Second, the movie is reasonably well filmed save for the parts where the alligator is clearly acting up and the violence just gets clunky.  There is a scene in which the swat team invades the sewer to try to find Ramon that appeared so real that neighbors watching apparently called it in trying to figure out what the threat was.  I can guarantee you no such calls were made surrounding the set of Troll 2.  Finally, the story is compelling enough that I actually found myself interested to see how things played out and rooting for Madison and Kendall.  That... has happened once in this blog and it was the beautiful romance, Gigli.

I give this the same rating and general summary as Gigl, a big fat ZERO.  Congrats, Alligator.  It's not good, but it doesn't belong on this blog.  In fact, if I was sick in bed on a Wednesday, I would definitely choose Alligator over the sixth hour of Today if I was flipping through channels.

    

Entry #11: Glen or Glenda?

Glen or Glenda?  Are those my only two options?

What better way to get back into the bad movie stream than with a nice dip in the swirling morass that is Ed Wood.  It’s been over 3 years since my last post and a lot has changed since Kazaam, namely I am 3 years sober.  I guess not being drunk took the allure off of watching bad movies.  I mean, who in their right mind would watch Superbabies, Baby Geniuses 2 sober?  BUT.. I started a project and I aim to finish it. 

Real quick note here on my original list of candidates:  in addition to me getting sober, other things have changed in the last 3 years: namely, Bill Cosby has shown himself to be less than deserving of getting any royalty money from me so I will be taking Leonard Part 6 off the last and replacing it with Alligator, which was recommended by my friend Ken and has a fun backstory that you will get to hear soon enough.

Enough tip-toeing on the banks, let’s jump right into the Ed Wood eddy. 

At first glance, a 68 minute movie seems right up my alley because, as my wife will attest, I can’t stay awake for any movie that is either 1) boring; or 2) over 100 minutes long.  Unfortunately, Glen or Glenda is 68 minutes of uncomfortableness.  It is uncomfortable to the point where I checked the clock thinking that it was surely almost over and found, much to my chagrin, that only 48 minutes had past.  Distilled down to its core, the movie is actually only about 35 minutes of plot and then 33 minutes of crazy filler scenes and Bela Lugosi spewing nonsense. 

The story part of Glen or Glenda? is basically a plea by Ed Wood for acceptance of the transvestite community.  Our protagonist, Glen, is engaged to Barbara and can’t decide if he should tell her about his alter-ego, Glenda, out of fear of losing her.  That’s about it.  There are some scenes with a police investigator and a doctor where the doctor tries to explain the causes and societal implications of cross-dressing, but it does nothing to advance the plot.

Speaking of doing nothing to advance the plot, Bela Lugosi’s scenes are filmed elsewhere and are of him basically slurring nonsense or repeating dialogue from other parts of the movie from a grandpa chair in a poorly lit room.  There are also some b-grade “grindhouse” scenes of women being tied up on a couch, the devil tormenting Glen (I think), and a SUPER uncomfortable rape scene.  All of these sidebars are clearly just filler to make the short public service announcement into something long enough to call a “movie”. 

In the end, Barbara does accept Glen because she loves him and the doctor meets with them both to help Glen move past Glenda and into a loving marriage.  Hooray!

This “movie” is terrible, I will not defend the quality, the acting, the random non-sequitur scenes, and Bela Lugosi’s rants.  However, it is a plea for acceptance for those who don’t fit into society’s norms; a tall task for 2016, much less 1958.  So while I can hate the movie, I can’t hate the message.  It’d be like asking me to pick my least favorite flag and throwing the rainbow flag into my options: even if I did hate the way it looked, I couldn’t pick it because it has become a symbol of tolerance and acceptance.  Thus, I can’t put Glen or Glenda? in the same category as Battlefield Earth, Troll 2, or They Saved Hitler’s Brain.    Suberbabies and Gigli on the other hand, I can lump it there.  I give it a -3.  Dress however you want, I don’t care, just don’t make me do it and don’t make me watch this again. 

It seemed like a good idea to get back into researching and sorting through my bad movie list, but as Barbara so eloquently put it “…the end of studies is only the beginning of reality..” and the reality of Glen or Glenda? has me rethinking my studies.