And now, going along with our theme, a hive mind of bad video game movies for your viewing pleasure.

“A sprite pretending to be a plumber with a mustache runs across a screen to a castle and fights a dinosaur to rescue a princess”. A giddy fever dream, most definitely, but a film? Super Mario Bros and its sequels are to this day a cipher by which audiences confront video game pop culture, but they are elder statesmen now. So much so that it is difficult to conceptualize how fresh and alien this franchise was in the late 1980s, and how singular it was in its rejection of judiciousness or common courtesy. Today, video games bend over backwards to fill our heads with maturity, sense, and symmetry that varies from unearned to, well, slightly less unearned, and while a few prime selections rise out of the medium every now and then, it has a lost a touch of its new-fangled otherworldly singularity. Today, most games look to cinema to accrue the veneer of “respectability”. They are far less interested in the candy-coated, mechanized fluff they used to be, and they tend to function more or less like other mediums, conforming to film’s definition of narrative and the ensuing precedence for cohesion and order especially.
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And now, going along with our theme, a hive mind of bad video game movies for your viewing pleasure.

A Christmas morning present if ever there was one! Modern movies can be this bad! Thank you Santa, I mean, Mr. Boll. May you reign long and without forgiveness.

For what they say is true. Modern movies just don’t suck like they used to. Films used to be passionately bad, defying all good taste and jumping head first into their personal idea of art and sense. Now, they stumble into badness almost against their will. They are bad not because they defy the basic laws of filmmaking, but because they lazily fumble within the rules. The best bad movies are anything but lazy, and as we know from a director who was willing to personally enter into a boxing match with some of his most vicious critics to defend non-existent honor, Uwe Boll is no lazy guy.
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The Blaculas of the world aside, the 1970s were not a safe time to be a vampire film fan. Horror? Absolutely. But vampires? Not so much. As a rule, vampire films were saved only when they went off the deep end and reveled in their ineptitude and incompetence, a criterion which, admittedly, takes us more often than not into the nether-realms of South European soft core erotica horror, a sub-genre of film that is absolutely worthwhile for wholly unintended reasons. But today our subject is the mac daddy of all modern vampire film franchises, the Hammer Films Dracula franchise, which began with a re-invigorating explosion in the late 1950s and damn near herded in a new age of serious horror filmmaking a far cry from the pesky atomic-age kitsch-fests of the 1950s. Continue reading →

Scream Blacula Scream

For the many lonely souls who will undoubtedly look to it for an ounce of frivolous camp and disco-tinged incompetence, the flaw of Scream Blacula Scream is readily-knowable and open-faced: it is, maybe against all odds, a very good film, almost as good as its wonderful name suggests. Although, “against all odds” may be misleading. Many exploitation films, and blaxploitation films among them, are surely bad, and the difficulties of the budget and the audience had their limits for these films to be sure. But exploitation cinema had a certain magic about it, a certain unhinged, brash, expressive quality that freed it from the restrictions of popular cinema and allowed it to concentrate on its own artistic whims with the full extent of its limited budget. Simply put, exploitation films didn’t have to please millions to make a buck, so they had the freedom of actually concentrating on their almost accidental goodness. They had the freedom to eschew normativity and expand in fascinating and creative new directions that didn’t require composure or good sense. They had the freedom to be artistic in an environment where “pleasing the masses” wasn’t of interest. And the fact of the matter is, blaxploitation films were often quality productions, even when they were pretending not to be.
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Now, a trio of what could charitably be called “rock ‘n’ roll films” for Worst or “Worst”. It’s gonna get weird.

It is a crying shame that the slasher film and heavy metal music, the two most iconic cultural forms of the 1980s (in my mind at least, but that may say more about me than the cultural forms of the 1980s), crossed paths so infrequently. Perhaps because slasher films were more about making the quickest buck imaginable, the sort built on cheap budgets and profit-cost margins mind you, and metal may be the most self-consciously grand genre in all of music, the two just didn’t meld well (metal and giallo on the other hand…). They just seem such natural companions for each other, though, and the opening ten minutes of Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare proceed to do just about everything it can possibly imagine to destroy the legitimacy of this melding of minds.
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Now, a trio of what could charitably be called “rock ‘n’ roll films” for Worst or “Worst”. It’s gonna get weird.

Whatever else one can say about Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park, it achieves something that less than one-tenth of one percent of all films achieve: it ends on its strongest note: a performance of “God of Thunder”, the best Kiss song ever released, and the most naturally cinematic. This is a genuine achievement, something most films aspire to and few succeed at. Watching this particular film, it is immensely obvious how easy it was to earn that “best scene as last scene” achievement, but all involved had a genius, heretofore unheard of tactic for ensuring they arrived just there: make sure that the rest of the film is absolutely awful, and run from there. Continue reading →

Now, a trio of what could charitably be called “rock ‘n’ roll films” for Worst or “Worst”. It’s gonna get weird.

You gotta love a movie that tells you what you are getting in its first second. Here, that would be a robotic text visible on the screen that reads something like the tiny village of, ahem, “Fleu de Coup”.

What an awful joke, and furthermore, what a nonsensical one. The clear implication is that our heroes, the titular Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band (played, with performative anonymity at that, by Peter Frampton and the then ubiquitous Bee Gees), are to leave their small town for corporate fun-time and fame, before they, you know, return and save the day and all that. But if everyone else stays in the village – necessitated by the fact that it is still a functional village after they leave, and thus something that needs to be saved in the first place – the name couldn’t be further from the truth. And I know what you are thinking; no, this film is not remotely clever. It does not have one clever bone in its body, and the irony is not intentional.
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Update mid-2018: The Exorcist II remains truly singular: spellbindingly hedonistic, unabashedly oneiric, and deliciously overwrought, an unapologetic product of John Boorman’s supremely monomaniacal ego as well as an apotheosis of his lunacy. Too many films, good and bad alike, evoke the polished, prefabricated air of professionalization, the hand of a skilled but acquiescent artisan. Boorman’s picture has, instead, the unholy eye of a demonic cinematic fanatic, a director for whom every idea and shot quivers with thematic weight and cinematic possibility. The film does not always, or mostly, fulfill this possibility, so watch at your own risk, but, for good or ill, I still consider it essential cinema. 

Original Review:

Ah, but John Boorman was not done with the world after Zardoz. Failure, after all, was nothing to kill a human of such vision as he. And with his sequel to The Exorcist, one of the most well-received horror films ever made and an instant popular hit upon its release in 1973, vision is what he had. It is all he had, of course, but he had it in spades. Concept is not the failing of The Heretic, not by any means. In fact, Boorman was somewhat onto something. He had a vast interest in critiquing and expanding the first film in confrontational new ways. It is exactly this desire that drove him to the script of William Goodhart, hired to create a small, tight recreation of the first film and perhaps a work to quietly make a quick buck on the side. And it is exactly this desire which drove him to essentially re-write the script until it fit only his vision of what The Exorcist ought to be. He had a point, at that, as the first Exorcist has always had a slight puritanical must about it, as though it was designed more to shock than to induce proper dread or a lingering crawl of dysfunction and fear. What Boorman attempted to do with Goodhart’s script was to accentuate its more exploratory qualities, and to flip the first film on its head, invest its energies in the larger, broader mythology of the characters while also growing still deeper and tighter with character introspection and psychological depth.
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May is my birthday month, and I have decided to treat myself in fine style with a month composed of some of my favorite kinds of movies: the worst ones. Naturally, this will include a cornucopia of films that endear me like few others, as well as some fascinatingly bad films I’d like to take on in writing, and it will no doubt incorporate a few “first timers” that I have heard so much about I cannot but run from any longer. All of which serves no primary goal other than me indulging in the kind of film that doesn’t usually find enough of a place in my blog (where I tend to house my “respectable” opinions, and not my swelling love for awful cinema). Really, it is just happy birthday to me, and I cannot wait.

Most of these films, although not all, will be of the genre-fried, “old school” awful variety, the sort of horrid, putrescent midnight cinema you hear about in your nightmares, and thus the normal Midnight Screenings postings will be suspended for the month, since not a single one of these films I have planned for this feature would qualify over there, so you are getting more than the safe limit for the month anyway. Not all of them will be exploitation films or proper B-movies, but we’ve always taken a broad, all-inclusive definition of “Midnight” around here, and we aren’t about to stop now.

In addition, there will be two scores, each between one and five, for each review. The first will be akin to my normal scoring, rating in terms of artistic merit and skill (with 0 being the most inept), and the second will relate to its value as deliciously bad entertainment (with 5 being the ideal score for any  bad movie connoisseur).

First up, a duo of stupendously silly films notable because they come from the mind of John Boorman, and as I hope to reveal with these two reviews, that is a most special mind indeed.

Ladies and gentlemen, our show…

It is always a great present when a film announces its totality in the first scene, as Zardoz does. A floating head clad in vague blanket garb anonymously moves around the screen, all hand-drawn goateed and self-serious, and we are informed in one of the most wonderfully supercilious soliloquies ever to grace the silver screen that God with a capital-G is in show business, that we are all muckish, pointless creatures still serving our base-whims and reptilian brains, and that the world and the human species is nothing but the playground for immortals who sit above us and who would call us subjects. Soon after ward, the infamous “the gun is good, the penis is evil” monologue, delivered by a floating, seemingly constipated rock head in the sky, graces the screen, and the insanity continues. But that opening soliloquy, head arbitrarily moving around an empty black screen as if looking for a resting place, tells us all we need to know about Zardoz before Zardoz even knows what to do with itself. It tells us, rather simply, that we are in for a stupendously kitschy and zany roller-coaster fun-house of galvanized nonsense and passionately inept storytelling. That is what it tells us, and the film does not disappoint.
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