20 Movies for $5; What could possibly go wrong?  Part XI.

This was a huge letdown almost immediately.  The title had me anticipating something very different.  Well, at least it was only 73 minutes.

The gang is hanging out at the ‘ol Campus House malt shop.  One of them suggests a picnic lunch on an island that no one has ever realized was just off the coast.  In the next shot, they are lounging on the beach.  Their small boat is anchored 25 yards off of the beach, yet none of the group seems to be wet.  And that is a shame as the girls are pretty hot.

Lilly of the Field, not toiling.

They follow a path and see zombies — more like lumbering workers — toiling in the field overseen by a women who looks like Lilly Munster.

I have to hand it to this film, White Zombie and King of the Zombies — they have at least harnessed the zombies to do something productive.  Walking Dead could learn a lesson here.

The youts bolt, but discover their boat is gone.  They go to a nearby house where Lilly meets them at the door.  While talking, they hear the girls screaming.  Soon they are locked in a cage with the girls.

A couple of Men in Black go to the island.  They inquire about the production of  5,000 capsules which will be used to subdue the US population.  If they are not ready, they must rely on hydrogen bombs to complete their mission.  Really seems like there would have been an alternative somewhere in the middle.  Luckily Lilly has the 4 teenagers to use as guinea pigs — presumably for the drugs, not the H-bombs.

Is this the Sheriff or a picture of the Sheriff?

There is a lot of walking, boating, and a gorilla.  And that makes it sound more interesting than it actually was.

Definitely one of the worst movies in the collection, not worthy of further discussion. Clearly, it is in the collection due to its public domain status, and in this blog due a slavish obsession with completeness.

Post-Post:

• Available for download at You Tube and Internet Archive, but why would ya?
• One of the boys says he is from Compton.  I got nuthin’.

C’mon, a payphone mounted on a louvered panel? I guess Mom didn’t want her big-shot director putting holes in the wall.

After watching Cruel World, I noticed the blurb on the cover where Luke Y. Thompson called it “a Cult Classic.”  Curious what his criteria could possibly have been, I tried to track down the review.  It was not linked at IMDb, but Rotten Tomatoes still had his headline.

Classic out-of-context blurb!  Frankly, the producers should have been thrilled with “watchable.”

20 movies for $5; what could possible go wrong.  Part X: Cruel World.

It gets off to a decent start as a group of 20-somethings explain why they want to be on a reality show.  It gets better as Jamie Pressly shows up wearing a man’s shirt and panties.  At this trajectory, this thing could be Citizen Kane before the 2nd act.

She and her husband met on a reality show called Lover’s Lane filmed in the house where they now live.  While they vacation in Tahiti, they plan to rent the house out to another reality show.  Edward Furlong shows up unexpectedly, as he would have to, because who would invite him?

Jamie had rejected him on the show where she met her husband.  On tape we see her use the excuse, “I don’t think I could make you happy.”  Also acceptable would have been, “You are unbelievably bloated and creepy.”

She attempts to get away, and even inflicts some very satisfying damage on him.  They end up in the pool, further elevating the picture.  Sadly Jamie is killed, thus largely ending the entertainment portion of our program.  If you can overlook Furlong’s performance, it really is a decent low-budget movie for the first 15 minutes.

The contestants show up in a stretch Humvee, and thankfully are less hateable than any cast of Big Brother I’ve ever seen; although, to be fair, I have never made it past episode 3.  Furlong starts them off easy with drinks and a pool party as he watches from a control room.

The challenges begin with disgusting, then progress to dangerous.  The first person is voted out and is killed off-site by Furlong’s slow brother Claude.  And when you are in a family with E. Furlong, and you are known as the slow one, that’s making a statement.

Claude’s attempt to kill a second contestant does not go so well as she is Asian, and thus is a black belt.  Claude take several kicks to the noggin before throwing her to the ground.  She tries to escape by climbing a tree.  As Claude grabs her leg, she brilliantly starts peeing so he releases her in disgust.  Asians is smart!

Finally, still being smarter than Big Brother contestants, the survivors realize that Furlong intends to kill them.  Eventually the field is whittled down to one.

It is understandable why Furlong wants to kill the lovely Jamie Pressly — he feels that she humilated him on national TV.  Although, I assume she similarly humiliated at least 8 other guys in this reality show — she only married one.  But his motivation for killing this new bunch of yahoos is a mystery to me.  Not sure motivation was a big issue for Furlong as an actor either.  He is not a method actor, but more likely is a meth actor.

My big question, what happened to the Asian girl?  Claude chased her into a storage pod  Is she still there?

As Luke Y. Thompson said, “watchable.”  But not much more than that.

Post-Post:

• Cast includes Angel’s sister from Dexter.
• Halfway through the collection, but I can’t even claim to have finished 2 of the 4 discs since the box listing does not match the discs.
• Just for the record, a furlong is 1/8 of a mile or 220 yards.

20 movies for $5; what could possibly go wrong?  Part IX.

Called Shaded Places in this collection.  A search on IMDb turned up The Giving Tree.  The cover on IMDb has the title The Brutal Truth.  Not a good sign when your movie has more names than Frank Abagnale.

This was actually the first film in the big box o’ fun.  I skipped it (and film #2) due to universally dismal reviews and comments.  In the interest of completeness, I felt compelled to watch both before playing the back ten.

This one was bad.  The worst in the collection so far.  Dreadful acting, forced awkward attempts at humor, stunningly awful ballads used as a score, leaden pace, barely detectable story, terrible possibly improvised, dialog.  The vets like Molly Ringwald and Christina Applegate are mostly bearable as they know how to calibrate their performances to this piece of crap.  Their screen time is limited, though.

Of the others, only the blonde bimbo pulls off anything resembling a character. Unfortunately, the script is so terrible I can’t even identify her character by looking at IMDb.  Is she Vanilla?  Is she Paula?  Is she Paulo?  None listed in IMDb.

I guess they were going for a Big Chill type of joint here, but failed miserably.  A group of friends gather at a place where a friend has just died.  Scenes are frequently backed with or intercut with singing.  There is even the sexy outsider — Meg Tilly in The Big Chill vs the unknown blonde here.  The Motown tunes are replaced by generic crap, real actors replaced by hacks.  An insemination is replaced by an actual birth.  I suspect the dialog includes a lot of improv, and this group just was not up to the task.

Post-Post:

• Try to remember the better times with Christina Applegate.
• Finally figured out the blonde is “Zoey”.  She actually does provide a couple of laughs.  If that is her, she is named Tiffany Salerno, and actually got story and producer credits on this joint.  Sadly she has not one subsequent credit.  Not one.  If I magnanimously gave this movie 1 star, it would be for her (for onscreen, not production skillz).
• So awful was this movie, that I actually laughed out loud at this shot.  There was about 5 genuinely funny seconds of reaction, then the script / improv quickly ruined this one oasis of quality.

20 movies for $5.  What could possibly go wrong?  part VIII.

I went into this expecting something like White Zombie with Bela Lugosi.  In tone and quality, it was no White Zombie.  King of the Zombies is a comedy intended to capitalize on (i.e. ripoff) the success of Bob Hope’s Ghost Breakers released the previous year.  I can’t say how successful it was at the box office, but as a comedy, it is not a complete failure, except by all modern cultural standards.

Mac McCarthy is piloting a plane carrying Bill Summers and Jeff Jackson.  They have lost their way “somewhere between Cuba and Puerto Rico”, which is apparently what they called Haiti in 1941.  Running low on fuel, Mac says he must put the plane down in the jungle.  Jeff observes, “I knew I wasn’t cut out to be no blackbird.” Thus, Jeff is established as the comedy center in a Stepin Fetchit sort of caricature; he is even sitting in the back of the plane.

The model plane lands in the model jungle knocking over a few model trees on the way.  Despite all 3 men being thrown from the fuselage in the crash, they are unhurt.  Jeff, however, wakes up believing himself to be dead.  When Bill assures him they are alive, Jeff says, “I thought I was a little off-color to be a ghost.”

Anyway.

They find a house in the jungle and let themselves in.  The owner Miklos Sangre greets them and offers them drinks.  You can’t accuse the movie of not being multi-culti when the villain is an Austrian refugee with a Greek first name, Spanish last name, and German accent. Mac tells the owner that they picked up a strange radio broadcast as they were landing.  The owner says he must be mistaken, there is no broadcast.  The next boat is not due for 2 weeks,  but he offers them rooms.

Naturally, Jeff can’t stay upstairs with decent (i.e.white) folk, so he is escorted downstairs. Getting a glimpse of the titular Zombies, Jeff bolts back upstairs and begs his companions to leave.

Sangre introduces them to his wife who seems to be a Zombie, or at least a real cold fish.  And his niece who is not. Mac inquires about another plane which crashed in the area recently.  Sangre pleads ignorance, but will “ask the natives” in the morning.

Sangre is clearly modeled after Bela Lugosi’s character in White Zombie.  Lugosi was actually offered the role, but was unavailable.  The script still reflects his participation when Sangre says, “Zombies never eat . . . meat” mimicking Lugosi’s line in Dracula, “I never drink . . . wine.”  Although that doesn’t make sense when you think about it.

This is all Mantan Moreland’s movie.  Apart from a few quips from Sangre’s “help”, no one else has any laugh-lines.  It is easy to cry raaaaacism, but really, was Bob Hope a symbol of manhood playing so many cowards back then?  Didn’t Lou Costello play a a man-child idiot for decades?  Moreland became one of the first black millionaires, and was a pretty funny guy, often improvising lines.  Sadly, it appears that Hollywood was offended by his shtick and banished him in 1949; he did not make another movie for 15 years.

Someone would have to be having a pretty bad day for me to recommend them spending 67 minutes of it on this. In fact, I can’t imagine such a scenario.  On the plus side, I did finish it and had a couple of guilty laughs.

Unratable.

Post-Post:

• Incredibly, Edward J. Kay’s musical score was nominated for an Academy Award in 1942.  He didn’t win, but then his competition included Max Steiner, Alfred Newman, and Bernard Herrmann for Citizen Kane.  Impossible to imagine Hollywood snobs today even admitting to watching a movie like this.
• Mantan Moreland was considered as a replacement in the Three Stooges after Shemp died.  Anyone who saw the post-Shemp shorts knows that he could only have improved them.
• Holy crap, I had no idea Stepin Fetchit lived until 1985.
• Or that his son killed 3 and injured 15 as the Pike Killer shooter on the Pennsylvania Turnpike in 1969.
• Available on YouTube, but why would ya?

20 Horror Movies for $5.  What could possibly go wrong?  Part VII.

What a nightmare — I watched this after a long flight, half asleep and hated it.  Wanting to be fair, I started writing as I rewatched it.  As I wrote about how awful it was, I kept finding nuggets that I really liked.  I finally got to the point where I realized my whole thesis was wrong.  So I got up early and went to Panera Bread to rewrite the post.  And the wifi was out.

To be sure, it fails on every objective technical level, but it does have some fun ideas which puts it ahead of a lot of movies not included 20-to-a-box.

It actually starts out with a good gag where a man’s legs are sticking out of the cab of a pickup.  They start jiggling a little, and given the genre, it is reasonable to assume he he is being chomped by a zombie in the cab.  It is revealed that he is just drunk.  I’m not entirely sure this bit of comedic misdirection was intentional, because it is so poorly directed.  On the other hand, I’m pretty sure this was intentional:

I have no patience for PC fascists, but this just didn’t seem earned.

The drunk, and the next two people we meet — a kid and a “slow” (I think he was supposed to be slow) man are among the worst actors I’ve ever seen; I mean, like Bill Paxton bad.  The next character we meet, bearing a striking resemblance to Jesus, is maybe the only competent actor in the movie.  At this point, I can see how I formed my initial assessment of this film.

We spend a little more quality time with slow-man Phil.  If his speech impediment and krazy camo hat were not classic DSM-IV symptoms of a mental health condition, then his sloppy sandwich eating skills clinch it.  Although, he has written a Zombie Survivalist Manual, so maybe he is some kind of high-functioning savant.

I have to give the movie credit for one of the greatest cuts since 2001:  From Phil chomping on a cream cheese sandwich, we cut to a Renaissance Fair style trio playing instruments that I can’t even begin to imagine what they are.  Also hanging out are magicians, jugglers and swordsmen.  I have a feeling the auteur happened to have friends into Renaissance Fairs and thought that might be a cheap way to add some atmosphere.  And he was right.  The new actors are also horrible, but the concept is such a great non-sequitur, that much of the charm of the movie comes from this quirk, which — bonus! — is actually integral to the story later.  That is already more thought than went into Die Hard 5.

Jesus, Phil and a couple of kids see the first reports of Zombies on the TV at Jesus’ garage.  For some reason, the newscaster is played by the same actor who plays Phil.  There were 112 people in this thing — they couldn’t throw a speaking bone to one of the Zombies?  His acting as the newsman is slightly less offensive than as Phil, however, he is wearing a bizarre hairpiece which more closely resembles a beret.

The attacks begin, first on a farmer and his daughter.  Credit to the movie for allowing the daughter to clock some Zombie kids in the head with big-ass rocks.  It is so unexpected, that it is good for laughs.  She also executes a very poor spin, delivering a kung-fu kick to a Zombie’s gut — but again, kudos for having her foot go right through his rotting body.  Good stuff.

A second couple, from the Fair, is attacked just as the man is kneeling, proposing to his girlfriend.  They begin chewing on the girl’s neck.  After some absurd projectile bleeding, the man goes to his car to get a sword. Alas, he is too late and swears, “I will avenge thee!”

The drunk from the first scene comes to Jesus’ garage looking for the kid.  He realizes that toxin he disposed of in a graveyard is responsible for this Zombie attack, and mugs relentlessly for the camera to show his guilt.  With our core group under one roof, they decide to make a run for the local armory.

Along the way, there are many Zombie kills, and the group meets up with more Renaissance Fair participants including a guy in a very handy suit of armor.

Really the only unforgivable sin is the acting.  Except for Jesus, the acting is uniformly dreadful.  I mean over-the-top, mugging, hammy, 2nd grade Thanksgiving pageant awful.  It wouldn’t have cost the director anything to tell the cast — especially the drunk — to dial it down to 11.  Maybe they were going purposely over the top like Raising Arizona, but did not pull it off.

The special effects were of course not Avatar-level.  But for a low-budget movie, I adjust my expectations accordingly.  I actually find the resourcefulness kind of charming.

In all, it was not a wasted 90 minutes as I initially thought.

Post-Post:

• How do these small films like this or Awaken the Dead afford such enormous casts?  In this case, IMDb lists 112 people, 89 credited as “Zombie.”
• While seeking refuge in a hardware store, a woman finds her weapon-of-choice, a hedge trimmer (more suited for dainty hands than a chainsaw, even the Lady McCulloch).  She is later seen along the road carving a zombie which presents a conundrum since it was a corded electric trimmer.
• A Google search reveals there is no such thing as a Lady McCulloch which, frankly, kind of surprised me.
• This same woman gets the award for most bizarre zombie kill — she shoves an umbrella in its mouth and opens it, causing its head to explode.
• Credits for Shawn Darling: Director, Writer, “Zombie”, Producer, Film Editor, Makeup, Props, Sound, Camera, Special Features Camera, Music Editor, Score, Location Scout, Puppeteer, Visual FX and Compositing.
• Heard on a TV:  “We interrupt this premiere of Shawn Darling’s Ghosts . ..