A Bad Movies 2019 Retrospective (part 2 of 5)
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It’s that time of the week again. Time for us to look at some of the over 1000 Bad Movies that I had the misfortune of watching during 2019. This time we’ll look at the months April to June.
If you haven’t read the first part of the Bad Movies 2019 Retrospective yet, just click here.
April
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The Best
April was a pretty great month. It was an anniversary for our Reddit Bad Movies Screening group, so we had a few repeats, but even without those there were some genuinely great movies. Funnily enough, my three favourites of the month could easily be counted as oddities too. Fatal Pulse for example is about how the big cinemas want to destroy the smaller cinemas during the 90s and how William Friedkin, Julie Roberts and Dick Cheney work together to achieve it. As if that wasn’t enough, the movie New Jack City plays an important roll and leads to mass outrage. It makes barely any sense and everyone is pretty much just screaming “REMEMBER THIS SHIT?”, but it’s charming as fuck.
Then there was Jekyll and Hyde… Together Again, the drugged up comedy version of the well known Jekyll & Hyde story. It’s balls to the wall hilarious, with a wonderful lead performance by that blind dude from Robin Hood: Men in Tights. Great music, great jokes and incredibly stupid. So what not to like?
But my favorite of the month has to be 1984s Furious. It’s a completely bonkers kung fu movie with talking pigs, fart jokes, people flying around, chicken magic, teleportation and a story that makes no sense at all. It’s seriously stupid, but every second is wonderful. And then there is that beach scene…
Go home!
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The Worst
As I already called April a pretty great month. Besides having many great movies, it also had barely anything bad, that could count against it. besides a rewatch of my most hated movie of all time, also known as Hip Hop Locos. The only other movie I hated and that wasn’t a rewatch, was The Curse of Bigfoot, though it’s hard to even call that a movie.
Someone decided that it would be a great idea to take an one hour long movie from the 50s about a mummy and then add some thirty minutes of Bigfoot footage to the thing. Most of it is just boring padding with no fun to be had.
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The Oddity
I already talked about Jekyll and Hyde… Together Again and Fatal Pulse as part of my favorites, so besides this mention I don’t feel like giving them the spotlight here. And to be perfectly honest, while I loved those two movies, they definitely can’t keep up with Lewd Lizard. Not only does it have a very questionable title, but the whole movie is absolutely fucked up. The lead character is a scientist out on research, but as he finally comes home he finds out that his fiancé already married another man. So what do you do in such a situation? You go into the desert and catch some lizards. You steal used panties and use their juices on the lizards. You train them into sex-hungry, women-hating fuck-machines. You bring the lizards to women, so they can crawl into their vaginas and kill them…by orgasm. Does this sound fucked up to you? That’s because it is, but if I piqued your interest you should absolutely watch it.
Our likable hero: the science-rapist!
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The Disappointment
April had two bigger disappointments for me, though one of them is more of a general thing. How in the hell is it, that like 99.99% of all insect horror movies are boring garbage? While there are a few nice ones, like Stung, most of those movies I barely even remember at all. They are just so incredibly boring and April’s insect movie Swarmed was no damn exception. It’s a whole subgenre of disappointment, and since I know that a certain person who always forces me to watch that shit is reading this, I want to say him one thing. Fuck you! And please don’t stop. There’s got to be a good one out there somewhere.
My other big disappointment has to be Suicide Girls Must Die!, because how the fuck can you make a slasher movie with The Suicide Girls and turn it into garbage? Make it found footage. And turn it into a zen movie. That’s how the fuck you do it! I’m not even joking, because some goddamn tard came up with the wonderful idea to make a Suicide Girl slasher movie, but neither gave them clothes, dialogue or a real camera. So they just talk garbage until a person vanishes. And then we end the thing with the ending from April Fools Day.
May
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The Best
Would I follow my own ratings, The Streetz would have to be my best movie of the month. If I’m entirely honest though, I can’t really remember it anymore, as it turns into a blur with many of the other shitty gangster movies. It might have been really great, as I was watching it, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable calling it that great right now.
So I had to look a bit further. I had watched The Apple, the Cannon Films rock musical, which I certainly loved as a trashy musical. It has nice songs combined with a nice little, stupid story. But I certainly watched better.
Instead I want to call May my Asian month. I’m a big fan of the late Shaw Bros horror-fantasy action flicks and The Boxer’s Omen is easily the pinnacle of that genre, but that doesn’t mean that it’s the only good one. One of the two great movies that I watched was Buddha’s Palm. It has fantastic wirework, a golden dragon-dog which people used for flying, a musical fight, a kid with an acid pimple, giant feet (look out Tarantino) and laser swords. It’s anything you’d want from crazy Asian bullshit movies and is super enjoyable.
The other movie was Holy Weapon. A simple movie about a fight between good and evil. Just that evil could turn itself into a massive sword and good simply recruited seven female virgins, so he could go full on Voltron and combine into a mega person. The best action is inventive with what it shows and this movie doesn’t shy away from going crazy.
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The Worst
Just looking back at it, I really had much to hate about May. A shitty comedy Sex Pot, an animated Bollywood movie called Roadside Romeo, the Rocky Horror TV remake, weed musical High Note and the dreadful Hellraiser: Revelations. All of these movies are absolute shit and are worthy of hatred, but not one of them was as dreadful as one particular movie…
…a movie that hit all the wrong boxes, that rubbed me in a completely wrong way. That movie was Christian Mingle. A by-the-numbers romance movie with an added level of religiousness. It features an atheist lady who joins a Christian dating website, because she never could find her true love so somehow expects it there. She of course falls in love with the first person she meets and turns full-on Christian for him. Even worse, the whole movie is just an obvious commercial for the website and that makes me hate it even more. It might not be the worst movie ever made, but it made me so damn angry. I will never know how actor Corbin Bernsen came to make this movie, but he entered my personal movie hell and deserves a spot on my list of the ten worst movies ever made.
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The Oddity
The Story of Ricky is a wonderful movie and there sadly are not enough ultra gory action movies of this kind. At least that’s what I thought, before I watched The Dark Angel: Psycho Kickboxer. It’s a similar movie that combines absolute non-acting with nice fights and hard gore. Kickboxing champion Curtis Bush (not that I would know who he is) plays the lead and after watching his father and fiancé being murdered, is trained back to health and swears revenge in the form of cracked skulls and decapitation kicks.
Another oddity for me was the Mexican version of Predator, called Amenaza maldita. The predator himself is clearly just a guy in a coverall with a cheap mask.
Then there’s a group of mercenaries trying to rescue the daughter of a governor, but soon enough they have to fight against the predator to survive. It follows the typical steps of the Schwarzenegger movie, but builds upon it with tons of political intrigue, nudity and by turning the Predator into a rapey alien who first rips off clothes and fondles titties before murdering them.
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The Disappointment
Pet Graveyard was a big disappointment for me. I expected the typical mockbuster, especially since it came out around the same time as the new Pet Sematary, but it felt more like a ripoff of Flatliners. A group of idiots want to prove, that life after death is just a myth, so they develop a safe way to kill and reanimate themselves. Of course something else comes back with them. So booooo, what a spooky movie, but sadly it is too boring to entertain.
My bigger disappointment though is Jack Frost. I know this is supposed to be some kind of trash cult classic, but it doesn’t really work for me. The overacting is hard, the jokes bad and the kills mostly mediocre. It’s pretty much Child’s Play, but cheesier and with a snowman. The psycho badguy is already throwing around the one-liners before he was really introduced, but he’s no Brad Dourif and doesn’t bring the same screen presence, so for me, this sadly is a waste of time.
June
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The Best
June had more than a few great movies. There’s that wonderfully shitty action flick Stickfighter, whose lead actor is about as charming as a bag of dicks. There was the McNamara twin epic Twin Dragon Encounter, which has one of my favourite bad movie soundtracks, thanks to composer Billy Butt and epic songs like “Fight for the right to fight”. But the McNamara twins themselves are also wonderful and a bit of crazy, which I learned when I emailed them to find out where I could get the soundtrack (sadly nowhere).
But my favourite of the month just has to be Fighting Spirit. Our lead Billy is played by shit movie actor Sean P. Donahue, whose sister loses her sight when she nearly gets raped. Billy wants revenge, so he joins a deadly fight club to get near the bad guy, but thirty minutes into the movie, there is a big surprise. Billy gets killed.
What would typically be the end of a movie, brings Billy back as a ghost, as he appears in front of his best friend David, played by that other shit action star Loren Avedon. Billy wants revenge, so now David has to train and become a good fighter, so he can be The Man.
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The Worst
June had just so much shit, that I barely know where to start. A big part of it were parodies like 30 Nights of Paranormal Activity… and The Helix… Reloaded, but mockbuster Adventures of Thunderstorm: Return of Thor, wasn’t really any better. But June also brought back flashbacks to one of my biggest weaknesses…German horror.
If anyone wants to call Uwe Boll the worst film-maker in the world, I’m totally up for a boxing match (not really). But please go watch some other German shit first. Uwe might make bad movies, but at least he kinda understands what a movie is, unlike people like Ulli Lommel. Then there is the masturbatory German amateur shit made by a group of hacks lead by special effects guy Olaf Ittenbach. Andreas Schnaas, Timo Rose and Marc Rohnstock are only a few of the directors, that basically make more shit each year and then tell each other how amazing that crap is. I watched my first of these movies at least twenty years ago and the quality of their trash is still the same. That’s why we, even after twenty years, still get unwatchable crap like Unrated: The Movie.
I’d actually be more than happy if I could keep it at that, but some asshole of a website owner just had to go one step further. (Defector Edit: Is he referring to me?) This midget-obsessed dickhead had to go deep into the rabbit hole and find something that nearly is as bad as Hip Hop Locos. He travelled deep into hell and came back with Psycho Space Demons, (Defector Edit: A perfectly serviceable film and you know it) which he probably stole from Einstein himself, as Einstein used this movie to describe time dilation. It’s seventy minutes long, but feels like watching crap for day, because the whole movie is made up from filler material.
There is not a single second of worthwhile footage in here, even though there are tits in the movie. But while Carl Sukenick’s Alien Beast was an incomprehensible mess, it at least was charming to some degree. This one is just annoyingly shit.
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The Oddity
I actually wanted to write a review about Showgirls 2: Penny’s From Heaven before. I watched it as part of Fuck You Friday, where I try to find a movie that is worse than Hip Hop Locos. All ratings for Showgirls 2 were horrible, so it seemed like the perfect contender, but damn did I have much fun. As a wannabe sequel to the Verhoeven movie, I just couldn’t expect this to be great, but got something that was even better than the original. I even wanted to write a review about the movie shortly after I watched it, but my words never seemed to properly describe my enjoyment for it. Every word just seemed to make the movie look bad and boring, but that’s not what it is. So let’s just call this a big recommendation.
The movie is bonkers and involves a subplot about murder and incredibly unsexy stripping, though it also goes a bit too far with the whole “remember this” bullshit, as it repeats way too many things from the original and typically does them worse. But when it tries to be its own thing, it is absolutely glorious.
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The Disappointment
Before I talk about my biggest disappointment, I’d like to mention one that I actually mostly liked. Simmba certainly was an enjoyable movie, but as a spin-off to Singham, I just expected so much more. It’s a fun movie, with a good lead, that never can reach the sky high expectations and that Singham cameo is so small that it disappoints you even more. But it still is an enjoyable movie.
But I certainly did not enjoy The Yin and Yang of Mr Go. Directed by Burgess Meredith, this movie promises Buddha with superpowers, a sexy lady, martial arts, a James Bond-like story and Jeff Bridges. This sounded like a clear winner to me, but it delivered exactly nothing…besides a sexy lady. Instead it delivered mostly boredom and that’s the worst a movie can do.
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The End
That’s it for part two of my 2019 retrospect. Next week we’ll cover July, August and September, so stay tuned!
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