A Bad Movies 2019 Retrospective (part 4 of 5)
[themify_hr color=”dark-gray” width=”50px” border_width=”1px”]
It’s time for part 4 of my Bad Movies 2019 retrospective! This time we will look at the last months of the year. While October is my go-to horror month, December is built up around Christmas movies and that really bit me in the ass, but more about that in a bit.
Part one of the Bad Movies 2019 Retrospective can be found here, with part two being available here and part three is waiting for you just around the corner.
October
[themify_hr color=”dark-gray” width=”50px” border_width=”1px”]
The Best
There’s only one movie that could take the top spot for this month and that’s Dancin’ It’s On, which our site owner still hasn’t seen (Defector Edit: Why have I still not seen this?). David Winters was once a star himself, appearing in classics like West Side Story, but this movie is nothing less than his magnum opus. It’s a movie set in its own little world. A world in which people start to randomly dance everywhere, no matter if it is an angry dance, a happy dance, or a sad flashmob dance.
Another part of its charm are the random appearances of Stilts-Woman and Stalker-Mime. While Stilts-Woman simply shows up to walk through the background, Stalker-Mime is much worse and even leads into another dance scene. Because we all wanted that to happen.
Yet the most important part of the movie is David Winters’ very own role. He’s the main guys’ mentor, and while he definitely was a good dancer when he was younger, it’s just awkward to see him move around in this. Then there is also Gary Daniels, who only shows up to be angry and to flex his muscles.
[themify_hr color=”dark-gray” width=”50px” border_width=”1px”]
The Worst
I’m not surprised that I am apparently the only person on Letterboxd who actually watched Naked Horror: The Movie. If there is one thing correct about the title, it’s that there is indeed nudity in the movie. But the rest of the film is about a woman who has bad dreams and watches videos of other people on the internet.
Some people have similar dreams, but are dead. And then she visits a healing pyramid. It’s so much boring garbage that doesn’t feel in any way like it was made in 2010, but more like 1995.
[themify_hr color=”dark-gray” width=”50px” border_width=”1px”]
The Oddity
During this month there were some pretty bad oddities around, like the super annoying Death of a Ghost Hunter, which somehow has five hours of narration in a 100 minute movie.
But then there is Maximum Shame. If the title makes you hope for some kind of kink movie don’t get your hopes up, because this is a no-budget musical, filmed completely inside an abandoned factory. It’s supposed to be based around chess, with all characters being named after chess figures, but I don’t think I need to explain how that doesn’t make any sense. Then there are the BDSM aspects, the bad singing, the dialogue, and one of the weirdest moments of the whole year.
Because suddenly the Queen and her slave have a conversation with a mirror, like it’s another version of Snow White. But the mirror lady begins eating spaghetti and starts spitting them out of the mirror for the slave to start eating it. It’s not a good movie by any means, but it certainly is special.
[themify_hr color=”dark-gray” width=”50px” border_width=”1px”]
The Disappointment
I know that I shouldn’t expect anything particularly good from a soft-core musical, but I guess that Adventures Into The Woods spoiled me. But then there is Ghost in a Teeny Bikini, which is exactly what you’d expect from a soft-core musical. It looks cheap, feels cheap, the acting is cheap, the sex is cheap and the songs are god awful.
What a wonderful voice
The only saving grace is a great performance by Evan Stone, who always gives his everything.
November
[themify_hr color=”dark-gray” width=”50px” border_width=”1px”]
The Best
For November it is a bit harder for me to choose my favourite movie, as there were two that absolutely deserve the title. Thinking about it thought, I simply have to give it to the movie that actually works as a movie.
That means Gatwick Gangsters is only my number two. It’s an incredibly ugly movie with bad acting, dreadful effects and colour-grading that will give you eye-cancer. There is also the fucking lens flare, which most likely is just a 10-second loop, straight up taken from Shutterstock and then played again and again and again. At some point we actually started to count the time between the appearances of the lens flare, and the longest we counted was only 12 seconds.
The biggest problem with the movie though, is, that there is no way you could understand it. It cuts from one place to the next, from one time to another and yet never connects anything. At some point in the movie they literally started to use subtitles to try and help you understand what the hell was happening. And even later into the movie, those subtitles get their own subtitles. Suddenly it’s not just “You are at place A”, but also “This shit is supposed to happen”. But this ‘help’ begins way too late and by that point any braincells I had left had already given up.
So what’s my favourite movie of the month? That would be Mind Trap. We are thrown into the movie with an action scene. We see a lady asleep in her bed, while someone tries to crack her safe. The robber succeeds and now wants to murder her, but accidentally steps onto a cat, which wakes the lady up. She fights him, runs away, throws the cat at him, takes his gun, opens the door and… apparently we are in a moving truck. She throws him out, takes the morning newspaper which was in front of the door and… we find out, that this was just a movie and that our lead is just an actress.
What now follows is even more stupid. Her dad, who works for the military, created a dream-machine which allows you to actually enter your dreams. He was so good, that he hid the machine inside a secret room within the military base. A room that only his family knows about. Bad guys appear and want the machine for whatever reason and so they kill daddy. The lead tries to find the rest of her family, but the bad guys find them too, kill mom and try to rape her sister in what is one of the most hilarious rape scenes ever put on film. It’s best described as…what happens when Beavis and Butthead try to get their sex on?
HE HE HE HE
It’s one of the weirdest espionage-action movies I have ever seen and if you told me that David Lynch was somehow involved, I would probably believe you.
[themify_hr color=”dark-gray” width=”50px” border_width=”1px”]
The Worst
Does anyone reading this remember the scene in Dumb and Dumber about the most annoying sound in the world? Airplane Mode is basically that one scene but turned into a full movie. Anything supposedly comedic in this is just loud and violent. Besides that, the movie could have actually been kinda decent, as the acting and camera work are okay. Too bad that the movie is just excruciatingly annoying.
There’s not a single good joke in this, but they still had to include Nick Swardson in a role that is so incredibly bad and annoying that it turns the movie into one of the worst movies of the year.
[themify_hr color=”dark-gray” width=”50px” border_width=”1px”]
The Oddity
Let’s make one thing absolutely clear. I’m not just a freak when it comes to movies, but I also watch tv-shows and anime in my spare time. Sometimes I go full on crazy, as when I watched all of One Piece in about six weeks. At the time, that were 780 episodes at about 25 minutes each. I was completely burnt out and barely watched any anime in a year, so I instead decided to only go with shorter stuff and also give smaller things a chance. And while I still watch something like One Punch Man every now and then, I kinda found myself at home in the pervy anime section. I’m not talking about hentai, but the stuff that is filled with all the fanservice.
So instead of classics like Death Note, I am now watching weird shit like Keijo, which is basically what happens if you’d have female sumo and only use butts and boobs to fight. Or the actually really good No Game No Life, which is about two humans, sucked into a world where every fight is solved through a game. What could be stupid, is not only absolutely gorgeous looking, but also feels more like House M.D. in anime form as our leads are always the best in games and always try to find the way of winning.
But the weirdest and most fun of them all is Shimoneta: A Boring World Where the Concept of Dirty Jokes doesn’t Exist. In it, Japan has banned everything dirty, no matter if porn, hand gestures, or even just words. A terror group called S.O.X. (Sex occurs most Often on X-mas) tries to fight the government for jokes and sex. The show absolutely celebrates everything dirty, while giving it importance in a world that abandoned all of it.
It’s something that could have easily turned into full on trash, but it has its heart in the right place and never overstays its welcome. And it also has an absolutely wonderful theme song, even though nothing will ever beat that song from Assassination Classroom. That show just killed me.
[themify_hr color=”dark-gray” width=”50px” border_width=”1px”]
The Disappointment
If talking about the biggest disappointment, I’d probably have to go with Abnormal Attraction. It’s a movie about a world in which humans and fairy tale creatures are living together, which takes its movie title from a person who wants to fuck one of those creatures. The movie has more than a few good ideas, like for example having Ron Jeremy as a tooth fairy, but there are sadly too many problems with it.
The problem that hurts the most is that the movie is clearly too ambitious for its own budget. That’s never something I like to say, because things like Who Killed Captain Alex would be pretty much the same. Except they aren’t. Whereas Captain Alex works on a barely existing budget, it always knows that and uses tons of love to make up for it. Abnormal Attraction doesn’t have that same heart and is just mostly guys in furry costumes, while trying to play it off as serious. That works on a few occasions in the movie, but most often than not it just looks stupid.
The other problem is that the writer of this movie just wanted to be in the movie, so he wrote the most annoying role for himself. And whenever Finbar shows up, any attempts of humour go down the drain and come out of the toilet, as we suddenly are left with shouting, burping and farting. He’s neither interesting nor funny, but the movie turns him into a central character and that really kills the movie.
December
[themify_hr color=”dark-gray” width=”50px” border_width=”1px”]
The Best
This was another month that had a few too many repeats, so I will just count Two Front Teeth and Tammy and the T-Rex (finally the gore cut) as wonderful masterpieces, but will not talk much more about them here. Instead, my favorite movie is going to be Bad Black the newest movie of Nabwana I.G.G., who already gave us Who Killed Captain Alex. His new movie is just as crazy and just as honest, while again showing us how good a movie can be, if you actually love what you do.
Objectively seen, it would be hard to recommend this movie, but on a pure subjective level you can feel how much care and love went into it. How much everyone wanted this to be the best they could ever make. They absolutely succeeded.
[themify_hr color=”dark-gray” width=”50px” border_width=”1px”]
The Worst
How the fuck am I supposed to choose the worst movie of December? There’s just so much shit that it’s hard to decide. Is it the escort-“superhero” movie Hellfire! or the super weird and rapey Ghosts Can’t Do It? I actually can’t decide.
So I instead will declare war on christmas and will say that most of the christmas movies of this month are combined into the worst of the worst, because it basically was all part of my 12 Days Of Shitmas. I watched 31 christmas movies this year and I absolutely hated nine of them, which is pretty much a third.
If you prefer to hate animated movies, I have Eight Crazy Nights for you, the Adam Sandler kids movie that has way too many adult jokes for it to be a kids movie. If you prefer to hate on Krampus (and you should), then Krampus Origins is an easy movie to hate, because like all the Krampus movies (excluding that one good one), it again barely shows Krampus and is just boring. And it’s also set during WW1 and doesn’t even talk about his origins.
You might also like to hate on Kirk Cameron, whenever he saves christmas, or how about a British musical like Nativity Rocks!. Or the fake sequel Silent Night, Bloody Night 2: Revival. There’s just so much trash to find here.
And while I just wanted to continue to name more and more shitty christmas movies, it suddenly came to me. The actual worst movie of the bunch is another one I was forced to watch, thanks to Defector (Defector Edit: There’s no need to thank me, it was my pleasure). He’s the one who made me watch Last Ounce of Courage, which is a Christian propaganda movie, about, you guessed it, the war on Christmas. The whole thing is about how people are not allowed to celebrate a traditional Christmas any more, because bullshit. It takes itself so damn serious and wants to be so important that it has to be the worst.
[themify_hr color=”dark-gray” width=”50px” border_width=”1px”]
The Oddity
My oddity of the month is the aerobics version of Flashdance. Heavenly Bodies is about three women who hate their jobs and who start their own aerobics studio, and for the most part, this is more of a slice-of-life movie as we simply follow our leading lady through life, love, and problems. If that’s not for you, then I can absolutely understand that this movie won’t work for you as well as it did for me. But when the movie finally escalates, it does so in the best way possible.
After an incredible 70 minutes, the movie finally offers us the big problem. Another studio used their money to buy the building that our hero’s use and tries to throw them out. How could we save the building and our lives? Of course with a dance off! So the rest of the movie has two teams dance against each other, with more and more contenders leaving the stage until only one team is left. Who will survive the battle of the legs?
[themify_hr color=”dark-gray” width=”50px” border_width=”1px”]
The Disappointment
A Raunchy Christmas Story could have been just one of the named movies for the worst of the month, but it actually got to me. I expected something bad from it, especially thanks to the low score, but I liked the cover-art and as long as the movie would have delivered on the raunchy part, I would have been fine with it.
Too bad, because the movie offers none of that. The raunchiest moment is the one depicted in the screenshot and there aren’t even any particularly nice looking people in this. There is nothing raunchy and nothing sexy about it and it barely even is about Christmas. Worst of all though. It isn’t funny.
[themify_hr color=”dark-gray” width=”50px” border_width=”1px”]
The End
So that’s it for part 4. Next week we take a last look back at 2019 and decide on the best, worst, oddest and most disappointing movie of the whole year, take a look at movies that actually came out in 2019 and have a bit of a geeky look at some stats.
[themify_hr color=”dark-gray” width=”50px” border_width=”1px”]
