A Bad Movies Retrospective – January 2020
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As promised with the last part of my Bad Movies 2019 Retrospective, we now begin with a monthly breakdown of the best, worst, and everything in between, of all the Bad Movies I put myself through, with today’s edition being of course for January.
Unlike before, I will not just look at the number one favourite or most hated, but simply at a few movies for each category. There is also that added fifth category for whatever I want to talk about.
So welcome to the first of hopefully many retrospectives. Let the suffering begin!
January
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The best
When the director of Riki-Oh makes a fantasy-adventure movie, you’ll gotta expect something crazy like The Seventh Curse. Our hero is a young cop trying to rescue a girl before she is sacrificed by a Worm Tribe and as a thanks for that, the tribe puts seven blood curses on him. These curses make parts of his body explode from time to time until the seventh explosion happens when he will die. The lady he rescued (called Betsy) gives him an antidote, which only works for one year. Only with the advice of Wisely, played by none other than Chow Yun Fat, we find out that there is a curse and so we start on another adventure. This time our lead will have to steal the golden eyes of a Buddha statue and swallow them whole, and he will also have to fight a murderous baby worm monster and the old ancestor of the Worm Tribe, who is a skeleton that can turn into a flying killer monster.
As is expected from the director, the movie is absolutely bonkers, with ridiculous comedic bits and some extreme gore moments. And the good guys actually adopt the little worm monster, which leads to one of the best moments of the whole movie. But first the old ancestor has to turn into the crazy fucked up monster.
And then the worm thingy and the monster have a crazy ass fight, which ends in one seriously badass way.
Another great movie was the 80s classic Uninvited. I most likely watched this one a long time ago, but this was the first time since the release of the bluray. Everyone knows that cats are assholes and if you take one with you onto a boat, you shouldn’t be surprised when said cat releases its inner monster to murder you. The 80s also were the time when people still believed that George Kennedy could play a lead character, though he actually plays the bad guy here.
Whoever thought it was a good idea to have George fight a Hobgoblin deserves a goddamn medal. The movie is super enjoyable, with the cat monster being the clear highlight, but for whatever reason someone also thought it would be wonderful to ADR the cat. So the whole movie we have a fucking MEOWing in the background, no matter if the cat is near or not.
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The Worst
Nearly every time I watch a DeCoteau movie, it feels like it is his worst movie ever. I mean… that dude clearly was able to direct something enjoyable, as his earlier movies are proof of (not the gay porn, I haven’t watched that). At least his 80s and 90s movies like Creepozoids or Lady Avenger are fun to watch, but somewhere in the early 2000s, he fully embraced his gay side and started doing stuff like The Brotherhood or those 1313 movies. But even then, he at least still tried with some of the earlier stuff, while it feels like he completely lost his passion somewhere inbetween and only uses the later stuff as an excuse to watch as many nearly nude guys as possible. I definitely want to find the movie at which point he clearly gave up, but that is going to be another project.
But to get back to the point, 1313: Hercules Unbound! is just another of his worst movies. A group of six gods is hanging around a mansion, so they can train. And that’s all the plot wwe get. One of the gods is slightly angry at Hercules and tries to fight him, but the movie is pretty much just watching these fucks train. And train. And train. They run around a bit, wrestle each other and flex their muscles. That’s the whole fucking thing.
Bikini Hotel wasn’t any better than that. It’s supposed to be one of these sex-comedies for teens, offering women in small bikinis doing funny things. Just that the comedy of the movie is so damn bad, that there is not a single chuckle in sight.
To make matters worse, the version I watched was apparently edited for tv and was missing all the nudity, besides some man ass. But why watch a bikini movie with Julie Strain, if you don’t even get what the movie is all about…the damn fucking nudity! Instead all there was, was the godawful comedy with Julie going all stealth-like into a room to steal something, but because she is shit at cracking the safe, she instead tries to hump the code out of the guy.
And then we watched a movie, that was essentially a stageplay. Blood is the story of a drug-addict lady, who needs money for drugs and gets offered $500 for a threesome, as long as she brings another guy with her. Along comes a sudden visit by her brother, who wants to become a priest. Since she can’t find anyone else, she now tries to seduce her brother into that threesome. But he of course had another reason to visit her, as he is actually in love with her and wanted to fuck her, just like family does. Yet his biggest problem is that he’d have to share her with another guy.
The whole movie is just these two fucks, inside of a room, talking with each other. Sometimes they are naked. Sometimes they are not. Sometimes they want to fuck. Sometimes they don’t. If I want to watch this kind of stuff, I can just go to Pornhub and get rid of the ridiculous story.
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The Oddity
I was a bit afraid of watching I was a Teenage Wereskunk, because these kind of parodies fail more often than not. And while I wasn’t 100% happy with Wereskunk, it was definitely a fun movie, with some nice acting, good songs and some actually funny moments.
What really made the movie work for me, was that every character was a one-bit character, built around a certain type of joke. While this made me hate a few of the characters, it streamlined the idea of comedy in the movie, allowed the director to focus more on the writing for each of them and actually offered a nice way of having the certain types of comedy play off of each other. There were people like the manly screaming idiot cop, who just didn’t work for me, though I liked that he obviously was played by a woman. But then you also had the time-travel cop making all those future references, not even knowing herself why she would say such things. She also had some of my favorite moments, when playing around with the other characters.
I kinda hope, that some of my readers would know, who cTom is, but in case you don’t, Tom Charley (calling himself cTom) might be the least humanlike human who ever tried to make satirical movies. Song of the Blind Girl is clearly his magnum opus, but The President Goes to Heaven is still a strong contender, when it comes to satire, that is clearly just weird bullshit.
Let’s make a movie about the ex-president having a stroke and his wife whining about how he has to be in such a shitty hospital, because that’s funny. Let all kinds of priests visit him and prey for him, like a catholic priest, an orthodox priest, a rabbi and even a clergy, because that also is funny. Let’s also kill the clergy, because all muslims are terrorists and that is also super funny.
Nothing in here is as fucked up as Song of the Blind Girl, which tried to sell abduction, child rape and abortion as something totally hilarious, but the antisemitism of this one is nearly as mindbafflingly retarded. I need to get my hands on more cTom movies.
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The Disappointment
When 100 Monsters is good, it is really good. When 100 Monsters is bad, it is simply just boring. And sadly enough, that is the biggest part of the movie. For the first hour of the movie, you’ll get to see about five monsters. There’s your cyclops-bigfoot thing, the one-legged umbrella and your Rokurokubi, but those only appear for short moments, with most of the runtime being used for old people, who tell each other stories about hauntings, but we rarely see anything during those stories.
But luckily the ending is quite great, as it throws about thirty monsters at you and all of them at once. That moment was pretty amazing and I’d really loved the movie if it would have delivered on what the poster promised, especially as the monster designs were great for its time, but there just isn’t enough. I would have loved to see these guys try themselves on a japanese version of 13 Ghosts.
I also feel like it is unfair to be disappointed by a Shot On Video movie, especially when made by students, but when said movie is called The Heaping Bouncy Breasts That Smothered a Midget, then I just can’t feel any less than disappointed. With such a great title, the movie had to deliver exactly on these two important points, but they are absolutely a lie. There are no Heaping Bouncy Breasts and there also is no midget to be smothered. If only I would have checked the director, as John Bacchus went onto doing mostly softcore ripoffs of better movies (kinda ironic I feel). But I guess that would have made me even more disappointed in this. The guy directed Kinky Kong and Bravengers, yet there is no nudity in this.
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Outside Bad Movies
I grew up on movies and video games and have memores of both for most of my life. With movies it all started thanks to my aunt, who, whenever I visited her, made me watch all the stuff I otherwise wasn’t allowed to watch. Movies like Die Hard, Alien and Predator are burnt into my mind, since the time I watched them at age six.
With video games, there are two factors. My father always brought some used consoles home so we could play with them. Even from a very young age, I had a C64, the Atari 2600, a NES, Sega Mega Drive and all up to a SNES. And while I have great memories of playing them, everything changed when I played on my cousins PC for the first time. The game was Day of the Tentacle and I adored the hell out of it. The look. The writing. The jokes. I just loved everything about it.
So it’s no wonder, that I was super happy, when I finally got my very own pc for my 8th birthday. With it came a Gold Games mega pack and some more Sierra adventures, which not only turned me into an even bigger Point ‘n’ Click fan, but also into the pervert that I am, as I will never forget the one forbidden game, which I obviously secretly played the most. Leisure Suit Larry VI: Shape Up or Slip Out!
Today my love for video games isn’t as strong anymore. Games become longer and time more important, with more and more importance put onto DLC and other possibilities to get more money out of the gamer. I still play some of those bigger games and I’m honestly a sucker for stealth games in the kind of Hitman or the Assassin’s Creed games, but my biggest interest lies within the small indie games now.
And that’s where we nearly get to the point, which I want to talk about, as there is one publisher that still stands out today and doesn’t care about all the extra bullshit. Devolver Digital gave me some of the best gaming memores of the last decade to me. The stylized murders, combined with a wonderful synth soundtrack and a fucked up story make Hotline Miami into one of the best topdown action games of all time. Being a beta tester for Broforce made me play the game for 1000+ hours, falling absolutely in love with the chaos it delivers and finding one of my best friends, while doing so. And Dropsy brought back my strong feelings for PnC games, while also being the creepy-cutest hugventure of all time.
And this January I finally played Gris, a game that absolutely proves why games are art. It’s very own small puzzlish adventure game, that could have never been made under any other publisher today. It combines the light puzzles with absolutely stunning visuals, a fantastic soundtrack and gorgeous narration, while not having a single word spoken or written. Everything is told through moving pictures, almost feeling like a Ghibli movie. This game somehow brought back the magical feeling of playing Day of the Tentacle for the first time, which I only remember one other game to achieve. If you manage to get your hands on it, please give it a chance.
I actually just wanted to write about some more pervy anime this month, yet here I am. Whining on about a beautiful video game. What a loser 😉
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The End
And that’s it for the first month of our monthly retrospect. See you again for february, where we’ll talk about many more movies.
