Bad Movie Night
Our own homage to/takeoff of MST3k
| When | What | Well? | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 12/95, our first one | Dark Star | People on spaceship terrorized by beach ball alien. Slow. Boring. Badly done. Most of us had seen it before, and it was so painful for them to watch it a second time that we ended up canning it to get relief with Brazil. | |||
| early '96 | Attack of the Killer Tomatoes | Horrible song saves city! Keep this movie in mind while watching (for the umpteenth time) ID4... | |||
| early '96 | Tank Girl | Not really a bad movie in my book (too well done and enjoyable), although there was plenty to make fun of. The rest of the gang didn't necessarily agree with me, of course. | |||
| summer '96 | A Vampire in Brooklyn | Eddie Murphy takes a bite into crime and babes. Lots of fun, really. | |||
| 8/96 | Zardoz | Flying head (a la Easter Island) terrorizes primitives. Sean Connery, between old & new Bond. He wears a loincloth and bandolier, and not much else. Bad 70s clothes, hair & makeup. Watch the movie and try to decide at what point Connery asked his agent what he'd gotten into. | |||
| summer/fall '96 | Arena | Ivanova, Gul Dukat, and Quark (the actors, not the characters) in a movie about wrestling with/between aliens. If you like this (or Ivanova), rent Hexed - Ivanova at the age of about 19, playing a psychotic fashion model. One scene in Hexed has her jumping up & down on a bed with no clothes on (and a knife in hand, I think). | |||
| fall '96 | Army of Darkness | The Necronomicon. Windmills. The dead come to life. Horrible acting. | |||
| 12/07/96 | Yor: Hunter from the Future | Blond guy impresses babes. His people have spaceships; the rest of the people in the movie live in caves, more or less. Major tans & skimpy loincloth-type outfits. Watch for discontinuities, particularly in who's wearing which necklace. | |||
| ???, aka. Secrets of the Red Bedroom | From the description (Linda Hamilton and Geena Davis being recruited as sex spies), we thought it was going to be a comedy. Nope. Slow, boring, made-for-TV drama (there were even long fade-outs to allow for commercial breaks!). It was rated R; none of us could figure out why it would be more than PG-13. Very disappointing--not funny; not much to make fun of. More sad than bad. | ||||
| 1/04/97 | an assortment of Ed Wood's movies: Plan 9 From Outer Space, Bride of the Monster, and Glen or Glenda? | Very very very very silly, extremely strange movies. If you're not familiar with director Ed Wood, rent the bio Johnny Depp starred in. It was great (plus you get to see Johnny Depp in angora & heels). | |||
| 2/01/97 | Can't remember yet. We saw two... | ||||
| 3/01/97 | Cabin Boy | It made so much fun of itself that there wasn't much left for us. Chris Elliot(t?), annoying as ever, is joined by some bit-part actors you'll recognize and David Letterman, in a cameo as a monkey-doll salesman. We were more miserable sitting through it than anything else. | |||
| Death Race 2000 | This lovely flick featured 70s fashions, overly trashy racing cars, gore, and nudity. It was studded with Sly Stallone (bad guy with the inability to use a napkin) *and* David Carradine (supposed bad guy; dressed in black cloth and rubber/vinyl/spandex, alas). We were forced to see Carradine in his briefs, dancing with his (naked) navigator. Not nearly as bad as Cabin Boy, though - better acting. Scary thought, eh? | ||||
| 04/05/97 | 1,000,000 Years B.C. | This mid-1960s caveman film, set in a desert near what
looked like the San Francisco Bay, stars Raquel Welch. This is an early
blonde incarnation, decked out in a fur bra and miniskirt. She carried
what most of us took to be a purse, but which turned out to be a shell
horn. There were almost no words to interfere with our enjoyment of
the slight-if-any plot. Sophia's character, a member of the "shell"
tribe, joins up with a caveman from the "rock" tribe. The two tribes
scuffle over women and fight incredibly huge herbivores and dinosaurs who
seem to be trying to eat them.
The monsters they fight include a giant iguana, a giant sea turtle, a giant turantula, a giant cricket, a triceratops, and two meat-eating dinosaurs (different ones). I think they were an allosaurus and a tyrannosaurus rex, but it was difficult to tell. All of these creatures managed to eke out a diet from the rocks and fish and occasional bushes found in this desert. Oh, and at the end there was a volcanic eruption combined with an earthquake. No plot wind-up. The movie just ended. Great one, though - fun. |
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| 05/03/97 | Vegas in Space | Late 70s glamour queens (truly); sex-change pills; makeup and clothes worthy of Divine. An almost-all-transvestite cast. Extremely low-budget; possibly someone's high school or college project (although for which school?). It looked like most or all of it had been shot in black and white and then colorized with glow-in-the-dark paints. This is what our BMN movies strive to be, and Vegas in Space, despite its no-name cast, has now displaced Zardoz as the worst one we've seen yet. | |||
| BioDome | Pauly Shore (annoying), Stephen Baldwin (annoying; not as cute as brother Alec; not as bright as brother Alec), and toilet humor. The two play high-school-ish dullards who get locked inside BioDome (a "fictionalized" analogue of BioSphere II in Arizona). I didn't stay for the end of this one. | ||||
| 06/07/97 | Mary Reilly | Julia Roberts (the meek housemaid with a backbone) vs.
John Malkovich (Dr. Jekyll, but wants to be bad, evil Mr. Hyde).
Julia Roberts did a much better job
than we'd expected - we had to give her credit. She was very believable
as the abused-as-a-child, way-too-nosy-now maid to Dr. Jekyll.
The cinematography was good. The costumes were good. The makeup was
too heavy for Glenn Close (Madam Faraday), but was
okay for Julia Roberts and the other servants.
Much scarier than we'd expected, though - it should be in horror/suspense,
not mystery/classics.
So why was this a bad movie? The cheesy effects at the end, when we SEE the Jekyll/Hyde transformation. What's the deal with Kuato [from Total Recall, although I probably spelled it wrong] showing up? Why mostly? The plot. Mary Reilly could read, even though she'd been "in service" since she was about seven. This worked into her relationship with Dr. Jekyll. How/where did she learn, when so many of the other servants (who seemed to have grown up normally) couldn't read? Dr. Jekyll knew the Councilman from school, but why did Mr. Hyde dislike him? How did Dr. Jekyll meet Madam Faraday? She seemed to have known him for quite some time. How did nobody ever find Madam Faraday's body? How did Mary's flowers bloom so suddenly? If Dr. Jekyll had such a bad case of schizophrenia, why weren't there indications before he started playing with his chemistry set? And speaking of chemistry, what *did* he need all of those organs for? Maybe they'll make a sequel to explain it all...Mary Reilly takes over Jekyll's lab, makes up her own version of the concoction, pours it over the corpse of Madam Faraday (assuming the body can be found), and Madam Faraday comes to life a la Frankenstein as a sweet young girl... |
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| Our inspirations | |||||
| ~1993 or 1994, possibly earlier | Zardoz | see above description | |||
| ~1993 or 1994 | Solaris | An extremely slow Soviet sci-fi movie, consisting of a bunch of people on the ground in a cabin and in space watching a swirl of psychedelic jello. Long and boring. | |||
| ~1993 or 1994 | This Quiet Earth | Better than Solaris. Explosion sends people to alternate Earths. I don't remember much more of it. | |||
| ~1993 or 1994 | Nemesis | Cary Hiroyuki-Takagawa(sp?), from Black Rain, Rising Sun, and (I'm pretty sure) Showdown in Little Tokyo, joins a cast of barely-clad actors in a lovely desert sci-fi number. Watch the cast members share what seems to be the one extra outfit on the set. | |||
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