The cheesy B-Movie thread

[Futtocks]

Just bought a ticket for the first ever RiffTrax Live show in the UK.

RiffTrax are three former Mystery Science Theater 3000 veterans, now doing their own movie-riffing thing. They are putting on two shows at the Prince Charles Cinema in London's greasy (sorry, glitzy) West End on the 15th of February. 

At tea-time, they are giving the treatment to 'Plan 9 from Outer Space'. Later that night, it'll be 'Samurai Cop', which is the show I've booked to see. Either one will be a treat, though.

[Futtocks]

Starship Invasions (1977)

Canadian B-movie guff, with Christopher Lee and Robert Vaughn both slumming it more than usual. This is Ed Wood-level film-making, in the era of 'Star Wars'. Like the contemporary cash-in, 'Starcrash', it is gloriously inept stuff.

Lee (sporting possibly the most regrettable headgear of his long career) plays Rameses, the leader of a flying saucer fleet. They want to colonise Earth, after inducing the human race to commit collective suicide. Vaughn plays a UFO obsessive, who is recruited by the good aliens to combat Lee's baddies.

It starts with a farmer being abducted and seduced. Then, the aliens need a woman to study. Unlike the farmer, she gets stripped down to her undies for the examination. Both kill themselves later, as part of the bad guys' track-covering process.

Pie-plate flying saucers chase each other across the screen in wobbly trajectories for a bit. Exposition trudges onwards in some kind of death march. All the aliens communicate telepathically, as it was cheaper to dub dialogue on after filming without having to synchronise sound and vision.

At one point, the good guys' saucer has a computer malfunction, and one of the characters fixes the problem by using a pocket calculator. They were the big new gadget at the time, I suppose (kids, ask your grandparents what a 'calculator' is).

Then we get the epic space battle, which you or I could replicate with a black cloth, fishing line crockery and silver paint. Finally, one of the good aliens' robots destroys Rameses' suicide machine and most of his fleet. Rameses, rather than surrender, crashes his saucer into the Moon.

We stagger over the finishing line, with the aliens saving the life of Vaughn's wife, who had slashed her wrists. The aliens return to their undersea pyramid and all is well. Apart from the millions of people who killed themselves under the bad guys' influence, that is.

This movie lacks the brightly-coloured, headlong silliness of 'Starcrash', but is still good for giggles.

 

Edited January 6, 2018 by Futtocks

[Futtocks]

Never too young to die (1986)

The Eighties gymnastics/martial arts crossover movie that isn't 'Gymkata'.

From IMDB: "A top secret Agent is murdered, so his estranged son, a high school gymnast, teams up with his dad's attractive female partner to stop the psychopathic hermaphroditic gang leader who killed him, and now plans a major terrorist attack."

And that's pretty much what you get. Gymnast boy Lance Stargrove is played by John Stamos and his mullet, teaming up with former Prince sidekick Vanity, after his dad (who really is played by George Lazenby) is killed. The bad guy is played by Kiss' Gene Simmons, who is enjoying himself here more than you might believe possible. Toothmarks in every piece of scenery stuff. Robert Englund is also in it, but only as a minor character.

Oh, and we have a bigly Eighties rockin' action theme too!
Stargrove! Flying like you've never flown.
Stargrove! Runnin' through a danger zone.
Stargrove! Are you gonna stand alone?
Stargrove!
Stargrove!

This is textbook schlock, and while Stamos emotes as much as a brick, Vanity's actually pretty good, as well as pretty. Simmons steals the show, of course. With a character like Velvet von Ragnar(!) to play, he pushes it as far as it'll go... then a little further.

Top it off with cut-price 'Mad Max' biker crazies and lots of explosions (because explosions are ace!), and you have some proper trashy entertainment.

https://youtu.be/qIMmIlWS7JM?list=WL

 

[Futtocks]

Who killed Captain Alex (2010)

Ugandan action/comedy/martial arts insanity, filmed on a budget of $200, which is as close to nothing as you can get. Apparently, the director has made movies before, but had to delete the old ones whenever a new project started, in order to free up disc space, as he couldn't afford more storage. He's used to working on that sort of budget, and he's got a lot of mates who'll pitch in as extras when they are needed. They also know their Karate, so the fight scenes are pretty well choreographed... unless they actually were beating each other up for real.

The basic plot can be found on Wikipedia.

It is so clear that everyone involved is having the best fun they've ever had in their lives, you just get swept up in it. They also throw in 'Video Joker' commentary, which ramps up the craziness ever more.

This is magnificent. Director Isaac Nabwana, take a bow! To make the movie, apart from selling everything he owned (as well as selling housebricks that he made by hand) for a camcorder, he built his own PC from junked spare parts to do the editing.

Oh, and there's a pan-pipe cover of 'Kiss from a Rose' on the soundtrack. I bet Seal's lawyers don't know about this. Keep it under your hat, okay?

Here is a fantastic article about the movie and the man who made it.

You can watch the whole movie on YouTube, or just a compilation of the action scenes.

Edited January 13, 2018 by Futtocks

[Futtocks]

Just remembered - this forum used to post a whole load of insane news reports from the Uganda New Vision newspaper, often about the outrageous behaviour of boda-boda men.

Clearly, that country's sense of humour tends towards the unhinged.

[Futtocks]

Rollergator (1996)

So this is what we've sunk to, eh? A movie starring Joe Estevez that actually makes most movies starring Joe Estevez look good. Or, at least, like an actual movie.

This is directed by Donald G.Jackson, who has the enjoyably trashy 'Hell comes to Frogtown' on his CV, but who has since embraced an approach that he calls Zen Filmmaking. Basically, everyone makes it up as they go along and he just keeps the cameras rolling. It is to masochists what Dogme is to chin-stroking bores.

The story, such as it is, concerns a rollerblading girl who rescues and befriends a talking purple alligator (a bad hand-puppet). If we know anything from watching Barney, it is that purple lizards are never as charming as their creators think. This gator is a grade-A tosspot, who 'raps' on more than one occasion. And he doesn't rollerblade either - he just sits in the girl's backpack.

The gator is being pursued by his rightful owner who misses him, a carney (Joe Estevez) who reckons it'd be an attraction for his grim funfair... and a skateboarding female ninja, for absolutely no reason at all. Throughout the movie, an acoustic guitar noodles away at repetitive riffs, in a way that betrays a deep understanding of psychological torture techniques.

Long, badly-framed scenes trudge on, with the dialogue either being drowned out by the music or delivered so badly that only the occasional word gets through. Joe Estevez looks like he's having that final gin-sodden breakdown that necessitates the jacket with extree-long sleeves and a soft-walled room.

Many hideous minutes later, the gator's back with his owner, desultory farewells are said and Estevez appears to have also turned into a purple alligator, for reasons that are never even hinted at, let alone explained.

And yet, 'Rollergator' is still a better movie than 'Repligator'.

[Futtocks]

Just got home from this - a fine evening's entertainment!  

[Futtocks]

Another 20 episodes from the original Mystery Science Theater 3000 have just been added to Netflix.

The latest additions include all-time favourites 'Space Mutiny' and 'Manos: The Hands of Fate'. 

[Futtocks]

Idle Hands (1999)

Starring: Devon Sawa, Jessica Alba, Seth Green, Elden Henson, Vivica Fox.

Not many big stars in this black comedy horror, but the kind of second-stringers whose faces often ring a bell. Seth Green's been in tons of films, while Vivica Fox was one of the gang in 'Kill Bill'. 

To be honest, to describe much of this would involve spoilers, but I will say that Ms Alba looks as fabulous as she has ever done, plus the SFX, the action sequences, the inventiveness and the humour are much better quality than most attempts on the genre.

If you want to read more, at the expense of spoilers, this is critic Roger Ebert's take.

And this is Jessica.

[Futtocks]

Star Slammer (1986)
aka The Adventures of Taura, aka Prison Ship

Holy moley, what an enjoyable mess!

This is a "chicks in chains" exploitation movie, given a comedy sci-fi twist, and the trash is strong in this one. Unusually for the genre, there is only one brief example of boobage, but otherwise nothing to scare the horses.

We have our blonde heroine (Sandy Brooke), her crazed masochistic cyborg nemesis, a prison governor whose look could be best described as "bondage Vorderman", a one-eyed hench-babe, a monster that looks like a testicle crossed with a xenomorph and more chewed scenery than Gary Oldman's entire movie career.

Everyone looks like they were having more fun than is strictly wise while making this, and the enthusiasm makes up for the often ropey acting. Slapstick collides with melodrama, which then does a handbrake turn into extra-ketchup gore. Also, we have rodents of unusual size and a ghost druid.

Oh, and the music is often wonderfully inappropriate, including a snippet of Ravel's Bolero.

For a finale, we have a space battle lifted wholesale from (if I'm not mistaken) 'Battle beyond the Stars'. And why not? It's a pretty good sequence for the budget, and recycling is A Good Thing, right?

In the end, this is a B-movie that knows exactly how silly it is, but never winks at the camera like a modern mockbuster, and is all the better for it.

[Futtocks]

Godmonster of Indian Flats (1973)

Oh, Christ knows. Really! It tries to be a satire of sorts. it also tries to be a monster movie about a giant mutant sheep. It tries to be coherent. It tries to be an actual movie instead of a rambling mess. It doesn't try all that hard.

Excessive banjos, a funeral for a dog, an attempted lynching, a town whose main industry is historical re-enactments, the line "I've been following you all the way from the glory hole", the irregular-length limbs of the monster, the picnic scene, the leaden pace, the authentic frontier gibberish, the whole nine yards.

[Futtocks]

Dark Future (1994)

It is a post-apocalyptic world (isn't it always?) and, in an inversion of 'Westworld', a small group of humans is kept alive in period surroundings to entertain their cyborg masters.

The leader of the resistance is played by Darby Hinton (from 'Malibu Express'), whose luxuriant moustache and bouffy hair makes him look like an Eighties snooker commentator. There's also a sinister German character, whose purpose is to be the dodgy foreign type. The cyborgs come in standardised models, so you can kill off plenty of them without having to hire extra actors.

Then again, this is directed and written by Greydon Clark, so it was never going to make much sense, even with a following wind.

A baby is born, which is apparently against the law of The Forbidden Zone, where the humans are confined. This sparks a rebellion against the cyborgs. Naturally, to imply technological superiority, all the cyborgs move really slowly, but still slaughter plenty of non-headlining cast members.

Then there are the "Patrons", who seem to run everything and dress like druids. They get to be in scenes that aren't all shot in the same basement, lightly disguised by burning braziers.

The hero's moustache and Generic German Guy escape from The Forbidden Zone, pursuing the baby, which has been kidnapped by a cyborg, who has brought it to the patrons, who congregate in what looks like a movie theatre. They want to extract DNA from the baby, to continue the human race. That sounds like a Good Thing, right? Apparently not, for no adequately-explained reason.

GGG shows his true colours, and promptly gets impaled on a chair leg. Moustache Guy saves the baby, gets the girl and everything fails to go 'bang' in the approved fashion. Instead, Moustache and Cleavage Gal show the baby off on a balcony, to the other humans and the credits roll. The druids, who apparently ruled the world and controlled the cyborgs, are left standing around at a loose end.

[Futtocks]

Faust: Love of the Damned (2000)

Goethe wouldn't recognise the plot, that's for sure. This tale of a sold soul veers from gore to body-horror to the title character acting a bit like Jim Carrey in 'The Mask'.

In order to get revenge on the murderers of his girlfriend, an artist sells his soul to the mysterious 'M' (guess what that stand for?) and gains Wolverine-style blades and a demonic makeover. He gets his revenge but, having failed to read the small print, 'M' orders him to kill again and again against his will.

He discovers that 'M' is planning to release a homunculus from Hell to devastate the Earth, and vows to stop him. There's a secondary plot with the female lead, who was raped by a demon as a child and who 'M' needs to give birth to his monster. It all comes together as the film progresses, along with buckets of blood.

Directed by Brian Yuzna, this one also features the special effects of Screaming Mad George. The latter's talents are used in several scenes, including one where 'M' punishes one of his henchwomen by reducing her to literally ####'n'ass, with just a face and two withered hands between the main elements.

Not anywhere near as good as Yuzna's 'Re-Animator' or 'Society' (you really should watch both), but a twisted bit of cheap fun. There are plot illogicalities and the budget limitations often make themselves evident, but still.

[Futtocks]

Amazons (1986)

Yet another Roger Corman production from his Argentinian period. If you've ever seen a movie from the Deathstalker or Wizards of the lost Kingdom series, you can have fun spotting familiar sets, props, cast members and, in some cases, entire scenes.

So, Amazons, eh? Here's how they made it:

1. Leaden dialogue.
2. Nipples.
3. Fight scene.

Rinse and repeat 'til you hit feature length.

In fairness, the bad guy's performance isn't bad, and when our heroine is hunting him, she lets out a howl of "WHERE ARE YOU?" so feral, it would impress Delia Smith.

[Futtocks]

Class of 1999 (1990)

You have Malcolm MacDowell, Pam Grier and Stacey Keach in this, so how bad could it be? Well, think of some of the ###### each of those have been in individually... yeah, you got it.

Actually, there are some good elements in this tongue-in-cheek horror/sci-fi flick. It is very definitely a B-Movie at heart, but in a flawed sort of good way. 

Major let-downs include our hero, who is a charmless doltish plank of wood, and his love interest, who gets virtually nothing to do except be gasp in terror and menaced by killer teacherbots.

Oh, i didn't mention the killer teacherbots, did I? Well, the schools of the future are dominated by warring gangs, of the spandex-clad, laughably camp variety so beloved by Tinseltown in the Eighties/Nineties. So, in hommage to/ripoff of 'Robocop', a sinister corporation sells the idea of the perfect technotronic teacher to the head of a gang-ridden high school.

The three teachers are ex-military models and - shock'n'awe - they almost immediately revert to their original programming. Hero oaf's gal gets kidnapped by the bots, so the gangs resolve their differences and take on the rampaging remedial-class replicants.

The better actors in the cast actually show some glee in their over-the-top roles, and some of the practical effects are pretty good. But the sheer lack of gorm or acting talent from the central character drags it down a notch or three.

 

[DavidM]

Not sure tbh what classes as a B movie but The Thing From Another World ( 1952 ) is one of my top three all time movies . Forever on my iPad . Kurt Russell in John Carpenter’s effort is a very good remake and the recent prequel about the Norwegians was good . Original as usual best though 

[Futtocks]

4 hours ago, DavidM said:

Not sure tbh what classes as a B movie but The Thing From Another World ( 1952 ) is one of my top three all time movies . Forever on my iPad . Kurt Russell in John Carpenter’s effort is a very good remake and the recent prequel about the Norwegians was good . Original as usual best though 

I love the John Carpenter remake, which is complete paranoia-overload, like Invasion of the Body-Snatchers*. I was annoyed that the recent prequel ditched a lot of high quality practical effects work for second-rate CGI in the final release.

*Another story with more than one good movie adaptation.

[DavidM]

9 hours ago, Futtocks said:

I love the John Carpenter remake, which is complete paranoia-overload, like Invasion of the Body-Snatchers*. I was annoyed that the recent prequel ditched a lot of high quality practical effects work for second-rate CGI in the final release.

*Another story with more than one good movie adaptation.

Invasion from Mars was very creepy and an on obvious metaphor on the early 50s ‘ red menace ‘. They’re cheesy but very atmospheric films 

[Futtocks]

On 2/19/2015 at 11:23 AM, Futtocks said:

Okay so here's the nutshell: the location is Canada. A nerdy kid finds a mystery map in dead father's possessions. Immediately, a car full of machete-wielding chunky blokes in balaclavas chainsaw their way into his house, followed by their leader, described by one of the MST3K robots as 'Garth Vader'.

 

He escapes on his bicycle, staying ahead of the villains' car, then piles into the back of an unreliable pick-up truck driven by the bemulleted, boozing Zap Rowsdower, a drifter with a secret past and a less secret moustache.

 

After various chases, the pick-up breaks down in the exact location of the signs for the lost city and a cave full of inscriptions (and a handy translation guide), and also meet the nerdy kid's father's archaeologist ex-colleague, who puts in a performance of authentic frontier gibberish (see 'Blazing Saddles') to fill in the plot holes a bit with some semi-coherent exposition. He also warns the nerdy kid about Rowsdower's past. Yep, after fleeing from the black hats, they have found themselves exactly where the nerdy kid's dad was killed.

 

Then there's an odd episode where the bad guy does some pentagram stuff in daylight, while Rowsdower has a bad dream/flashback in the nighttime. Simultaneously. Bits of the map (remember the map?) turn black.

 

The nerdy kid gets captured - well WHAT a surprise - and Garth Vader plans to sacrifice him so his people can take over the world. They're an advanced race of aliens or Atlanteans or something, despite their uniform of wifebeater vests. Rowsdower runs up and down some hills and through some woods, beating up chunky gentlemen in balaclavas, before freeing the kid and setting up the climactic fight scene with Garth. Fire v grappling hook 'action' ensues, climaxing with bad guy's death. I think. 

 

Suddenly, it's night-time (eh?) and the chunky gents remove their facegear and walk off into a blue light. Meanwhile, a cardboard backdrop of the lost city rises from the ground. Rowsdower smiles for the first time, possibly in his entire life. Our heroes drive away. Roll credits.

 

In short, Stallone's got the USA covered, Ahnold Europe, Dolph looks after Scandinavia, but Canada's defender of all things right is ROWSDOWER! Sleep safely eh?

 

Very sad to announce the passing of Bruce J.Mitchell, who played Zap Rowsdower, and was a very good sport about the jokes made about this film.

[Futtocks]

A 10 minute short by Richard Gale, made in the style of a trailer: The Horribly Slow Murderer with the Extremely Inefficient Weapon.

 

[Futtocks]

Currently watching Hausu (1977), a thoroughly bonkers Japanese comedy horror flick.

And I mean thoroughly bonkers... by Japanese standards!

[Futtocks]

This is coming to your screens, some time in 2018.

Written by Michael Flatley.
Directed by Michael Flatley.
Starring Michael Flatley.
Production Co: Dance Lord Productions.

 

[Futtocks]

Strap yourselves in, 'cause the trailer for Neil "The Breenius" Breen's new movie has arrived!

 

[RidingPie]

Watched Megashark vs mechashark this morning. It’s something of a guilty pleasure watching movies like that. 

 

[DavidM]

22 minutes ago, RidingPie said:

Watched Megashark vs mechashark this morning. It’s something of a guilty pleasure watching movies like that. 

 

Who won ?