“Zombie Nightmare” is a very boring movie. Outside of the near-indistinguishable “Prince of Space” and “Invasion of the Neptune Men”, I haven’t had to rewatch any IMDb Bottom 100 movies as many times as this snoozer. I don’t know what it is about this movie, but the details of it vanish from my memory as soon as I watch it.
After the first time I watched “Zombie Nightmare”, the only memories I retained were disturbing images of Adam West in a creepy mustache, and the sound of a poorly dubbed voice that sounded vaguely like The Penguin. I tried reviewing it based on those recollections alone, but that wasn’t going to do.
When I watched the movie for the second time, a few more things stuck with me: really bad 80s fashion everywhere, the zombie’s revenge plot against the unrealistically shitty hit-and-run high schoolers, the origin story of the zombie (and his father’s death in the opening sequence), and one of the slowest chase sequences of all time through what looks to be a YMCA. I half-expected the Toxic Avenger to show up at some point during the pursuit. Anyway, I was pleased to retain details that time around!
Would I rather watch “The Toxic Avenger”? Sadly, yes.
Then, before I wrote this review, I went on a brief hiatus from the blog. And, of course, I forgot most of those details again. Thus, I watched the damned movie again. This time, things stuck out differently. All of the previously mentioned details were rattled out of my memory, but I caught a few more that didn’t stick with me previously: I’m crediting this to the fact that I had myself glued to my computer for this viewing. Believe me, there is little I want to do less than watch this movie for a fourth time. Anyway, this time I particularly noticed the horrendous overacting by the voodoo priestess who resurrects the zombie, and caught a lot more details about the subplot of police corruption in the film. The movie almost takes a “Touch of Evil” turn to focus more on the shady police practices by Adam West and the other senior officers than the giant zombie wandering around the town tearing people apart.
Oh yeah, and the zombie drags Adam West to Hell via an open grave. That was actually pretty awesome.
They used it for the soundtrack cover. Also, “Batman Goes To Hell” has a nice ring to it.
So, do I recommend “Zombie Nightmare”? Honestly, despite the fact it is incredibly boring, it isn’t nearly as bad as a lot of the flicks on the list. In this case, that is kind of a weakness? It isn’t consistently bad enough to be a whole lot of fun. It is certainly incompetently thrown together, but not in a charming or entertaining way. I enjoyed little pieces of it, so I can maybe recommend the MST3K highlights. I certainly can’t recommend sitting through the whole thing, unless you just want background noise of low-quality rock songs. Speaking of which, for a movie that sells itself on the soundtrack, the audio quality is really bad. Seems like a bit of a squandered opportunity, but what isn’t in this movie?
Honestly, I felt like this was a stone’s throw from being a “Maniac Cop” movie. Speaking of which: just watch “Maniac Cop”. You get police corruption, a giant revenge-seeking zombie, better deaths, better writing, and Bruce Campbell. And, if you stick it out to “Maniac Cop 3”, you will even get an overacting voodoo priest. If for no other reason, watch it for Robert Z’Dar’s chin.
I genuinely feel like there is a good, entertaining movie hidden inside of “Mitchell” somewhere. The idea of an eccentric, schlubby cop with curious and unclear ethical boundaries solving a major crime sounds pretty great to me. Unfortunately, “Mitchell” doesn’t live up to its potential, which is a real shame.
In the hilarious MST3K riff of “Mitchell”, Joel and the bots have a lot of fun poking at the acting and physique of star Joe Don Baker. For the record, I didn’t think he was all that bad in this movie. I personally feel like he did the best he could with the writing, but it just wasn’t a good enough foundation for the movie. None of the banter works, particularly the brief interaction between Joe Don and a young child which plays out in an incredibly grating fashion. Also, there is a serious problem with the tone of the film: it seems like it wants to be an action movie and a comedy movie, but somehow does neither well enough to be an action-comedy. I’m still not sure how the audience is supposed to feel in the infamous sex scene, which features the song “My My My My Mitchell”: a tune as silly as it is catchy.
I think that the MST3K treatment of “Mitchell”, while perhaps unfair at times, is one of their best. It also holds a important place in the series, as it is the last episode to star creator Joel Hodgson. I recommend the episode highly, though I can’t necessarily say the same for the film on its own. The pacing and editing are almost as bad as the writing, which makes it pretty dull to sit through. Even the ending is anticlimactic, which means there isn’t really any payoff to the wait. There are a few clips, like the sex scene, that are absolutely worth catching, but not much else.
“Mitchell” has a pretty firm placement in the IMDb Bottom 100, though not as highly as another Joe Don Baker movie: “Final Justice”. Truthfully, it is hard for me to pick between the two of them. “Final Justice” is probably objectively worse, but “Mitchell” irks me in a unique way in how it squanders what I see as a promising premise. Then again, I might be biased: some of my friends have claimed that my destiny is to successfully remake “Mitchell” into an awesome movie. Maybe I will get to that some day.
I admittedly did no research ahead of watching “Miss Castaway and the Island Girls” for the first time, so I wasn’t quite sure of what to expect going in. I can say that the last thing that I anticipated was a low-budget “Movie Movie” with a plot involving Noah’s Ark, Michael Jackson, the Tim Burton “Planet of the Apes”, and a giant prehistoric bipedal pig. I have talked and written at length before about the weaknesses of the “Movie Movie” genre in my reviews of “Epic Movie” and “Disaster Movie”, both also on the IMDb Bottom 100. I won’t retread that ground, other than to point out that this style of movie has no longevity for future audiences due to their reliance on references and current pop cultural references. “Miss Castaway” definitely suffers from this in a huge way, given most of the ‘humor’ is derived from lampooning movies like “Castaway” and “Miss Congeniality”, which are barely on the cultural radar nowadays. However, that is a weakness of all of these movies, and there are plenty of issues unique to “Miss Castaway” that the big budget sister films like “Epic Movie” and “Disaster Movie” were able to evade.
First off, “Miss Castaway” is a cheap movie, and that is a fact that shows itself at every turn. Any time CGI is used (which is far too often), it looks like it was scraped out of the bottom of a barrel. Check out this clip featuring “Jurassic Pork”, one of the handful of CGI creatures in the movie.
Also, check out this dodo bird / alien thing. Doesn’t it look fantastic? As you would expect, all of the acting and writing is abysmal. The acting is about what you should expect from any spoof movie, but the line deliveries are particularly stilted and wooden. Then again, there is no way to seriously deliver half of the lines in this script. For most of the movie, I was wondering if the writers had ever heard a human being talk before. In some ways, “Miss Castaway” dialogue feels like an alien race is trying to communicate with the audience, but their only knowledge of our planet, culture, and language is through movies circa 2004.
The plot feels like a clumsy patchwork to drive the characters from one reference to the next. It progressively devolves into incoherence, and it doesn’t make much sense to start with. I believe there are secret agents from the Vatican on board the crashed airplane who were hunting for Noah’s Ark, and were charged with saving it from humanoid Ape creatures who want to destroy humanity? There are also aliens involved at some point? It lost me about halfway through. I think Michael Jackson was in league with the Pope though.
Honestly, there isn’t much else to say about “Miss Castaway”. It is a cheap spoof movie that fails to be funny on paper, and is executed incredibly poorly. It is hard to compare Movie Movies to other kinds of movies, as they are kind of unique beasts. In comparison to the other Movie Movies on the IMDb Bottom 100, I can at least say that “Miss Castaway” is less low-brow that “Epic Movie” and “Disaster Movie”. It is far from high-brow, but I don’t recall much. if any, poop or bodily fluid humor, which puts it a notch above “Epic” and “Disaster” at least. However, the incredibly poor effects work probably puts “Castaway” right back down on their level. So, I guess it is pretty close to a draw? That is actually saying something for a movie with a fraction of their budgets, though.
In general, I don’t see any reason to recommend this movie. The plot is bafflingly stupid, the acting and writing are bad, and the effects are horrendous. If there were any actual humor to be had in the writing, the effects, acting, and plot might have been overcome. However, that was not the case. I advise avoiding this one, unless you have a burning need to see miserable CGI.
“Torque” is basically a “Fast and the Furious” movie with all of the dials turned up to 11, and with motorcycles instead of cars. That pretty much covers the basic summary of this movie. The film takes place in what I assume is a fantasy realm with looser physical laws more akin to the Loony Toons universe than our own, at least judging from the ludicrous opening sequence.
Something that I neglected to mention in the video review up top is the plethora of product placement scattered throughout this movie. The sheer quantity and brazenness of the advertisements make Michael Bay movies look subtle. For one particularly notable instance, there is a climactic bike duel that prominently features billboard backdrops of Pepsi and Mountain Dew. It is impossible to be more blatant with product placement than in this scene (or if it is, I’ve never seen an example of it).
I would be doing a disservice to everything good in the world to not at least mention the absolutely ridiculous special effects in this movie. I think they can be best described as “overzealous”. Just check out this final fight scene from the movie, and tell me they didn’t go completely overboard with the effects.
I had to re-watch that scene so many times to figure out what exactly happened. Everything is so distorted and frenetic that it is nearly impossible to make out the details of what is actually going on. That takes some real talent to make your pinnacle action scene so action-packed that the movie loses coherency.
Oh yes, there are also actors in “Torque”. They don’t matter all that much, but they are present. Most notably, Adam Scott of “Parks and Recreation” and “Party Down” plays one of the primary antagonists: a dirty special agent who is tracking down the film’s “hero”. To say that Scott’s performance is absolutely ridiculous doesn’t go nearly far enough: I am shocked that he ever got acting work ever again. Other notables in the cast include Ice Cube, who does his typical role of scowling and being angry at things, and Dane Cook, who is mercifully absent for the vast majority of the movie.
thank goodness
There is interestingly a fair amount of controversy around “Torque” in the bad movie community, specifically in regards to the film’s earnestness. Is “Torque” an honestly made bad movie? There seem to be lots of people who think that Torque was made intentionally over the top as a self-parody on the genre. I can see some slight nods to this in the movie, but I don’t think they are quite frequent or blatant enough to convince me that this movie was an intentional farce. My personal opinion is that the filmmakers realized that the movie was going too far over the top, and the humor was an attempt to try and ground it in some way. If you ask me, the nods and winks actually did the movie a disservice. I know I would have enjoyed the movie more as a bad movie if it didn’t try to feign parody, and just owned the identity as a ridiculous action movie.
When it comes right down to it, I feel like I can recommend “Torque” for what it is: dumb action. If you want to see over the top explosions and ridiculous content, this is a movie to check out. Just don’t expect anything more than that.
“Torque” isn’t in the IMDb Bottom 100 any more, which isn’t terribly shocking. The movie is silly, but the production values are good, and the semi-popular opinion that it is a self-parody has gained it some levity from audiences I think. I personally see this as a genuinely bad movie, but not so bad that it necessarily merits a spot in IMDb’s basement.
If you would like to hear more about the good, the bad, and the ugly of “Torque”, I highly recommend checking out the Bad Movie Fiends Podcast episode on the movie.
Watching “McHale’s Navy” gave me a whole lot of flashbacks to “Car 54, Where Are You?”: A television show treasured by an older generation is remade as a film with new actors and a new direction to lure in the younger folks, and the result is something that no one enjoys and doesn’t manage to be funny for anyone. I will say that “McHale’s Navy” is almost unarguably better than “Car 54”, and has more in the way of redeeming value. It is even relatively watchable, there just aren’t any laughs to be had. It is structured and paced well enough like a typical comedy movie, but someone forgot to include the funny parts.
Tim Curry and Bruce Campbell almost save the movie with their presences alone. However, Campbell is in a bit role with minimal screen-time (and according to Campbell, often wasn’t given direction at all). Curry is likewise significantly hamstrung by his villain character’s writing. He does what he can, but there was no way that the role could be saved without serious re-writing. At the very least, Curry is always entertaining to watch as he chews up the scenery, regardless of how bad his writing is.
On the flip side, Dean Stockwell and David Alan Grier are unforgivably grating in their character portrayals. Grier specifically plays one of the most aggravatingly annoying characters ever to grace a screen, and is some of the worst comic relief I have ever sat through. The rest of the cast is utterly forgettable, including Tom Arnold as McHale himself. He just isn’t quite charming enough, and the rest of the characters aren’t fleshed out in the slightest. I seem to recall one character who was primarily defined by the fact he slept in a tree. Don’t ask me his name, I couldn’t remember any of them outside of McHale, and that’s only due to the title and how often it is spoken throughout the movie.
The direction and editing was mostly run-of-the-mill, outside of some reused shots during the boat battle scenes. I suppose they were pulled off well enough, but I didn’t find either of the showdowns particularly interesting. There wasn’t quite enough suspense to give any of the actions significant gravity.
The only moment in the whole film that actually grabbed my attention was a throwaway scene when Tim Curry’s character is so frustrated that he shoots one of his minions in the head. The execution is played off in a very cartoony manner that felt incredibly jarring, particularly as the body limply falls over one of the other characters. Despite the lack of graphic content, the killing felt incredibly dark and out of place. Given that the scene had no plot relevance that I can recall, I am surprised that it made the final cut of the film.
“McHale’s Navy” is no longer in the IMDb Bottom 100, which doesn’t particularly surprise me. It isn’t funny, but it is more or less a semi-competently put together film. A lot of the acting is bad and the tone doesn’t work, but the key issue with the film breaks down to the very concept itself: no one wanted this movie. I doubt that loyal fans of the show were clamoring for a reboot, especially not on the big screen. I also seriously doubt that the mainstream movie-going audience of 1997 had any interest in a remake of an ancient TV show that was hardly a blip on their cultural radars. Even with an outstanding script, cast, and masterful direction, I don’t think this concept would have resonated at the box office. In truth, it was mediocre-to-abysmal in every arena, which would have doomed even a good concept at the box office.
“McHale’s Navy” isn’t a movie I can recommend for fun watching. Failed comedies are hard to squeeze laughs out of, even from a critical perspective. If you want a weird bad movie experience involving a boat, check out fellow IMDb Bottom 100 entry “Going Overboard”. That feature is damn surreal. Or, you could check out Jason Vorhees terrorizing a boat in “Friday the 13th Part VIII”. Either way, it’ll be a better time than “McHale’s Navy”.
Ah, “The Creeping Terror”. This movie has to have one of the worst monsters in cinema history, and that is really saying something.
I’ve already mentioned this flick briefly when I covered the upcoming movie “The Creep Behind the Camera”, based on the bizarre story of how “The Creeping Terror” was made. To be honest, this is one of those rare cases where the story of how the film was made is far more fascinating and entertaining than the film itself. There are some that swear by “The Creeping Terror”, but before I started reading into the back story, I just found it to be another boring, repetitive Corman-esque monster movie. The only things that stood out for me on the first watch were the silly monster design and the inconsistent and perplexing use of narration. However, after learning some more about the behind-the-scenes shenanigans that spawned this film, I am way more intrigued by it. I still think the movie is crushingly boring, but there is at least a fraction of intrigue as well.
First off, take a good, long look at the star of “The Creeping Terror”:
Yeah, that’s the first problem. Carpets are not very scary, and this thing is about as far from intimidating as you can get. However, I believe that you can make a decent monster movie without a decent monster. You just have to be creative with the shots, build tension with the writing and music, and keep the embarrassing rubber suit off-screen as much as possible. Financial limitations can force artists to be creative to make their film work, and some directors actually work best under those limitations (Robert Rodriguez pops to mind). Or, y’know, they can do none of that at all, and make their film as boring as possible. Just like “The Creeping Terror”.
I would be hard pressed to find anything that was genuinely done well in this movie. I guess the infamous dance hall scene is sort of ok…except for the damn music.
…and, of course, it all goes wrong when the monster shows up.
I am not personally a big fan of “The Creeping Terror” as a bad movie, and don’t recommend it for group viewing. However, if you are interested in the machinations behind the scenes that produce crap movies, then there is perhaps no better tale than the spotty information available about star/director Vic Savage and “The Creeping Terror”. It sounds like a delightful brew of fraud, addiction, sex, bribery, and madness went into the making of this atrocious feature. Seriously, I am incredibly excited to hear what was put together for “The Creep Behind the Camera”. It is sure to be a blast, and I bet the trailer can sell you on it if you aren’t already intrigued.
“Merlin’s Shop of Mystical Wonders” is barely a movie. A lot of people throw that claim around whenever a movie is really poor in quality, but in the case of “Merlin’s Shop of Mystical Wonders”, the claim is absolutely true. This perplexing film is a loose stitch-job conjoining a failed television pilot with a previously existing film by the same director (“The Devil’s Gift”). Aside from some lazily added shots of Merlin aimlessly wandering around on a street, there is nothing tying the two halves together. The resulting “movie” is a powerful testament to film-making laziness, but at least it comes out as an entertaining sort of mess.
Most of the acting in “Merlin’s” is astoundingly forgettable, with a couple of exceptions. First off, the opening segment features an amazingly dickish skeptic who threatens to bury Merlin for being a charlatan. The actor has an absolute ball with the role, and is about the only reason that the first half of the movie is watchable at all. Almost all of his lines are pure gold, and his comeuppance is thoroughly satisfying (despite the really crappy effects along the way: including the fakest fire-breathing I have ever seen, and some really embarrassingly bad age makeup ).
In age makeup, breathing fire onto a possessed cat puppet. Gold.
The only other performance of note is the child actor in the second segment, who is straight-up atrocious. However, he does get the best line in the movie:
I really hope that wasn’t scripted.
One particularly interesting aspect of “Merlin’s Shop of Mystical Wonders” is that it changes the original ending to “The Devil’s Gift” (again, that’s the original movie where all of the monkey plot line footage came from). “The Devil’s Gift” ends in a very dark manner, with the implication that the family is all killed by the cursed monkey toy. In “Merlin’s”, it seems that writer/director Kenneth J. Berton is correcting his lackluster ending. Instead of the evil monkey ending victorious, Merlin shows up at the last moment to save the day (in footage filmed explicitly to die this jumbled mess of a movie together). It definitely feels strange and tacked-on when Merlin shows up at just the right time, and it certainly doesn’t do the movie any favors from a quality standpoint. Then again, neither does anything else about the movie.
Overall, “Merlin’s Shop of Mystical Wonders” is surprisingly watchable, despite the confusingly edited together plot(s). There are actually a handful of genuinely good shots interspersed throughout the madness, and plenty of moments of ridiculous fun that make this a great choice for a bad movie night.
“Die Hard Dracula” is an incompetently made movie on every level. The editing is jerky and feels devoid of continuity, the writing is bizarrely inconsistent in tone, the costumes and makeup are ridiculous, the effects are garbage, and all of the acting is either cartoonishly over-the-top or non-existent.
An interesting thing I noticed from digging around on the web is that “Die Hard Dracula” is clearly one of those movies that no one knew how to market (and not just because it is horrible). If you look at any of the posters or covers for the movie, they all portray a typical vampire horror movie. However, the tone of the movie is oddly light-hearted, and at times is a full-on spoof of “Dracula” and vampire movies in general.
At the same time, it doesn’t go quite so far as to be a “comedy”, so it would be deceptive to market it as such without acknowledging the attempt at horror. I’ve noticed this same trend with other movies that mix styles (whether they are good or not). It is difficult to easily pitch or sell something that has both genuine horror and comedy elements. In this case it didn’t matter all too much, because the movie is astoundingly horrible all-around and fails to blend the genres successfully. However, this problem does affect good horror-comedy movies of recent years like “Cabin in the Woods” and “Drag Me to Hell”.
Managed to drag both Joss Whedon and Sam Raimi into this.
I can’t say for sure, but some of the comedic moments in “Die Hard Dracula” seem forced enough that they might have been added in after the fact, perhaps once everyone realized how bad the final product was going to be. In particular, the ending feels very unnatural, jarring, and improvised. Then again, most of the movie feels oddly edited and confusing, so the ending almost blends in. I’m not sure if this is a case where the sudden, whiplash-inducing tone shifts between horror and comedy were intended from the original script, or if they are the results of a flubbed attempt to salvage/redirect the movie. In any case, the writing and editing crash together to turn the film into a complete cinematic wreck. Even if all other elements were average or better, this film would have been a failure due to those aspects alone. Fancy trim on a poorly constructed house isn’t going to make for a good home, after all. Unfortunately for the film, not even the trim-work looks good in this mess.
If you are going to make any kind of horror movie, you absolutely must be able to do makeup and practical effects (unless your name is Uli Lommel and you don’t have standards). “Die Hard Dracula” not only has horrible makeup on Dracula, but it fails to be even remotely consistent with his appearance. The closest thing I can liken Dracula’s ever-changing appearance to is how Jason changes his appearance under the hockey mask from one “Friday the 13th” movie to the next.
As you should probably expect, the acting in this movie is generally horrible. There is one notable exception: Bruce Glover (“Diamonds Are Forever”) plays Dr. Van Helsing, and is the one saving grace of the movie. He chews the scenery like he is sucking life force out of the props, and actually makes the movie watchable while he is on screen. His performance is perhaps the only reason I might consider recommending this movie. He is at the very least a breath of fresh air next to the fellow playing Dracula. Ugh.
I have really only scratched the surface of the landfill of garbage that is this movie. There are flying special effects worthy of “Pumaman”, and a flying coffin sequence that will make you cringe. Dracula even shoots lightning out of his hands like Emperor Palpatine at one point for some reason.
You may notice that I have managed to avoid the plot of this movie so far. That was quite intentional. Honestly, there isn’t an easy way to sum it up sensibly. There is a young man who watches his girlfriend instantly drown in a water skiing accident, after which he goes backpacking in Europe to grieve. He makes a vague wish upon a star that resurrects a drowned woman in eastern Europe. Meanwhile, Dracula exists and starts creeping out the drowned woman’s town. Protagonist-man shows up in the town while back-packing, falls in love with the formerly drowned woman, and volunteers to help Van Helsing kill the local vampire menace. Shenanigans ensue as Van Helsing repeatedly fails to vanquish the vampire to comedic effect. Ultimately, Dracula turns everyone into vampires and they live happily ever after for eternity.
It is all pretty much nonsense.
The thing that really gets me about this movie is that I can’t decide if I hate it or love it. It is incompetent on every possible level, and fails miserably at everything it sets out to do. The pacing slows down quite a bit, and there isn’t much entertainment value to be had, but I can’t help but enjoy it in retrospect. I feel similar about this movie as I do about “Leonard Part 6” I suppose: it is a rare case where I enjoy a failed comedy, in just how miserably it fails to be comedic. I also just love Bruce Glover’s performance, which is probably the tipping point for me. I definitely recommend checking out the trailer above: if that seems like something you might enjoy, then check it out.
“Zaat” is a movie about a mad scientist who turns himself into a human-catfish hybrid, and then terrorizes a town. He kidnaps and performs experiments on people until he is discovered and defeated. That premise sounds vastly much more interesting than this movie actually is. Generally, most of the movie is a man in a bad monster suit stumbling around blindly, occasionally carrying people around or fiddling with machinery . There’s also some lovely stock footage of fish with hilariously over-the-top voice over.
This pretty much covers everything
One thing I will say is that watching a catfish-man walking around with a giant syringe and trying to do science is pretty enjoyable. Just watching him shamble about in general and kidnap people is delightfully ridiculous given the suit’s limited range of motion…for the first few minutes. After that, the movie gets pretty unbearably monotonous and repetitive. The pacing moves along about as quickly as a catfish on dry land.
Some people regard this as a titan of bad movies, but I just don’t see it. It has gained a cult following since being featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000 as “Blood Waters of Dr. Z”, and to be fair, the riff is quite good. However, I just don’t think the movie itself has much entertainment value. There is some miserable acting, horrible props and effects, outstandingly boring cinematography, and plenty of general incompetence, but most of it doesn’t make for laughs. I did get some chuckles out of the generally clumsy suit, but that was about it. The folks at RedLetterMedia disagree, and seem to get a real kick out of this flick:
I can see why some people enjoy this film, so I can give it a very light recommendation. It doesn’t do much for me, but I think enough bad movie fans have enjoyed it that it is worth giving a shot. I can definitely recommend the MST3k riff, or at least the highlights. That way you will get all of the shambling monster and stock footage without all of the droning in between.
Happy Friday the 13th everybody! To celebrate the occasion, I have a double feature of two IMDb Bottom 100 alumni from the infamous “Friday the 13th” franchise. There’s also a Stanley Cup Final game tonight, so you should dig out your hockey masks either way.
Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning
“Friday the 13th: Part V” is probably the most intensely reviled of all of the “Friday the 13th” movies. “Part V” has even been ignored in the continuity of the subsequent films in the franchise. There are a lot of reasons why this film ultimately failed so spectacularly, but the most famous reason is related to a key aspect of the previous movie, “Part IV: The Final Chapter”: Jason was killed in the end, and is actually still dead for once.
That’s right: Jason, the iconic hockey-masked star of the franchise, is not in “Part V”. Instead, the killings are being perpetrated by a copycat, whose identity is withheld until the end of the movie.
It plays out like a particularly dark episode of Scooby-Doo. In the end, the dude under the mask is “the one guy from earlier”
Most fans of the franchise felt quite cheated by the absence of Jason, particularly due to the heavy implications from the promotional materials that the super-zombie would be returning.
The problems don’t end with just Jason’s absence and the deceptive marketing. Rumor has it that the MPAA ratings board was lax with their judgements on “The Final Chapter” due to their belief that it would, indeed, be the concluding movie in the franchise. When “A New Beginning” came up for review, evidently the ratings board was harsher than ever. In order to avoid a NC-17 (and the significant hindrance that brings to distribution and box office revenues), massive cuts had to be made to any graphic scenes. The results of this are a number of off-screen deaths, minimized gore effects, and an overall underwhelming “Friday the 13th” experience in the violence department, which did not go over well with franchise fans.
This is as bloody as the movie gets
Alas, there are even more issues with “Part V”. The soundtrack elects to use “updated” 80s style pop music instead of the traditional horror music you might expect. The characters are mostly shallow caricatures and stereotypes (more-so than usual), and comic-relief comes in the form of unexpected and unnecessary poop jokes. There also isn’t a true protagonist, as Tommy (a character returning from “Part IV”) is absent from most of the movie, and acts as the primary red herring for the audience. Because of this lack of focus, the audience doesn’t get enough time with any characters to form emotional connections, and thus the story doesn’t have any sense of gravity. When a character dies, the audience needs to feel a sense of loss. In this movie, the lack of character depth means that effect doesn’t happen.
While “Friday the 13th: Part V” has plenty of problems and is a long way from being good, I feel like it doesn’t deserve all of the ire that it gets. It seems to me that it spurned the fan base, but mostly in a way that was outside of the film-makers control (the ratings cuts and the deceptive marketing). I personally think that using a Jason copycat is a pretty interesting concept that could have panned out better. It played with the established mythos of the franchise, which is a cool way to mix things up in a formula that was on the verge of going stale.
Still, this is widely regarded as the worst movie in the franchise, and I agree that it is certainly a heavy contender for that title. The other most common candidate for that claim (outside of the semi-parody “Jason X”) is…
Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan
Much like “Part V”, “Part VIII” drew an immense amount of ire from franchise fans and general audiences alike for its deceptive marketing. The movie known as “Jason Takes Manhattan” in fact mostly takes place on a cruise ship, and is primarily filmed in Canada. That wouldn’t be such a huge deal if the film’s marketing didn’t look like this:
To say the least, the marketing didn’t do the movie any favors with audiences.
Personally, I like the idea of relocating Jason to mix the movies up a bit. And honestly, a cruise ship works splendidly for the “Friday the 13th” formula: you have a large group of people who are isolated from society, and prone to all sorts of youthful shenanigans. I’m actually quite curious if this setting clicked with the writer more-so than having Jason wander the streets of the Big Apple, which is pretty far outside of his usual style. My guess is that the script needed a reason for Jason to be in New York, and the ship was intended initially as just a story mechanism, maybe with just a kill or two. I’m willing to wager that the urban setting caused a lot of problems for the Jason formula, so the writer ultimately relegated the NYC portion of the story to what is essentially an extended chase scene.
Once again, there are a lot of issues with “Part VIII” that go beyond the deceptive marketing. The protagonist has a number of hallucinations of Jason as a child, which are never fully explained. She is also afraid of water due to a traumatic experience at Crystal Lake as a young child, which is implied to have been Jason attempting to drown her, despite that not being Jason’s M.O. Further, the New York sewers are conveniently filled with a toxic waste that melts skin, which is used to defeat Jason at the end of the movie. During that death sequence, Jason’s under-mask makeup is absolutely miserable when compared to previous films, and worse yet, he somehow reverts to his child-form after being thoroughly melted by the toxic sludge. Even worse yet, the child-form of Jason looks almost nothing like the previous depictions of his younger self. These are all generally small things, but the missed details stack up eventually. Also, a character has a fist-fight with Jason. I still can’t decide whether that was dumb or amazing.
“So…we’re going with that?”You can guess how well this goes
In general, “Jason Takes Manhattan” is primarily a victim of fan rage at the deceptive marketing for the movie. The film is technically better than “A New Beginning” in my opinion, but a long way off from being good. Yet, once again, I feel like it gets far more loathing than it really deserves. With both of these movies, the filmmakers took risks to mix up a formula that was wearing thin. They didn’t wind up panning out, but I can’t help but appreciate the creative efforts in both of these movies. Personally, I think I like both of them more than “Part VII”, which features a telekinetic psychic who battles Jason with her superpowers. That movie, while probably more competent than either of these, is just damn stupid.
Unless you are dedicated to watching the entire “Friday the 13th” franchise, both “Part V” and “Part VIII” are totally skippable. If you are curious, I recommend just looking up the highlights from each. “Part VII”, however, is a bizarre love-hate experience that i can definitely recommend to bad movie fans.
Reviews/Trivia of B-Movies, Bad Movies, and Cult Movies.
![Misan[trope]y](https://misantropey.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/misantropeyhead1.png)
When I watched the movie for the second time, a few more things stuck with me: really bad 80s fashion everywhere, the zombie’s revenge plot against the unrealistically shitty hit-and-run high schoolers, the origin story of the zombie (and his father’s death in the opening sequence), and one of the slowest chase sequences of all time through what looks to be a YMCA. I half-expected the Toxic Avenger to show up at some point during the pursuit. Anyway, I was pleased to retain details that time around!
Misan[trope]y 