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IMDb Bottom 100

IMDb Bottom 100: Aag

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Aag

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“Ram Gopal Varma’s Indian Flames” (also known as “Aag”) was the first Bollywood movie to make it into the IMDb Bottom 100, and helped start the growing international trend of the list. As you should expect, it isn’t a good movie. However, as is sometimes the case, there is more to the negative reputation of “Aag” than the poor quality of the movie on the screen.

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The poor quality of the movie is a big part of it too, though. A very big part of it.

“Aag” was initially planned as an official remake of the beloved Bollywood classic “Sholay” by Ramesh Sippy.  It was even titled “Ram Gopal Varma Ki Sholay” during development, until it was ruled to be in violation of Sippy’s copyright and trademark on the film (the character names were ordered to be changed as well). To make things worse in the court of public opinion, numerous members of the cast and crew of “Sholay” spoke openly against “Aag”, meaning no one was particularly excited about the movie even before it hit theaters. The best parallel I can think of is whenever someone has done a remake of Hitchcock: audiences and critics are not usually receptive to the idea of readdressing films regarded as timeless.

Unsurprisingly, the movie was a massive critical and box office failure. After all of the production shenanigans, I honestly think it may have failed regardless of the quality of the movie. But, as it so happens, “Aag” is no masterpiece.

To start with, the movie is far too long for what it is, and is not structured in such a way that the length is justified. The run-time is 164 minutes, but the structured made it feel even more inflated from there. There were numerous points throughout the second and third acts where I thought the movie was coming to a conclusion, only to have the conflict fizzle out and the pieces on the board reset. To say that this was frustrating doesn’t cover it in the least,  mostly because of the entirely uninteresting characters the audience is subjected to throughout.

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Except for that dude with the giant face on the right, he’s awesome.

While “Aag” has a fantastic villain character (Babban) played by Amitabh Bachchan, the rest of the cast is a stone’s throw from abysmal. Whenever Babban isn’t on-screen, the movie screeches to a halt underneath the shittiness of the acting and writing. The leading duo, who should carry the film, are two of the least interesting characters in the story. One of them primarily fills the role of comic relief (poorly) until the last act, whereas the other does less emoting than Keanu Reeves. There are love interests shoe-horned for both characters, most notably Gungroo, who might be the worst-played and worst-written character in the movie. She spends most of the movie either threatening violence on people or being harassed by one of the leads (named “Heero”, groaningly). She ultimately magically falls in love with “Heero” after a jarring musical number and a handful of shenanigans, because of course she would. There is one other decent character outside of Babban (Inspector Narsimha), but he is more passable than he is good, and he never owns a scene in the way Babban does.

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Gungroo is one of the worst woman characters I’ve seen in years, and that includes all of the Paris Hilton movies I have had to watch. She exists to be grating, and eventually to fall in love.

You can tell that there is the skeleton of a decent movie buried underneath the layers of dull sediment of this film, but that just makes the experience all the more disappointing. It feels like someone took the story beats and concepts from a classic story, and then locked a bunch of unpaid interns in a room and demanded that they recreate the movie before they could get fed. Rushed, amateurish, and without any regard for an audience: that pretty much nails the writing issues with “Aag”.

I do not recommend watching “Aag”. There isn’t a lot of entertainment to squeeze out of this, and you could do far better things with the time you would spend watching this movie. The performance of Amitabh Bachchan as Babban is pretty delightfully over the top, but not good enough to redeem the movie as a whole. I haven’t seen “Sholay”, but I am willing to wager that it is a much better time than “Aag”.

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Seven Hells

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Last month, I had the pleasure of attending the Gateway Film Center’s premiere of Seven Hells: a collection of lauded horror short films that have made the festival circuit in recent years.

It is a real shame that short films rarely get significant distribution, because they can be a whole lot of fun: particularly in the horror genre. Seven Hells is a showcase of some of the best horror and horror-comedy short films out there, and is at its core an experimental attempt to promote them to a more casual theater-going audience.  To say the least, the concept is well-intentioned: the films deserve a wider audience, and audiences deserve these films.

Seven Hells only has a loose frame between the segments, but it doesn’t need to be flashy: its strength is in the existing short films that make up the content, and they have already proved their muster to festival audiences. The connection between the segments is simple: each story is a tale of everything metaphorically (or literally?) going to hell for someone. It is simple, and it works.

The weaknesses, where they exist, are related to the mostly uncharted format of the movie. The short films vary wildly in tone, with some being campy horror-comedies (Killer Karts, Horrific) and others that are dead serious and macabre (Cold Turkey, Black Sugar). This causes a little bit of whiplash, but it doesn’t ultimately damage the collection as a whole. Would it be a better experience if it were solely focused on one style or the other? Probably, but I don’t think it would be dramatically different in the end, and there is something to be said for the collection showcasing the diversity within horror.

The pacing is somewhat hampered by the inclusion of credits within each segment (rather than being bookended on the entire collection), but that’s the extent of the complaints I have with Seven Hells. When it comes down to it, the intention of the movie was to expose some fine films to a more casual audience of horror fans, who would otherwise never have seen them. In that regard, I thought it was quite successful. After all, I’m a horror fan who can’t make it to film festivals, and I would not have seen this shorts without Seven Hells.

Speaking of which, here are the trailers for the seven short films that comprise Seven Hells:

Jack Attack

The dialogue in Jack Attack is really snappy, and the effects in this are top-notch. I love the original concept here, and it also features the rarity of a decent child actor.

Incident on Highway 73

This is suspense mastery, and yet another brilliantly original concept. I also thought this had some particularly brilliant sound work and cinematography that fantastically enhanced the tension.

Killer Karts

Seeing the trailer for this is what got me in the door to start with. It is a funny short without being overtly humorous, instead relying on the outlandishness of the concept. Killer grocery carts? Yes, thank you. It also manages to be of genuinely good quality, resisting the temptation to drift into Tromatic territory with its off-the-wall premise.

Cold Turkey

Certainly the darkest film in the collection, this was the only time I felt some real tonal whiplash during Seven Hells. That said, Cold Turkey has some astounding practical effects, and is frankly haunting in its depiction of a self-starving cannibal.

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Black Sugar was maybe the coolest stylistically out of the bunch, and is also the only one I recall to extensively use computer-generated special effects. I am typically a bigger fan of practical effects, but the CG here is used brilliantly to depict a hellish alien world. Black Sugar is yet another incredibly original concept, focusing on a group of teenagers experimenting with a mysterious drug.

Horrific

A clearly Sam Raimi inspired tale of one man’s struggle against a Chupacabra, this is an absolute blast. It is probably the shortest entry, but it might be the one that stuck with me the most. Next to perhaps Killer Karts, it is the funniest of the bunch.

Til Death

Seven Hells is the brainchild of Jason Tostevin, who contributes the final segment in the collection. Til Death has some great comedic acting and some really fantastic make-up effects, but there were a couple of things that bugged me about it story-wise. Unlike the others, it actually has a happy ending. That alone wouldn’t really bother me, but the characters in the segment are, in my opinion, the most loathsome in the collection (I’m including Cold Turkey in there). The main characters are all in unhappy marriages, and decide that they should all kill their wives to escape their respective hellish matrimonies. They are all childish and cruel, and the karmic system that underlies most horror stories would leave them to their hellish fates, and definitely not allow them to live happily ever after.

There is an implication that the characters mature over the course of murdering their wives and killing themselves, but you don’t really see it happen. The credits roll over happy images of the various married corpses, who have apparently re-found love after their deaths. It just didn’t feel right to me: they should have been doomed to an eternal life with their undead spouses to pay for their heinousness, but instead they learn to enjoy it.

All of that said, Til Death has some really great comedic moments, and it is exceptionally well-crafted. Honestly, I might just be over-thinking it: the film leans more towards comedy than horror, and I may have just wanted it to lean the other way. It also probably wasn’t the best capstone for the collection given the upbeat ending: after all, the theme of Seven Hells is about things going bad.

It is to be seen what sort of distribution Seven Hells will get, but my hope is that it will go far and wide. Even if it doesn’t, I hope that the concept isn’t abandoned: the format of Seven Hells is undoubtedly the best way to publicize short films to a larger audience, but it may some tinkering to make it more marketable overall. In any case, I whole-heartedly recommend checking it out if you can. Who knows, maybe it will pop up on Netflix one of these days?

IMDb Bottom 100

IMDb Bottom 100: Breaking Wind

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Breaking Wind

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“Breaking Wind” is yet another “[Movie] Movie” (a term used for modern, lazy parody movies in the vein of “Scary Movie”) in the IMDb Bottom 100, joining “Miss Castaway”, “Epic Movie”, and “Disaster Movie”. I have basically exhausted everything I have to say about the inherent issues with this particularly abysmal genre, but “Breaking Wind” does at least have some specific issues all its own. First off, it is about farts.

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Also, fat werewolves

“Breaking Wind” is a parody of the “Twilight” movies, deriving the title from one of the sequels (“Breaking Dawn”). As you can gather from the title, a large quantity of the attempted jokes in the film center around farting. There is what I would describe as an aggravating number of fart-related gags throughout the film. The few attempts at humor that aren’t directly fart-related are at least crass and lazy, or are so dependent on knowledge of the “Twilight” franchise that casual moviegoers are not going to understand them. Check out the following clip, in which Danny Trejo cameos to fart a bunch, reference random things, and parody what I assume was a specific scene in one of the “Twilight” movies:

Wasn’t that nauseating? The whole movie is pretty much like that. I wonder if this was the low point of Danny Trejo’s acting career?

On top of the lazy humor, “Breaking Wind” also suffers from the fact that it isn’t even the only “Twilight”-centered parody movie. Friedberg and Seltzer, the typical “[Movie] Movie” duo who were behind “Epic Movie” and “Disaster Movie”, released their own “Twilight” parody (“Vampires Suck”) a good year and change before “Breaking Wind” hit theaters. And, unbelievably, “Breaking Wind” writer/director Craig Moss has a worse track record than the Seltzer/Friedberg duo when it comes to parody films. His only other credit at the time was the annoyingly-named parody “The 41-Year-Old Virgin Who Knocked Up Sarah Marshall and Felt Superbad About It”, which has a whopping 2.7 on IMDb: only marginally better than “Breaking Wind.”

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Not only is it lazy and second-rate, but “Breaking Wind” doesn’t seem to understand its audience either: for a movie that nearly requires knowledge of the “Twilight” franchise to follow, it is incredibly mean-spirited towards fans of the books and movies. The movie ends over clips pulled from YouTube of “Twilight” fans reacting ridiculously to “Twilight”-related events. It comes off as really uncomfortable and unnecessarily shitty to a group of people who could theoretically be buying tickets to the movie.

As with any of the modern generation of parody movies, there isn’t anything redeeming enough about “Breaking Wind” to justify recommending it. The humor is dated and crass when it does exist, which is not often. This one just needs to be chalked up and archived as yet another dumb parody movie, and never re-addressed again.

IMDb Bottom 100

IMDb Bottom 100: Track of the Moon Beast

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Track of the Moon Beast
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“Track of the Moon Beast” is yet another forgettable entry in the IMDb Bottom 100. Like a good number of the films featured on MST3k, this is one that feels like background noise. There are a few memorable moments, but definitely not many. I haven’t had as much trouble recounting a movie since “Zombie Nightmare”, and I think that one is a good deal more entertaining than “Track of the Moon Beast”.

One thing I can give this movie credit for is some kick-ass box art. That muscle-bound blue alien creature stretching its claws towards the moon is pretty bad-ass. Unfortunately, the monster in the movie actually looks like this:

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Not very impressive. And yes, the creature is shrouded in darkness almost the entire movie, probably an attempt to hide how crappy it looks. The only exception I can recall is the excessively colorful death scene, in which you still can’t make out much in the way of details:
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So, bad effects are definitely an issue that hampers this movie. I will say that the transformation effects aren’t too bad, especially in comparison with something like “Laserblast”, where they just painted the actor’s face green. There is even some alternate box art featuring the transformation makeup that doesn’t look too bad.

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some more box art that is way too good for this movie

However, there are a lot of issues with this movie beyond the mediocre effects work. For instance, the plot is just a wee bit ridiculous. The main character becomes the “moon beast” because a tiny meteorite lodges into his brain without him noticing. Weirdly enough, it is later stated that there is a local, native legend about an identical creature existing in the past. So, the story implies that more than one person in the history of this town has had an evil moon rock lodged into their skull that transformed the victim into a were-alien. Honestly, it sounds like they had two origins written down, and couldn’t make up their mind between the two of them.

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This monster looks better than the one that made it on screen

All of that said, you can make a good movie with a ridiculous plot. In fact, I like where they take the plot as it moves on. Unlike most werewolf features, doctors discover his ailment and try to fix it, and don’t hold him accountable for his crimes. Unfortunately, they ultimately can’t help him, and the main character decides to run away and attempt suicide so his moon beast form can’t hurt anyone else. He is eventually stopped from carrying out this plot, after which he to transform into the moon beast and is shot. The ending is kind of a bummer, really.

Honestly, there is some promise in this movie, but there’s not enough talent behind the film on any level to make it work. With better writing, better effects, better acting, and someone with a better eye for shooting in charge, this could have been a fun little sci-fi story. As it is, “Track of the Moon Beast” is a really boring movie to sit through, and it isn’t one I can recommend. I do, however, recommend the box art. That is, again, very bad-ass.

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Cushing/Lee ’72

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Cushing/Lee ’72 is a ticket that would have gotten my vote.

A couple of days ago, I decided to dive into my immense backlog of DVDs to find some blog fodder. I was planning to watch through some Hammer films to compare with Tim Burton’s “Sleepy Hollow”, based on an interesting theory I came across on “The Nostalgia Critic” last week.


That “Sleepy Hollow” theory is something I may get into at another time.  In any case, I pulled a couple of Christopher Lee / Peter Cushing combos out of my collection, and popped them in for an evening of British horror. I honestly assumed from the casts that both would be Hammer films, which I don’t think was an outlandish assumption for a film from that time period. Interestingly enough, only one of them was Hammer, but both films came from the good ol’ year of 1972.  Also, they were both thoroughly delightful. So, here they are!

Horror Express

First up is a delightful international flick called “Horror Express.” A couple of months ago, this was recommended to me based on some of the outrageously ridiculous science in the film, so I decided to pick it up when I spotted it in the bargain bin.  What they didn’t mention is that the film is an absolute blast, and the cheesy pseudo-science in the plot is just icing on the cake.

There is a mad monk, a snarky Soviet commander who takes over the train (played by Terry Savalas, who is awesome), pale-eyed zombies, a possessed defrosted neanderthal, and an alien adversary that kills people by staring at them with glowing red eyes. It is a delightful time, and the whole thing is hanging out on YouTube.

Nearly the whole movie takes place on the Trans-Siberian Express, which gives the movie an interesting claustrophobic vibe (one of many things that reminded me of “The Thing” in this movie). Cushing and Lee play rival anthropologists who coincidentally wind up on the same train, but they learn to cooperate fast when things turn bad. Lee’s character has discovered a corpse he believes to be the “missing link” in the history of human evolution, and tries to hide his cargo for the first section of the film. Of course, things go wrong when the ancient corpse wakes up and starts killing people. It winds up being dispatched pretty quickly, at which point Lee and Cushing poke at its eyeballs a bit during an autopsy. After looking at images of dinosaurs and space in the creature’s eyeball fluid under a microscope, they come to the brilliant conclusion that the missing link was possessed by a parasitic alien, and that the parasite has found a new host on the train. Spooky!

The rest of the movie involves some great alien possessions, care bear stare deaths, a train explosion, and some generally delightful practical make up effects. Here are a few stills:

I can’t recommend “Horror Express” highly enough. It dances along the line of being a good-bad movie and being just a good movie, but it is a train-load of fun either way. It might actually be my favorite Cushing / Lee movie, though there are a lot of good ones out there. Including the next flick…

Dracula A.D. 1972

“Dracula AD 1972” is one of the later Hammer films Dracula movies, and probably the most ridiculous of the bunch. It starts with the supposed final battle between Cushing’s Van Helsing and Lee’s Dracula in 1872, which ends with both men dead (Lee is notably impaled to death by the spokes of a broken buggy wheel).

The movie then hops to the modern setting of 1972 (100 years to the day), where a young man named Alucard is dead set on reviving Dracula. He is played very hammily by Christopher Neame, who went on to have a successful career as a television character actor. Honestly, he is most of the reason why I like this movie so much. He goes over the top and beyond as Dracula’s #1 fan.

Coincidentally (or not?), Alucard is in a friend group that includes the great-great-granddaughter of the original Van Helsing. Cushing of course plays her protective grandfather (the identical grandson of the original Van Helsing), who is an aging expert on the paranormal. In fact, there isn’t any perceptible difference between this Van Helsing and the original at all, which I honestly didn’t mind so much. No need to mess with a good thing.

Through a particularly silly string of events featuring a plethora of 1970’s slang, partying, and astounding British-ness, Alucard successfully resurrects Christopher Lee’s Dracula via a blood sacrifice (of a Bond girl, no less) in an abandoned church. Dracula immediately makes it clear upon his reconstitution that he has come back specifically to wipe out the Van Helsing clan, but doesn’t do a whole lot to see that goal through. Most of the actual vampiric antics are left to Alucard and his goon, during which time Dracula presumably just hangs out in the abandoned church, mostly satisfied to let others take revenge for him.

“Hey, you. Go do my revenge plot.”

Most of the movie plays out kind of like a cop drama, with Peter Cushing offering advise to a somewhat skeptical police investigator who is digging into the string of clearly vampire-inspired murders of the Van Helsing granddaughter’s friends. My favorite piece of advice Cushing gives to the cops is that they should look into Alucard as a prime suspect, because his name spelled backwards is “Dracula”. That is some deep detective work.

“I think the guy with the teeth is the bad guy”

As you might expect, the young Van Helsing girl is ultimately kidnapped by the Dracula gang, leading to a pretty underwhelming final battle between Cushing and Lee that involves a tiny spiraling staircase. More notably I think is the fact that Alucard is dispatched by Van Helsing via a shower.

so, do vampires just not bathe?

“Dracula AD 1972” isn’t quite as fun or as good as “Horror Express”, but it was still a pretty good watch. The Alucard character and all of the 70’s youth slang are hilarious, and the Satanic blood sacrifice scene is delightful. Really, the first 30 minutes or so has most of the best parts, between the wagon chase battle opening, the Satanic sacrifice, and the 1970’s youthful partying. I’d recommend giving it a watch if you want to see a campy Dracula movie, or just need an emergency dose of the early 70’s in your life.

I empathize with the characters on the left

Ah, and last but not least, “Dracula AD 1972” has a theme song for the ages. It is just amazing. Nothing says Dracula quite like funky french horns and saxophones. Give it a listen:

 

IMDb Bottom 100

IMDb Bottom 100: From Justin to Kelly

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From Justin to Kelly

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“From Justin to Kelly” is a somewhat unique member of the IMDb Bottom 100. It has been hovering at the bottom of the list for some time, and has held the top spot on a few occasions, but it isn’t quite what I typically expect from the list. The production values are good, it isn’t a parody movie, and Paris Hilton is nowhere to be seen. All of that said, this is a movie that deserves a slot in the Bottom 100, without any doubt.

As with many films, you can’t truly appreciate “From Justin to Kelly” without knowing a little bit of the story behind the scenes. In fact, this is a movie that doesn’t make any sense at all without context. Eponymous stars Justin Guarini and Kelly Clarkson were the finalists on the first season of the television singing competition “American Idol”. “From Justin To Kelly” was apparently an attempt to cash in on the popularity of the show in a different medium. Unfortunately, neither Justin nor Kelly had any meaningful acting experience, which should have sent a red flag up on the project from the start. The movie attempted to bank on their singing talents rather than their acting, and this relied on choreography and musical numbers to make up for the lack of a acting ability, sensible plot, or decent dialogue.  This tactic, as you might imagine, did not work well.

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A good number of movies on the IMDb Bottom 100 at least have a workable concept behind them, but are ultimately executed poorly. “From Justin to Kelly” has an inverse issue: the concept is unworkable (make a movie around two non-actors), and a lot of (more or less) competent people were brought in to try to make it work. So, the result is a movie that looks fine on the outside, but doesn’t have a foundation beneath it.

While the choreography and directing are done by veterans (though still pretty badly), the job of writing “From Justin to Kelly” was clearly not given the same amount of thought. All that was needed from the film was music and a serviceable trailer from a financial point of view, so why would anyone stress the script? It seems like everyone knew that they were dealing with non-actor leads anyway, so a good writing job would just be wasted on the flick. The writing was tasked to Kim Fuller, who has had a career in television, but is best known for penning another notable musical train wreck (and IMDb Bottom 100 alumnus), “Spice World.” That tells you all you need to know about how the horrendous writing of “From Justin to Kelly” came to be. The dialogue is stilted, the characters are entirely unbelievable, and the plot is a jumbled mess: all because no one particular cared to make it better.

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The guy in the middle gets an entire side-story about internet dating or something. Ugh.

“From Justin to Kelly” feels like the manufactured product that it is, which makes it an incredibly off-putting viewing experience. Most movies, including bad ones, are made in the honest attempt to create something good. “From Justin to Kelly” has more in common with Z-grade exploitation films than it does any of the other Bottom 100 features, because it was made without any desire for quality or artistic value. Even more so than the many contrived blockbusters out there, this is a soulless movie.  Blockbusters at least, on some level, aim to entertain an audience. “From Justin to Kelly” was not made to even entertain: it was made to profit. Luckily, it failed miserably in this regard, and is remembered as one of the most universally loathed movies of the decade.

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The one in the middle with the cowboy hat is the villainous mastermind of the movie. Really.

There isn’t a whole lot of entertainment value to extract from this film. The characters are so inconsistent, unbelievable, and unlikable that there is at least somewhat of an awe factor involved in watching their stories unfold, though. In particular, one of Kelly’s cohorts is almost certainly the most inexplicably conniving villain that I have ever seen in a movie. Still, the vapid plot and tortuous, twisting love story between Justin and Kelly is immensely tiring. Not only can they not act, but their characters are written to be dumb as rocks, and are constantly manipulated into fighting each other. Their ineptitude is amusing for a while, but it gets old very fast. The fashion is pretty laughable as well, particularly the skirt made of ties, but none of it is enough to make it worth sitting through the movie.

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tie skirt

So, I do not recommend watching “From Justin to Kelly.” Unless, of course, you want to watch a poorly-written, abysmally-acted,  inexplicably PG spring break movie with a bunch of early 2000s pop music threaded throughout. And, hopefully, no one does.

IMDb Bottom 100

IMDb Bottom 100: The Beast of Yucca Flats

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The Beast of Yucca Flats

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What happens when you put “Red Zone Cuba” and “Plan 9 From Outer Space” into the blast zone of an atomic bomb? Ideally, both movies would be destroyed. Alternatively, they could synthesize into a mindless creature of a movie called “The Beast of Yucca Flats”.

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Starring the hulking Tor Johnson of “Plan 9 From Outer Space” infamy, and directed/written by “Red Zone Cuba” visionary Coleman Francis, “The Beast of Yucca Flats” is exactly the quality of movie you should expect: it is absolute garbage. The only saving grace of “Yucca Flats” is the curious charm that is occasionally the side effect of absolute incompetence.

Pictured: charm
Pictured: charm

First off, eponymous “Beast” (Tor Johnson) cannot act. He spent most of his career in the background of movies as a muscle-man, but he never really had the chops for acting. Luckily (or unluckily, depending on how you look at it) for him, in “The Beast of Yucca Flats”, he doesn’t really have to act. Due to some of the most baffling sound work in cinema history, all of the dialogue in the film is spoken from off-screen. This means that Tor’s lead role is more or less relegated to a silent beast (I don’t recall if he even got a line before his transformation). This mechanical issue also leads to some awkward off-screen conversations set against still images, and numerous disembodied voices with unclear sources moving the plot along. Clearly in an attempt to cover this horrific sound work, the movie also has narration throughout. Unfortunately, the narrator rarely speaks in complete sentences, and never quite makes any sense. Ultimately, all of the film’s problems mentioned here (and many more) boil down to the same fellow at the rotten core of this attempted film: Coleman Francis.

Coleman Francis is the writer who cooked up all of the horrendously stilted dialogue. Coleman Francis is the narrator who rambles incoherently throughout the movie. Coleman Francis is the director who allowed the astoundingly horrible sound and cinematography decisions to made. “The Beast of Yucca Flats” is entirely and unequivocally the fault of Coleman Francis.  Even the perplexing opening scene that has no connection to the rest of the film was reportedly inserted after-the-fact because Francis “liked nude scenes”.

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The kind-of touching final shot had nothing to do with Francis. The rabbit just showed up.

Yet, despite the countless issues with the film (or maybe because of them), “The Beast of Yucca Flats” is almost certainly the most entertaining and best remembered of the Coleman Francis movies. As mentioned before, there is a certain intangible charm that certain movies have that can only come from the honest incompetence of the filmmaker, and “The Beast of Yucca Flats” has it. The movie is rightfully considered to be one of the classic considerations for “worst film of all time”, right alongside “Manos: The Hands of Fate” and “Plan 9 From Outer Space”. The Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode on the movie is also considered to be one of their finest:

It is mind-boggling to compare “Beast of Yucca Flats” to Coleman Francis’s other IMDb Bottom 100 movie, “Red Zone Cuba”. Both movies are arguably of equal incompetence, but “Yucca Flats” is far and away more entertaining to watch. Watching them back-to-back illustrates the hazy boundary between an entertaining bad movie and an unwatchably bad movie, at least in my opinion. In any case, I can recommend checking out the MST3K of “The Beast of Yucca Flats”. but I certainly wouldn’t say the same about “Red Zone Cuba”.

However, “Yucca Flats” doesn’t have nearly as catchy of a theme song:

“The Beast of Yucca Flats” isn’t going to be as much fun for a casual group today as “The Room” or “Birdemic”, but it rightfully has a place among the classic bad movies of yesteryear. If you can enjoy “Plan 9”, “Manos”, and other bad flicks from back in the day, then you don’t want to overlook “Yucca Flats”.

IMDb Bottom 100

IMDb Bottom 100: Horrors of Spider Island

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Horrors of Spider Island / Body in the Web

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Here’s another IMDb Bottom 100 entry with a whole lot of alternate titles. Most commonly called “Horrors of Spider Island”, it also shows up under anglicized versions of the original German title (“Body in the Web” usually). The movie was re-released as “It’s Hot in Paradise” in an attempt to capitalize on a different marketing approach, but I have rarely seen it labeled under that title in the secondary market nowadays.

The plot of “Horrors of Spider Island” is pretty straight-forward: a plane full of dancers, accompanied by their manager, crashes into the ocean en rout to an overseas gig. All of the survivors wash up on an uninhabited island, which they learn contains a giant spider. The manager is ultimately bitten by the spider, after which he turns into a sort of were-spider-creature and starts hunting down the other survivors.

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The eponymous “body in the web”

Once again, the basic plot-points here could make for a pretty decent movie. I would rather have seen the spider as the primary monster than a poorly designed man-spider, but in general the setting and set-up work for a monster movie. Unfortunately, the potential is absolutely squandered.

As mentioned, the monster design is less than inspiring to say the least. The movie is kept pretty dark to cover up the shoddy work, but there a few instances where it really stands out in a bad way. Particularly, the monster’s death is a moment where it appears prominently on screen. Speaking of which, the monster dies by wandering into quicksand and drowning, which is one of the worst anticlimaxes I’ve seen so far among the IMDb Bottom 100.

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I’m not sure if the blame should lie more with the writing, the acting, or on equal shares of both, but absolutely none of the characters in this movie are interesting, and most of them are utterly indistinguishable. Part of this is just due to the cast being far too large and filled with too many similar characters (all of the dancers), but there were certainly no compelling personality traits or performances to make any of them stand out either. The movie tries to balance out the horror with some light-hearted romance, but none of the characters are strong enough for it to work, so those segments ultimately just drag the whole movie to a screeching halt.

This movie strangely reminded me of a very unrelated fellow IMDb Bottom 100 feature: “Miss Castaway and the Island Girls”. Despite the films being from different eras and made in different genres, there are some really distinct similarities. “Miss Castaway” features a group of models who are stranded on a deserted island after a plane crash, only to discover that there is a monster inhabitant that starts to pick them off. “Miss Castaway” came by that plot by combining “Miss Congeniality”, “Castaway”, and “Jurassic Park”, so I am pretty sure it is pure coincidence that the plots have so many similarities. Still, it was an unexpected find that was interesting to note.

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“Horrors of Spider Island” might have been better with a Michael Jackson cameo

There aren’t enough genuinely enjoyable moments in “Horrors of Spider Island” for me to recommend it, but it does have a pretty solid episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. It is considered a classic B-movie, and it isn’t quite a painful watch, so I wouldn’t specifically advise against watching it either.

 

IMDb Bottom 100

IMDb Bottom 100: Invasion of the Neptune Men

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Invasion of the Neptune Men

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I honestly can’t tell the difference between “Invasion of the Neptune Men” and fellow IMDb Bottom 100 and Mystery Science Theater 3000 feature “Prince of Space”. They are so similar that I bet you could cut them together into a half-coherent movie. I initially made the mistake of watching these two back-to-back, not realizing how similar they were. You can even tell back in my “Prince of Space” review how difficult it was for me to distinguish between the two flicks. If it weren’t for the distinctive tones of Krankor, I wouldn’t have had a chance.

Given the similarities between these movies, most of the points I made in the “Prince of Space” review still stand here. There is a certain bizarre charm to these Japanese import movies, with all of the bad dubbing and dialogue. However, “Neptune Men” lacks a distinct, entertaining villain; which I saw as a big boon for “Prince of Space”. That being said, Sonny Chiba’s Space Chief is a little more interesting than his doppelganger, the eponymous Prince of Space. And I don’t use doppelganger lightly here, just check out how similar these characters look:

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I am sure you can understand my confusion here. In addition to the near-identical heroes, the movies also have similar invasion plots, and both prominently feature a gang of poorly-dubbed children (which is to be expected from the genre). One of the key differences that helped me distinguish between the features were the alien designs. Both look horrendous, but they at least don’t look identically horrendous. “Prince of Space” featured chicken-like humanoids, whereas the Neptune Men wear stylized, conical spacesuits. I give the advantage to “Invasion of the Neptune Men” here, mostly because I could imagine these suits showing up in early “Doctor Who” serials or a weaker episode of “The Twilight Zone”. That’s not saying much though.

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Overall, “Invasion of the Neptune Men” is a more forgettable flick than “Prince of Space”. Apart from the destruction of the Hitler building, there isn’t much that makes this movie stand out from the pack. It is a very long way from being good, but I don’t think it is distinctive or genuinely poor enough to be one of the worst movies of all time. Just like “The Starfighters”, I’m sure there were hordes of movies like this of similar quality that have been forgotten to time.

I can only recommend this movie in conjunction with “Prince of Space”, and with the MST3K treatment. The riffs are pretty good, and the similarities will throw you into confusion pretty fast once you get into the second of the films. As you would expect, you can find both films quite readily on YouTube with a little digging.

IMDb Bottom 100

IMDb Bottom 100: Demon Island

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Demon Island / Survival Island

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If someone told me that there was a really bad killer pinata movie out there, I would not be surprised. However, the movie I would picture would not be anything like “Demon Island”. There are a few similar elements, such as a monster pinata beating people to death with a stick, but not as many as I would have expected. For being a movie about a killer pinata, “Demon Island” somehow completely misses the mark.

Let us imagine for a moment that a b-movie outfit like Troma decided to take on a killer pinata movie (which certainly isn’t out of their wheelhouse). I would want a number of things to happen:

1) I expect the monster to be a multi-colored, dead-eyed horse creature.

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2) There will be a scene where children break open a pinata, only to have human body parts and organs fall out instead of candy, to their shock and disgust.

3) The colorful horse creature will beat someone to death with a stick, and/or kill someone utilizing weaponized candy

This one at least sort of happened in “Demon Island”

Outside of those things, all I want from a killer pinata movie is a fun ride. It just needs to be a traditional gorey slasher movie with a silly plot and some tongue-in-cheek humor around the edges, and you have yourself a movie. “Demon Island” could not have messed up the concept more.

A lot of people initially mock “Demon Island” for the outlandish concept, but as demonstrated above, I think a killer pinata movie could totally be a decent horror/comedy set-up (In fact, there is another killer pinata movie just about to come out).The real problems with “Demon Island” are numerous, but the premise is not necessarily one of them. I mean, just check out this teaser for “Killer Pinata”, which has the same concept behind it:

Anyway, on to the multitude of issues with “Demon Island”. First and foremost, the central monster is a massive problem for the film. According to IMDb, the movie was initially filmed using a rubber suit monster and practical effects, but that it was later replaced with the hideously cheap CGI creature that appears in the final cut (given how bad the CG looks, I shudder to think of what the practical alternative looked like on screen).

Any time that you add in a monster after the fact, there are going to be serious issues with the film. In this case, there is never any sense of proximity between the characters and the monster due to the editing. There are only a couple of instances where it is clear that the monster is interacting with the same environment as the characters, and that is mostly achieved through using disorienting monster point-of-view shots with excessive after-effects.

The poor quality of the monster effects and the shoddy editing around it are enough to make this movie bad. The acting and writing on top of those issues make the film horrendous.

All of the acting is a good few rungs below what you would expect from a run-of-the-mill horror movie, and comes in just underneath the thespian quality that you would find in an Asylum SyFy Original movie. Honestly though, this is one of those cases where the actors couldn’t have saved the dialogue with all of the talent in the world. Writer/Director tag-team Scott and David Hillenbrand have a little more experience producing and directing now, but at the time neither of them were experienced in screen-writing or directing, and it shows throughout the movie. The movie feels like the work of overambitious amateurs that just don’t quite know what they are doing, and that comes through in the dialogue in a very bad way.

The following clip encapsulates almost every major issue with the film. Keep an eye out for the editing, the effects (including the monster vision), the sense of proximity, the acting, and the dialogue.

I don’t know if I can recommend this movie. It fills me a profound sense of disappointment at the wasted opportunity to make a fun killer pinata movie, and there aren’t enough enjoyable moments to justify sitting through the whole thing. It is kind of interesting to see how many things are wrong about it from a semi-academic point of view, but that is about the only saving grace of this thing. Instead of watching this, I recommend supporting a new attempt to create a killer pinata movie: appropriately name “Killer Pinata”. You can find them on IndieGoGo. Their funding period ends on November 1, 2014, so go help them hit their goal!