BAD MOVIES THAT SHOULD BE SEEN (22 OF 100)

"Hercules And The Captive Women" (1961),
Dir: Vittorio Cottafavi

$$$ Unknown Budget vs. Unknown Gross $$$

I once wrote a whole 25 page essay on this movie... and no, I'm not kidding, and no, this one will not be twenty-five pages. To understand this film, one must be familiar with the Italian Peplum (or "Sword & Sandal Films" or "T & A Films") films that were popular genre through the late-1960s, even giving Arnold Schwarzenegger his first role in Hercules In New York. In terms of cinematic history, the Italians made hundreds of these cheap, Neo-Mythogical films, capitalizing on the popularity of biblical films like Ben-Hur and The Robe, but appealing to the drive-in movie crowd through through skimpy costuming and absurdist humor. One could go on for months breaking down what possible importance these films could have or you could simply watch Hercules And The Captive Women and pretty much sum up the main points... and maybe The Colossus of Rhodes, starring Rory Calhoun for kicks.

Firstly, I love this film. Maybe it's because I had to watch months of this schlock for a film course and this installment was at least the best of the worst. I won't even go into the grim details of how bad some were (Hercules Against The Moon Men), whereas this one nails all that was good about them in one movie. Depending on what version you see (I prefer the American), the film opens with a bar fight. Hercules and his entourage of skimpily dressed young men and a midget are overwhelmed by angry drunks. Meanwhile, Hercules (Reg Park, the most awkward and hilarious of bodybuilders to play Hercules) continues to enjoy his meal. Once finished, he casually pushes aside a group of men coming at him with a battering ram and leaves the bar with his friends, completely unscathed.

Upon their leave, they encounter a bright red... something. It's honestly very unclear what they are looking at in the scene, but it's very red, makes the sun shrink, and forewarns them of a dangerous army coming, that could destroy their beloved Thebes. Androcles, King of Thebes, brings this problem to the counsel and neigboring cities, but none can agree to help the king. Worried for his kingdom while he is gone, Androcles asks Hercules who will take care of his throne. Hercules rips the thrown off the floor and smashes it, proclaiming that the people shall build Androcles a newer, better thrown upon his return.

Now, the counsel scene is probably the only real "intelligent" part in the movie. A lot of the humor and farce falls upon being a reflection of the constant incongruity of Italian politics. Historically, the Italians have never had a working government. An example can be found with the good old Red Brigade right here. The country is so fragmented between north and south, struggling with class conflicts, language barriers, extremist political parties that these problems are generally reflected in their movies. In this case, this scene does it very comically, alluding to a fragmented government that cannot work together to stop a looming threat that could destroy them all. For further insight, you can read about The Christian Democrats and it just might make this sequence even funnier.

So with no one else to join them on their journey into the unknown, Hercules and Androcles are forced to go alone. But then, after a talk with his formidable wife, Hercules decides not to go with Androcles either and stay at home and rest. Without any support or fleet to join him, Androcles is forced to drug and kidnap Hercules to take him on their journey. When Hercules awakes on a ship at sea, he completely forgets telling Androcles that he would not be going, assumes everything is going according to plan, and takes a nap... It should be noted that Hercules actually spends the majority of the film unconscious. If not because he is drugged, because he is simply lazy. If not because he is simply lazy, because the task at hand is beneath him. One could argue that Hercules is a very apathetic hero, if not actually hero at all...

In fact, one could argue that Hercules is simply a device of destruction that one transports place to place and is only to be used when absolutely necessary. There are even more direct references this notion later on, but we'll get to that. Back to political references for now and the is littered with them. Logically, it's doubtful that many would have thought these films to be particularly political-driven given their nature, but Italian films are generally very political in their nature. This film in particular has tons of political allegories, but they don't all necessarily add up. For example, Hercules finds himself in the Lost City of Atlantis (when it was above water), which has a population of slaves, female sacrifices to the Gods, and a lot of subecjts diseased from some strange energy source...

Hmm. They wouldn't be in Atomic Age America, would they? No, no. They couldn't be. Because the superhuman guards dressed in black armor (that are also all identical) are clearly a reference to Nazi Germany... So does that mean that the filmmakers are trying to say America is the new Nazi Germany. Maybe. But that wouldn't make sense because at the end of the movie, when Hercules ignites the volcano and blows up Atlantis, that destructive imagery suggests that that must be a reference Hiroshima, Japan (or Nagasaki), which the Americans bombed, meaning that... meaning that...? Ah, f&%$ it.

The only commonality here is pretty much everything Hercules touches gets destroy and any heroics he performs just end in mass destruction, but he is still the film's hero. Whether or not the Italians were trying to make a bold statement about the United States, or Nazi Germany, or the events that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nothing is more bold than wearing those costumes and managing to keep a straight-face.

You really have to enjoy your bad movies to like this one. One of the film's highlights is when Hercules fights the shape-changing monster Proteus. The clip below is the closest thing I could find for a trailer and goes under one of the film's many names, "Hercules Conquers Atlantis."

For your viewing displeasure, Hercules vs. Proteus!

MOVIE TROPES - DANCING RESOLVES EVERYTHING

 "MOVIES AND THE MYTH OF DANCING"

 
I like to dance. Lots of people like to dance. Men, women, children like to dance. But why do we dance? Is it the florid release of energy, the synchronized movement, or the fact that somehow a single dance number will solve all your worldly problems? Wait! What? That isn't true. I dance alone all time and I'm still balls-deep in debt! How come dancing doesn't make that go away? Have movies been lying to me about the awesome powers of dance my whole life?

Now I don't know where this trope came from, but I'd like to say 80s films like the John Hugh's classic The Breakfast Club. All those disenfranchised high school misfits went from hating each other to bonding over the course of a dance montage, becoming a harmonious unit... It's pretty cheesy, but beats the previous scene where they're all sitting around and f&$@ing crying.

But the myth of the star-studded dance number goes back further than that. One could say as far back as Old Hollywood with movies like Singin' In The Rain, which was a song-and-dance musical about performers in song-and-dance musicals. Typically with these films, the conflict would be resolved with a final dance number, stunning producers and sourpusses alike, marking the big payoff. But what never made sense to me about these films was how one particular dance number seemed to vanquish all dilemmas, but the dozens of others prior (even the more memorable ones) had no affect at all.

This same school of logic was reflected in the Oscar-Eating-Monster The Artist (which is actually a great movie) when the two leads managed to sway their old crotchety producer John Goodman with a starry dance number that would win the old lug's heart, but also serve as nice transition to the film's ending where the leads are on top of the world again.

But that's just something that happens in hokey musicals, right? There's a dance number and all's well that ends well? Not in every musical. West Side Story is an odd exception. In that movie (where all gangs dance and jump on top of each other when they fight) the characters are introduced as using their ability to dance to intimidate people, showing ownership over the neighborhood (but also being the daintiest gang ever). Tony, the leader of The Jets, gets murdered in street and no amount of dancing or singing brings him back. It's actually a surprisingly tragic ending to a musical and has no final dance number to cap things off. 

However, twenty years later, Danny Zuko and Sandy Olsen would do the leather-pants number at the end of Grease and give everyone the happy ending West Side Story never had. Gang feuds are resolved, classic conflicts are washed away, teen pregnancies were, um, gone suddenly, and there was even enough time for a big hooray-hooray before the credits rolled.

In some cases, the movie dance is just a coping mechanism and solves nothing. Take Alex Cox's gritty bio film Sid And Nancy for example. If you can actually stomach this piece of sh%# film, the climax is Sid Vicious stabbing Nancy Spungen to death in a testament to their toxic relationship, and Sid going to jail for being a woman-killer. Once Sid is released, he runs into some rapper kids on the street. They tell him not to not be "so stuck up" and dance with them. He does so, forgetting that he's a f&%$ing murderer for a second. Then a cab pulls up. The door opens and Nancy is inside, alive. Sid gets in and the two drive off into whatever crappy city they live in, excusing Sid of murdering this person and giving us the most condescending happy ending bull$%& I've ever seen... Now, this isn't a dance number per say, but it follows the trope that dancing makes everything okay, and in this case is used very manipulatively. God, I hate this movie so much. As the British would say, pure rubbish.

Personally, I thin dance numbers are their most effective when they cap off a movie in a way that words cannot. For example, Napoleon Dynamite's Jamiroquai dance number won Pedro the election. How? Doesn't matter. The final dance number of Chicago shows that Roxie and Velma have now joined forces and become bigger than they ever were alone. How in reality do a pair of murderesses get so famous? I don't know (ask Sid Vicious), but regardless we accept it.

Then you have a climax like the one to Little Miss Sunshine where it tries to show the family uniting in a way that most dialogue scenes leading up to this could not do. During Olive's semi-stripper dance, the family joins her on stage and supports when the crowd doesn't. Then they all get arrested, but as a family, together. Does that win them Little Miss Sunshine and absolve them of any crimes they have committed? No. Does that resolve their inner dysfunctions? Not really. Does it illustrate a connection that would otherwise be cheesy in words? Yes, it does. Does it make the audience feel good about themselves and laugh? Absolutely, which is exactly the point.

Perhaps the dance number is the comedy/musical answer to the action movie's final fist fight between between good and evil. Neither musicals or comedies usually have villains, so the movies themselves don't really have a visual outlet for what is usually a character's internal struggles. Perhaps the dance number is the answer for those particular genres... but then again, you also have endings like the big dance recital in Staying Alive and realize that sometimes dance numbers a punch in the face might be better.

BAD MOVIES THAT SHOULD BE SEEN (14 OF 100)

"Tammy And The T-Rex" (1994), Dir: Stewart Raffill
 

$$ Something in Budget vs. Nothing in Gross $$

Most filmmakers walk into a project with an intention. They usually have an idea what kind of movie they are trying to make or at least what audience they are aiming towards. But with the sci-comedy-disaster Tammy And The T-Rex, I don't think Director Stewart Raffill could even answer those questions. Coming off his screaming success Mac And Me (that was sarcasm by the way), Raffill brings us a movie that embodies three very distinctively genres, but fails at achieving anyone of them.

Firstly, Tammy And The T-Rex is supposed to be a teen comedy. The majority of the cast are 90s teen actors with the lovely (but talentless) Denise Richards playing Tammy and Fast & Furious' own Paul Walker playing her goofy boyfriend Michael. Immediately we learn that Tammy fears for Michael's life when her psychotic ex-boyfriend Billy won't leave her alone. Michael tells Tammy that he is not afraid of Billy and confronts him. The two proceed to grab each other's balls in probably one of the funniest teen movie confrontations I've ever seen ("What we got here is one of them testicular stand-offs!").

But from there, Billy and his cronies kidnap Michael and drop him off at a zoo to be lion-lunch. And surely enough, Michael is mauled and killed by a lion... This is where the film takes a sudden turn, casually becoming a teen-comedy that also happens to be revenge-film...? Hmm. So Paul Walker dies (in a very funny hospital sequence), but his brain is left in tact, even if his body is not. Meanwhile, a mad scientist named Dr. Wachenstein (played by Weekend at Bernie's own Terry Kiser) has built a giant robotic Tyrannosaurus Rex... for whatever reason. All it needs to be functional is an unsullied brain, making Paul Walker's now useless brain the perfect suitor. And yes, this is all the same movie...

So the mad scientist steals Paul Walkers's brain (in a lab sequence that looks a lot like Simpsons Treehouse of Horror II) and transplants it into the robot dinosaur. And within a few seconds of becoming a robot dinosaur, Paul Walker sets out to exact revenge by viciously slaughtering Billy and his gang in some rather gory PG-13 moments. So essentially, at this point, this so-called teen-comedy that just recently became a revenge-film now also features sci-fi special effects of about the caliber your see in the picture below.

Ridiculous plot aside, the most off-putting thing about Tammy And The T-Rex is the blatant disregard for human life that the film tries to treat humorously. There's a sequence where Denise Richards and her super-gay friend Byron (Theo Forsett) go to the morgue and start picking through corpses to find Michael's potential replacement body. Leaning the bodies against the window so the giant robot dinosaur can see them, Tammy rejects one because apparently his c$%k is too big for her... Yup. She's not that kinda girl, but is the type that will desecrate a corpse.

Now I know this is an attempt at humor, but the popular brand of 90s dark humor (typically found in era classics such as Pulp Fiction) doesn't work here. Especially not when paralleled with some imitation 80s bubble gum schlock. They do try comedy with the dinosaur like having it trying to make a phone call, but this weird playfulness seems out of place when just moments ago the T-Rex ripped a guy's guts out and crushed him in front of an old lady.

As a director, I think Raffill deserves study. His career includes two films that attempt to tap the youth market of a particular time without having any idea what that market wants or why they even exist... Or maybe it's as simple as Raffill wanted to make a movie about a T-Rex (in light of Jurassic Park's success the previous year) and the name Tammy just happened to start with a "T." Wow! Marketing genius at its finest!

The only thing that makes Tammy And The T-Rex worth seeing is Denise Richards. Simply put, she's young and gorgeous. And I assume the striptease she performs for the camera at the end was the filmmakers half-assed way of apologizing for making the audience put up with whatever the hell this was, while also exploiting Denise Richards for being very attractive at the same time. Poor Denise... She may never have had much in the way of acting talent (even slightly), but the Charlie Sheen years really look as if they took a toll on her pretty face and that's a real shame.

Enjoy this movie for the few laughs it has (mostly among the human characters surprisingly) and to see Denise in a better place, even if that better place is a world where Paul Walker's brain can be kept in salad bowl so that he can enjoy a daily striptease from Tammy. 

And for your viewing displeasure, the off-putting violence I was speaking of, accompanied by some really, really bad special effects.

BAD MOVIES THAT SHOULD BE SEEN (13 OF 100)

"Orgy of the Dead" (1959), Dir: Stephen C. Apostolof
 

$$ Unknown Budget vs. Non-Existent Gross $$

Regardless that the credits claim this movie was directed by Stephen C. Apostolof, a veteran in the exploitation realm, this film through-and-through belongs to Mr. Edward Wood Jr. Most cinephile's familiarity with Mr. Ed Wood extends as far as Plan 9 From Outer Space or the Tim Burton biopic film, typically claiming him to be the worst director ever. (Clearly, these people have never seen a Michael Bay film.) But Ed Wood gets a bad rap in my opinion. Plan 9 is not nearly as bad as people say. Glen Or Glenda is not that bad either. If David Lynch made a feature in 1953, it would probably look a lot like Glen Or Glenda. But 1959's Orgy of the Dead is a bad movie, but as the headline of these articles states, worth seeing at least.

Opening with your typical Ed Wood introduction, Criswell (an Ed Wood regular) seems pretty drunk as he describes the limbo the film takes place in, slurring his nonsensical monologue. From there, the film follows a husband named Bob (played by Williams Gates, who only ever appeared in two films and looks a lot like Rock Hudson) and his wife Shirley (played by Pat Barrington, no stranger to the horror-smut realm). The married couple survive a car crash only to end up in a strange cemetery somewhere between the realm of the living and the land of the dead. At this place, they meet Criswell, known to his awkwardly comedic minions as The Emperor of the Night, who calls upon the spirits of the dead for "the orgy."

And that's the entire plot. Fawn Silver fills in for Ed Wood regular Vampira, but really nothing much happens outside of that. To save you some disappointment from the film's misleading title, there isn't an orgy. Aside some nudity, probably the most naughty thing that happens in the film is Fawn Silver unbuttoning Shirley's shirt as knife-point (with the fakest knife ever) and then buttoning it back up (oh la la). The rest is pretty much just a series of topless go-go dancers, who all perform the exact same dance for the Emperor, to music that isn't very cryptic or even sexy for that matter. As the happy couple are forced to watch the most boring orgy in the history of the act, a mummy and a wolfman provide laughs (I guess) for dialogue-interludes between dances. One of these interludes results in the greatest movie lines of all time: "Torture! Torture! It pleasures me!" Other than that, nudity is the only thing this movie has going for it and I own dirtier Sears catalogues than this.

It's a good movie to have on at a party, where no one is paying much attention to it, and everyone is extremely drunk. For those few moments you do turn your attention back to the screen, it'll be worth the laugh or two if you can even find it. Happy hunting. No trailer for this film was available, so here is the infamous drunken monologue by Criswell.

And for your viewing displeasure, pretty much anything else that happens in Orgy of the Dead that isn't some mindless go-go ghoul doing the same dance the last girl did. Watch for the great one-liner "Torture! Torture!"

BAD MOVIES THAT SHOULD BE SEEN (11 OF 100)

 

"Dracula 3000" (2004), Dir: Darrell Roodt
 

Nothing in Budget vs. Direct to Video

Back in my Blockbuster Video days, I was stuck working the Thanksgiving Day shift and going home to nobody. At the time, a co-worker of mine was from Sri Lanka and in the same boat, so rather than both spending our night by our lonesome, we decided to join forces and watch an array of bad movies instead. Of our three picks, each will be reviewed in this blog. There was Boa vs. Python, Waterworld, and the king of stink, Dracula 3000...

Oh, Dracula 3000. Completely unrelated to Dracula 2000, which has Star Trek Voyager's very own 7 of 9 getting staked in the boobs, Dracula 3000 is about a team of space aboard a craft called Mother III (Alien rip-off #1), a salvage ship that finds a derelict craft called Demeter. The crew of this ship is led by Captain van Helsing... Yeah, that's his name. Clever, huh? And better yet, played by Starship Trooper's own Aryan-bred Casper Van Dien. The film also stars Baywatch's Erika Eleniak (the not-so-hot one), Tom "Tiny" Lister (the president in The Fifth Element), and former rap sensation Coolio in a performance let's hope he's terribly ashamed of. We'll get back to that later.

So the crew finds the dead captain of the Demeter clutching a crucifix. During this discovery, their own ship Mother III decides to take matters into her own hands (Alien rip-off #2) and abandons the crew on the Demeter... without any explanation. It isn't long before Tiny and Coolio discover a cargo bay full of coffins. Thinking the coffins might have been used to smuggle drugs, Coolio opens one and is attacked by a vampire. Now under Count Orlock's control, an army of vampires intend to force the crew to bring the Demeter back to earth (Alien rip-off #3), and release a blood-sucking, vampire clusterf*&% (as if the earth's population couldn't possibly fight off 20 to 40 vampires).

Now, for all its terrible plottery, terrible actors, and a set that looks like the back of a grocery store (but turns out was a re-used set from the short-lived series Space Rangers), the biggest flaw of the film is Coolio. In mentioning my co-worker from Blockbuster at the beginning of this review, I wasn't just trying to highlight that I once had a friend, and that friend was a black-friend too, and a woman for that matter, but that her reaction to Coolio's performance was what put Dracula 3000 on this very list.

If you were around in the 1990s, you remember Coolio's 1995 hit song "Gangster's Paradise." For this socially-conscious tune, Coolio received the reputation of being a street philosopher and a positive role model for black youths. Flash-forward ten years to Dracula 3000 and Coolio is playing a pot-smoking cargo specialist named 187... Yep. 187. His interests are getting high and sexually harassing Erika Eleniak. When finding the corpse of the Demeter's dead captain, Coolio insists they search it for drugs. When Coolio turns into a vampire, instead of killing Erika, he goes on a rant describing in great detail how much he fantasized about, well, you might as well just watch the clip... And unfortunately, I cannot find the clip where Coolio chases Erika around the produce department -- I mean, ship, trying to run along the walls after her. Now, typically, when attempting something like that, a film production would employ special effects. But since this particular production didn't have any money, instead, what we get is Coolio trying to run along the walls himself, and for some reason making offensive monkey noises, leading to a speech where he actually refers to himself using the N-bomb. At that point, my co-worker screamed, "Holy sh*%! Coolio just sold-out his entire race!" And for the guy who used to speak out against negative black stereotypes, to do a complete 180 for Dracula F*&%ing 3000, I would agree.

As for the rest of the movie, once Dracula (or Count Orlock) actually enters, that's when everything just starts raising too many questions: Why was a cargo ship transporting coffins into space? If it's the year 3000, why is Dracula still dressed so Elizabethean? Did the vampires at some point learn how to navigate an interstellar spaceship? And if they did, why then do they need Capser, Tiny, or Coolio to do anything? Unfortunately, the only reason one really has to watch this film is if you wanna see Coolio make a fool of himself, and he does, dearly.

For your viewing displeasure, the title character Dracula gets one of his only scenes in the whole damn movie. Poor guy.

BAD MOVIES THAT SHOULD BE SEEN (10 OF 100)

 

"Hard Ticket to Hawaii" (1987), Dir: Andy Sidaris
 

Unknown Budget vs. Non-Existent Gross

There are bad movies that make you cringe and then there's the ones that make you rejoice. Watching Hard Ticket to Hawaii, I wonder three things: (1) How did I ever live before seeing this wonderfully horrible film? (2) Why hasn't somebody like Quentin Tarantino tried to remake or capitalize off this gem? (3) I'd better keep my mouth shut so it stays just the way it is. I don't think I could live if someone ever modernized this amazing theme song.

 
Starring a cast of near-porn stars and a giant snake-puppet, the film follows two secret operatives on the down-low. Played by two former playboy playmates -- Hope Marie Carlton in 1985 and Dona Speir in 1984 -- the two are stationed in Hawaii, pretending to be two unassuming female cops, who never wear bras and always manage to find an excuse to be topless. The plot (to my surprise) takes off when the girls are hired to deliver a large venomous snake to the island (for reasons unknown), as well as a married couple on their honeymoon (inevitably snake-lunch). Now I usually avoid movies with snakes of any kind because of a crippling phobia, but this movie is so much fun and the giant snake is so bad-looking, it's, well, just plain unavoidable (kinda like watching Snakes on a Plane and all its stupid C.G.I. snakes).

 
After delivering their cargo, the two girls accidentally stumble upon a secret diamond-exchange, orchestrated by a powerful crime-lord named Mr. Chang. The delivery was meant for one of the island's most vicious criminals named Seth Romero, but after a series of struggles, ends up in the ladies' possession and their non-human cargo is accidentally released.

Amongst many superb qualities, the main villain Seth Romero is one of the film's highlights, probably suffering about as much physical punishment and agony as Jason Voorhees would by the end of a Friday The 13th film In the course of these ludicrous events, Seth gets shot in the face, stabbed with a harpoon gun, falls onto a switch-blade, gets bit by the giant snake on his face (which makes him unknowingly contract snake-cancer... yep), and so on. (There's even a sequence that deliberately rips off Halloween with Seth in the Michael Myers role, only to get punctured like Michael did, suggesting that Seth is... a ghost??? I dunno.) By the end of it all, you just want someone to put the poor guy out of his misery before he does any further damage to himself.

It's actually shocking how enjoyable this film is. Does anyone remember in Boogie Nights how Burt Reynold's character says that he's always wanted to make a real movie, yet still starring porn actors? This is what I picture that movie being. There isn't much I can say without giving away all the best parts, so we'll just sum up the reasons to see it: (1) Boobs, boobs, and bewbs, (2) budgeted yet ridiculous action sequences, (3) porn stars trying to be action stars, and (4) a giant Jim Henson-esque snake that steals the show. Watch this gem movie in all its terrible glory.

Now that's a trailer. And if my review hasn't sold you on this one, perhaps this clip will. For your viewing displeasure, our friend Seth getting further mangled and the famous cancer-snake's greatest scene!