Seen any crappy movies?

[LarsMac]

Watched a couple episodes of that new GoT spinnoff.
I think they might be coming up with a workable plot by the next episode.
Maybe.
Or, it's possible that they will spend the first entire season setting up the story.

The actress playing the Princess (Milly Alcock) seems to have some talent. But the rest of the cast appears to be calling it in.

I'll check back next season. Maybe.

[specious_reasons]

Orphan: First Kill (2022)

Isabelle Fuhrman reprises her role as "Esther/Leena," but this time it's a prequel, so she's younger than she's supposed to be in the 2009 movie! In the 2009 movie, Fuhrman was 13 playing 33 playing 9. Now she's in her mid-20s, so they had to do more work to keep her looking young. It mostly works, if you don't think about it too hard. Even at 13, she didn't really look 9, but we accept that actors play younger than their real age all the time. So technically, it's believable enough.

In this one, Leena escapes the Saarne Institute, and looks through missing children websites until she finds a girl whose identity she can reasonably assume. She gets herself found by the police in Russia, and proclaims she was abducted by a crazy Russian (to explain her accent). Soon, she is at her new home, and Esther's father is so happy, but her mother (a wonderful Julia Stiles) feels like something is a bit off...

I don't want to spoil this, but this is once again a battle of wits between Esther and her new mother, but there's enough difference in the family dynamic that it's not at all the same as the original. It's also slightly more "realistic" in that it takes place over a shorter time, and the parents are not incredibly stupid.

This was fun and enjoyable. I also had a free promotional copy, which is a very good price to pay for this.

[LarsMac]

Well, I was browsing one of the movie channels and ran across something called "Moonfall."
It starts out with astronauts on a space mission, when something rather weird begins to happen. Kinda like the beginning of "Gravity" and the astronaut that was out doing the work gets blown away, and Halle Berry and here fellow Astronaut in the Shuttle get bounced around and she gets knocked out and her partner sees a bunch more weird shit, but managed to get the shuttle headed for home.
So, ten years or so later, we suddenly find that the Moon is shifted its orbit and is "falling" to Earth.
I was about to blow it off as the absurdity it seemed to be, when along comes "Dr KC Houdman", a nerdy, Astronut Wannabe played by John Bradley (Sam Tarly in GoT) who gets to be the comedy relief.
As the "plot" progresses, Berry's and Wilson's characters manage to drag their Ex's and current interests into the story, and it quickly become one of those brilliantly silly SCi-Fi thrillers like we used to go to the Drive-ins for back in the 60s.
It's silly, stupid, schmaltzy and a lot of fun to watch, but probably won't see a lot of Oscar nominations.

[specious_reasons]

Watcher (2022)

A husband and wife move to Bucharest, Romania for the husband's job. He's from a Romanian family and speaks the language, she doesn't. As they're getting settled in, she notices a man creepily watching out his window, and they learn about a murder that just happened.

She also catches a man watching her as she goes about the city. She's upset and has her husband call the police. The police talk to him, but since being creepy isn't a crime, nothing happens. The husband, in trademark horror gaslighting, thinks the loneliness is getting to her, and she's obsessing over some harmless people-watching. She suspects he's the murderer people are talking about.

This is a pretty basic thriller done fairly well and sets a decent mood. I'm pretty sure this was filmed in Romania for budgetary reasons, and so they just set it in Romania. It's a good choice, because the language barrier makes her feel more isolated. There's a scene late in the movie where they're at a work function, and the husband makes a joke in Romanian at her expense, only she's learned enough to get the gist of it, and he realizes he's busted, so he goes full asshole. It's got to suck discovering that your husband's a dick after you've moved to a new country.

[specious_reasons]

Halloween Kills (2021)

I kind of liked the 2018 version of Halloween. It was a pretty clever combination of funny, scary, and brutal. Jamie Lee Curtis was back and took Laurie Strode in an interesting direction - we got to see how the trauma of her assault affected her and subsequent generations. I didn't agree with some of the artistic decisions, but I think it worked as a whole, and was a pleasant surprise for someone who wasn't expecting much.

There were a lot of poor reviews for Halloween Kills, so I put it off. This year, I want to watch Halloween Ends when it comes out, so I decided to watch it.

Kills is an unpleasant combination of funny, scary, and brutal. There's some amazingly tense, scary scenes, but I can't exactly describe what went wrong this time. They just didn't get it right.

Perhaps there were just a few too many nods to other Halloween movies that aren't even in the continuity. Maybe they made the riled up townsfolk a bit too stupid. Probably because there's an extreme lack of Curtis, who is just great when she's on screen, but she's holed up in a hospital room for most of it. The ending, which I shant reveal, is particularly terrible and disappointing - killing off a major character by having them act out of character.

I enjoyed parts of this, but I didn't like it overall.

[specious_reasons]

Terrifier (2016)

A group of people who just happen to be in one area are attacked by a tall, skinny, black and white clown named Art. Art is a complete slasher trope - silent, weird, takes more damage than should be humanly possible, and completely brutal. The primary distinction is that Art does all of his attacks as a kind of clown performance.

This is a rough one- a bridge between a slasher and torture porn. There’s not much of a point of view here. The victims are a random assortment of people that happened to be in the same area. I rated this somewhat higher than I might because it was rather scary.

[specious_reasons]

Nightmare Weekend (1984)

This movie opens with a pair of men sneaking up to a house, with a woman directing them to install something to allow her to connect to "the mainframe". They are thwarted by a puppet at a computer terminal. The puppet transforms one of the man's necklace charm into a metal ball and then the ball headshots him.

This is a pretty wild, trashy, mostly incompetent movie. Movies like this can either be a brain-buster or a transcendental experience. I had high hopes for this movie after this first sequence, but my high hopes were dashed.

There is a complicated plot. Part one, a famous scientist is working on a project that would alter people's brains and cure them of various mental illnesses. His female assistant is working with a shadowy figure to sabotage/take control of these experiments. Part two, the scientist's lovely college aged daughter comes to visit and accidentally falls in love with the lady's henchman - the surviving guy from the open sequence. Part three, evil scientist lady brings 3 other lovely young ladies to a mansion for a "relaxation experiment," but plans to use the experimental technology on them.

This is a big swing and a miss for me, but I know of others who enjoy trashy films who did enjoy this.

[specious_reasons]

Halloween Ends (2022)

Michael Myers is back, baby! Or is he?

I found this better than Kills, but not by a lot. It also has this weird incel vibe that I wasn't too happy with.

[BrotherMan]

This is the most positive review I've seen for it. Other folken I know were actively offended by it.

[specious_reasons]

Originally Posted by BrotherMan

This is the most positive review I've seen for it. Other folken I know were actively offended by it.

There's a lot of ideas, some of them bad, and the filmmakers don't really seem to know what to focus on. The most time is spent on a new character, which is really what's giving me the incel vibe, even if it's not exactly what they're going for.

[specious_reasons]

Daughters of Darkness (1971)

Sleazy lesbian vampire movie.

...that's actually too glib. It is sleazy and features a lesbian vampire, but this is rather good overall, if not particularly scary. It's definitely a macabre movie.

A newlywed couple are travelling to visit the husband's mother on his ancestral estate. They miss the boat, so they stay in an empty hotel waiting for the next one. Soon, though, they are joined by the Countess Elizabeth Bathory and her lady servant/lover. With a name like Bathory, you know she's going to be trouble for this couple. Soon she is involving herself in their stay, and she's plotting to steal the wife away.

[Miss Shelby]

Overboard. Not my idea of crappy. Love Goldie and Kurt. Watching it for the millionth time

[viscousmemories]

"Rambo: Last Blood"

The original is one of my all-time favorites, but I haven't liked any of the sequels and this one was no exception.

[specious_reasons]

Demonia (1990)

So this is a movie by Italian schlock-master Lucio Fulci. I generally don't like Fulci movies, but I'm often entertained, disgusted, or both. Usually, there are a few really interesting/disturbing scenes and maybe a generally feeling of dread it's trying to evoke, but this felt long and boring, and the gore scenes were mostly unexciting. This one strikes me as having a lack of imagination, like the well had gone dry for this director.

[specious_reasons]

Stepfather 2 (1989)

A weak but OK sequel to the original Stepfather. It turns out the wounds he got from the first movie weren't fatal, and we start the movie with the titular Stepfather (Terry O'Quinn) in a mental institution. He escapes and sets about getting a new family, played by Meg Foster and Jonathan Brandis.

The actors here are much better than the script, which is pretty basic and predictable, but it all kind of evens out to an decent time. If you like Terry O'Quinn going from milquetoast to psychopath in a blink of an eye, this might be a fun watch for you.

[specious_reasons]

Evil Dead Trap (1988)

A Japanese late night TV show crew is sent a creepy snuff video and is lured out to a secret base to investigate it. Soon, the crew are being murdered by a masked stalker in all sorts of gory and improbable ways.

This is a pretty wild, gory movie, but I didn't like it much. Stylistically, this is mimicking an Italian style giallo, and it's a very good mimic. It also mimics some of the worst tendencies in those movies too, like the villian sets up impossibly elaborate traps in what seems like minutes, the stalker appearing to be in two places at once, and plot twists executed so poorly it's basically nonsense.

I personally didn't find it very tense or scary, just gross and kind of mean.

[specious_reasons]

Evil Dead Trap 2: Hideki (1992)

I had read reviews that the sequel to Evil Dead Trap was an entirely different movie than the first - a sequel in name only. Boy was it ever different! It was even worse.

The movie centers around Aki - a quiet young lady who, when she's not being stalked by a ghostly young boy, is murdering other young ladies and mutilating their bodies. Her (best?) friend is Emi, a talkative news reporter obsessed with the murders. They both spiral downwards from there.

This was gory and weird, but boring and confusing. I think the ghost boy Hideki is the spirit of a botched abortion Aki had. Maybe it was just taking that form to torment Aki, because it seems like the boy is haunting other people too. I don't know, and it's annoying me to think about it.

[specious_reasons]

Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death (1989)

The US Government sends mainstream feminist Dr. Hunt (Shannon Tweed) and her dim but enthusiastic student Bunny (Karen Waldron) to the avocado jungles of Southern California to make a treaty with the Piranha Women. They're "guided" by Jim (Bill Maher), a toxic male who is the only person willing to do the job.

You don't expect a movie like this to be good, but you hope it will be funny. I found this funnier than some of the worst comedies I've seen — weak praise is the most I can muster here. Some of the concepts and bits are amusing. Adrienne Barbeau is the leader of the Piranha Women, and she nails the few jokes she has. Bunny is a terrible, stereotypical character but Waldron delivers her terrible jokes with impressive skill.

Maher sucks. This isn't "Pizza Man" bad, but close. He affects a mid-atlantic accent, like he's trying for Cary Grant, but it's grating and makes his comic delivery worse.

This wasn't dire, but it also wasn't funny enough to get over the terrible plot, script, production and bad gender politics.

[specious_reasons]

Arabella: Black Angel (1989)

Arabella is a "nymphomaniac." During an outing to seek out sex, she gets into trouble with a corrupt vice cop. The cop tries to sexually blackmail her, and when her husband discovers her in a compromised situation, she kills the cop. This excites the husband, who helps her cover this up. Her husband is a writer, and claims he needs more like this to get over his writer's block. He then encourages Arabella to seek out more risky sexual adventures and report back to him.

She does, but her partners all get murdered after their sexual encounter. The killer is following her. She can't stop these encounters, and the police are getting closer to connecting her to the murders. She comes up with a plan to confront the killer...

I think I just made it sound better than it is. This is a late 80s Italian thriller. I should have avoided this one. It's supposed to be erotic, but the misogyny and bad psychology make this somehow gross and unsexy. There's an extremely sexist subplot where the lead investigator is a woman who can't handle looking at dead bodies. The husband is abusive and gross throughout the movie.

The plot itself is just a series of events intended to get the lead into situations where we see her nude as often as possible. The lead actress is quite beautiful, but it's all unappealing and somewhat boring - I think because a lot of these sexual encounters are either coerced or compulsive. Consent is rarely a consideration. Gross.

[specious_reasons]

A Wounded Fawn (2022)

We meet Bruce (Josh Ruben) as an art buyer, bidding for a client on a piece which we see has really affected him. He loses the auction, but gets the piece back by murdering the winner. Next, we see Meredith (Sarah Lind) talking with her therapist and her friends about getting back into the dating pool after an abusive relationship. She's got a weekend date with - you guessed it - Bruce.

He takes her to a cabin in the woods, and strange things start happening. It's like she's being warned to get out. Bruce attacks her, but things don't go as planned...

Not a crappy movie in my estimation, but this is where I post about the trash I see, and sometimes they're also a treasure. I like Josh Ruben, and I was impressed by Sarah Lind. I enjoyed the visual language the film used, and I really enjoyed the costumes. Definitely on the artier side of horror movies, and this worked for me.

When I rated this on letterboxd, I rated this a little bit lower than I might because I basically knew how the movie is going to go after the turning point. Oh, there were still surprises, but there is a central visual theme, and it sticks to that theme.

[ShottleBop]

I got fooled into watching "Love On a Leash" (available on Tubi) because there was a letter to one of Slate's advice columnists about the less-popular high school kids skipping their prom to watch it together. It was described in the letter as an example of a movie "so bad it's good." So I watched it. It was bad. Simply bad. The makers couldn't afford a soundtrack, so large parts of the movie where a soundtrack would have been are simply soundless--no ambient noise, nothing: just silence. The dialog was terrible. The acting was terrible. The camera work was terrible. So was the lighting. The story was crappy: a man, formerly dead, has been reincarnated as a golden retriever for his fickleness in love, doomed to life as a dog unless he can find true love with one woman. There's more, but I'm afraid of accidentally whetting someone's appetite, and I don't want anyone here to waste an hour and a half of their life.

[specious_reasons]

Possession (1981) is coming to Shudder tomorrow. One of those classic horror/thrillers that has been unavailable on any home video format for quite a while.

I will be watching this ASAP.

[specious_reasons]

I watched Possession and need to watch it again to even form an opinion.

[specious_reasons]

Austin Found (2017)

A former beauty queen Leanne (Linda Cardellini) is now a pageant mom - the worst kind of pageant mom. The costs of preparing her daughter Patty (Ursula Parker) for the competition is draining the family's bank account. She sees that a kidnapping event is bringing in big money for the family of the victims, so she hatches a plot to kidnap her own daughter, milk the press and gain fame.

So, this is mostly a dark comedy that's only sometimes funny. The leads of the movie are great, besides Cardellini and Parker, Skeet Ulrich and Craig Robinson are the two hapless kidnappers Leanne recruits, but the humor is inconsistent, and I'm partial to dark comedies.

[LarsMac]

The Menu -
The previews were awesome. It starts out promising - you follow a young couple on the boat ride to an island which is home to a World Famous Restaurant where the Chef is reputed to be the BEST.

Ralf Fiennes does a great job of being the most highly regarded Chef in the Modern world. He is a big fucking asshole.
He runs dinner like a Marine DI.
It turns out that most of the diners have a history with Chef, though, and very quickly, it becomes a whodunnit, in which the who hasn't done it, yet, but Chef is taking these poor saps on a not-so-magical Mystery Tour.

Two high points are Margo, played by Anya Taylor-Joy, and Elsa, played by Hong Chau.
Margo will prove to be the closest thing to the Heroine that the story ever gets.
Elsa is the Kitchen Manager, and Chef's "Doberman"
There is a lot of attempts at life drama from the various Diners, who prove to be unready for the adventure that Chef has planned for them.
There are a lot of foody jokes, and jabs at the the "Joi de Cuisine" games that accompanies the world of Gourmet Dining.

The story hops around but comes to a rather improbable Climax after mocking the entire world of Haute Cuisine.

The acting is great, but the storyline is loaded down like a 17 course Banquet when you forgot about the dinner date and had a huge breakfast late in the day. Too Much! The ending is a glorious mocking of an all too popular "treat."