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Rate the latest movie you've seen.

Started by GalacticBusDriver, February 16, 2013, 12:37:09 AM

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Gawdzilla Sama

I bet most people have seen movies by Alan Smithee and didn't know who he was.
We 'new atheists' have a reputation for being militant, but make no mistake  we didn't start this war. If you want to place blame put it on the the religious zealots who have been poisoning the minds of the  young for a long long time."
PZ Myers

the_antithesis


the_antithesis

Alright, so...

I finshed watching Outtakes and it is as bad as I thought. It's maybe bafflingly bad, as in how can someone have such a bad sense of humor so as to have every single joke fail like this?

I'd run down the bits, but really, why? They're not funny.

Well, that isn't entirely true. The phone company commercial parody where a cat answers the phone and gets an obscene phone call made me chuckle, but that may be only funny in context.

The main problem is the bits go on for way to long and don't have enough jokes in them to justify the length. For example, another bit that was almost funny is a tattoo removal shop that does so with a chainsaw. This goes on for twenty seconds, I timed it, and it still went on for too long. That's amazing!

Another weird thing is how dated it feels. I mean, it was made in 1987 but it feels more like something from the late 70's/early 80's. There's a talk show segment with a young gay man as a guest and AIDS isn't even mentioned. This tells me the script probably was mostly from the late 70's/early 80's which is why the jokes are dated. Either that of Jack M Sell has a terrible and dated sense of humor for 1987.

On the plus side, if you can call it that, we get to see some more of Black Christmas. I am mildly obsessed since the short doesn't appear to be anywhere online or on Sell's website. So it basically constitutes lost media, although I'll bet he still has a copy of the full short somewhere. Here it is presented as an overlong and spoileriffic movie trailer, but we do get some additional footage not seen in Deadly Spygames, such as when one teenager before Santa stabs him to death yells out "Scotty, beam me up!" I assume in the full short he was established as a trekkie and this was kind of funny. I mean, what last words.

Overall, it was also a goddamed slog. Perhaps more so because comedy was this thing's only reason to exist. It's not funny. The nudity isn't titillating. They keep reprising the goddamned repetitive theme song. That short the director had made is cut into this thing to pad out the runtime. Bits that could have been funny are robbed of their punch by not being edited properly.

I have to say, this is not making me excited for Psychotronic Man. Reviews on IMDb call it boring. I guess if it's just boring rather than actively painful, it will be an improvement.

the_antithesis

Okay. I needed a break from the films of Jack M Sell. In the video game thread I mentioned my love for the Mattel Intellivision video game console from the early 80's. One of my favorite games on that system was Bomb Squad where the player has to defuse a bomb to prevent a building from blowing up. They said the game was inspired by the 1974 movie Juggernaut. For some reason, I never thought of checking out that movie, so today I watched it.

Juggernaut is about a bad guy who placed several bombs on a cruise ship to extort money and it's up to Dumbledore to save the day.

The first Dumbledore, that is, who passed away after the second movie.

This is one of those 70's "box pictures" that has the cast of reasonable stars in a strip a the bottom of the poster. Quite a cast here. Besides Richard Harris, we have Omar Sherif, David Hemmings, Anthony Hopkins, Shirley Knight, Ian Holm, Clifton James and Roy Kinnear.

Truth be told, I don't know who half of those people are, but I'm sure they're nice people.

The movie is a slow burn. We're about a quarter of the way into it before we get the bomber plot. It's an ensemble piece with everyone playing their part, I guess, to fill the run time if nothing else.

That may not be fair, but I can kind of see why they don't make movies like this anymore. Having such a wide cast of characters and multiple, if related goals lacks the focus that people like in a movie these days.

There's a lot less to the bomb defusal that I would've expected. Probably because clever devices in a bomb are difficult to communicate to a film audience. So instead, we spend time with the passengers on the ship and you can tell it's a British movie and not American because no one is acting like petulant children. Not even the children. This pads out the run time and your mileage may vary if you'd rather see the bomb squad crew working to solve the problem or the passengers trapped on the ship worrying about their predicament.

I will say the ending, while satisfying in a movie sense was a bad move on Dumbledore's part. This is spoilery but also cliched.

The bad guy turns out to be the guy who taught Dumbledore all he knows and he's down to the detonator. He has a red and a blue wire. One will disarm the bomb, the other will blow it up in Dumbledore's face. There are several bombs on the ship. Dumbledore talks to the guy and says he's planning to cut the blue wire, so if it blows, the rest of the team will know to cut the red wire. So this is personal. The bad guy is already going to jail for being a dick. The only difference here is if he tells Dumbledore the wrong wire, he kills him, but the ship will be safe. So it makes no sense for the bad guy to tell Dumbledore to cut the wrong wire, the blue wire in this case because the team already knew he was going to cut the blue wire. This is important. So in a tense, dramatic moment, Dumbledore cuts the red wire and nearly doomed everybody. He doesn't say he's going to cut the red wire against what the bad guy said and contrary to his original plan. If he was wrong, the rest of the team will think he'd cut the blue wire and cut the red and gotten blown up and the ship would sink. It was a movie moment, but careless of Dumbledore to take a chance in that moment and not tell the team until after he would have blown up if he was wrong.

That said, it was an enjoyable enough movie. Weird seeing Hopkins and Holm when they were young.

the_antithesis

Psychotronic Man (1979)

It occurs to me that I watched the films of Jack M Sells in reverse order and now I'm concerned it may be like playing a record backwards and summon demons who will punch me in the stomach.

I had stated earlier that I had hopes that Psychotronic Man would be that best of the lot. It is. It's still not good. Maybe I should explain.

When watching bad movies, there are various ways to "enjoy" them, note the quotes. Most want a movie that is dense with unintentionally funny things so it becomes a comedy. Others have a more masochistic streak and "enjoy" being bored when the movie has scenes and shots that go on for far too long and lacks proper structure to justify the scene in the first place. Still other latch onto one or two elements in the movie and write a kind of fanfiction version of the movie in their head because they see potential for the ideas, it's just the movie itself fails to take advantage of them.

Psychotronic Man falls into the later category. There's something here despite the poor direction... probably more the poor editing.

The first asset is its star. Just look at him:


Finding actors with some kind of unique look is one of the reasons to dig into Z-grade schlock like this. Peter Spelson has such a unique look. He reminds me of the dealer for Las Vegas Poker and Blackjack on the Intellivision.



The plot, if you can call it a plot, is threadbare. Not a lot happens, but in the hands of the right director and editor, it could be good. Too bad we have Jack M Sell doing both.

Our hero, Rocky, is a barber with a drinking problem. He closes his shop early to drive around rural Illinois while drinking an unidentified liquid from one of his barber bottle things. He pulls over and passes out only to awaken with his car levitating in the air. He awakens the next day at home, thinking it was a dream and now he has weird headaches. He goes to the doctor who listens to his weird story, but is otherwise dismissive. Rocky tries to go to work the next day, but shit in his shop move around on their own and he just leaves. He goes back to where he'd parked the night before and meets the old man who lives in a house nearby. The old guy is the sort of asshole who'd be wearing a MAGA hat today. They get into an argument and Rocky uses his psychotronic powers to kill the guy. The cops are investigating the murder. Fortunately, Rocky left his barber's smock nearby and he becomes a person of interest. His doctor tries to rat him out and Rocky force throws him out the window. But the cops find clues and go to Rocky's home and he tries to make a run for it. Then a overlong car chase happens and then an overlong foot chase, then the cops corner him on the roof of a building with sharpshooters and then it's over... OR IS IT?

That plot description makes the movie sound much more watchable than it really is. I didn't touch on many of the plot points, like how Rocky is having an affair with the woman who owns the beauty salon next to his shop (and they have a mostly tasteful sex scene where the nudity is implied. Shocking after all the pubes in Sell's later movies). Ultimately, most of it doesn't seem to be going anywhere and how Rocky got his powers is not really explained.

Also, you may notice he doesn't seem to use his powers very much. Maybe it does since summaries, by definition, cut out big stretches of nothing. But, for most of the movie, there is little reason for him to have super powers because he doesn't use them. I suspect it's because they didn't have a good special effects department that could do very much. So it comes across pathetic.

That's a good word for the whole movie: pathetic. It's the little movie that couldn't. It's a pathetic thriller that's not very thrilling with a supernatural element that really is not super about a main character that is pathetic. He's an unlikable drunk who's cheating on his wife, but you still feel sorry for him. He's the last person who should get super powers and he's also the last person who would even want super powers. Being able to move things with his mind did him no favors. He moved up from being a shitty person to a murder because he really had no idea what he was capable of. And then trying to use those powers to get out of the jam he was in only made things worse.

All of that sounds like it could have been a great movie to me, but this movie really isn't it. It's just too boring. I suppose fixing this movie could be a good exercise for a film editing class. They'd probably cut it down to thirty minutes, but it would be a tight thirty minutes.

So, that's it for the filmography for director Jack M Sell. He still has a web page and probably still tries to find work, but nothing on IMDb. The problem is he's like a high schooler who likes doing the essay questions on final exams because they found if they just keep writing, the teacher grading their paper will just assume they know what they're talking about and give them a good grade. This is not good filmmaking. All three of his movies need an editor and two of them should probably just be thrown in the garbage. There's nothing in them.

So, Psychotronic Man gets an extremely weak recommendation. It's not good. It's very boring. But I like it the best of the three Jack M Sell movies.

SGOS

Sometimes bad movies are fun.  Mystery Science Theater made a 20+ year success out of showing bad films.

Gawdzilla Sama

Gone are the days when drunks hosted the Friday movie, after the 11:00 o'clock news.

"Attack of the Crab Monsters". What, oh what, is attacking the scientists?
We 'new atheists' have a reputation for being militant, but make no mistake  we didn't start this war. If you want to place blame put it on the the religious zealots who have been poisoning the minds of the  young for a long long time."
PZ Myers

Mr.Obvious

Started watching the wolf of wallstreet the other day. First time.

Turned it off shortly after he married the blonde. Was tired.
The acting was good and all. Not harking on anyone. But i don't know... it just didn't click for me. I could take it or leave it at this point. May just erase it without seeing the whole thing.

"If we have to go down, we go down together!"
- Your mum, last night, requesting 69.

Atheist Mantis does not pray.

M

Watched
Where the crawdads sing.

I'd give it a solid 7/10

A young girl in the south of the US basically brings herself up.
She ends up on trial for murder. It's alright to watch if you're at a loose end and have a couple of hours to kill.

The last five minutes are the most interesting.

Hydra009


I'm not sure if this will get a theatrical release or not, but I'm SUPER excited for the Guardians of the Galaxy Christmas special, which'll have to tide me over until GoTG3.

I know, I know, it seems goofy and silly and kinda stupid but...*long pause* damn, I thought it'd think of something for that last half of that sentence.

If we get anything insightful or heart-tugging about any of the characters, it'll be worth the price of admission.

Shiranu

QuoteI know, I know, it seems goofy and silly and kinda stupid but...

So... their normal movies?

But joking aside, I am actually kinda happy to see a comedy coming out - esp. within the GotG world. Not what I expected, but a pleasant surprise.

Disney+ cant screw up comedy, can they? They cant go like 6/100, I refuse to believe it.
"A little science distances you from God, but a lot of science brings you nearer to Him." - Louis Pasteur

Hydra009

Also, Christmas specials hardly ever go wrong.

*pulls out the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet to reveal a Star Wars Christmas Special VHS tape inconspicuously housed in a blank VHS sleeve, "SCP-001" is scrawled on the sleeve with red ink*

Mr.Obvious

47 meters down, not worth your time, imho.

Also, decided to just delete the wolf of wallstreet.
Might just see it sometime, but i with some hindsight; i wasn' enjoying the story itself.
"If we have to go down, we go down together!"
- Your mum, last night, requesting 69.

Atheist Mantis does not pray.

Shiranu

Netflix's "All Quiet On the Wester Front".

If you want to feel like shit, watch this movie. It's exactly as depressing as you would expect.

That is a complement to it, but still.
"A little science distances you from God, but a lot of science brings you nearer to Him." - Louis Pasteur

Hydra009

Apparently the usual suspects didn't care for it: