RECENT VIEWINGS (Bad Movie Thread!)

[M.10rda]

SO LONG AT THE FAIR (1950):
A "bubble" bad movie that's competent and had good parts but ultimately kind of cheesed me off. This is the earliest version I've seen of the same story that would reappear in BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING, FLIGHT PLAN, and (sort of) THE FORGOTTEN. Any of these movies could almost be renamed GASLIGHT: THE MOVIE, except of course there was an earlier/1940s movie named GASLIGHT that (ironically) does a less vivid job of illustrating the popular modern phrase "to gaslight" etc.......

Anyway. It's like the late 19th century or something and Jean Simmons and her bachelor brother are visiting Paris during the world's fair. The first 15 minutes are slow as molasses, then Simmons wakes up one morning in her hotel room and the separate room where her brother was staying has vanished and apparently never existed, taking her brother with it.  Although there's still some padding in the next hour, pretty quickly you're on Simmons' side and developing an intense hatred for the hotel staff that's clearly conspiring against her to obscure the brother's fate. All is well and good until the resolution, where an old white man authority figure tries to explain to Simmons how the bad guys were entirely justified in their villainy. Uhhhh that bit really spun my head around and made me  . The mid-20th century, ladies and germs!

2.5/5

Dirk Bogarde plays a dashing young guy who comes to Simmons' aid. This is the earliest Dirk Bogarde appearance I've seen and besides obviously being a good actor, he was a strikingly attractive fellow at 20 or 25... even much moreso than 10/15/25 years later. So if you're into male eye candy, I guess that's one selling point here.

[pacman000]

The play "Gaslight", & the movies based on it, are what inspired the term.

[M.10rda]

That is true. The original GASLIGHT is about a man trying to convince a woman that she's insane, and that is the traditional and literal definition of gaslighting.

However, in the past X years I most often see the word "gaslight" used to more specifically describe someone (usually a man) telling a woman that her account is inaccurate or false or imagined - that what she knows to be true is untrue. Although the result may be related (a woman feeling like she's delusional or feeling like a man is trying to make her feel delusional), the dynamic doesn't match the original definition unless the man is specifically conspiring to delude the woman and invoke a state of madness in her. Often of late when I hear someone say "You're/they're/he's gaslighting me" what they mean literally is "You're/they're/he's bulls**tting me or telling me something isn't true even though I know it is."

That's more precisely what's happening in SO LONG AT THE FAIR and the other titles I mentioned... not "gaslighting" in the original sense. I did a bad job of articulating that in my review and I apologize.

[zombie no.one]

IN THE LINE OF FIRE (1993)

Big glossy 90s politico-thriller is big and glossy...

 opening 2-minute scene of Eastwood kicking ass on a boat easily the high point of the film. Malkovitch is reasonable as creepy bad guy. Whole thing loses focus and becomes very generic, no tension.

Eastwood more or less tries "is that a gun in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?" chat up line on a woman. Clint old, possibly vision is failing...

wanted to like this, but it's a pretty bad movie imo.

5/10

[M.10rda]

I agree! Did Malkovich win an Oscar for that? Indeed, his performance is... "reasonable"!  Not, perhaps, outstanding. It's a pretty boring flick.

[zombie no.one]

I agree! Did Malkovich win an Oscar for that?

nominated but lost to Tommy Lee Jones for THE FUGITIVE apparently... I haven't seen a ton of Malkovich films but the best role I've seen him play is in BURN AFTER READING (divides opinion but for me everyone is great in that, even Brad Pitt)

[Rev. Powell]

Some pretty decent "bad" movies showing up in this thread... 2.5/5, 5/10...

Here's a real stinker, the worst movie I've seen all year (and I watched every Ormond family movie):

SPIDER BABY (2024): A color (with the option to watch it in black and white) remake of the 1967 weirdo classic about a family suffering from "Merrye syndrome," which causes the adults to slowly regress to a childlike (but homicidal) state, and the kindly caretaker who tries to protect them from scheming relatives seeking to seize their ancestral mansion. Everything is much, much worse than in the original: every performer is embarrassing compared to their predecessor; most of the top billed "stars" barely appear in brief cameos; the estate isn't creepy and dilapidated, yet the film looks much cheaper; the scenes they added made no sense; they scenes they cut were classics; they scenes they remade beat-for-beat have no tension or suspense; and the music, while good, is oppressively overdone. Sadly, Poor Jack Hill backed this, so he must either be destitute or senile. Unsurprisingly, they did not find a distributor. 0.5/5.

[M.10rda]

I agree! Did Malkovich win an Oscar for that?

BURN AFTER READING (divides opinion but for me everyone is great in that, even Brad Pitt)

  Brad Pitt's one of the best parts!

[M.10rda]

Some pretty decent "bad" movies showing up in this thread... 2.5/5, 5/10...

Here's a real stinker, the worst movie I've seen all year (and I watched every Ormond family movie):

Thank you, Reverend Powell, for inspiring us to do better (or rather "badder")! I did watch a strong 0.5/5 a couple days ago and will get around to reviewing it eventually. Good contender for worst movie I've seen this year. We will do BadMovies.org proud yet!

[zombie no.one]

Alas there is no  'Average Movies' board, so I guess anything 5/10 or less has to go in here?

SPIDER BABY (2024): A color (with the option to watch it in black and white) remake of the 1967 weirdo classic about a family suffering from "Merrye syndrome," which causes the adults to slowly regress to a childlike (but homicidal) state,

not about an actual half spider-half baby  hybrid freakmonster thing then? for shame...

edit, yep the trailer alone is painful. that particular style of intentionally non-realistic acting seriously gets on my nerves. could not manage a whole movie of it

[M.10rda]

that particular style of intentionally non-realistic acting seriously gets on my nerves. could not manage a whole movie of it

Well in that case, hold my beer - here's my promised review of
OH DAD, POOR DAD, MAMMA'S HUNG YOU IN THE CLOSET AND I'M FEELING SO SAD (1967):
I read a description of this one in Joe Bob Briggs' "News Of The Weird" version of our "What Was That Film?" board somewhere around 1990. It remained unidentified for years and haunted me. It just sounded so darn weird and fun. I'm gonna' do everything in my power to not make it sound that way in this review so none of you ever make the mistake of watching it!

"Mamma" is an bodysuit-wearing harridan in drag queen wigs and makeup who jetsets around the globe with her emasculated manchild son on her deceased husband's dime. They take "Dad" everywhere with them in a coffin and while staying in hotels, Mamma does indeed stand up taxidermied Dad in the son's closet. Mamma meets and sets her talons into a gnarled bug-eyed old sea captain (Oscar-winner Hugh Griffith); meanwhile the sea captain's overripe child bride decides to seduce the virginal and deeply neurotic son.

The 1960s! Everyone was wacky, zany, and madcap, and movies about such folks had to have wacky zany madcap and entirely too long titles like IT'S A MAD MAD MAD MAD WORLD and "Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?" and this one. I guess we could blame DR. STRANGELOVE - however that's a classic and almost everything about this movie sucks painfully. Adapted from a reputedly "hit" play by a playwright named Arthur Kopit who did write a few good ones in his day, nothing about OH DAD... elicits any emotion besides irritation and, at great length, agony. The slapstick highlight must certainly be when the son is about to finally consummate w/ the young vixen and suddenly his closet door opens and Dad's corpse falls out on top of them. I suspect that Kopit was maybe hoping for an updated farcical version of HAMLET but Shakespeare's HAMLET has much better jokes than OH DAD. Of course, HAMLET lives on good Hamlets (Burton) and dies on bad ones (Brannagh). I've seen terrible Hamlets, but I've never seen one worse than Robert Morse, who plays the son "Jonathan" as a developmentally disabled version of early Jerry Lewis. Yes, you read that right.

OH DAD... was shot in 1965 by one director, then taken out of that director's hands and given to Alexander Mackendrick, who directed legendary Ealing comedies in the 50s and then came to the States to make SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS. It baffles the smarts to realize that Mackendrick's solution to this film's problems was to add sped up chase scenes, a cloying theme song, and a new voice-over by Jonathan Winters as "Dad", who's credited with writing all his own lines (what Patton Oswalt calls "punch-up"). Winters' contributions include the very last punchline of the film: "...BAMBI... DUMBO... or MONDO CANE!"    Yup.

0.5/5

Half a star for Lionel Jeffries, the bulletheaded baddie from ROYAL FLASH, which was also bad but nowhere near this bad, who's onscreen for two minutes as the commander of a small airport who is inexplicably a Nazi. Yes, that's the one good part. 

[zombie no.one]

sounds like a 60s WEEKEND AT BERNIES on LSD 

[M.10rda]

WEEKEND AT BERNIE'S is a lot more fun, funnier, and better made!

THE KIYOTO CONNECTION (1973):
I started watching this under the assumption it was maybe Brucesploitation or something. I did DL the file from Soulseek at some point though so who knows what I was thinking.

For fifteen minutes we watch a dopey Japanese cabbie try and fail to pick up girls in what appears to be a nicely shot comedy. Then he drives to the Kiyoto airport and Christina Lindberg from THRILLER: A CRUEL PICTURE gets in his cab and won't leave. They make cute (he knows no Swedish and she knows no Japanese) and both the cabbie and the viewer presumes she's just a cheerful hooker. Just when I thought I'd discovered another flick that Tarantino ripped off (for TRUE ROMANCE in this case), the cabbie takes Christina home, beats her, sexually assaults her, then keeps her in bondage for most of the rest of the movie.  Because Japanese sex movie.

KIYOTO CONNECTION isn't very graphic but it's still gross and depressing. The filmmakers have some pretty objectionable ideas about male/female relationships. They clearly want us to sympathize w/ the cabbie but he's just a mean-spirited incel creep who shows no ability to empathize w/ his captive, who he claims to love. I kept hoping Lindberg would go all "One-Eye" on the dude at the end but instead she develops Stockholm Syndrome ("Kiyoto Syndrome"  ?  ) for him. (She's also assaulted a second time by a group of hipsters later in the film, ugh.)

So of course it was all a misunderstanding and the Yakuza is driving around Kiyoto looking for Lindberg and one keeps hoping they'll serve up violent comeuppance to the cabbie at the end. They start to and then they get busted by undercover popo. All cabbie gets is a bloody nose.

1/5 AVOID.

[LilCerberus]

Tonight's Stinker
Italian Spiderman
https://youtu.be/RDB0HcHVw-I?si=KbFLlut4dEcwD5JC

Ugh... I don't know how to describe this...
A spoof of low budget super hero movies....

[zombie no.one]

Tonight's Stinker
Italian Spiderman
https://youtu.be/RDB0HcHVw-I?si=KbFLlut4dEcwD5JC

Ugh... I don't know how to describe this...
A spoof of low budget super hero movies....

at least it spawned one of the all time great reaction gifs...