RECENT VIEWINGS (Bad Movie Thread!)

[RCMerchant]

SERIAL MOM (1994)

Am I in the minority here? Is it just me who doesn't like any John Waters film?
I've seen MULTIPLE MANIACS (1970), CRY BABY (1990), CECIL B. DEMENTED (2000), and now this one. I found it boring, predictable, and with the humor level of a 12 year old. Painfully unfunny. Maybe I'm missing something.

[M.10rda]

I think your feelings are valid and permissible.   

SERIAL MOM is one of his better ones and one that generally seems to please most viewers, so if you didn't like it, I guess there's little point in recommending DESPERATE LIVING, FEMALE TROUBLE, or the original HAIRSPRAY. Those are the ones I like most. Oh, A DIRTY SHAME is also a good time... possibly.

[zombie no.one]

also can't seem to get into any of his films. just the general vibe / ambiance, irks me somehow... one of my brothers is a massive JW fan and has met  (fan stalked) him a few times...

[RCMerchant]

^ Yeah...his stuff is supposed to be funny or shocking. Maybe in 1959.... and Divine eating dog s**t doesn't make you a good film maker- just tasteless.
Maybe his tweaking the nose at accepted film norms  was trendy in 1970, but I find it merely boring and irritating.

[chainsaw midget]

I just watched the new Nosferatu. 

Extremely disappointing.  For one thing, they ditched the iconic design for something a lot more plain and boring.  A guy in a fur coat with a bushy mustache, and he... talked... very... slow... with... a... very... thick... accent. He didn't even have the iconic two front teeth. 

One of my biggest issues was just how incredibly dark the whole thing was.  You could barely see what was going on in some scenes.  The scene that did take place in the light, were completely desaturated and drained of any life of color they had. 

Now, I know this is a remake, and a copy of Dracula, but the whole thing just felt like it's been done and they were just going through the motions.  There was no twist, no new angles, or actors taking things in a different direction. 

I actually started nodding off a few times in the theater. 

[Dr. Whom]

Lips of Blood/Lèvres de sang (1975)

At a reception a man sees a photo of a ruined castle, which brings back childhood memories of meeting a mysterious girl there. The image of that girl now haunts his imagination and he desperately tries to find her.

A pretty standard erotic vampire movie by Jean Rollin. Apparently this was rereleased with hardcore scene a year later.
This is very nearly a good movie. It makes absolutely no sense, but the protagonist's quest through a deserted nighttime Paris had a dreamlike coherence. The problem is that the whole thing is built around the main actor, who clearly thought this would be his breakout role, and he is just awful.

[M.10rda]

Chainsaw, I was glad to read your review and see that someone else had the same experience and criticisms of the new NOSFERATU. If I'm going to watch a slow and mostly uneventful vampire movie, I'll go with a Jean Rollin flick any day! 

[chainsaw midget]

And how many time did they do that "Character suddenly wakes up in shock only to realize within 30 seconds that they weren't dreaming and that stuff actually did happen"?

[Trevor]

SERIAL MOM (1994)

Am I in the minority here? Is it just me who doesn't like any John Waters film?
I've seen MULTIPLE MANIACS (1970), CRY BABY (1990), CECIL B. DEMENTED (2000), and now this one. I found it boring, predictable, and with the humor level of a 12 year old. Painfully unfunny. Maybe I'm missing something.

I liked CRY BABY and Hairspray, none of the others really.

[LilCerberus]

Tonight's Stinker
The Unknown Terror (1957)
https://youtu.be/MhJ1qFLyoBE?si=ZWI1TFWQl_uvE61S

A famous explorer disappears, & his brother in law has been searching for him, and it's all over the news....
The news attracts a mutual friend, a former spelunker with a limp....
A calypso singer plays a song about the cave he was looking for, and a south American Indian is supposed to explain the song, but chickens out...
After accepting a bribe, the indian agrees to to show the two men & a woman to his village, where they're not to happy to see him back....
The trio moves on to the lair of an evil mad scientist, who's been working with a fungus, & encounter local superstitions, men in monster suits and the cave they were looking for, NONE of which is ever explained to any real satisfaction.....

[M.10rda]

KRAVEN THE HUNTER (2024):
This made no sense when we tried to watch this around Christmas and tapped out after a decent first 10 minutes and then a grueling, WHOLLY unnecessary 25-minute flashback to Kraven's childhood. Then I learned that Aaron Taylor-Johnson has been tapped to be the next James Bond and I guess KRAVEN makes more sense as a 2+ hour demo tape for ATJ to do parkour, leap from tall heights, chase vehicles on foot, cling to the sides of vehicles or trail behind vehicles on rope ladders, flip off or out of vehicles as they crash, and all manner of other unrealistic things that Bond might do. I think ATJ honestly looks a little goofy in close-up - too earnest yet a little vacant, in the manner of Ben Stiller satirizing Tom Cruise - but he looks credible in wide shot doing all the action stuff. 

I suppose KRAVEN might also serve as an audition to direct a future Bond movie for J.C. Chandor, who used to direct serious films about people having conversations. Oddly Chandor handles the action in KRAVEN pretty well, including some light gore during JOHN WICK-style mayhem, but all of the (plentiful) long dialogue scenes are stultifying in extremis. The recurring theme from many previous Sony adaptations of Marvel Comics is the bizarre attempt to obfuscate the source material. Kraven Junior assumes the mantle from Kraven Senior in comics, so having Russell Crowe play Sr. makes sense until you realize he's just plain old "Nikolai Kravenov", a Russian mobster whose conflict w/ Jr. is strictly movie melodrama w/ nothing to do w/ superheroism or supervillainy. The big bad is Alessandro Nivola as the Rhino and he does actually go full Rhino @ the end and looks pretty close to what the Rhino looks like in comics, for all of 5 minutes... but honestly the film would've been a lot more lean and less tiresome if Crowe had just played the Rhino and we'd done away w/ all the family BS. There's also a supporting villain named the Foreigner who, like Madame Web, has appeared in about half a dozen Spider-Man comics in 40 years... so he's a cool deep cut on one hand, but on the other hand he's just a generic guy in a black jumpsuit.

Also like MADAME WEB and other Sony/Marvel movies, KRAVEN seems like a prequel to future franchise films, presumably where he hunts Michael Keaton's Vulture et al. At the very end of the film he finally puts on the iconic lion-pelt vest that he wears in the comic, then sits down and looks at himself in the mirror #thrillsville'24 - roll credits. KRAVEN will likely never get a sequel as it grossed only half of its production budget, but presumably AJT's future as James Bond remains intact. I recommend that AJT lose that dumb mullet, though!

2.5/5

Ridiculously surnamed Kravenovs that appear in this film include Nikolai, Sergei, and Dmitri... would it have killed them to give the audience a few laughs and hire Matt Berry for a day to cameo as "Uncle Lazlo" from the British isles?

[M.10rda]

BREEDERS aka DEADLY INSTINCTS (1997):
Understandably confusable with BREEDERS (1986) which I haven't seen though which seems to have a very similar plot, this BREEDERS (aka DEADLY INSTINCTS) seems like a very typical slice of 90s cheese. Bad movies from the 60s, 70s, and 80s all have very distinct bouquets and flavors, if you will, and I can appreciate those on their own merits or lack of merits. But I came of age watching many, many bad movies of the 90s, and to my mind, most of them just congeal into a single homogenous, amorphous mass of indigestible lard. B/DI isn't the worst I've seen, yet all the ways its bad are ways in which countless other 90s movies are bad. As a result, not that interesting!

In what I am pretty sure is the same plot of the 80s BREEDERS, a generic Xenomorph clone is abducting ladies to its sewer lair, where it menaces them before it covers them in a sheet of white goo. (Ahem.) Meanwhile a "Space Girl" (as she is named in the credits) wearing a vinyl goth outfit cowers and sympathizes with the victims but doesn't actually do anything to help them. There are humans on the surface trying to investigate, including a meatheaded hero unironically named "Ash"  and his annoying blonde girlfriend, as well as a bunch of cops led by a chief detective who (to his credit) chews ev-uh-ree sin-gle syllable of his dialogue and all available scenery in an attempt to steal the movie. Alas, there's little to steal!

Because this is a bad ALIEN/S ripoff from the 90s, you will collect only the most marginal payout for placing a bet that a supporting character will sacrifice themselves in a self-ignited inferno while cheekily telling off the Xenomorph clone. There is precious little that would make anyone remember B/DI, except for this: upon research into the quaint, rustic setting and the suspicious "English people doing American accents" quality to most of the performances, I discovered that B/DI was produced in Isle of Man, a small island country near the U.K. that exists independently from the U.K.! Now I'm fairly certain I've never consciously seen a film produced in or by the Isle of Man before, because, I confess, I don't even think I knew that the Isle of Man was an independent nation w/ a film industry until I looked up this movie! But it is, and they are capable of making ALIEN-knockoffs just as mediocre-to-bad as any other country. Let the record stand!

2/5
Also w/ an appealing middle-aged redheaded woman named "Roper". Roper?!

[zombie no.one]

BREEDERS aka DEADLY INSTINCTS (1997):
Understandably confusable with BREEDERS (1986) which I haven't seen though which seems to have a very similar plot, this BREEDERS (aka DEADLY INSTINCTS) seems like a very typical slice of 90s cheese. Bad movies from the 60s, 70s, and 80s all have very distinct bouquets and flavors, if you will, and I can appreciate those on their own merits or lack of merits. But I came of age watching many, many bad movies of the 90s, and to my mind, most of them just congeal into a single homogenous, amorphous mass of indigestible lard. B/DI isn't the worst I've seen, yet all the ways its bad are ways in which countless other 90s movies are bad. As a result, not that interesting!

In what I am pretty sure is the same plot of the 80s BREEDERS, a generic Xenomorph clone is abducting ladies to its sewer lair, where it menaces them before it covers them in a sheet of white goo. (Ahem.) Meanwhile a "Space Girl" (as she is named in the credits) wearing a vinyl goth outfit cowers and sympathizes with the victims but doesn't actually do anything to help them. There are humans on the surface trying to investigate, including a meatheaded hero unironically named "Ash"  and his annoying blonde girlfriend, as well as a bunch of cops led by a chief detective who (to his credit) chews ev-uh-ree sin-gle syllable of his dialogue and all available scenery in an attempt to steal the movie. Alas, there's little to steal!

Because this is a bad ALIEN/S ripoff from the 90s, you will collect only the most marginal payout for placing a bet that a supporting character will sacrifice themselves in a self-ignited inferno while cheekily telling off the Xenomorph clone. There is precious little that would make anyone remember B/DI, except for this: upon research into the quaint, rustic setting and the suspicious "English people doing American accents" quality to most of the performances, I discovered that B/DI was produced in Isle of Man, a small island country near the U.K. that exists independently from the U.K.! Now I'm fairly certain I've never consciously seen a film produced in or by the Isle of Man before, because, I confess, I don't even think I knew that the Isle of Man was an independent nation w/ a film industry until I looked up this movie! But it is, and they are capable of making ALIEN-knockoffs just as mediocre-to-bad as any other country. Let the record stand!

2/5
Also w/ an appealing middle-aged redheaded woman named "Roper". Roper?!

I just watched about half of it on youtube... yeah weird variety of non-accents. the redhead you mentioned sounds more irish? the blonde lead is (or at least was) quite well known in uk as a soap star / tv personality... didn't recognise anyone else. fairly diverting crap though, some cringe dialogue!

Isle Of Man has an annual bike race where people just bomb it round the island. there's always insane crashes and deaths 

also looked on imdb and 'Space Girl' was murdered by her real life boyfriend shortly qfter filming this

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kadamba_Simmons

:(

[M.10rda]

Ohhhhhhhhh no.... Space Girl!!!  

There's probably no good time to be murdered, but immediately following playing the role of "Space Girl" in BREEDERS/DEADLY INSTINCTS has to be a worse time to go than many...!

[zombie no.one]

aye sadly reminiscent of the murder of Dominique Dunne from POLTERGEIST... strangely I was looking up the details of that one recently. the boyfriend (who beat her to death unprovoked) barely served any time and landed a job as head chef in a flashy restaurant on release from jail.

sorry for the morbid derail...