Last night I wasn’t in the mood to sleep, so I caught a showing of “The Eighteenth Angel” on some movie channel or another.
It was supposed to be a horror film, I suppose, but it was just absolutely hilariously dreadful.
Maximilian Schell played the evil Father somebody-or-other who was working diligently to bring Satan into the world with the face of an angel. To do this, he had to accumulate 18 angelic faces; when the 18th angel was ready, Satan would pick a body to inhabit so he could wreak his evil throughout the world and get away with it because he looked like, you guessed it, an angel.
Rachel Leigh Cook plays a girl, Lucy, who wants to be a model. Her mother has just committed “suicide” after interviewing the evil Father Whatsisname. Lucy is “discovered” by some famous photographer and invited to Italy to train for 3 months. Since her father won’t let her out of his sight, the bad guys lure him to Italy with a job project.
All kinds of eerie suspenseful things happen, including one character, Maria Elena, who gets murdered by a horde of evil Satan cats.
At the end of the movie, Lucy is in a hospital bed and she’s flatlined. Her father is mourning her death, when the monitor blips. He runs out of the room to find a doctor, while the room starts shaking. A crucifix falls off the wall and shatters some things on a table. Lucy levitates off of the bed and her body is posed in the shape of the Christ on the cross. Her father comes back in and is hugging her; Lucy is planning to murder him with the scalpel she levitates off the table until she hears him say that he’ll never let anyone hurt her again. She smiles, and her eyes turn evil yellow for a moment. Yes, folks, Lucy is now SATAN!
The movie would have been unbearable if it hadn’t been so dang funny!
Any others of this nature that I need to watch? Seriously–I was laughing until I cried last night.
Well, Night of the Lepus, about a horde of giant killer rabbits … no kidding … it’s good for a fit of giggles every time you see some bewildered bunny rabbits being herded about onscreen, photographed to look large and menacing. Only they don’t look the least bit menacing, or all that large.
I will say this again…Satan’s Cheerleaders . John Ireland, John Carradine, and Yvonne DeCarlo as satanists kidnapping the local HS Cheerleading Squad for a virgin sacrifice…too bad the only virgin amongst them is the ditsy coach! Plus there are a few other fun surprises in store. It is such a hoot to see.
Lifeforce . The only movie I have been to where the packed movie theater started spontaneously MSTing the movie. This was 1985, long before I saw MST3K (don’t remember when it started). There is a very nice looking lady space vampire who didn’t understand the concept of clothing, which kind of made up for some of the silly bits.
Ken Russell’s version of Tommy had me laughing throughout. Russell had no discernable sense of humor and hadn’t the slighest bit of imagination, so everything was hysterically literal. The images were hilariously wrong.
Plan 9 from Outer Space. I don’t have to say much, but each viewing reveals something awful that I hadn’t noticed before. (Note, for instance, the way the detective using his gun as a pointing device.)
The most recent one I can think of is Van Helsing. Gods it was SO bad that me and the wife were howling with laughter. Especially the frequent Igor “Yessss Masssterrr…” comments. ROFLMAO!
Wow, I was going to respond just for this movie, which is weird as it’s an obscure one.
I was in college (about 7 years after the movie was in theaters) and someone brings this tape to the lounge that he vaguely remembers having really liked when he saw it years ago in the theater. And we watched it, MSTing it all the way through, interrupted with jabs at the guy who had brought it in the first place.
I think the unclothed, space vampiress might have skewed his perception during those preteen years.
“Beowulf” with Christopher Lambert was laughably bad. Actually, my friend and I knew that when we saw it in the video store. But we saw Lambert was in it, which just made it that much funnier. We kept throwing in lots of Highlander references in there. God that movie was terrible!
Lifeforce is forgivable because it had a naked vampire hotty wandering around for half the movie. However, Head of the Family is so bad it gets funny and almost to ‘not funny’ on the scale…I think there’s a reason those films went straight to video.
Trivia: This is the movie playing on the TV in the Oracle’s apartment in The Matrix, while the children sit around doing various things. My husband the sci-fi/horror movie geek identified it immediately.
