I am at this moment watching Roger Corman’s take on The Fantastic Four(1994) on Roku on B-Movie TV. It is cheesy, cheap…and it has heart. It is the only version that gets the origin right, btw.
Last night, my daughter (30 years old) picked the movie for the family. She picked The Nest, starring Jude Law. She picked it because it was described as a “thriller”.
Well, thrilling it was not. In fact, nothing happens throughout the whole movie. The movie is very attractive and well-acted, but nothing ever happens. What little does happen makes no sense.
We ended up watching it to the end thinking that, surely something would eventually happen. I mean, why did the dead horse start breathing? Who opened the front door? What was the point of all this?
It has very positive reviews on IMDB an even has won awards at festivals. They must have watched a different movie than we did.
As for the “is it a good bad movie or a bad good movie” dichotomy, I have that problem with Flash Gordon (1980). As pretty as Sam Jones was, I’ve seen better acting from a cigar-store Indian. OTOH, everybody else more than makes up for him: Max von Sydow, Topol, Timothy Dalton, and the always delightful Brian Blessed as Voltan. He doesn’t just chew the scenery, he swallows it, craps it out in a big pile, and then plants a tree in it. Why this man hasn’t been given a knighthood is beyond me.
Flash Gordon’s big problem was that it wholeheartedly embraced the aesthetics of the pulp sci-fi of the Thirties and Forties. But 1980s audiences, used to Star Wars and other such more or less realistic sci-fi, didn’t quite know what to make of it.
1981’s Clash of the Titans had a similar problem by using Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion animation techniques from the 50s when the special effects of Star Wars outshone them by far. It is not a surprise it ended being Harryhausen’s last film.
I am not sure Clash of the Titans qualifies for this thread though because it is actually a fairly entertaining film despite its outdated special effects.
I greatly prefer it to the CGI-overladen remake of 2010.
Agree entirely. I’m a big Harryhausen fan. And the effects weren’t outdated – Lucas has stated that he made Empire Strikes Back, with its stop-motion AT-ATs and Taun-Tauns as a tribute to the older stop-motion movies (although he didn’t explicitly name Harryhausen), and he used precisely the same techniques, although mixing in “go motion” to blur the “strobing” and using other techniques.
My complaint is that a lot of Harryhausen’s effects actually looked worse than movies he made much earlier. The matted flying seagull at the beginning looks awfully jerky and slipshod. So do the compositions of the Kraken swimming in the ocean. Compare the film to his earlier Greek Mythology film, Jason and the Argonauts, and it mostly comes in second-best.
But the film has by far the best cast of any of his films, with proven stars Burgess Meredith, Ursula Andress, Maggie Smith, Claire Bloom, and, of course, Sir Laurence Olivier, along with newcomer Harry Hamlin. So it was an appropriate send-off. Beverly Cross’ script (he also wrote Jason and the Argonauts) was great, and he actually included far more of the original myths than you’d expect.
To stick with the restrictions of the OP. Like others I just had to keep watching Valerian because it was so bad. That’s also why I watched all of Prometheus, I kept thinking “Oh, god, this is so stupid, but it can’t stay this dumb, can it?” and but it did.
That’s different from how I watched Toxic Avenger which I just happened to watch at an age where I felt such a movie was cool.
Ridley Scott is one of my favorite directors and Alien is one of my favorite movies. My impression is that since his trilogy he keeps reaching for theme at the expense of plot. But he’s not succeeding at establishing theme, either. He starts playing with religion and then drops it without explanation. Androids are an exploration of humanity, but really not. One very much gets the idea that he is trying desperately to say something of substance, but has nothing to say. So yes, Prometheus was a mess, but worth it for Michael Fassbender. I would also designate many of the characters in that film as Too Stupid To Live.
Gotta agree with this.
Like some others here, though, I didn’t much care for Alien , aside from the awesome imagery. I thought too many of those characters were Too Stupid to Live (or, as my wife Pepper Mill puts it, Outta the Gene Pool!). I much prefer Jerome Bixby’s 1950s film It! The Terror from Beyond Space which Alien liberally ripped off. even though Paul Blaisdell’s suits can’t compare with H.R. Giger’s designs (especially when the damned mask wouldn’t fit on Ray “Crash” Corrigan’s head, and his chin poked out through the mouth-hole), and even though the 1950s attitudes towards women, smoking, and firearms are painful to watch*, the plot made more sense and was more straightforward.
- Hey, at least they had women – plural – in the crew, even if they did make them serve the coffee. They can’t be blamed, perhaps, for not having the foresight to foresee how unhealthy smoking was, but carrying and using firearms on a space ship(!) is insane in any era. And they weren’t the only movie at the time to do that.
Fatman - a Christmas movie starring Mel Gibson as Santa Claus.
Spoilers A-Plenty. You were warned.
In all honesty, you’re better off being spoiled than to watch this travesty.
Holy shit, what a fucking mess. It stars Mel Gibson as a crotchety, gun-collecting Santa who gets a subsidy from the US gov’t for his present deliveries (I still don’t understand how that works). Since so many children are ‘naughty’ these days and get no presents, his subsidy dropped too low to pay the bills, and he decides to take a contract with the US military for the elves to fulfill - control panels for fighter jets.
Dear God this is horrific. There is a stereotypical spoiled-rich-kid-Willie-Wonka-reject, who has Walton Goggins on speed-dial. Goggins is a hit-man who hates Santa, because Santa couldn’t bring his parents back for Christmas when he was little. Goggins and the spoiled rich kid kidnap and threaten a 12-year-old girl with car-battery torture to give up her first prize status in the Science Fair. It’s as bad as it sounds.
Later, the spoiled rich kid contracts with Goggins to kill Santa, since he got coal this Christmas. Goggins drives through the movie on the trail of Santa-Mel, peeing into bottles, playing with a hamster, and killing almost everyone he meets.
Goggins finds Santa-Mel’s workshop and kills the military men who are stationed there because of the military contract. He goes on an ineffectual elf-killing rampage, but Elf #7 initiates, “Barricade Protocol Yellow” and the elves are told to take refuge in the domestic wing. They’ve drilled for a workplace shooting, I guess. All this ruckus interrupts Santa-Mel’s post-coital cuddle, who then arms himself (with Mrs Santa’s help) and he goes forth to do battle with Goggins. “I’VE COME FOR YOUR HEAD, FAT MAAAAAANNN!!!” (Incidentally, Mel is at his normal weight throughout.)
“You think you’re the first? You think I got this job because I’m fat and jolly?” So, it isn’t unusual for people to come gunning for Santa-Mel. I have to say this is the one part of the movie I find believable. I totally think if Mel Gibson were Santa, people would come gunning for him. At this point, I wasn’t even sure who to root for.
The gunfight in the snow that follows would look more at home in the movie, “Fargo” than a friggin’ Santa Claus movie. Shot to pieces, they engage in a hand-to-hand fight in which Goggins is bludgeoned with firewood, Santa-Mel is stabbed brutally and repeatedly, then as he lay in the snow helpless, he is shot in the head. Goggins is shot by Mrs. Claus from a distance, but he chases after her and shoots her in the back before she manages to get the drop on him and gun him down with some large-caliber gun. But thanks to the magic of Santa-Mel, he recovers. Goggins, not so much.
Finally, spoiled rich kid is interrupted by a visit from Santa-Mel and Mrs Claus when he tries to poison his sickly but vicious Grandma. The poisoning is averted, and spoiled rich kid is made to look at the head-wound Goggins gave him. He then threatens to come back if Grandma is hurt, or if the kid acts up again. “The Fat Man has his eye on you, kid.”
Stuff I noted and/or thought about:
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The elves don’t have names, just numbers.
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Santa-Mel gets shot by, “a couple of kids with deer rifles” during his Christmas flight. It has no lasting consequences, it simply acts as another example of bad kids. We ARE treated to a scene with him rinsing the bullet wound in his side with rubbing alcohol. In a different scene, he takes target practice on some cans. Still later, Santa-Mel works over a heavy bag in the barn. Ho Ho Ho. . .
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The whole military angle goes nowhere, except that the elves do a good job and Santa-Mel gets a check that makes everything better. You would think that having Santa’s elves making military hardware would have some sort of moral or payoff later on, but no. They just got paid.
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This movie has rather a high body count for a Santa Claus movie. I’m not sure even, “Die Hard”, another traditional Christmas movie, had a higher body count.
What the FUCK kind of brown-acid nightmare is this!? I don’t know what movie they thought they were making. Did anyone want a postmodern Santa story? A shitty assassin story with Santa? A black comedy, devoid of ALL comedy? It’s Fargo, with Santa and utterly without humor.
Good God, the entertainment wasteland caused by the COVID pandemic is an underappreciated side-effect of this disease. I can’t wait until the normal shitty stuff is back. The batshit crazy shitty stuff is wearing on me.
In other words, the perfect movie for Mel Gibson.
You made this up.
Exactly my thought as I read it!
I didn’t belive it either. Wow.
Oh dear, I just watched the trailer. How can this thing exist? How did nobody involved with this take a long hard look in the mirror and think, what the hell am I doing? Seriously, that whole thing looks like a Rainier Wolfcastle film on the Simpsons…
Uwe Boll wasn’t even involved; how could this have happened?
I should have posted the trailer with my original post, thanks for the reminder.
Here’s the Fatman trailer. May God have mercy on your soul.
A Christmas Prince was one I somehow watched all the way through – and to add to the cliches, scheming wicked relatives, and royals who speak with impeccable British accents!
From the Vogue article:
" If escapist art takes you far, far away from real life, A Christmas Prince delivers, and then some. You’ll find yourself asking so many questions about the characters, their fates, their motivations, ensembles, hairstyles, elocution, and mental health, that you will certainly be transported to a world where a journalist with big dreams can marry a prince of what is likely an offshore tax haven."