Despite that, I have mixed feelings about this show. Mike Stoklasa, Jay Bauman, and Rich Evans have a very caustic "fuck everybody" style and I'm increasingly less in the mood for that these days. These guys started back when a big part of Youtube movie culture was finding "the worst movie ever". It is their work that led me to review crap like Jack and Jill because I thought bad movies would make for good content.
As a whole, movie criticism seems to be moving away from "so bad it's good" as an ethos. The Razzies got a lot of shit this year for naming the Worst Movie of 2019. Personally I have tried to cut down on the irony. If I like something, I like it for it's qualities. Even if those qualities are perhaps an unusual form of "good". Last year's Cats is a movie I actually recommend. Yeah, it is terrible on most levels but also it is also a legitimately unique cinematic experience, even if not for the reasons the creators intended. That is more positive than negative. Plus, it is clear through these last ten years that RedLetterMedia got the Star Wars Prequels wrong. They might be "bad" for these aging nerds but they're also beloved by a fanbase who have gained a lot of joy from them.
I will religiously keep watching Best of the Worst and Half in the Bag the moment those shows update. However, as for Mr. Plinkett, I can't watch him anymore. I don't care what toxic shit he has to say about the new Star Wars movies anymore. Still, as I whole, I like RedLetterMedia. They have helped me find a lot of legitimately great movies even while they have gone out of their way to find nothing but terrible things. I discovered Xtro, Chopping Mall, and Brian Yuzna's delightful Faust: Love of the Damned thanks to these guys. So this month I set to see how many of their "Worst" movies were actually great.
Five of my Top 9 were featured on Best of the Worst or Half in the Bag. The other four are just movies I saw because. I'll include show links to RedLetterMedia's opinions on the movies too.
Turns out Naughty Dog did not invent the idea of the mushroom zombie. Actually, Toho beat them to it by about fifty years. Matango was here in the west as “Attack of the Mushroom People”. Matango is probably the more accurate title in terms of what you should expect. You’d think a movie directed by Ishiro Honda, the master of the increasingly silly 60s kaiju genre, about killer mushroom people would be incredibly silly. Matango is not. This is a gritty slow burn of a horror movie.
Unfortunately, I was not able to find the original Japanese version of the film. Amazon Prime only has the English dubbed Mushroom People version. Frankly, Prime did this movie wrong. Ishiro Honda had in mind a very serious psychological thriller. However, since I only have the English dub track, I lose whatever emotion he had in mind. Instead I have these American voice actors hamming it up like Godzilla is fighting King Kong. I love a cheesy kaiju dub. I grew up on them. But Matango deserves a language option. Plus, even though there is a Japanese language BluRay available, it appears Prime scanned the movie in from a very dusty print. So, the streaming version looks like VHS quality in widescreen. Get you shit together, Jeff Bezos.
However, in spite of seeing Matango in perhaps the worst possible way, I think this movie is really interesting. The plot is very familiar, let me say: Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip. They started from this tropic port, aboard this tiny ship. The mate was a mighty sailing man. The skipper brave and sure. Five passengers set sail that day for a three hour tour, a three hour tour. The weather started getting rough, the tiny ship was tossed–
...You get the idea, it is exactly the plot of Gilligan's Island. As far as I can tell that is a complete coincidence despite both coming out within a year of each other. But in this version everybody are total assholes to each other. And this island is not full of hilarious sitcom plots but a mysterious strand of mushrooms growing everywhere. A previous shipwreck’s notes calls the fungus “Matango”. Ominously, things did not end well for the other ship. The cast of Matango then breaks down over the 88 minute runtime, slowly losing their minds and submitting to the mindbending allure of the Matango mushroom.
Only at the end do mushroom zombies attack, as promised. They are well worth the wait.
On June 22nd, director Joel Schumacher passed away. Schumacher was a proud, openly gay director back when that was not very common. He made of a lot of interesting movies, not necessarily great ones. But that's not really a weakness, Schumacher was happy to make schlock in a refreshingly unpretentious way. Batman Forever and Batman & Robin were mocked for decades as the worst superhero blockbusters of all time – but I personally love them. If you go through his filmography you'll find a lot of solid gems: The Lost Boys, Flatliners, Falling Down, Phone Booth, The Phantom of the Opera, and A Time to Kill. Yes, he also made the single worst movie of the entire 80s, St. Elmo’s Fire, but I can forgive that.
Joel Schumacher’s death made me sad so I needed to watch something of his to honor his memory. I chose The Number 23, which was a terrible, surprisingly boring movie. That was a mistake, so, the next night I watched a different movie, 8mm.
8mm is a hard-boiled mystery thriller led by Nicolas Cage. This is pre-irony Nicolas Cage, before movies like The Wicker Man destroyed his A-lister status. But even if want your wacky Nic Cage overacting moment, you’ll get it by the third act once he finally cracks. The plot of 8mm involves Nic Cage investigating a reel of amateur hardcore pornography that might be a true example of the legendary “snuff film”. Along the way he runs into a host of sleazy character actors like James Gandolfini, Joaquin Phoenix, Peter Stormare, Catherine Keener, Anthony Heald, and even Norman Reedus in one scene. By sheer power of this cast, 8mm cannot be an uninteresting watch.
I won’t call 8mm any kind of masterpiece, that isn’t what you expect out of this director anyway. But Joel Schumacher is doing great work with a pretty shitty script here. The plot is full of pretty gross judgments on S&M fans and sex workers. At least the actors sell the sleaze well. 8mm also looks great. There’s all kinds of dim lighting and dull colors. It really sells the uncomfortable, dirty vibe of this movie. David Fincher could not have made this movie look better.
7. Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 (1987), dir. Lee Harry
The "GARBAGE DAY!!" movie. That's a classic meme from back to the very beginning of Youtube. It's up there with "OH. MY. GOOOOOD." from Troll 2 and "You're tearing me apart, Lisa!!" from The Room. It's a great clip. It is hilarious. But is it actually bad acting? How good is the rest of the movie around this?
Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 is only about 60% of a movie. The other 40% is a shameless clip show of all the best scenes from Silent Night, Deadly Night 1. You'd think this would be a negative, but I think it's efficient. Both movies have basically identical plots anyway. The first movie has Billy Chapman (Robert Brian Wilson) as a deranged psycho killer in a Santa costume. The second movie is about his little brother Ricky (Eric Freeman), who at first is a deranged psycho killer out of a Santa costume. But then in the climax he puts on the Santa suit. You know what you're here for, and it is hilarious gore gags and murders. The clip show portion of this movie gives you everything you want from the first one. Nobody needs to watch Silent Night, Deadly Night 1 now, Silent Night, Deadly Night 2 covers everything for you.
Now as for Eric Freeman and "GARBAGE DAY!!". I don't actually think Eric Freeman is that bad in this movie. He's doing a lot of 'eyebrows acting', which is distracting once you notice it. But as Ricky, he can be quiet and menacing. Then in other scenes he's wonderfully hammy. I'd also point out that "GARBAGE DAY!!" is not a serious scene. This is a moment where Ricky is going on a rampage and the goal is black comedy. Just a minute earlier he electrocuted a guy with a car battery until the dude's eyeballs exploded. There's a kill earlier in this movie with an umbrella. Silent Deadly, Night Part 2 is a slasher, but it's not supposed to be scary. This is lowest common denominator, cheap seats exploitation thrills. You're supposed to laugh at this.
I think on that level, Eric Freeman is great in this movie. Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 kicks ass.
6. Mystics in Bali (1983), dir. H. Tjut Djalil
I cannot find too much information on Mystics in Bali. That should not be too much of a surprise since it's an exploitation horror film from Indonesia. I'm going to base most of what I know on a really great Vice Foreign Film Club video from 2017. In the 80s the Indonesian film industry hit a kind of high water mark thanks to reduced censorship and a ripe international market for movies, especially weird horror. Mystics in Bali was part of a conscious effort to appeal to Westerners. It even stars a white America woman, Cathy Kean (Ilona Agathe Bastian).
Unfortunately, this B-movie scene in Indonesia ended in the 90s due to economic factors. Other media came in and the hunger for gross exploitation died down. Most of the great Indonesian horror films have been forgotten. That's really a shame because these movies are fucking crazy. They're full of unique imagery based on local legends. There's a lot of evil witches using black magic to make limbs fly off. If you've never seen an East Asian horror movie from this period, you have to do it. Mystics in Bali is only about 60% as weird as The Boxer's Omen, the Hong Kong movie I watched a few months ago. But even then, it's one of the wildest watches I've ever had. It is the kind of movie you want to tell strangers on the street about.
Mystics in Bali is about our dear Cathy and her Indonesian boyfriend, Mahendra (Yos Santo). Cathy wants to study local witchcraft, so Mahendra introduces her to The Queen of the Leák (Sofia W.D.). This starts weird enough when the Witch Queen has them dance together to turn into pigs. But then Cathy's body is possessed so her head separates from her body, dangling out her spine and organs. This flying head then travels to a pregnant woman to suck the fetus out between her legs. If you have seen another movie where a flying head goes down on a lady to drink her baby, please tell me all about it. Otherwise, you need to see Mystics in Bali right now.
5. Disco Godfather (1979), dir. J. Robert Wagoner
Rudy Ray Moore is the Disco Godfather, or if you prefer the alternate title, The Avenging Disco Godfather. He’s a former cop turned club owner. Once a night he shows up to boogie with a big wild grin and shout his catch-phrase over the mics, “PUT YOUR WEIGHT ON IT!!”. Unfortunately, his simple life of endless funk is interrupted by a new drug scourging the streets, “Angel Duss”. His nephew Bucky (Julius Carry) takes a bit too much Angel Dust on night, and loses his damn mind. After the Godfather watches Bucky hallucinate and rampage, he decides that Angel Dust must be stopped. So thus he begins his quest to destroy drugs, one sloppy kung-fu kick at a time.
One of the best movies of last year was Dolemite is My Name, where Eddie Murphy lovingly played Rudy Ray Moore. I had a lot of respect for Moore, but weirdly had never actually seen one of his movies. He’s a fascinating actor. He can’t fight but insists on doing very incompetent martial arts. His performance is more barking charisma than traditionally “good”. He’s at his worst when he’s trying to do a regular conversation. Yet, when he’s shouting for a criminal to give up the boss’s “NAME?!!!”, he's pure energy. Also, he can scream really well. That works to Disco Godfather’s benefits since the last fifteen minutes of this movie are a wild left turn into experimental horror. Disco Godfather is the glorious confluence of Lucio Fulci and Shaft.
So, if you need a movie with cheap kung-fu, an irreplaceable energy in its lead, and a voodoo angel of death appearing as the main character’s mother, Disco Godfather is your thing. It has everything a B-movie could need. Maybe there's more policing and War on Drugs shit than you'd want right now. But if the real cops were more like Rudy Ray Moore's fantasies, the world would be a better place. The cops listen to the community, arrest one of their own when he turns dirty, and treat victims of drugs with respect instead of murdering them. Rudy Ray Moore imagined a better world for us all.
4. Miami Connection (1987), dir. Richard Park & Y.K. Kim
Miami Connection is the unofficial River City Ransom movie. It operates in the same ridiculous logic of an NES beat-em-up. Everybody in the world knows martial arts. All conflicts, no matter how small, are solved by kickboxing in the streets. This is a universe where a club owner needs to use taekwondo to fire the house band. The poor replacement band, Dragon Sound, then are attacked by gang after gang of jealous rivals. Then ninjas on motorcycles show up swinging katanas around. So there’s your movie premise: a rock band has to fight motorcycle ninjas. Fucking 10/10, guys. All this action must naturally be accompanied by a rocking synth soundtrack.
Y.K. Kim wrote, co-directed, and starred in Miami Connection. It was his first and only movie. Kim was over forty when he decided he was going to be an action star. Next to the four twentysomethings in Dragon Sound, Kim’s wrinkles make him look much older. Worse, he can barely speak English, seemingly reading his lines phonetically. He’s no Jackie Chan, but he can kick. He knows some damn good taekwondo. By normal standards of filmmaking, Y.K. Kim does not belong on camera. But nothing about Miami Connection needed to be normal. It is a shame Y.K. Kim only was able to make one movie, but at least the one he made is a ton of fun.
Miami Connection is clearly an amateur production. Characters flub their lines and nobody thought to do a reshoot. The editing and the overall pace of the movie is bizarre. There are five guys in Dragon Sound, but only two, Mark (Kim) and John (Vincent Hirsch) are in every major scene. The other three float in and out of the movie. I can only guess they weren’t available at all times for the shoot. This means there is no real main character. There’s no arcs. Jim (Maurice Smith) gets the big drama moments, and he’s the worst actor in the movie by far. Thanks to a strange choices in padding, the movie will wander onto the beach or at a biker bar for no apparent reason. Those sections are montages of nothing in particular, just regular people Miami Connection felt like showing. So if you want a martial arts Terrence Malick movie, here you go.
I must have said this before, but unorthodox filmmaking does not need to be bad. Miami Connection is not an incompetent movie. It’s strange but also thrilling. Y.K. Kim and his pals really know their craft, and put on some solid martial arts scenes. Dragon Sound isn’t even a bad band. Their two songs, “Friends Forever” and “Against the Ninja” fucking slap, man. The movie even accomplishes some of its dramatic goals. The finale is meant to be this brutal slaughter, and it is terrifying. Miami Connection is a movie that works. I'd argue it does a better job of being an anti-violence violence story than Last of Us 2.
3. Tammy and the T-Rex (1994), dir. Stewart Rafill
According to director Stewart Rafill, Tammy and the T-Rex only happened because a T-Rex animatronic happened to land in his possession. It was apparently on its way to a theme park in Texas, and Rafill had a few weeks to cobble together a movie together around it. This animatronic actually is pretty impressive as a prop. It has articulation around the mouth, the eyes, and it can move in a lot of ways. Its legs obviously do not work, but that could be hidden. Used correctly, it could be very effective as a horror movie prop. But Rafill either didn’t have the budget or the time to make that work. So instead of a horror movie, he made the greatest dinosaur love story of all time.
Tammy or “Tanny” depending on the inconsistent credits (Denise Richards) is in love with Michael (Paul Walker). Unfortunately, Michael had a bad run-in with a lion. Then his day got worse when a mad scientist, Dr. Wachenstein (Terry Kiser) put his brain in a robot dinosaur body. (Exactly why Wachenstein does this is never explained, it appears he just likes dinosaurs and wanted one as a pet.) So now Tammy/Tanny and Michael have to overcome this prehistoric complication in their relationship. Tammy wants a man, but Michael wants to eat the school bullies. It’s the usual young love difficulties, you know?
Between Denise Richards and the robot dinosaur body, Michael is living out every dream I had as a kid.
Tammy and the T-Rex is a B-movie, it is a ridiculous movie, but this isn’t a “bad movie”. Stewart Rafill wanted to make a teen comedy with a killer dinosaur. He did that. If he was making a horror movie, maybe you could argue this is unsuccessful. But he knew what he was doing. This is hilarious and it was made to be so. It is audaciously stupid and wonderful for it. Denise Richards in this movie is making as much of a fashion
statement as Alicia Silverstone in Clueless. Tammy and the T-Rex is
thoroughly great.
There is also pretty solid gore thanks to a recent restoration of the movie by Vinegar Syndrome. (Previous versions edited the movie down to a PG-13.) Currently that version is up streaming on Shudder, so right now you are able to see a better version of the movie than RedLetterMedia could.
2. The King of Staten Island (2020), dir. Judd Apatow
As a society we have come together and conspired to make sure young adulthood is the single worst time of anybody's life. Finding a job sucks. Being really poor and lacking any stability or coherent direction for years sucks. The world just expects a twenty-two-year-old to suddenly know their entire life plan and how to do it? At twenty-two I didn't know shit. You can read all about it right here on this blog. Our culture is obsessed with personal responsibility so if you're lost as a young adult, it must be your fault. "You're lazy, you're entitled, you're stupid and worthless" is all I ever heard from the media when I graduated. Fuck you. I didn't ask to get thrown out on my ass during the worst economy in a century trying to make it into an online media industry that would be all but dead before I was thirty. Fuck you.
So... ...Um... ...I think I lost whatever point I was looking for.
The King of Staten Island is a movie all about that early adulthood sense of confusion. When I heard the words "directed by Judd Apatow" I had in my mind a light, enjoyable comedy that I could watch with my sister. Instead this movie is a brutally heavy 136 minute tale of directionless depression. My sister only could stand about 115 of those minutes and left. She hated it. I, however, loved it. Depressing dramas dressed as a comedy is my more my shit, I suppose. At least she liked Tammy and the T-Rex.
This is a big movie for Pete Davidson, an actor I have never encountered before. He stars and co-wrote the film, and made it a very personal project. It is really more Pete Davidson's movie than Judd Apatow's. Davidson is from Staten Island (which, yes, we in New Jersey do look down on), he actually has battled depression before, and his father was a firefighter who died in the line of duty. The line between Pete Davidson and his fictional character, Scott Carlin is blurry at best. Scott is begging for help throughout this movie. He tries to play off his own helplessness in some irony, but there's only so much irony you can hide behind. He is an incomplete person who has no idea what to do, and everybody has already given up on him.
The King of Staten Island is a very complicated movie. It's not all that funny but I found it very affecting in a raw kind of way. The characters feel like a real Staten Island family to me with all the faults and scars you'd expect. Not a lot actually happens in those 136 minutes. It's more six months of this dude's life, with the structure just as aimless as his existence. Scott bungles one lifeline after another, until finally just by sheer process of time, his wounds do not hurt as much as they did before. That isn't an easy story to tell or an easy story to summarize. But I guess that's what your twenties are. You have no fucking clue until you trip and fall backwards into real adulthood. Things never make sense but they start making a bit more sense after awhile.
1. Hard Target (1994), dir. John Woo
John Woo probably needs his own theme month. So does Jean-Claude Van Damme. Neither of these guys are as loved they should be. Sure, there’s tons of love for John Woo’s Face/Off thanks to Nic Cage and John Travolta fighting in one of the greatest ham battles in film history. Woo basically created the bullet-fu style, but how many movies of his other than Face/Off and Mission Impossible 2 can you name? Van Damme is well-remembered but a bit lost in the shuffle of 90s foreign action icons. There’s more to him than Universal Soldier and Time Cop. Hard Target is a great example of an unfairly forgotten action triumph.
Hard Target is set in New Orleans. It is about a weirdly depressing subject for a meathead action movie: homeless veterans. Van Damme plays the fabulously-named Chance Boudreaux, an ex-marine barely off the street. Turns out his veteran friends have been disappearing into the night. They all were lured into a Deadliest Game scenario led by Emil Fouchon (Lance Hendrickson) and his grinning sidekick, Pik van Cleef (The Mummy himself, Arnold Vosloo). When Natasha Binder (Yancy Butler) comes to town looking for her missing father, Chance is led directly into the line of fire with this ruthless gang of maniac millionaires. Then the dispiriting social commentary ends real fast to make room for forty-five minutes of amazing action spectacle after amazing action spectacle.
The only way to really sell you on the wonders that follow is just to summarize a few of them, which I’ll do now with three select moments. There are many more:
1. Chance is on his motorcycle being chased by a sedan of full bad guys. When his fuel tank is shot, what does he do? He turns around, rams the car with his motorcycle, leaps over the crash, and watches the explosion.
2. His dear Uncle Douvee (Wilford Brimley) joins the fight. Douvee isn't sitting on the sidelines, oh no. He's riding into battle on a horse and bow and arrow. So, you get the sight of a sixty-six-year-old Wilford Brimley riding a horse screaming with a bow in his hand and a massive explosion behind him. This may be the greatest moment of film history.
3. Chance tells Nat to close her eyes while they have an intimate moment. They don’t kiss, instead he grabs a rattlesnake off her shoulder, punches it in the face. Then rips its rattle off to kill one of Lance Hendrickson’s men. Lance Hendrickson then blows the poor snake's head off.
Hard Target fucking rules. This movie won’t even waste your time with a dumbass romance subplot because it needs to make room for more explosions in a parade float factory. Yes, the movie ends in a parade float factory. It's glorious. Everything about this movie is glorious.
Chance Boudreaux makes Bayou Billy look like Ignatius J. Reilly.
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Next month's theme: Spike Lee Movies. I never got around to seeing Do the Right Thing, so now I need to make a full commitment. I am putting in the goddamn work.
I absolutely hated Da 5 Bloods. I will not get into here. But I feel if I should be better versed in Spike Lee's work. This may not be a fun July but I should come out of it a more knowledgeable critic.
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