Tripping Stardust Through Fetid Film - Part I

When I began this site as a blog, it was more a way to document what I was watching. That opened the door to more serious film study, much in the same way as Thom Ryan does it, one year at a time, and with many thanks to 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, which, though it has some significant faults (Clueless?!), is a nice foundation for discovering a genre or era of interest that you may have never known you'd be into.

But 1001 Movies is certainly no guide to schlock cinema - thought one of those would be nice...

But I digress... For a while now I've begun to really start to appreciate the effort of all films. As Kurosawa said, "in my films there's really only two or three minutes of real cinema," and I believe that to be the case of most films. I try to see in every movie, whether it be Kubrick or Corman, something to appreciate.

And so appeared the extreme challenge to this theory with Hidden Phlegms, my page of really bad movies and what I had to say on the subject. From this comes Hecklefest, my weekly social adventure into a schlock-out with my cock out... except that I'm dressed and I'm sure the other guests appreciate that.

We watch bad movies, heckle them and drink. Usually the movies just hurt. Sometimes though, we find flecks of gold and after a recent wave of months of viewing, I though I'd boil and render that stench of over thirty films down for you into the cream of the schlock, touching a little on the Why-On-Earth this stuff is as worthy as it is:

Creepozoids (1987) Horror Sci-Fi: A roaringly popular 2.1 out of 10 on IMDb's user rating, the premise is simple. It's the post-apocalypse, people are scavengers, and the rain is really really dangerous. So dangerous that it's better to hole up in an abandoned research facility than to be outside melting in it. No you don't need to know what people drink to survive, that's not important. What's important is there's a big Alien-like monster goin' around eating people.

Best scene ever? Guy with a gun is surprised by the monster growling at the other end of the room, ready to consume his face. Guy with a gun runs at monster until monster can grapple him, throttle him around, give him shaken baby syndrome, and slam him against the terribly-lit ceiling over and over. We howled at the perfect mix of corn and cheese.

Budget - loooow lowlowlowlowlow. Dudes playing with latex in their spare time low. 15-year-old gaffer with three sets of gels low. Guys making movies 'after hours and weekends' on the sound stage low.

Inseminoid (1981) Horror Sci-Fi: Also a sci-fi, this one's hot because it's got a woman getting boinked by alien ding-dong, and it's not even Animé. We start off with a new spaceship captain, a wild-eyed psychonaut really, who breaks all the safety codes within two minutes when she makes the ship go into hyperspace without calculations or seatbelts. Her complete lack of safety protocol seems to somehow lead to some other chick getting totally nailed in her dreams, gettin preggers, and her first trimester is nesting on crack. Instead of tidying up a bit, she flips out and tries to kill everyone to protect her alien babies - all with her newfound super strength.

Best scene ever? The boinking. Hot high-art dream sequence with tetonays.

Budget - low. Underground mineshafts and small rooms make for sets that are detailed enough, though... obvious.

Commando (1985) Action Adventure Drama: That's right Schwarzenegger, (AND Alyssa Milano yeah) but now that it's been 20 years, hindsight turns this once-really-popular Action film into a painful shirtless display and the constant barrage of beatings from a big stick I like to call 'Suspension of Disbelief'.

Best scene ever? Oh I can't decide. Is it the climax, where dropping two or three claymores around the enemy's base perimeter causes everything to blow up, including the top of the wooden guard tower in the middle of the camp? Or is it more the moment where we realized that the black stewardess love interest could fly a plane? We were in awe at previously mentioned Suspension of Disbelief stick, until someone mentioned,"Guys, maybe she's actually a pilot?" We all stopped, looked within ourselves to find the budding misogynistic racism and burst out laughing, blaming it instead on the backwards 80s and her outfit - really not 'professional pilot' material.

Stop judging.

Stop.

Budget - You'd think big, and $10 million's pretty decent, but that exploding base looked chintzy, dude. Seriously.

Whoopie's most glorious mistake

Theodore Rex (1995) Action Comedy Family Sci-Fi: Even explaining this premise can't do it justice, but I'll try. It's the future and Whoopie Goldberg plays a tough detective. She wears this slick black bodysuit thing - kinda sci-fi awesome, but the awesomeness ends there, because it's a buddy cop movie, and her partner is a talking dinosaur with a vest and sneakers.

Best scene ever? It's not that kind of movie. The rich pastel palette used for the colour scheme is classic 'vision of the future' as seen by the 90s, and emulated in such shows as "Quantum Leap", but the awkward growing pains of the past don't end there. The talking dinosaur is more of a socially inept pre-pubescent teen. His jokes are gut-wrenchingly clumsy. His is the sort of character that you may prefer to pity than mock, for his comments induce embarrassment on his behalf. He's the kind of maladroit that you just know will grow into the fat loser co-worker who raids their neighbor's cubicle for handfuls of chocolates and doesn't get invited to parties because of his retarded "nobody likes me" attitude and accompanying 'anguished but smiling' laugh. Right - there's a stupid plot too. All around painful but fun to mock. Stupid awkward dinosaur.

Budget - This is the best part. Apparently this was such a bomb that studios went straight to video on this before even letting it go to theatres, instantly turning it into the most expensive straight-to-video film ever made at the time.