Bad but I liked it

Kind of a disappointment here. This anthology film showing stories of people wandering across a postapocalyptic wasteland, really just some hilly rural area, starts with a couple of incredibly cheap-looking shorts that are so artificial it's almost more like watching animation than live action: very high contrast, saturated colors, and animated beasts, mutants, and robots that literally look like they were rendered on a '90s desktop computer, or were clipped out of an old video game.

But, it's so cheap-looking, and so stylized, it almost works. It reminded me in a strange way of watching som strange French animated feature (it's foreign-language, but with so little dialogue I couldn't place the language) or even a low-rent "Yellow Submarine".

The only problem is, after the weirdly charmingly bad first couple of shorts, it goes on for way too long, and gets less interesting. Some of the shorts aren't as…

A horror-themed variant of those sub-"Airplane!" movies that are intentionally stupid, play to overly broad stereotypes, etc., such as the "joke" of having a child played by a full-grown dwarf, or two nuns who, becoming possessed tear off their habits and begin having sex. Hilarious!

Anyway, plane full of passengers become "possessed" one by one.

Except, weirdly, this cheap-shit movie somehow has cameos from known names—Lance Henriksen (who does not die last, because this is a comedy, not a horror movie), Bai Ling, even Adrienne Barbeau is in there. And, also, weirdly, it's a little bit.... funny? Maybe? Kind of? Maybe I kind of actually found it entertaining? Sort of?

This little oddity has a story that isn't really relevant to it, but it's amusing: Roger Corman bought the rights to a Russian early '60s sci-fi film, had Peter Bogdanovich shoot some scenes of blond woman cavorting on a rocky, storm-tossed Los Angeles beach because the studo demanded "girls" to release the film, they added voice-over narration to make a story out of it, and Bob's yer uncle, they had a movie.

Not only that, but this was the second time Corman did this... with the same Russian film. Same footage and everything.

Anyway, this Russian flick apparently had all the ambition and none of the budget. If you want to see fun early '60s footage of astronauts and mermaids cavorting around rocky landscapes that are supposed through smoke machines running at full blast, I dunno, it's actually kind of fun, for a movie that never, ever shoots…

This is one of those really bad movies that kind of feels like a group of friends got together and made a movie, but in this case, every single one of them is a huge ham and really into it, so it makes it kind of funny even though it's totally bad.

During a voard game night among a suspiciously diverse group of geeky friends, a guy who violated the superstition of kicking a cat in heat and rolling three sixes on dice throws them all into a horror movie. The rest of the movie is spent doing fourth-wall lampoons of a million different conventions of horror and other genres, much in the manner I imagine "Scream" probably does if I ever had any interest in watching that, except with way worse acting and production.

I don't know if I could ever sit through it for another viewing, but…

Tough call here. I have a hard time viewing this movie objectively due to the affection I feel for having seen it in the theaters as a kid.

It's not great, definitely far from it, and deeply flawed. Mostly it coasts on the chemistry of Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi both playing against type as unlikely neighbors thrust together at the end of a remote cul-de-sac... Aykroyd as a wild man and Belushi as a conservative, but both with the comic chops to pull off what otherwise might have been a disaster on the order of casting Steve Martin as the straight man in "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles".

The writing is terrible though. I like the film in spite of it, but, the writing is pretty terrible.

This is a bad movie. Let's get that out of the way.

First off, this film commits one of my least favorite filmmaking sins: spends half its time on just showing unlikeable people basically just hanging out. It's not even bad pacing; there is no pace.

The acting is, of course, terrible.

In terms of plot, this plays like the mentally challenged cousin of "The Long Weekend". Five high school friends, who don't appear to like each other at all, reunite years later for a camping trip. They get lost in the woods and, one by one, suffer inexplicable deaths by misadventure, often from injuries that would seem to require a bandaid but in this film's world are fatal: a woman stumbles and accidentally pierces her thigh with a branch, which turns out in a under a day to be a mortal wound; a few minutes of another woman sticking…

A mad doctor's experiments cause an outbreak of of cannibalism at an insane asylum.

It does take a very long while to get going, but once it does, how appealing you find that one-sentence synopsis will pretty much tell you how much you will like the movie.

I will say, within the range of what movies that could be summarized as "a mad doctor's experiments cause an outbreak of of cannibalism at an insane asylum" could possibly be, this is pretty much near the top. The doctor is played by Peter Stormare, if that tells you anything.

Tensions escalate (to say the least) among group of women gathered at a remote cabin for a bachelorette party when a nearby train accident releases a cloud of caustic chemicals into the air.

Oh, my, does this want to be a great movie. It tries SO hard. And, it's not the very worst movie I've ever seen. Some (only some) of the actors and production values aren't bottom-of-the-barrel. But, it's extremely deeply flawed, at very best. They just didn't think some things through, or something. Lots of fridge logic and unbelievable behavior that I'm sure seemed cool when they thought of it but didn't quite work in practice. And the characters are pretty much 100% unlikeable.

But... it's kinda weirdly fun for the trying. If the characters had only been 75% unlikeable, or quite so many of the characters hadn't quite so unrealistically lost it, it might not…

A group of friends go out on a boat, wind up adrift, and random "scary" stuff happens which is never explained. Actually I kind of enjoyed it mildly, for a piece of trash. It held up tension kind of nicely. For a piece of trash.

Absolute bottom-of-the-barrel crap from the final fading moments of the "Jason And The Argonauts"/"Seventh Voyage Of Sinbad"/"Clash Of The Titans" epic mythological fantasy era, although I feel bad besmirching the names of those films by associating this with them.

Adam is alone in the Garden Of Eden, so, with unclear theological grounding, he fashions Eve out of sand, they frolic a while to a soundtrack that sounds like The Carpenters, before a snake tempts them to eat the apple that gets them evicted, and from there, the movie spins off into a bizarrely low-fi, shamelessly episodic series of encounters with dinosaurs, cavemen, and various poorly-edited stock footage and stop-motion animated perils. They literally wander on foot, judging by the backgrounds and stock footage used, from southern California to the Grand Canyon to the Amazon to the Arctic, trying to find "the sea", because, "life began in the sea, and we…

This is a charming semi-spoof horror featuring a bunch of '80s horror actors playing themselves (Kane Hodder, cameo from Michael Berryman, plus Bill Moseley in a role obviously intended for Robert Englund, and, strangely for just a moment, John Schneider, who directed) who decide to skip an autograph session at a horror movie convention (where fans thank them for signing autographs by gushing things like, "I'm going to sell it on Ebay!", etc.) to take an assignment "haunting" an RV park for a weekend.

An obvious love letter to the folks who starred in the sequels to "Friday The 13th", "Halloween", etc., and, like a lot of these movies, fun enough to watch these guys play comedic versions of themselves to be entertaining, even though it's basically terrible.

The sole problem is that for some reason, Schneider, whose filmmaking skills are apparently about on par with his political…

If John Waters made a horror movie, this would be it. Which is to say: absolutely terrible, but, if you're in the mood for ridiculously over-the-top camp, fits the bill admirably.

An odd tale of a twisted suburban family that seems normal enough to begin with, except for mom's unfortunate habit of punishing family members' misbehavior by putting their goldfish in the blender or hacking their fingers off unexpectedly with a cleaver and feeding them to them. Also, senile old grandma eats flies and crawls into bed while family members are having sex. Before long, every distasteful thing under the sun is drawn into the story—starting with incest and ending with a meal that turns into the most ridiculous bloodbath ever filmed, culminating, I kid you not, in a dwarf getting shot in the dick, replete with pulsing corn-syrup blood spurts from his pants.

I am shocked John Waters…

In Los Angeles, a bunch of tough-as-nails cops, soldiers, and criminals who look like actors and models shoot guns at rubbery aliens with CGI tentacles, while CGI spaceships appear in the sky and suck rooftops into the air. And, ok, of the movies that that could possibly describe, this is one of the best possible ones. It has a certain USA-Up-All-Night-iness that entertained me very well.

Very decent paint-by-numbers monster/nature-run-amok movie, for a paint-by-numbers monster/nature-run-amok movie. New veterinarian comes to a small town where all the farmers have an arrangement to buy futuristic new feed from a big sciencey company, which it turns out causes ordinary microscopic parasites to turn into giant, bloodthirsty monsters that destroy people and animals from the inside.

It's got big rubbery monsters chasing women in their bra and panties, it's got tough-as-nails farmers shooting shotguns at big rubbery monsters, it's got rubbery chest-bursters bursting out of people's torsos, it's got an innocent, wide-eyed tow-headed boy for pathos who (awesomely) gets eaten by a big rubbery monster. What do you want from a monster movie? It's not "Citizen Kane".

I liked it, I was totally entertained.