31 Days of Cheese: Day 28 - The Exorcist Two

Oh my, what a mess. What an utter mess of a film. I mean how do you take the most successful Horror film of the era and mess it up this badly.

Well for one you have John Boorman, fresh off his epic disaster Zardoz direct.

Then add an obviously blotto Richard Burton, dress James Earl Jones up in a grasshopper suit and have a lot of scenes with blinking lights in people’s faces and behold! An utter mess from 1977 that ended up finishing second to Plan Nine From Outer Space in voting for the 1980 Golden Turkey Awards worst movie ever made (by only a few votes if memory serves).

Anyway the setting is that it’s a few years after the first film. Linda Blair, Regan has grown up a bit and is in New York. her mother – (the actor didn’t want to do the sequel) is away on location somewhere so she is being care for by Nurse Ratchet (well Louise Fletcher who needed to pay the bulls I guess) who is some kind of doctor for kids and some other woman who acts creepy and weird before she sets herself on fire at the end of the film (an idea that came to me once or twice while watching this mess).

Anyway enter Father Lamont (Richard Burton) who seems to be looking for scotch but actually is investigating Regan’s exorcism. There is some nonsense early on about feuding inside the Church but it’s very quickly dropped and we shall drop it too. Meantime Nurse Ratchet (I’m going to call her that, it’s fun) has invented or is using this machine where two people stare at blinking lights and synch their minds while hypnotized. It’s a massively stupid idea.

Really, watching lights flash on and off on the faces of Richard Burton and Linda Blair does not gripping cinema make.

And then as if the drugs have kicked in the film wanders over this rather pointless story about Kokumo who has power to calm locusts or something that the demon Pazuzu doesn’t like so it possesses him as it would Linda later on.

We then see the Father from the first film as young man climb up some cliff to church in Africa (several folks fall to their death as they climb the cliffs. Would it have killed them to set up a rope ladder? ) and he rids Kokumo of the demon.

Lamont convinced that the demon is still inside Linda somewhere goes to Africa where he meets James Earl Jones dressed as a locust. He then turns into a scientist who is an expert on locusts (and can I say that insects, even lots of them do not gripping cinema make either?). And the viewer’s brain turns to mush.

There is a final confrontation back in Georgetown where Linda is split into the good Linda and the bad Linda the bad Linda is supposed to kind of a hottie. It’s not well right, there really is an icky quality to it and there is an uncomfortable moment were Lamont starts snogging with the bad Linda. But then the room is full of bugs and explosions and Lamont rips the heart out of the bad Linda and the good Linda calms the bugs and I die inside a bit.

Then Nurse Ratchet realizes that only Father Lamont can protect Linda and as they walk away the house bursts into flames.

I’ve read that at the premier of the film people were throwing things at the screen as the film ended. I’m not surprised. I was throwing things at my own TV.

Enjoy with a cheese sandwich and a lot of scotch. I understand you can get grasshoppers as a food but really.

31 Days of Cheese: Day 27 - Battlefield Earth

Well we finally emerge from the deep cavern that is Grade Z Movie hell blinking the sunlight and... Oh no. Not this. Anything but this.

Battlefield Earth.

Well at least this film had a budget. In fact I think the budget for John Tavolta’s coffee was larger than the total spent on the last 4 films.

Still. Oh my.

Let me confess. I have, up to now, watched or re-watched each and every film I’ve written about just before I wrote about it. That is, up until now. I watched this junk about a month and half ago for reasons that I won’t get into and I utterly refuse to be someone who has seen this film four times. (The other times were once after my brother bought me the VHS for my birthday, the second time was with my brother who did want to see just how bad it was and the last time was as I stated. Never again.).

It’s appallingly bad. You could go mad simply pointing out the damn plot holes. For example it’s a 1,000 years after the Psychos (whatever) have conquered the earth. The good guys (us) end up defeating them using 1,000 year old Hawker Harriers after learning to fly them using a 1,000 year old flight simulator (which like everything else works perfectly).

Then there is the matter of the alien’s home planet having an atmosphere that would blow up if exposed to “radiation”. This means that the planet’s atmosphere would have blown up about 3-8 minutes after their sun’s first solar flare.

Enough.

Never mind that the aliens all look like Alien Rasta’s on stilts (and they walk that way too.) the poor actors had to walk about on elevator shoes or something to give them their 7 ½ average height. Which leads to them walking very very carefully. Late in the film one of the human rebels tells another (over the perfectly functioning 1,000 year old walkie talkie by the way) that “three Guards are moving fast towards your position” (these may not be the exact words but like I said, I’m not watching this again.) The Guards are not moving fast. They are walking slowly as if they were wading through deep mud or didn’t want to fall off their shoes.

And there is the acting.

The less said about Tavolta’s over acting the better. Cause it’s grating and awful and just bad. The rest of the cast doesn’t do much better (Forest how could you?). And I did notice that the female lead (who doesn’t have much to do other than being in danger was able, like the female lead in Waterword, able to locate leg waxing and hairdressing services in the wasteland (but that’s a feature these kind of films).

When this film was being made there was some worry that this would be some sort of subliminal propaganda piece for L Ron Hubbard’s Scientology (Battlefield Earth was written by him – indeed the film covers only the first half of the book.) but judging from this film and the way Tom Cruise has been acting of late, I suspect that a provision of scientology is that you have to wreck your career at some point.

Enjoy with tongue. (It’s in the film. No, I won’t tell you about it.).

31 Days of Cheese: Day 26 - Monster A-Go-Go

And we spend yet more time in grade-Z Movie hell. Oh god. Why? Why poverty? Why do innocents suffer? Why is man born to trouble? And really, why Monster A-go-go?

This is a confused, inept, cheap mess of a film. Really. Just awful. So bad your jaw keeps dropping and you end up with a strained jaw muscle from its dropping so much.

You know sometimes these kinds of films can have interesting or just odd back stories. For example the behind the scenes story of Troll 2 and The Creeping Terror are a heck of a lot more compelling than the actual film turned out to be.

Not so much here.

In 1961 Bill Rebane started making a film about how an astronaut comes back to earth and becomes a ten foot tall radioactive giant who walks about killing people. He ran out of money. Twice and was unable to actually finish making the picture.

Then in 1964 Herschell Gordon Lewis, aka the Wizard of Gore (story for another time) needed a film to be the second feature for his film Moonshine Mountain (if he gave the theaters a twofer package he’d get more money, well duh). He knew Bill had this footage hanging about so he paid bill, took the footage, added maybe a couple three scenes and a narrator and slapped a film together. The resulting horror was Monster A-Go-Go.

In the DVD commentary, yes there is a DVD with commentary and I have listened to it and have been punished for my sin as a result. Anyway in the DVD commentary Bill Rebane, well, the only real way to put it is that he complains about what Lewis did with the film. He constantly mentions unused footage and the like.

Still, it’s not like Lewis cut up a master piece here. Citizen Kane this ain’t.

Lewis didn’t over expose the film, Lewis didn’t put in static shot after static shot were people talk at each other and then kind of stop. Lewis didn’t keep filming after running out of money the first time and losing all the actors so that about ½ through the film we meet all new people.

None of that was Lewis.

What Lewis did was add the narration and not bother to fix any of the bad sound. You can barely hear the actors at times. Also he didn’t bother to add music to one scene where one actor says to another “remember that song?” it makes it very weird.

And then there is the infamous scene were the camera focuses in on a telephone and someone off camera (I’m guessing the actor himself) makes a bruppptttt noise and then the phone is answered. I can only guess that Bill intended to put an ring in there in post production but well Lewis didn’t because that would have cost money.

And what Lewis did, was, since the ending had not been shot, changed the ending to “and suddenly it all a dream.” Or such like. At any rate at the end the monster disappears like he had never existed. Then they roll credits and people I assume, would throw things at the screen.

Just a miserable soul sucking experience and some 70 minutes of your life you’ll never get back. I’ve seen it 4 times now (for reasons I dare not tell) and so that’s 280 minutes I’m never getting back. That hurts to think about.

Enjoy with Martinis with Anchovy Olives. No I don’t have the foggiest idea what they are. It’s in the film.

31 Days of Cheese: Day 25 - Eegah!

Our slog though Z-movie hell continues….with the 1962 film Eegah.

Eegah. Oh God. Why. Why Eegah? Why did they make this? What the hell were they thinking?

Anyway the story is that somewhere near Palm Springs California a 7 foot, two inch tall cave man is living. A young girl, Roxy, almost runs into him one night, then her father pursues him into his desert home followed by Roxy and her boyfriend Tom. After some misadventures, the trio find and then escape from Eegah who then follows them back into Palm Springs, where after disrupting a buffet dinner, he finds Roxy and Tom and is shot dead.

The horror is in the details of course. Eegah is played by Richard Kiel in an early role. He’s very very skinny and has for about 2/3rds of the film wears a very very fake looking beard. He walks about muttering gibberish and with the word “Eegah” popping in from time to time.

The whole thing was masterminded by Arch Hall Sr. who apparently cast his secretary as his daughter Roxy and his son Arch Hall Jr. as Tom.

Tom, Arch Hall Jr., is well, let’s be blunt, is not easy on the eyes. Plop a lot of over greased blonde hair on the stop of a cabbage patch kid and subject it to radiation and you’ll get some idea of what Tom looks like. That he sings just makes it worse. He sings one song out in the desert playing on an acoustic guitar while we hear violins and a chorus of female voices. It’s funny and makes you want to hurt yourself at the same time.

Not that Arch Sr. is much better – he’s been dipped in skin bronzer and sports the kind of thin child molester mustache that people on the neighborhood watch list wear. To top it off there is a weird icky undercurrent between Roxy and Arch Sr. that makes their scenes hard to watch (not that the rest of the film is easy to watch we’re talking relative terms here).

The ickiness all comes together in the scene were Eegah gets shaved.

What happens, plot things that are too tedious to recount land Roxy and Arch Sr. in Eegah’s cave. There, Roxy, in an effort to distract Eegah from jumping her bones, shaves her dad (why he brought a shaving kit into the desert in the first place is not explained ). Eegah then indicates that he wants to a trim as well. As Roxy shaves him we then see so much more of Richard Kiel’s tongue than anybody could be comfortable with. And really what kind of director’s vision is it that insists on having two shaving scenes in one film? Never mind I don’t want to know.

Rife with bad songs, bad acting and muttered gibberish this is a long painful slog in the desert.

Enjoy with a buffet.

31 Days of Cheese: Day 24 - Mesa of Lost Women

Oh my. I really didn’t want to watch this one again. I saw it three years ago and it still haunts me.

The experience of watching this film is like being struck about the head and shoulders with sticks while being forced to watch random images while a chorus of lunatics chant poetry that has been translated from Welsh to Chinese and then back to Welsh again by babble fish, meantime a tape recording consisting of random sound effects, out of tune trumpet solos and bits of opera being played backwards supplies the sound track.

Yes this 1953 film is so bad that for a while rumors were that Ed Wood either wrote or had a hand in directing it. Turns out he didn’t but Lyle Talbot supplies the narration and Ed’ girlfriend at the time Delores Fuller was in the film so the speculation is not without some logic. Also George Barrow, who played the Ro-man in Robot Monster is in this film. Really all this film needs is Bela and the world would be sure Ed did it.

The film starts with a rambling narration that goes on and on and on while folks wander the desert. They are rescued from the desert by a passing jeep from an oil company. And as they recover they begin to tell the story. But the narrator won’t let them. He focuses in on this guy named Pepe with a sombrero who, in a fairly unique cinematic technique, has someone else’s flashback a Doctor Masterson to be exact. This doctor arrives at the Mesa to meet the scientist living there.

There we meet the sinister Dr. Arana (Spanish for spider I am told) played by Jackie Coogan (Uncle Fester in the 1960’s Addams Family TV series) He had been one of the biggest child stars in the silent era (staring in Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid among other things but his parents had spent all the money by the time he reached adulthood so he ended up, before the Addams Family, playing roles like this.

Dr. Arana is busy popping the pituitary gland in and out of people and putting in and out of Tarantulas. Why? Science that’s why. We briefly meet Tarantella a spider woman hybrid in a halter dress and a big fake spider with a bandage. We are told that the women will live for hundreds of years and the men are, like spider males puny and insignificant. In other words dwarfs. Of which this film is full of. In fact, this film seems to follow the rule, when in doubt, cut to a close up of a dwarf.

Arana has a big mole and an eye that is either missing or sort of damaged. Depends on the shot.

Anyway what Masterson sees drives him mad. Much like I felt watching this film.

We flash forward and then pick up the story of the folks we saw at the beginning of the films. Dr. Masterson breaks out of the asylum and after we watch a long dance from Tarantella after which they end up back at the mesa then several folks are killed by spiders and the women and the dwarves shadow the other survivors and then after the Doctor regains his sanity and he causes the lab to blow up. Much like we would want to do to this film.

Aside from the bad acting, the fake giant spider, the random close ups of dwarves and the fake cave were spider/woman hybrids labor over microscopes (?) what really makes this film special is the sound track. Most of the music for this film consists of someone playing some flamenco style guitar strums over and over and over again while an orangutan on cough syrup bangs on a piano while wearing mittens. This is repeated over and over and over and over again until you beg for mercy but realize the film isn’t over yet. Then you give up hope. It’s easier to watch then. Yes you die inside, but it limits the damage somehow.

Never Watch this film. Not even Mystery Science Theater 3000 would touch this one.

Enjoy, if you must, with massive doses of your favorite sedative.