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"Cu*t Phenomenon": so bad it's good it's bad it's good et fucking cetera.

Started by Mark Steels Stockbroker, February 10, 2013, 09:02:46 PM

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Quote from: kngen on March 13, 2013, 02:50:52 PM
I can never see the name Coleman Francis without summoning up the image of him splayed out on an army bunk, with the MST3K commentary:

From that same scene 'Hour after hour of heart-pounding small-talk!'

Quote from: Famous Mortimer on March 13, 2013, 11:23:15 AM
My favourite bit of "Monster-A-Go-Go"

is also my favourite part of The Creeping Terror and The Dead Talk Back... the excessive, or at least intrusive exposition by the narrator. In The Creeping Terror it completely replaces any audible dialogue for long stretches.




finley

"Monster a Go-Go" is equaled in badness by "The Beast of Yucca Flats" IMO. The plot of the 2 are pretty similar, but while the production values are better in Beast, the complete lack of action (and no narration) makes up for it.

Don_Preston

I thought I'd managed to wipe Yucca Flats from memory. Indeed I was referred to it some years ago on here, and I'm sure a long time was had by all. It's almost nearing the end.

Famous Mortimer

I read an article in some pomo film journal about Coleman Francis, and while much of it was swingers, the idea that he was trying to do something other than cheapass drive-in fare has stuck with me. I mean, there's no doubt that he failed miserably, and his films are rotten and technically incompetent, but I can't put them on the low level of "Monster-A-Go-Go".

Although, just mentioning the name makes me want to do a Coleman Francis MST3K marathon. "Red Zone Cuba" was the first one I ever watched, and I was hooked immediately.

Lee Van Cleef

With the Francis films there is just something so hateful and nihilistic that, even though they are bad bad films, I can't really laugh at much in them (Cherokee Jack excepting!).  Admittedly I mainly remember RZC and less the other two, but that film really is a dark miserable thing in which the decent people are fucked over and taken advantage of, and the bad lack any sympathetic quality or depth, their sole purpose being to fuck over the decent people until they meet their inevitable fate.  If it weren't for MST3K I would not be able to watch them because they just hate people.

As an aside I was down in London over the weekend for the SCI-FI festival and attended the MST3K all-nighter.  Fantastic time with bad movies there.  The Final Sacrifice in particular stands out because (and this is one of the reasons it has long been one of my fave MST3K eps), going back to an earlier point, there really is the feeling that someone was trying to do something.  What they were trying to do was beyond their ability, budget and the ability of their cast, but it's a film that was made to tell a story and you can see that desire shine through. 

kngen

Quote from: Lee Van Cleef on May 10, 2013, 11:56:25 AM
With the Francis films there is just something so hateful and nihilistic that, even though they are bad bad films, I can't really laugh at much in them (Cherokee Jack excepting!).  Admittedly I mainly remember RZC and less the other two, but that film really is a dark miserable thing in which the decent people are fucked over and taken advantage of, and the bad lack any sympathetic quality or depth, their sole purpose being to fuck over the decent people until they meet their inevitable fate. 

Quote from: ShopkeeperThanks for not killing me! Real neighbourly of you!


Famous Mortimer

Now Rifftrax have done their magic on it, I reckon people can now give "Viva Knievel" a bit of a go.

The very first scene is the man himself delivering toys to an orphanage, where the kids all worship him. He's never anything other than completely honourable, even to people who've screwed him over, and the film is a one-man vanity piece which plays it so straight as to be hilarious. Oh, and Oscar winners Gene Kelly and Red Buttons are in it.


lazarou

Quote from: Famous Mortimer on May 11, 2013, 10:52:31 AM
The very first scene is the man himself delivering toys to an orphanage, where the kids all worship him.
Toys of himself and his related accessories, no less. Amazing scenes.

Jake Thingray

Quote from: Famous Mortimer on May 11, 2013, 10:52:31 AM
Now Rifftrax have done their magic on it, I reckon people can now give "Viva Knievel" a bit of a go.

The very first scene is the man himself delivering toys to an orphanage, where the kids all worship him. He's never anything other than completely honourable, even to people who've screwed him over, and the film is a one-man vanity piece which plays it so straight as to be hilarious. Oh, and Oscar winners Gene Kelly and Red Buttons are in it.

Famous Mortimer mentions the good old days.

Famous Mortimer

I just watched Birdemic 2 - The Resurrection and you know what? It's not very good.

I'm going to try and write a longer review of it in a bit, but you'd think / hope the people involved in the film would have learned some stuff after the last one, but it would appear not...and the occasional touches of comedy would make you think that every bit of awful sound and wooden acting is deliberate, some joke for the fools who've now sat through both films. But I'm not sure.

Pepotamo1985

Maybe the wrong place for this, but fucking giving this it's own thread...

For reasons unclear (presumably nothing particularly interesting happens in the British underworld), purveyors of shite British gangster cinema are absolutely mesmerised by the Rettendon murders.Essentially, three incredibly unpleasant drug dealers were found shotgunned to pieces in a Range Rover in a deserted country lane in Essex. Two men were convicted for the crime, on the basis of sod all evidence bar the testimony of a fellow crim (who got out of a lengthy stretch for smuggling and dealing illicits by testifying).

The Fall of the Essex Boys is the fourth bloody film to be released in 12 years (and the third film in five years) based on the event. The other three are pretty fucking abysmal (well, Essex Boys is at least reasonably competent), even by the toe-curlingly poor standards of cheaply made films about thugs straight out of Albion who say CAAANT instead of cunt and get so impassioned during football matches they maim each other, but whilst the other three were the usual stultifying orgies of violence, mockney accents, relentless fauxcaine snorting, sexism, gore, and astonishingly cunty behaviour on the part of the protagonists, this one is truly special, an epic example of shit 'cinema' (I use inverted commas because it was straight to DVD) at its bloody finest.

The acting is, as you might expect, hilariously bad, the music is fucking bizarre, it looks like it was shot and edited on an iPhone, you could probably shit a better script if you ate enough Alphabetti Spaghetti, and to top it all off, there's a breathless narrator who squawks in staccato gobbets with a faux-Essex accent at random points, to compensate for the total lack of coherence, logic and narrative. At several points, the narrator is reduced to talking about major events which have occurred entirely off-screen.

Even the DVD cover is amazing.



Fall of the Essex Boys' biggest claim to fame, apparently, is that it's yet another film based on the same story as another bloody film.

SCENE ANALYSIS

Exhibit A: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dknuY2-DS1U

Speaks for itself. This is sub-par sublimity.

Exhibit B: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qew2wyCP5I0

My favourite part is when he pointlessly breaks the balsa wood chair against the wall, and then appears to be hitting it against the wall again even more pointlessly, as the stock music erupts, bursting into action having lain dormant since its use in the 1990s on CITV dramas. In fact, no, it's not my favourite - it jostles for a position of primacy with the lanky one's pronunciation of the word 'cunt' and the total lack of anything approaching drama on the screen.

Exhibit C: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2U-LeAgJ9aY

Just listen to that fucking dialogue. Just look at the bizarre camera angles.

Ooh, ooh, and for an even bigger treat, catch the blink and you'll miss it tracking which occurs at around 0:20. Sufuckingblime....

All in all, this film is a much better satire than A Touch of Cloth. Prove me wrong.

Excellent, thanks for sharing. I might have to give that a full-viewing. Speaking of cringeworthy acting committed to film, do you have any idea what happened to the 'Get off my fucking floor' clip?

Pepotamo1985

Quote from: clingfilm portent on May 20, 2013, 07:59:35 PM
Speaking of cringeworthy acting committed to film, do you have any idea what happened to the 'Get off my fucking floor' clip?

Funny you should mention that - I was trying to locate it the other day. It got deleted (presumably because the people featured didn't like being featured) not long after it started doing rounds. I was hoping that the passage of time would've allowed it to circulate again, but nada! It really was brilliant, wasn't it :(.

Mark Steels Stockbroker


imitationleather

Haha. That Fall of the Essex Boys post deserved a thread of it's own,  surely!

Famous Mortimer

I just watched "One More Time", the sequel to "The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed Up Zombies", and I feel bad ragging on it. It feels and looks like a crappy home movie, and if you take the footage he just borrowed wholesale from his other film, it's barely half an hour long. Awful isn't the word.

Famous Mortimer

Drafthouse Films apparently found the reels of it in a box of other reels they bought off eBay, more than a decade after it was thought lost forever, and Red Letter Media covered it in their "Best of the Worst" show...

Miami Connection

A multi-racial taekwondo rock n roll group, Dragon Sound, have got a gig at a bar in Florida, and there's a biker gang who are linked to a group of ninjas, and there's the band who Dragon Sounds replaced, who want their old gig back and ally themselves with the bikers.

It's absolutely bonkers, the leader of the band, who's also the film's writer, producer and casting person, can barely speak English, none of the heroes can act worth a damn, but you'll be singing the hit song "Against the Ninja" long after the film's finished.

It's every bit as much a weirdly personal film as "The Room", and I think the readers of this thread will have a good time watching it. As with the other Drafthouse Films releases, there are some sweet merchandise options, so check it out.

Don_Preston

Youtube have a few of the Santo films uploaded to watch for free. Undubbed or subtitled.

Famous Mortimer

He's a perennial favourite, but I just watched another Godfrey Ho film last night, "Ninja Terminator". It might be his best one yet, for the sheer incomprehensibility of the plot (it's definitely at least two films stitched together).

Famous Mortimer

Quote from: Pepotamo1985 on May 20, 2013, 07:33:27 PM

The Fall of the Essex Boys is the fourth bloody film to be released in 12 years (and the third film in five years) based on the event. The other three are pretty fucking abysmal (well, Essex Boys is at least reasonably competent), even by the toe-curlingly poor standards of cheaply made films about thugs straight out of Albion who say CAAANT instead of cunt and get so impassioned during football matches they maim each other, but whilst the other three were the usual stultifying orgies of violence, mockney accents, relentless fauxcaine snorting, sexism, gore, and astonishingly cunty behaviour on the part of the protagonists, this one is truly special, an epic example of shit 'cinema' (I use inverted commas because it was straight to DVD) at its bloody finest.

The acting is, as you might expect, hilariously bad, the music is fucking bizarre, it looks like it was shot and edited on an iPhone, you could probably shit a better script if you ate enough Alphabetti Spaghetti, and to top it all off, there's a breathless narrator who squawks in staccato gobbets with a faux-Essex accent at random points, to compensate for the total lack of coherence, logic and narrative. At several points, the narrator is reduced to talking about major events which have occurred entirely off-screen.
Because it must have made 8p profit, they rather bizarrely have made a sequel to this film.


Pepotamo, I challenge you to watch and review this one too.

It appears they spelled the name of the site giving them praise on the front cover wrong (one Z, and it just looks like a site which regurgitates press releases).

prwc

^ I just watched that on the strength of the marvellously shite original. A few funny moments but overall doesn't compare to the non-stop onslaught of amusing unpleasantness of the first.

Famous Mortimer

I just discovered that SyFy Channel have made a film called "Bering Sea Beast", which combines my love of Alaska-based gold prospecting shows with my hatred of shitty SyFy Channel monster films. I may save it for my birthday (on the 10th, if you want to buy me a present).

Pepotamo1985

Quote from: Famous Mortimer on December 26, 2013, 04:35:55 PM
Pepotamo, I challenge you to watch and review this one too.

HAHA! I came to this thread specifically to post that 'they'd' made a followup.

glitch

Crap. I rather enjoyed Rise of the Footsoldier but I've got a soft-spot for hooligan media.

Pepotamo1985

Quote from: glitch on January 06, 2014, 02:33:33 PM
Crap. I rather enjoyed Rise of the Footsoldier but I've got a soft-spot for hooligan media.

That film is a bit of a wasted opportunity - all the Carlton Leach/evolution of British thuggery stuff at the start is slightly interesting, and whilst it's a bit overblown and voyeuristic in parts (presumably because the toff sibling duo who made it have a twanger for BASTARDS and a world they never knew and will never know) it's probably reasonably accurate - but then, when it starts to focus on the Essex Boys stuff, it descends into an endless orgy of overly nasty but not particularly shocking violence and incoherent, overly rushed storytelling. It feels like two halves of two separate films wedged together.

Craig Fairbrass is fucking good in it, though. Based on the stuff I've read about the Rettendon case, he seems to have nailed Pat Tate dead on. Just an incredibly vile, drugged up, violent and terrifying psychopath who was apparently capable of the odd glimmer of humanity every now and then.

Similarly, Bonded By Blood has a certain charm to it. It's really not good, has questionable morals and Adam FUCKING Deacon twats about in something like the lead role, but it's very watchable - Sacha Bennett's direction and editing is crisp and kinetic, and Neil Maskell and Vincent Regan are both good actors who give great performances.

Famous Mortimer

Reading back through this thread, I really want to track down the guy who made "After Last Season" and make him write a book about why he did it. From being sure it was for real, to being on the fence, I'm now on the side of those people who think it's some weird experiment, but I still want to know why he did it, how he got the money for it, all that. None of it makes any sense, and that's why it still interests me.


Shoulders?-Stomach!

I just read Pedros post from last February claiming Harry Potter is impenetrable for people who haven't read the novels.

Hahaha, oh mercy.

glitch


Pepotamo1985

Quote from: glitch on January 13, 2014, 05:50:58 PM
Oooh, thanks for that. Do you have any books on the Rettendon stuff or was it all on-line?

The book Essex Boys by Bernard O'Mahoney is probably the best book about the characters and the case. He knew them personally (and was even a suspect in the murder enquiry).

It's safe to say that he tries to minimise his involvement with the three and exonerate himself of crimes (when he was right in the midst of the drug/extortion/violent side of things), and some have suggested that he was involved (he'd fallen out with the three just before the murders, and days before the shooting had started staying at a hotel in Rettendon), so it's far from a sober and objective account.

There's also Bloggs 19 by Tony Thompson, which was written with the input of Darren Nicholls (the man who helped convict Whomes and Steele).

However, Nicholls is a pathological liar, who changed his statement something like 47 times before the trial got to court - and then his story got shredded by defence lawyers, and the Judge called his reliability and credibility into question. Whomes and Steele still got sent down for it, though.

By far the most fascinating resource on the case is O'Mahoney's own website, which has an extensive array of documents pertaining to the case. Police files, media reports, photos, court testimony, the fucking works. It's an absolutely fascinating record of the case, which will leave you in little doubt that W & S were almost certainly 100% innocent of the murders. You can find it here; www.bernardomahoney.com/rrmurders/documents.shtml.

You might also wanna read up on Operation Century, which was an illegal and unethical police enquiry into the murders and was an absolute failure.

A key tactic employed in OC was to haul in local scumbags on unrelated charges and then arrest them mid-interview for the murders, to see whether they'd implicate someone or offer clues or hearsay they'd encountered round the manor. As you can see from the interviews with Nicholls, this is exactly what they do with him. Up until they they 'arrest' him for involvement in the killings, he's no commenting everything.

A few hours later in the next interview, he's singing like a canary and saying he drove Whomes and Steele to the site.

As the interviews go on, the details keep on changing and his account gets more decorative and thorough, often in line with implicit and/or indirect prompts from interviewing coppers. For example, there's a stunning bit when he says he collected Steele and Whomes from the killing at half past six, and an old bill responds with "you must be wrong on the time, Pat's mobile phone records reveal he was called by his girlfriend Sarah Saunders at 6:44". He then does a total volte face and says "oh yeah, yeah, you're right, I must be wrong on the time, because Mick said Sarah had rung Pat just before they did it".

The police then use Nicholls' 'testimony' to harass and intimidate Sarah in a later interview, and get her to implicate Steel and postulate a motive. It's astonishing.