Trailers From Trailers From Hell

I am a Gen X child of the 80s and 90s, which meant that I spent a lot of time watching cable when it consisted of B-grade movies and 70s TV reruns. I stayed up late on the weekend to watch USA Up All Night and its treasure trove of trash, but also random monster movies, westerns, Kung Fu Theater, World War II flicks, and lesser Clint Eastwood films. (The Gauntlet and Coogan's Bluff anyone?). My whole family did Tae Kwon Do for a few years, and my dad would watch any random martial arts movie and dissect the fighting style, especially impressed with Chuck Norris and Bruce Lee. (He reached black belt.) Mystery Science Theater 3000 was such a revelation because the characters were riffing on bad movies the way me and my friends and my family did, just a lot funnier. Once I left college and was too poor for cable, my consumption of trash entertainment was replaced by pretentious foreign film rental. In recent years, however, I have been going back to the entertainment that nourished me in my youth. Three of my favorite recent documentaries are Not Quite Hollywood, about Australian "Oz-ploitation" films of the 70s and 80s, Electric Boogaloo, about schlock purveyors Cannon Films, and The World Of Roger Corman, about America's greatest B-movie producer.

As luck would have it, I learned about Trailers From Hell, and amazing website where B-movie film-maker experts like Joe Dante, John Landis, and Allison Anders offer commentary on the trailers for all kinds of great B-movies. I can sit down and lose hours looking at it. Fans of the genre should check it out. Here are some trailers from the site that I like, either for the movie, the commentary, or both.

Bloody Mama 

Shelly Winters as a murderous, gun-toting 1930s bank robber? Yes please! Roger Corman himself gives the commentary on this trailer. Also notice the very young DeNiro in the trailer.

Taste The Blood of Dracula

I love Hammer horror films, which are all spooky castles and Gothic moods with the blood mixed in, rather than the main attraction. Christopher Lee was the greatest Drac ever, period. I think the fact that he (purportedly) had killed men at close range as a member British special forces in World War II gave him special insight into the character.

Monster Squad

I loved this movie soooooo much when it came out. I dare not watch it again lest my happy childhood memories be disturbed, because I am sure my adult eyes will find it ridiculous. "Wolfman's got nards!"

The Car

This movie has haunted me for decades. It's about a killer, possibly possessed car that goes around running people over. I remember watching it with my dad late at night and being scared out of my mind, and being sent to bed before it was over. I woke up the next day and immediately asked my dad how they managed to stop the car.

Beneath The Planet Of The Apes

Bad sequel, but as John Landis points out, interesting in its badness. Charlton Heston delivers a performance that's insanely sweaty and over the top even by his standards. I'll never forget the moment when the mutants pull off their faces, which is serious nightmare fodder.

I Was A Teenage Werewolf

One underrated effect of the postwar teen culture was the proliferation of the "I Was A Teenage..." movies. My favorite thing is that the titular werewolf is Michael Landon. Yes, that Michael Landon. I remember seeing him as a guest on Carson one time, and Johnny showed a clip of this after he came out to embarrass him.

The Terror

Maybe the most infamous Corman film, because it had multiple directors and no discernible plot, until a completely contrived speech by Dick Miller at the end (in a Nu Yawk accent transported to old England) attempted to tie everything together. It still made money, which is more than you can say for a lot of Hollywood blockbusters.

Viva Las Vegas

Elvis movies are schlock personified, and mostly unwatchable. This one is different, mostly because of the unstoppably vivacious force of nature that was 1963 Ann-Margret. She practically bursts through the screen, and seems to inspire Elvis to wake the heck up and match her energy.

Alligator 

A baby alligator gets flushed down the toilet, then emerges a decade later from the Chicago sewers as a massive, man eating monster. I remember seeing this on TV and loving it as a little kid. Little did I know, the writer, John Sayles, would later go on to be a respected independent film maker.

Piranha

Last but by no means least, this is the best of all of the rip-offs of Jaws, and a movie I still can't believe my parents let me watch. Also written by John Sayles and directed by future Gremlins director Joe Dante, it's the rare film that shows children getting killed. The sequel was actually directed by James Cameron!

Disco Musicals: The Ultimate So Bad It's Good Genre

I am a sucker for what the hosts of The Flop House podcast call "good-bad movies." These are movies whose badness is so unique and fascinating that they elevate themselves into a realm of awful genius. No genre of film has produced a higher rate of good-bad movies than disco musicals. They were are sort of perfect for the role, combining the cashing in on a played out cultural trend, the interestingly wretched fashion of the period from 1978 to 1980, and a music genre that could produce maximum cheesiness.  If you, like me, enjoy these kinds of movies, I'd recommend all of them on the following list.

Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

This is a film so transcendently bad that it prompted me to write a long blog post just to be able to process it. It stars the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton as the make-believe group from the famous Beatles album and perhaps the most asinine plot ever put on film.  Words cannot do justice to this. The brothers Gibb appear at the height of their disco period, and many of the songs get a disco-makeover. At the very end of the film a bunch of B and C-list celebrities do some terrible disco dance moves as the reprise of the title song. The YouTube video has been taken down, likely due to extreme embarrassment on the part of one of the participants. Here's what I said about it after my first viewing:

"At this point I didn't think the film could possibly go any lower or be any more ridiculous, but boy, was I wrong! It ends with a bunch of mid-level 70s celebrities singing the reprise of the title song, making poorly choreographed disco-by-numbers moves in the process. For some reason the camera keeps finding Carol Channing, whose eerie grin unfortunately distracts from a young Tina Turner standing right beside her. Many of the assembled celebs look bored, stoned, hungover, or all three. The hokey dancing, awful wardrobes, shaggy haircuts, and complete lack of taste on display manage to encapsulate all that was wrong about the 70s and put it into one coke-addled package.

When I finished watching Pepper, I then realized its disturbing implications. Is it actually so bad that it is beyond bad? That made me wonder if there is anything in the world that is as good as Pepper is bad. Can evil in fact sink deeper than virtue can soar high? Furthermore, does a truly horrible piece of culture leave a more lasting imprint on my psyche than a sublime one? Or is something this bad sublime in its own way? Needless to say, I think I'll have to see it again."

Xanadu

At least the Sgt Pepper film came out right when the Bee Gees were standing on top of the world (although the film would help knock them from their perch.) Xanadu came out in 1980, right as disco was playing itself out. It starred Olivia Newton-John, fresh off of Grease and at that time both a hit maker and object of desire.  The theme song was written by Electric Light Orchestra, still riding high on a wave of prog meets soft rock hits.  Xanadu could've been a contender, but like the other disco musicals, the writing is just downright awful.  Michael Beck, who had just played badass Swan the gang leader in The Warriors the year before, stars as a struggling artist who meets a muse, played by Newton-John. Disco and Greek mythology ensue. The plot has something to do with a nightclub called Xanadu, and Gene Kelly appears to boot, in what would be his last film.  I get the sad feeling that this one broke him.  There isn't just disco, but ROLLER DISCO here, people.  The theme song is actually pretty good as this style of music goes, and Newton-John is as appealing as always. The problem is, the song comes at the end, after the viewers have already longed for the sweet release of death to get them away from the film. The dance scenes in parts look more like an industrial film than Busby Berkley.  But hey, there's so much light-hearted cheese here that someone recently made this into an ironically bad musical and it was a Broadway hit.

The Apple

Also from 1980, The Apple truly one of those movies that has to be seen to be believed. I learned of it through the stellar Electric Boogaloo doc about Cannon Films. This musical was intended by Cannon impressario Menachem Golan to be his magnum opus and entree into Hollywood success. Instead, it was so bad that the premiere audience started throwing promotional copies of the soundtrack at the screen. The premise is so insanely awful that I feel like I lose IQ points just trying to type it. It is 1994, and an authoritarian regime keeps the masses in line through pop music and enforced dancing. A cute folk-singing couple are tempted to take the "apple" of fame in one of many convoluted Biblical metaphors. (In case this is all too hard to grasp, you can watch one of the tempters in a loincloth holding a giant apple.)  They eventually flee to a hippie commune and when the evil music exec/dictator/Satan named "Boogalow" comes to get them, they are Raptured as God appears in a translucent Rolls Royce. No, I am not kidding. Before we get there we witness the musical number for "Coming For You" (featured above), a piece of Donna Summer knock-off disco and the least veiled metaphor ever in the history of pop music. (The MPAA had to be asleep at the switch to give this one a PG rating.)

Can't Stop The Music

Just when you thought 1980 couldn't have been more saturated with bad disco musicals comes Can't Stop The Music, starring Steve Guttenberg and the Village People. It starts with Guttenberg on roller skates wearing flared trousers and an Izod shirt, and only gets worse/better from there. My favorite thing about the trailer is that it proclaims this will be "the movie that launches the 80s." Instead it feels like the last groaning gasp of the 70s, a decade now totally exhausted, its polyester torn and frayed. Don't believe me? Just take a look at the "Milkshake" number in the trailer. The Village People themselves had already reached their very short expiration date, I am sure no one in the film thought that Steve Guttenberg would emerge as the one star from this piece of dreck.

The Power of Bad Movies

I always seem prone to picking up new popular cultural obsessions and giving my life over to them.  Right now I am doing this with podcasts about bad movies.  This summer I discovered The Flop House, and during the week I took care of the girls while my wife was out of town, I probably listened to the bulk of the episodes.  Recently I have also picked up on the different but equally stellar We Hate Movies.  Both have the same essential premise: three guys get together and make jokes and wisecracks about a crummy movie they saw.  The Flop House looks only at newly released critical and commericial failures, whereas We Hate Movies only takes up films made more than ten years ago (except for special request month.)

I tend to have seen more of the movies that the guys at We Hate Movies rip, because I grew up in a small town where the video store provided the locus of entertainment.  For that reason, I saw a whole lot of movies of varying quality released between 1983 and 1994.  My whole family did martial arts for a few years in the 80s, so I saw a lot of films along the lines of Best of the Best and No Retreat, No Surrender.  These days my tastes are discerning, so The Flop House reminds me that I'm not missing much by limiting myself to art house and foreign films.

That said, these podcasts have given me more appreciation for bad movies.  Watching and hearing others talk about these films is a great way to think about what makes good movies good.  For instance, I re-watched LA Confidential recently, and noticed more than before the narrative and cinematic choices  made by the film-makers.  It avoided easy melodrama, allowed for moral ambiguity, and steered clear of cliches.  These podcasts also help me think about how many great films have bad elements that they are able to overcome.  For example, the dialogue in Star Wars is pretty laughable at points, but it's something I chuckle about, not fixate on, unlike the awful dialogue in Attack of the Clones. The other elements of that film were pretty rotten, too.

I also get a kind of strange kick out of seeing a truly awful film, since the worst of the worst are unique in their wretchedness.  There is simply no other film that duplicates Manos, Hands of Fate.  Nothing in this world will ever be as good as that film is bad, which is a true statement about the fallen-ness of humanity if there ever was one.

Five Bad Movies I'd Recommend Seeing
Some of these films are so bad that they have to be seen to be believed, while others are awful movies with flecks of truly transcendent goodness in them.

1.  Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
I wrote one of my favorite blog posts about this one once.  It both desecrated the Beatles album of the same name and helped wreck the careers of the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton, which I guess was only karmic payback.  Ever wanted to see George Burns sing "Fixing a Hole" or Billy Preston perform a resurrection or Carol Channing dance in a big musical number with a bunch of C-list 70s celebrities?  Well this is the movie for you.

2.  Roadhouse
I am still amazed that this was made by a major studio in the 1980s.  It's wall to wall booze, boobs, and brawls with a monster truck crushing cars and Patrick Swayze tearing out somebody's throat.  Roadhouse is basically the magnum opus of dumbass, cornpone backwoods hick culture.  (As someone who comes from the boondocks, I feel I am specially qualified to make that assertion.)

3.  Manos, Hands of Fate
This was most definitely not put out by a major studio, and I was first introduced to it through Mystery Science Theater 3000.  Watching it is actually painful, it hurts.  Someway, somehow this awful still manages to be scarier that The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby put together, in that you wonder about how the people who participated in it survived with their sanity intact.  (Evidently the guy who played Torgo suffered injuries from his fake goat legs and later killed himself, a fact that I can't avoid when I watch this.)

4.  Convoy
Sometimes a great film-maker falls on hard times and has to do a little hackwork.  By the late 1970s Sam Peckinpaugh probably had more tequila than blood running in his veins, and had pretty much pissed off and alienated everyone he worked with.  With the runaway success of Smokey and the Bandit in 1977, Convoy appeared a year later as the inevitable rip-off/cashgrab, and Peckinpaugh was pulled off of a barstool somewhere to helm it.  Instead of Burt Reynolds, Jackie Gleason, and Sally Field, it features Kris Kristofferson, Ernest Borgnine, and Ali McGraw in a bad perm.  The movie looks awful, it's way too long, and the pacing is way off for an action film.  It's as if Peckinpaugh took the anti-authority message of the film way too seriously.  In objective terms this movie is hack, rip-off rubbish, but when viewed as the dying statement of a great artist working with crummy material, it moves me.

5.  Heaven's Gate
This 1981 Michael Cimino western epic became famous as the biggest flop in Hollywood history, and contributed to the decline of the power of directors in Hollywood.  It has become fashionable among cineastes to defend it as unfairly vilified.  However, make no mistake, Heaven's Gate is still a really bad movie.  The pacing is awful, the characters thinly drawn (especially the immigrant farmers), and the whole thing is just as ponderous as an elephant with gout.  However, it is shot beautifully, with some of the best cinematography I have seen in any movie, ever.  This is one where I like to watch individual scenes and just luxuriate in their beauty, and lament that such sublimity was not paired with story or acting.  It's one of those few bad movies where I watch it and think of how good it could have been.

Why Sgt. Pepper the Motion Picture Might Be the Most Transcendently Bad Film Ever

I've often said of William Shatner that his schtick cannot be called irony, that he in fact transcends irony. There is not a word in the English language that can quite describe him.  Flipping channels a couple of days ago, I was reminded of this when I caught a couple minutes of a film that has always left me even more dumbfounded than Shatner's rendition of "Rocket Man": the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band movie. It is awful on a truly transcendant level, so awful that seeing for the first time was a unique experience, like watching a supernova explode or a baby calf being born. It was so inhumanly awful that I enjoyed it more than just about any other film I've seen in recent years.  Something this wretched is an accomplishment, a challenge to the stars with a raised fist daring the fates to make something worse. (Xanadu comes close, but no cigar.)

I'll begin with the premise, which sounded so asinine that I steered clear of this movie for a long time: the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton play Beatles songs as Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. To answer your question, yes, this is 1978, the only year it would have been possible to construct this Frankenstein's monster of camp. They all have names from Beatles songs, and have dedicated themselves to saving the town of Heartland from the machinations of Mean Mr Mustard. Frampton's love interest is named "Strawberry Fields," Steve Martin (in his first film role!) sings "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" as a demented doctor, and George Burns plays Mr. Kite. You truly haven't lived until you've watched him sing "Fixing a Hole" in a Nimoy-worthy performance. I'm still trying to cleanse my ears with the steel wool in my sink, which is less painful than hearing it again.

Frampton and the Brothers Gibb utter not a word of dialogue, they mostly clown and make silly faces for the camera in a manner reminiscent of a home video recording, rather than a multi-million dollar motion picture. Beatles songs play through almost the whole film, their vitality sapped by hokey arrangements, Frampton's shite singing, and the worst kind of cocaine-infused late seventies soft rock accompaniment. Robin Gibb's singing of "Oh! Darling," and some spirited performances by Earth, Wind, and Fire and Aerosmith are about the only musical numbers where I didn't cry with pain or laugh with incredulity (especially when two vocoderized robots sing "She's Leaving Home.") It takes a lot of effort to completely drain the life out of a good song, a task worthy of Fred Durst-esque levels of suckitude, but this film manages to ruin at least a dozen classic McCartney-Lennon compositions. Ruin might be too kind. These sonic gems are deflowered, disembowled, dismembered, and their corpses desecrated.

And then there's the contextual placement of the songs in the movie. The character Strawberry Fields actually sings the song "Strawberry Fields," apparently about herself, to herself. When Barry Gibb sings "A Day in the Life," he utters the line "I'd love to turn you on" to his BROTHERS! (When he combs his prodigious disco mane during the line "got up, got outa bed, dragged a comb across my head" I let a cackle almost painful in its violence.) "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" is sung by a sultry women named, you guessed it, Lucy, but in a menacing tone that completely belies the fanciful, pleasant world evoked by the lyrics. Best of all, Sgt. Pepper (played by a prancing, grinning Billy Preston) resurrects Strawberry Fields from the grave while singing "Get Back," referring to her as "Loretta" and completely distorting the irony of the song's lyrics. (At least Preston played on the original track.)

At this point I didn't think the film could possibly go any lower or be any more ridiculous, but boy, was I wrong! It ends with a bunch of mid-level 70s celebrities singing the reprise of the title song, making poorly choreographed disco-by-numbers moves in the process. For some reason the camera keeps finding Carol Channing, whose eerie grin unfortunately distracts from a young Tina Turner standing right beside her. Many of the assembled celebs look bored, stoned, hungover, or all three. The hokey dancing, awful wardrobes, shaggy haircuts, and complete lack of taste on display manage to encapsulate all that was wrong about the 70s and put it into one coke-addled package.

When I finished watching Pepper, I then realized its disturbing implications. Is it actually so bad that it is beyond bad? That made me wonder if there is anything in the world that is as good as Pepper is bad. Can evil in fact sink deeper than virtue can soar high? Furthermore, does a truly horrible piece of culture leave a more lasting imprint on my psyche than a sublime one? Or is something this bad sublime in its own way? Needless to say, I think I'll have to see it again.