Reviews

The formula was simple: Elvis had some glamorous job, he sang a few songs to fill a soundtrack album and there was always some unapproachable hot woman which fate seemed to be holding just out of Elvis' reach. In the better Elvis formula pictures, the details made everything palatable. Here you get the bare minimum.

Viva Las Vegas was arguably the best of these, and as such makes for a useful comparison study. Las Vegas in that picture is presented attractively, but on a travelogue level and with little local cultural or social content to enrich the experience. Acapulco gets much the same superficial treatment here, but with worse colour cinematography and no real eye for found local imagery, which Viva had albeit in limited quantities. In Viva, Elvis played a racing driver, setting up a lengthy road race for its exciting action climax. Here, Elvis enters a cliff diving contest, which while still pretty spectacular fills a lot less screen time. Viva had multiple memorable great song and dance numbers; this one has Bossa Nova Baby and not much else. Fun in Acapulco simply seems to have less of everything, and worse.

Which brings us to the primary attraction in any Elvis picture... the romantic fantasy dream girl. The comparison is hardly a fair one. Ann-Margret in Viva was a singing and dancing dynamo with personality and charm for days. Ursula Andress had one previous screen appearance prior to this one (Dr. No), no formal theatrical training and could neither sing nor dance, and spoke limited English with a deep accent. Her whole bit was looking icy and distant, and that wears thin quickly. Just ask Anita Ekberg. The side romance with the lady bullfighter seemed like pointless filler.

A viewer could fall asleep five minutes into the movie, when Elvis swims ashore, wake up in time for the high diving and not have missed much. The cast, it should be noted, includes Oscar-winning European actor Paul Lukas! Yeah, he does basically nothing. Waste.

... and She Demons shows why quite quickly. Her range of onscreen expressions ranges from slightly bored to mildly perturbed, until, after being menaced by mutant natives and Nazis for the first third of the movie, Irish nearly gets upset enough to grind her teeth a little bit. Best known for playing Sheena in a very cheap TV series, the tall athletic blonde only appeared a few times on screen afterwards. Despite her limitations, Irish is far from the worst element in this movie.

She Demons is a buffet of incompetence and poor planning. Fight choreography straight out of a Three Stooges short. An underground laboratory with a window view of the outside jungle. A blond stunt double for a brown haired man. Captured native girls (who according to the Commandant have been there for ten years!) stage an escape, but interrupt it for a long and terrible dance sequence, allowing themselves to be recaptured. A long lecture by the Commandant about alternative energy, while Irish and her lackeys lounge around casually, with no guards to keep them from overpowering him while he goes on and on about extracting electricity from lava. (That does not work, BTW. No credit for dumb science.) Everything feels like it was improvised on the spot to pad out the runtime with no thought as to how any of it would play when assembled together. The result is a staggering mess, which cannot even manage to make half-dressed native dancers and Nazis with whips watchable!

If this sounds like perfect fodder for Rifftrax, it was. It was one of their funniest episodes. Hilarious and highly recommended. The movie itself is garbage.

The Cartoon Network green lit this pilot intending to include it in the Adult Swim lineup, based on optimistic estimates for cost and completion time. It wound up costing twice as much and taking much longer than expected to produce, resulting in the project being abandoned at that point. As a result, we only got this one glimpse of a series that might have been. But that one glimpse was glorious.

This was no basement production made on spec by college kids. Creator Aaron Springer assembled an all-star lineup of his buddies from Dexter's Lab to work on the pilot including that series' show runner Genndy Tartakovsky, who served as animation director. None of the technical gremlins that so often plague animation startups are visible here - framing, character sketches, background art etc. All have the professional look of a high end fantasy magazine such as Conan Saga. And the camerawork is superb, faux cinematically swinging slowly around to take in the detailed fantasy landscape in a way one rarely sees in 2-D animation. This is an impressive piece of animation.

Most importantly, this is a comedy and it succeeds beautifully. There is violence and splatter galore, way over the top, and all played for laughs, with a fast pace to keep things lively plus lots of silly dialogue to maintain the mock heroic tone. The script has plenty of surprises too.

This was a fun 22 minute adventure. We should have gotten many more, and might have had the suits at Cartoon Network not cheaped out.

To all of the reviewers who think this movie is the worst thing ever, allow me to refer you to Mr. Godfrey Ho...

No matter how bad a movie is, it always seems to have defenders. I was astonished to discover, after rating Bio-dome and Who's that Girl a two, that many people were jumping in to claim that I was overly harsh. But here I go with a review of the much hated Rollerball remake on the other side for once. By this I only mean that I hated it less than movies I gave a two. The thing is still pretty awful, but I would watch it again before Glitter.

To address the obvious point first, this is not your daddy's Rollerball. The 1975 version was a minor classic, thanks to its complex thematic landscape. There, sport was social hypnotic to keep the class distinctions in place, an intention which found itself clashing with one man's view of sport as masculine imperative. Nice. The creators seem here to have gone back no further than The Running Man for thematic inspiration. Sport is once again just more entertainment junk food for an audience too numbed by mediocrity to put up a fight. It's an equally cynical viewpoint, just a less sophisticated one. There is thematic synergy in the fact that the movie itself is as cynical, derivative, unimaginative and lowbrow as the thing it is portraying. Points for that, if unintended.

The directorial choices by John McTiernan, as pointed out by other reviewers, are indeed unfortunate. The overuse of night goggle POV is just one example. Note however that in the early 2000s, tech-eye viewpoint shots were being overused everywhere. I objected to this particular cinematographic gimmick less than I did the inescapable Dutch angle shots in Battlefield Earth. This is hardly a ringing endorsement, but we are grading on a curve here.

The failure to inspire a sense of threat during the matches is also a clear weakness. Minor league hockey in Slap Shot comes off as more violent, and that was played for laughs! That Rollerball's appeal is founded on bloodlust is hard to sell when the hitting in the game is at the level of senior league flag football.

Of most interest in this movie is the amazing Chris Klein. Like donut hole, he is defined only by what is around him, as has no substance of his own. In a two-shot with a sock puppet, a viewer's eye would be drawn inevitably to the latter. I know this from The Election, when I honestly could not keep my eyes on him, even when the only other thing to look at was the utterly colourless Matthew Broderick. The fact that Hollywood had enough roles for vapid pretty boys lying around to provide Chris with even a brief career is curious and perhaps a little terrifying. Here, of course, he is woefully miscast as a human with a personality - a thrill-a-minute thrill-seeker just looking for a few thrills. (He reminded me of Jimmy Stewart in his Oscar winning role in The Philadelphia Story, in that they are of similar height.) If his character has a setting beyond this default, I must have blinked and missed it. Chris Klein is, in short, a major drag on an otherwise capable cast phoning in performances that they would be keeping off their résumés.

As bad as the Rollerball remake is, I cannot bring myself to hate on it as much as Jaws the Revenge, Ghostbusters 2016, European Vacation, or some of the thousands of other remakes, reboots and sequels nobody wanted or requested. It's a lame cash grab to be sure. At least there was no role for Rob Schneider.

As a fan of both fantasy adventure and also goofball comedy, Your Highness struck me as a bit of a missed opportunity. With a $50 million budget, the production looks great. Ireland's countryside is beautifully presented, the music score provides the appropriate heroic tone, the mechanical creature effects look straight out of The Dark Crystal and the set dressings and costumes perfectly evoke the 80s heroic fantasy flicks director David Gordon Green set out to lampoon. Krull. The Beastmaster. The Conan movies. That alone puts this exercise in the better class of its genre, well above the likes of Ator, Yor and Gor.

The problem is the script. The film didn't really have one. Green admits that they worked from an outline and improvised much of the dialogue on the spot, rather than rehearsing and refining the comedy ahead of time. This was an unwise choice. Monty Python and the Holy Grail, for instance, has an improvised feel, but was in fact carefully scripted and rehearsed, with less improvisation than people thought at the time. Comedy requires testing and refinement or else you get improvised gags that don't land followed by dead air as nobody laughs. This is Your Highness's biggest failing. The characters have little depth or interest, as the constant stream of improvised bits provide limited opportunity for interaction between them. Outside of Toby Jones and Damien Lewis who are there to play straight men, everyone else is just a joke machine. That would work better if all the jokes worked. But the quality of the comedy is uneven and some scenes just have dead spots in them, like TV sketches where the first joke fails to hit and the rest of the bit just gets awkward. Also, cursing only works as shock comedy when you don't do it all the time. Someone remind McBride of that rule.

With a properly planned script, this movie could have been a real winner. Great looking production and a fine cast, what's not to like? Well, the jokes were supposed to write themselves but half the time they didn't and the result was a few great lines and a bunch of squirmy moments. Too bad. There are a dozen or so laugh out loud moments, normally enough to carry a comedy of this length. But with so little pre-planning, the laughs come at random, with no set up or other structural support within the narrative. A skilled script doctor could have fixed this, papered over the dead air and the result might have been a minor comedy classic.

The most interesting thing about this movie is how much the box art on the vhs copies changed in just one year. The 1993 version featured Tate Donovan and a lineup of hot women in mini dresses with no Sandra Bullock anywhere. A year later Bullock takes up about 80% of the cover with a tiny Donovan peeking up from a lower corner. Also the order of billing for the two leads was switched. Obviously the success of Speed had something to do with this...

The movie itself is a trifle and a guilty pleasure. Donovan and Bullock play two nerdy scientists (and for once Hollywood writers scripted reasonably authentic sounding laboratory banter) who obtain a gypsy love potion and begin to experiment with it. He, despite his rumpled appearance, finds himself irresistible to women when before he could not have picked one up with a forklift. She is now being showered with gifts by suitors who previously would have passed her without a glance. How does the potion work and where will it all end? A viewer's first guess regarding the latter is likely right - this is a paint by numbers ugly duckling romance after all.

There are few surprises here and little novelty in the way of narrative, but rom-coms are so generally contrived and formulaic that this is hardly a unique failing. On the plus side, the two leads are awkwardly charming geeks, Bullock especially in a comic turn that presages a similar character in Demolition Man a few years later. The audience cannot help but root for these coolness-challenged underdogs. There a few genuine laughs, too, and some wry observations about how status conscious the modern dating scene can be. The script is surprisingly sharp. In fact, most of the movie's component parts are a shade better than what is typically seen in such an exercise. The result is a pleasant way to waste an hour and a half that falls short of being outright special.

Recommended, but keep expectations modest.

In science fiction there is a sub-genre known as the "super science story", wherein new technology appears that fundamentally changes how the world works. In this movie, spy characters are given devices that allow them to instantaneously travel anywhere in the world and even to any moment in time! Just thinking of the possibilities of such power as applied to the spy game is dizziness-inducing, and yet in this movie the devices simply function as a get out of jail free card for whenever the script gets into a tough corner.

The fact that Donald Woods and Jeffery Hunter, the supposed big brains in America's top spy agency have not (or cannot) use such tech to jam up her Cold War enemies on an epic scale shows just how little thought went into this aspect of the story. The movie plays like an episode of To Catch a Thief but with a cheat code. One suspects that the creators wanted a gimmick to distinguish themselves from the tidal wave of James Bond knock-offs that followed after Goldfinger, but lacked the courage to take this key story device to its logical end point. As if they wanted to be different, but not that different. There is a short scene in the early part of the film in which Jeffery Hunter tests the device by carrying out a series of re-does to repair a botched mission, yet fails to take a similar approach to the main mission! The picture has a deus ex machina device on tap but wants to pretend it does not, not really...

This is the key failing of the film, and it dwarfs all other considerations. Jeffery Hunter and France Nguyen make an attractive pair of principals, and their scripted banter, while nothing special, passes the time acceptably; the production values seem adequate, albeit well below the Goldfinger standard; the stakes are high, with the main story concerned with thwarting a nuclear detonation within Los Angeles. Okay, supposed super spy Hunter has to be bailed out multiple times by junior partner Nguyen, which makes him look like a bit of a boob, but slightly different handling could have turned this into a fun running gag. There are elements here to like. And none of that matters, since the viewer has a leisurely 95 or so minutes between the credit sequences to contemplate just what a single field agent with TIME TRAVEL TECHNOLOGY could do! Looting every secret file in Moscow and Beijing would be child's play. Mike Hammer in Complex 90, if given such gadgetry, would have ended the Cold War in about three days. Such a ridiculously potent story device either has to be employed fully, which would radically alter the rules of the spy game (and thus, the spy thriller) or left out. Using it by half measures makes the characters seem not very clever or competent, and the writers seem unimaginative and cowardly.

The viewer is left with the inescapable feeling that a better thought out version of this idea should be possible. But what we get here just is not it. What a pity.

Easy Come, Easy Go features (famously) maybe the worst selling soundtrack ever for an Elvis vehicle and this simply shows discernment on the part of the record buying public. The songs here range from bland and forgettable to 'what was that, I nodded off...'. As a rock and roll picture (Elvis' own term for most of his output) this one is a loser. Rather surprisingly though, as a comedy-adventure it is passably plotted and paced with good underwater photography. Normally in an Elvis feature, the songs are the attraction and the rest is filler. Here the musical numbers get in the way of an unexpectedly engaging treasure hunt, while Elvis additionally gets to romance beatnik Dodie Marshall. The inclusion of beatniks in a 1967 movie shows just how far behind the producers were when it came to pop culture - this picture came out around the time of the Monterey Pop Festival - but I won't quibble since beatnik Dodie is a very likeable and quirky presence that keeps Elvis and the plot a bit off kilter whenever she is onscreen.

The result is an odd entry into the Elvis oeuvre. The treasure hunt is well-handled and believable; the romantic pursuit of Elvis' female lead is a more satisfying challenge than in certain other of his pictures; Pat Harrington is his usual very watchable self in a decently written comedy support role; and the musical numbers might provide welcome relief from chronic insomnia. If expectations are kept low, Easy Come , Easy Go will kill 90 minutes at least as well as solitaire on your iPhone.

TMS produced this late 90's Canadian adaptation of an Argentinian comic and it shows. The silky smooth action animation rivals that of Batman TAS of the same period and this is the series' best aspect. Every episode features at least one elaborately staged and beautifully shot action set piece which would have been insanely complex and expensive to shoot live action. The look of the series is an odd mix of comic strip art - hairy arms are depicted as dark dashes! - with extraordinarily detailed backdrops. The city setting is a marvel in itself, a blend of the old world with its dilapidated opera house, narrow streets and open air market stalls and mad science cybernetic modern. A character appears to be strolling through MGM Paris of the 1930's only to run across a killer robot. The stories never get quite as complex as the best of Batman TAS, but they are consistently well-plotted and watchable. Suspense abounds and there are some frightening moments, but no excessive violence amid the often wild action. The characters are a bit superficial and their interactions can be a bit simplistic but even this aspect of the show exceeds typical teen cartoon standards. The series' major theme is a positive one for young viewers, that even something created for bad purposes (such as the main character herself, a bio-cybernetic construct) is not inherently irredeemable. All shows should be this humane in this age of dark and gritty superheroics. As of this writing, Cybersix is streaming on Tubi.

The setting is a Mad Max style post-apocalyptic disaster land where dogs are a food staple. The lawless Outland, basically everywhere that is not an indoor fortress, is overrun by outlaws called Skins who ride low-end motorbikes and kill everybody for no reason. The viewer is not informed as to where they get fuel, a key story point in Mad Max 2. The story begins at a Bartertown-clone outpost, where bounty hunter Harry Stark (Michael Ironside in the sort of role he was born to play) has to transport wanted fugitive Vanity to Neon City for trial. The trip will be made in an armored truck, and the passenger list includes a socialite (pre-Buffy Juliet Landau), a not very talented entertainer (WKRP's Richard Sanders), and Stark's ex-wife in a not at all contrived coincidence. Driving the truck is former NFL star Lyle Alzado as a character unimaginatively named Bulk. There are a a few other passengers who may not be exactly what they claim, adding intrigue to the journey out into a hostile and unforgiving land. If this sounds like a setup for some kind of b-grade Stagecoach knock-off, well it is. On the plus side, the script is surprisingly good, with tight dialogue and sharply-drawn character business. This is unexpected in a low budget Max clone, most of which sound as if they were written by teenaged comic book nerds trying to sound tough, or (worse) by Italians who have never been to North America and have no idea how we talk. Yes, Antonio Margheriti, I am looking at you. The performances in Neon City are also surprisingly good, even from Vanity and Lyle. The drama plays out in logical and watchable fashion, uncommon in movies of this type where character interest is just filler between the action set pieces. The good cast and script unfortunately cannot overcome the film's other shortfalls. The chase scenes are poorly staged and not very interesting to watch, a fact which demonstrates a lack of understanding of action movie priorities. Action fans will overlook bad acting and clunky dialogue in the service of an adrenaline fueled stunt extravaganza, but not the other way around. Additionally, the environmental threats along the way, particle storms and hot spots, could also have been better staged and are hurt by the film's low budget. Damnation Alley this is not, despite superficial similarities. There is a decent shootout at an outpost along the journey, but not much else of interest to action hounds. Overall, Neon City is not a complete waste of time thanks to its cast and script, but has little to recommend itself as an actioner. It was directed by a TV actor and plays like a TV movie with some action movie business shoehorned in. There are much worse entries in this sub-genre to be fair. The JCVD vehicle Cyborg, for example, was certainly a waste of its admission price. But if you like Beyond Thunderdome, watch that, and if you like Stagecoach watch that. Do not settle for weak imitations.

Nobody but Hitchcock fans watch thrillers for the art. Everyone else is looking for actual thrills. The slasher cycle began with Halloween, and John Carpenter provided the blueprint for the imitations that followed - suspense, jump scares, false frights that turn out to be nothing, doom-laden musical notes... The mechanics of the low-budget thriller are familiar and easily achieved.

Final Exam borrows a few tried and true items from Halloween's box of tools. The killer is shot from the waist down or partially screened by trees to appear remote and menacing. Bright light glints off a bloody blade on an otherwise dark night. But the little here fails to actually generate suspense. The viewer is merely reminded that suspense-building is a necessary element of the process. The problem is that the building blocks of a slasher film are too thinly spread and separated by long stretches of time spent among poorly drawn and uninteresting characters. This is a common fault in slasher movies but one which can be at least partially offset by lively pacing and occasional action. Unfortunately, the film's pace is leaden and what little action occurs is so poorly staged that it fails to excite a viewer perpetually starved for distraction.

This is Final Exam's fatal fault. Nobody renting a slasher movie is expecting character interest on the level of The Big Chill or the epic sweep of The Godfather. The viewer's expectations are already modest. But providing more stimulation than what is minimally required to keep the viewer awake should not represent undue hardship for a slasher movie's creator.

No thriller worth the name should be this boring. Cinematic entertainment needs to be entertaining. Writer-director Jimmy Huston clearly slept through the lesson in film school that emphasized keeping things moving along.

Sax Rohmer's adventure novels often had a rambling quality to them, but this adaptation wanders so far afield at times that trying to keep track of who is manipulating whom and for what reason is likely to leave you with a headache. Canadian-born director Lindsay Shonteff was best known as the creator of The Second Best Secret Agent in the Whole Wide World (1965), which launched him into a career mostly spent helming spy spoofs. This a great-looking example of the form, exotically set and played dead straight by its cast as they toss off action movie quips that would make Ahnold blush. To call the resulting comedy throw away would be almost too kind, but the movie's mix of cringy lines and bat bleep craziness has undisputable power as entertainment and deserves to be seen at least once by collectors of so weird it's fun cinema. It holds up surprisingly well to repeated viewing, mostly since after one screening the viewer no longer feels a necessity to make rational sense of it all and gives up to just enjoy the whole crazy ride. Honestly, you could give this thing the What's Up Tiger Lily treatment - overdubbing random dialogue for a nonsense plot - with no wackier result than this movie achieved on its own.

Jennifer O'Neill became a star as the distant object of Gary Grimes' voyeuristic attention in the wonderfully nostalgic Summer of '42. That film showed that she could be captivating when viewed from afar, but her career went off the rails while she was still in her twenties owing to a shortage of technical chops. Simply put, she had the looks of a movie star but not the presence. Here we see Jennifer driving around Miami in a 1970 Maserati Ghibli, taking a late night swim, sunning herself in a bikini, flying off to the Bahamas... Mansions, speedboats, planes and jewels provide the rest of Lady Ice's eye candy. It's all very appealing to look at, but herein lies the problem. The movie is all surface gloss with nothing underneath to drive the wheels. Someone forgot to tell the producers that heist movies are crime thrillers, and crime thrillers are plot driven. They need tight pacing, high stakes, plot twists, none of which appear in this film. The only action is provided by a little routine fast driving. Otherwise, everything meanders along in predictable fashion. Some greedy people are interested in some jewels. No surprises here. The producers could have recut Lady Ice as a four minute music video or an episode of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and lost nothing.

Daddy-O is another in a very long line of Juvie D / rock and rollers that tried to look like an Elvis picture from a distance. Shot for only $100 grand on cheap sets and with few professional actors, the film makes King Creole look like Cabaret. Daddy-O would be just another badly dated grade Z picture but for one thing: Dick Contino's Blues. James Ellroy watched this clumsy oldster and then wrote a richly detailed -and thoroughly speculative - account of Contino's participation in the film while tracking a serial killer! The story is an action comedy masterpiece and to actually watch Daddy-O after reading DC Blues is like finding lost gold. The movie is admittedly pretty bad. Contino plays a singing truck driver (get it? Elvis drove a truck before he became famous) who meets a platinum bad girl out on the highway and finds his life spiralling downward. The songs are terrible, a shame really since Contino had a legitimate reputation as a musician, and the characters range from bland to dislikeable, with the exception of the myopic gym manager who is flat out wacky. The crime plot involves drug running, supposedly, although by the hour mark no drugs have actually been moved anywhere. With little story or character interest to engage the audience, there is not much to do except laugh at the dated hipster expressions, groan over the awful song numbers and wonder why Contino's pants are up near his ribcage. But watching the movie as a story within Dick Contino's Blues makes for a rich experience. The viewer sympathizes with Contino for having to take work which was so obviously beneath his musical talents, owing to the damage his reputation suffered following an accusation that he was a draft dodger. (He wasn't but the papers failed to tell the whole story.) Contino himself was not a good enough actor to save a film this hokey, plus he was five years older than Elvis and getting too long in the tooth to be a convincing Juvie D. But wondering how he found the time to play amateur sleuth amidst all of this - assuming that any part of Ellroy's crazy caper was even a little bit true - makes this a truly special movie.

An atomic blast turns Tor Johnson into, well... Tor Johnson in a ripped shirt. He then wanders the desert. A couple of lost kids also wander the desert, and so does their dad and a pair of deputies. Other than that, nothing much happens. Like other Coleman Francis movies, this one plays like it was actually a much longer movie and all of the interesting stuff was cut out. A Soviet scientist arrives in the US carrying defence secrets. We see him arrive by plane and depart in a car. In another movie, this would be filler. To Coleman Francis this is plot. We get endless scenes of people getting into cars and driving away, or parking cars and getting out. But then nothing happens. People look around, say nothing of value, and then leave, or the film cuts away. Often we don't even have dialogue, just an off screen narrator paraphrasing what characters say. We get sixty minutes of filler and no action. Two KGB agents have followed the scientist with orders to retrieve the stolen secrets. The viewer expects some sort of cold war thriller plot to develop, but the blast that turns Tor into a beast also kills the KGB men and burns up the secrets. We are ten minutes into the movie and have been stiffed on what looked like some actual plot development and this pattern continues. Characters are introduced who don't do much. Murders occur but there is little investigation of them. What we get is the filler. Francis clearly thought that having somebody get into a car and drive away satisfied the action requirements for a thriller, and having Tor spread his hands wide and growl like an animal covered the horror part. In this he was mistaken. Maybe he also thought that keeping the audience guessing as to whether anything that happened in the movie actually mattered constituted suspense. He's dead, and we can't ask him. Some bad movies make you laugh at their ineptitude, while others make you want to strangle their creators. This one just makes you sleepy. The title and box art for the movie suggest a drive-in creature feature, but even as a grade z movie it fails, since there is nothing campy here: no bad special effects or overwrought performances or shameless exploitation, none of the usual elements of a good bad movie. What we get is an hour of watching people wander randomly in the desert, and it's exactly as entertaining as it would be to do that yourself. I gave it two stars for being marginally more watchable than Red Zone Cuba, and for possible value as a non-narcotic sleep aid.

If ever a movie served as an object lesson that film is a visual medium and must be treated as such, this is the one. It begins with a series of spoken news reports about the arrival of subterranean monsters in L.A. Since four of the five main characters in the story have lived through these events, there should be no reason to gather them together to screen news items about the monsters, but it kills a few minutes of running time, so... The characters then spend several minutes talking, followed by several minutes of driving. The viewer begins to wonder whether this creature feature will ever feature any actual creatures. In fact, the early part of the movie feels like a radio play, with the actors being filmed as they give their lines. And the dialogue bits go on seemingly forever.

Once the (minimal) action gets going, the thick fog (created by the monsters to cool L.A.'s hot climate and make it livable) obscures much of what is going on. The fog is obviously intended to cover up the movie's cheap production values, but mostly it just makes everything even harder to watch. The visual style has evolved from casual minimalism to ocular strain inducing. Not that blowing aside the fog would have made it much better. Every aspect of the movie comes off as shoddy in the lowest sense. The plot was poorly thought out and the action poorly staged. Little that happens moves the story ahead, makes any logical sense or generates interest. The average student film shows more evidence of thought and planning. The characters are unappealingly dull, and most of their interactions seem pointless and go nowhere. The locations add nothing of interest. The lighting, editing and camera direction seem outright amateurish, about on the level of a locally made infomercial. What little budget existed went toward the creature costumes. These are mildly imaginative, but not very scary.

As entertainment, even bad entertainment, absolutely nothing gets achieved here. There are not even any unintentional laughs. All a viewer can expect to get out of this movie is a mild case of eye strain and an appreciation for the cinematic lavishness of The Blair Witch Project.

Some bad movies, such as Showgirls or Mommie Dearest, become camp classics over time as people come to forgive their shortcomings, and just groove on their excesses. That a movie as famously bad as Glitter has not entered this realm of camp, even after fifteen years, is telling. It tells us that Glitter commits a higher sin than being bad. It is boring. And derivative. And staggeringly incompetent. It was assembled by c-list writers and a TV director, none of whom had much idea how to gain a viewer's attention, and less idea how to hold it. Scene composition is flat and dull, evoking memories of bad holiday TV movies, while failing to establish intimacy with the characters or goings on, even in close up. Early scenes feature a hazy or gauzy look, no doubt to recall Hollywood's golden age, but that simply succeeds in making the movie look trite and derivative, rather than classic. It also makes it look as if the set decorator forgot to dust. The club scenes feature a color palette straight out of Blade Runner, just not as cheery. Every creative element in Glitter has the look of something borrowed from another (better) movie. And the less said about the bizarre, almost random editing choices the better. Every scene transition is another wtf moment.

Story and script construction are uniformly terrible. Scenes begin, stuff happens, scenes end... and NOTHING carries over. There is no continuing thread here of any kind - no overall character arc, no central theme, no ongoing visual motifs outside of the movie's hilariously inaccurate 80's fashion sense. Everything that happens seems utterly pointless, just a string of clichés recycled from old movies in which the chorus girl gets her big break. Glitter's brain-dead script gives none of its performers, not even once by accident, anything original or clever to say, nor any awareness of the storyline's utter inanity, making it increasingly difficult for the viewer to connect with the drama. And then we come to the Razzie-winning central 'performance'. La Carey could have been replaced by a Miss Piggy doll and the central role would have had more animation. Mariah's singular expression of vague incomprehension never changes, not even when gangster Terrence Howard grabs her face! To be fair she is not Glitter's only zombie marionette. Outside of Ann Magnusson's over-the-top pr woman, no actor in Glitter's 100 minute running time seems committed to being in any way memorable. A cynical person might suggest that they did this so that they could keep Glitter off their resumes without fear of contradiction. The result is a movie that defies any viewer to keep paying attention to it. You find yourself wanting to make a salad or do your taxes while the movie is playing, anything so that the time spent watching it is not a total waste.

This brings us to the music. Hollywood seems to have forgotten that the most important element in any musical is music, despite the fact that the word is right there in the name of the genre. Grease turns into a pretty bad movie whenever the singing stops and The Bodyguard is only marginally better. Both were huge hits however, and the fact that their soundtracks went multi-platinum was not a coincidence. Purple Rain features some downright cringe inducing 'acting' by Prince and Appolonia, but redeems itself time and time again with great musical performances. Viewers will put up with so-so filler in a musical as long as the songs entertain and remain in the mind after the credits roll. Glitter, unfortunately, features Mariah's worst ever (and worst selling) album at its core. Not only are the musical sequences not entertaining on their own, but they also make it hard for the viewer to swallow the idea that fictional Mariah would become a superstar on the strength of them, since actual established star Mariah could not manage to peddle them in real life. Thus, the fictional Mariah fails to engage as a performer, the actual Mariah fails to cross over into Hollywood despite having great singing talent and only having to play a person with singing talent, and even the spectacle of these failures fails to entertain on the basic level of a train wreck.

Glitter simply cannot provide an adequate reason to exist. Mariah's musical ability has already been showcased in a long succession of music videos, to better effect, and so we don't need Glitter for that. Rags to riches musical biographies have been done to death, so we hardly need another. The Girl in the Gold Boots told substantially the same story to drive-in goers fifty years ago! Heck, 42nd Street wore out this clichéd genre in 1933. If Glitter's only purpose was to act as a 100 minute commercial for its own soundtrack, as the Pokemon cartoons are simply ads for Pokemon toys, it fails there too, since it makes these crummy songs even less palatable in context than they would be standing on their own. So why does Glitter still exist? Was it financed by someone with a grudge against Mariah Carey, and she never caught on that she was being pranked until after its release? As a practical joke played on a gullible and vain pop diva, Glitter is pure malevolent genius. If, however, we were meant to have taken it seriously, then it's just a really, thoroughly worthless movie.

Poll question: Which pop diva embarrassed herself worst? JLo in Gigli, Jessica in The Dukes of Hazzard, Britney in Crossroads, Clarkson in From Justin to Kelly or Mariah in this piece of drek? I vote Mariah in a close race.

Amazingly, this movie was given a theatrical release, rather than being disposed of as hazardous waste. Even more amazing is the fact that it actually has defenders. There are those who believe that this movie is harmless fun, when in fact you would have to be one of the hysterically laughing stoners from Reefer Madness to find it at all entertaining. A failed internet stunt is less painful than sitting through this mess, and no more likely to leave you with brain damage.

Bud and Doyle are our two everyman heroes, assuming every guy is a nitwit with no job and Joey Lauren Adams for a girlfriend. And like the rest of us nitwits, Bud and Doyle just want to party while the Earth goes to hell on a fast train. There is a potential cautionary tale about environmental awareness in there somewhere, but it gets lost amidst our duo's goofy but unfunny antics. Bud and Doyle make the cast of Jackass look like Laurel and Hardy by comparison.

After a few misunderstandings and much time-wasting non-hilarity, our duo find themselves locked in a sealed environment with five scientists who are studying environmental sustainability. Two of the scientists are played by popstar Kylie Minogue and former model Dara Tomanovich, and if I ever find out which graduate school they attended, I may go back to school. But our boys just want to have dumb fun and proceed to trash the place. Again, the idea that this whole movie might actually be a social allegory about man partying over Mother Nature's deathbed may occur to those viewers who are still aware of their surroundings, but it quickly gets lost thanks to several long scenes involving Pauly Shore not being funny.

This whole business goes on for ninety fairly painful minutes. You can usually tell whether a movie succeeded as entertainment by watching the audience as it leaves the theatre. If a movie is a think piece, everybody looks thoughtful. Patrons of comedies tend to leave in an upbeat mood. The audience for Bio Dome looked lobotomized. The best part of the movie was that it did not end with a title card that read Pauly Shore Returns In...

Apparently the aliens from Contact who watch our TV broadcasts and try to find ways to respond to us have been eyeing late night cable drams with "sin" or "temptation" in the title and this is what they sent back. Or else the kids from the remedial English class got their hands on a camcorder and decided to make an internet sex tape, and the aliens from Contact were watching that...

If anybody has a better explanation for how a movie like this, a movie with no conception of human behavior or interactions on any level could exist, I would love to hear it. Even the worst movie makers manage to hit a correct dramatic note every once in a while by sheer statistical accident. But here, the writing and acting manage to fail with such unerring consistency that it is almost an achievement. Words such as 'surreal' do not begin to describe the experience of watching this movie. Its sheer terribleness on every possible creative level exceeds description. If you took ninety minutes of clips from a South American soap opera, spliced them together in random order and got blind street junkies to come with dubbed dialogue, you would still have a more coherent drama. The Room is so totally bad for every moment of its running time that it becomes a master class on cinematic ineptitude. The dialogue is awful, yet the actors still manage to make it seem much worse than it is by mistiming lines and giving inappropriate responses throughout the movie. The pacing of every scene, every exchange, seems off. And despite a reported budget of $6 million (??!) everything looks cheap and hurried, like a film class project that was left to the last minute.

The story construction is so inept that almost nothing that happens pushes the story forward, and virtually none of the plot threads get resolved. In fact, most of them are mentioned once and never come up again. Early on, for example, the mother casually discloses that she has cancer, and that is all we ever hear about it. This however is the film's secret virtue. When no plot point is important or connected to anything else in the movie, the viewer is free to play connect the dots.

For instance, Johnny's announcement that he failed to get a promotion at his bank shows his underachievement in the financial world. As financiers are sometimes called 'big swinging d*cks', this could be hinting that Johnny is underachieving anatomically as well. This would explain Lisa' perpetual dissatisfaction with him. Or perhaps Lisa' attitude is actually outwardly redirected self-loathing over all of the Weight Watchers meetings she has been missing. Mark's perpetual surprise over how Lisa's undressing indicates that she wants sex and not something else could be masking his own disappointment that she wasn't handing him her clothes to put on for some cross dressing role play. Such disappointment would go far in explaining the sternness of Mark's resistance to her chubby charms. Danny's drug purchase explains his apparent disconnection from reality throughout the film. The kid is clearly on goofballs. Has the mother's cancer spread to her brain? Memory impairment might explain why she keeps having the same conversations over and over. These are all ripe food for thought, and The Room's arthritic pacing gives the viewer plenty of opportunities to toss them around like footballs thrown by guys in tuxedos.

If you have ever wondered how many clichés one movie can contain, this movie may have set the record. The leading character, played by ex-Ryan Seacrest gf Jasmine Waltz, is an FBI agent who gets no respect in her male dominated workplace. Her latest assignment is to investigate the deaths of two border patrol cops down in a remote stretch of Florida swampland. The local sheriff's department has clearly never worked a major crime, since when our intrepid Fed shows up she finds that none of them thought to bring a camera to a crime scene! Two shady scientists claiming to be working on a secret project then arrive, and a monster hunt begins.

There are no surprises here and no originality, just a recycling of every creature feature story device we all grew up with. The movie's way of saving money on monster effects: show the victims screaming and then shake the camera so vigorously that nothing can be clearly seen until after the creature attack has ended. Saw that before too.

Jasmine herself is watchable as eye candy, and the movie succeeds as drive in level genre entertainment, assuming the viewers are drunk enough to be past the point of effective aesthetic judgement of its shortcomings. Other reviewers have remarked on the awful sound recording, and it is true that the dialogue is often drowned out by the wind or passing mosquitoes. This, however, given the uneven quality of the scripting, is not necessarily a bad thing.

This is not a good film. It is however, a GREAT bad film, which explains why many reviewers who remember it fondly have given it higher ratings than it merits on its face value.

The cast try hard, but other than Klaus Kinski, a great actor who can do creepy Germans in his sleep, nobody manages a performance that comes off as wholly authentic. The shrieky script plays at a daytime drama level. The model effects are anything but special. And most significant, nearly every plot device in the movie is ripped off from some other (much better) movie. The landing sequence is almost a shot by shot steal from Alien, the finding of the monster scene reminds the viewer immediately of the original version of The Thing, and other moments feel lifted from It! The Creature from Beyond Space. Story-wise there is little here we have not seen before.

Yet, somehow the whole rises above its elements and manages to entertain anyway. The pacing is consistently brisk and the story doesn't lag, at least not after the first twenty minutes we spend with the crew. The gore effects are genuinely shocking. And the cheesy model effects are forgivable by anyone alive during the 80s. Pre-CGI has its nostalgic qualities. The movie's total lack of pretentiousness is actually a virtue. It's a b-movie with a hand me down plot which never tries to claim otherwise.

Folks looking for Empire of Ash I should be aware that E of A II is not a higher gloss remake of the first, like The Evil Dead II. This movie actually IS E of A One, with a different title on the VHS box. As methods for cutting down the cost of a sequel, that one has to take first prize.

Anyway, Empire of Ash II played frequently on Canadian pay TV channels back in the 80s, as it qualified as local content thanks to being shot on location here. On a story concept level, it actually has some intriguing conceits. Two opposing groups have arisen from the flames of our dead civilization: a group led by scientists who are using captives to create a treatment for those stricken by radiation sickness, and a group of religious fundamentalists led by a loony preacher. Into this world stumble two sisters, and one is taken captive. The older sister, who just happens to have kick butt combat skills, enlists the aid of a couple of free living survivalists to retrieve her sibling. The result is a series of gun battles with both groups of crazies. For an 80s era shoot 'em up, this is not a bad foundation upon which to build. Moreover, the technical level of the movie is no worse than is typical for an exercise of this budget range. Lighting, video and sound recording were at least adequate to follow the action.

Unfortunately, the movie's execution falls far short of its ambitions. The story plays out in a hatchet-chopped fashion, with the action sequences lacking sharp form and dovetailing poorly one with the next. The dialogue is terrible and often makes little sense and the performances are all over the place. This tells me that either the script was being rewritten on the fly, or the creators had no idea how to shape a film, or more likely both. When working with a nothing budget and semi-pro actors, a sure directorial hand, good pre-production planning and effective rehearsals are essential and none of this is in evidence.

The action scenes themselves, the point of the movie in other words, are also of very inconsistent quality, and range downward from not bad to will-somebody-tell-me- wth-is-going-on? In certain scenes, the viewer is required to expend more energy trying to keep straight who is doing what and where than is justified by the underwhelming thrills. The lead actress, Melanie Kilgour, tries hard to keep the viewer watching, but frankly deserved better.

The only reason to watch this backyard movie making mess is to set up the more watchable sequel, E of Ash III.

I like to use this picture to demonstrate the fallacy of imitative form: mere awareness of a picture's kitschy origins or its own camp qualities are not themselves a virtue. If you set out to ape bad alien sci fy, and don't add anything into the mix that is on its own clever or funny or in some way entertaining, you just wind up with bad alien sci fy. Repo Man managed to be a true original, while casting a wink at its drive in antecedents. Big Meat Eater is just on par with its earlier influences, and in no way transcends them.

On its merits, BME is a terribly cheap and shoddy looking picture. The plotting is so random and haphazard that nothing that happens in the film seems in any way organically related to anything else that happens. One scene just stops and another starts up somewhere else. To call the effect incomprehensible is to suggest that BME merits comprehending. It doesn't. It's not a clever send-up, just cheap silly nonsense that somebody put together on a zero budget. It generates little conventional b-movie sizzle, in that there is little suspense, surprise or originality. It isn't even all that amusing as Bad Movie Note entertainment, in that its crazy grab bag of a plot fails to actually pull the viewer along. Random silly stuff just happens, and then more random silly stuff happens.

Get a grip guys. This is not a 10 of a movie despite some of the ratings above. It's just a cheap, backyard production put together in some sleepy Canadian burg by amateurs who watched a lot of bad creature features and wanted to make their own.