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Post by Jeremy on Oct 18, 2020 15:53:36 GMT -8
So here's where I clarify that I haven't watched Robot Monster in the traditional sense. I've seen the MST3K episode where they riff on it. (This is common to my experience with shlocky 1950s B movies - I'm usually most comfortable watching them when the silhouettes of Crow and Tom Servo occupy the lowest quarter of the screen.) It was an early episode in the show's run, before they found their feet - but even there, the snarky commentary for the film practically wrote itself.
But that said, I just didn't find the film itself to be particularly interesting, even from the so-bad-it's-good perspective. You'd think a film with the premise of "Fishbowl Gorilla hunts down the last family on Earth" would at least hold my attention, but the drawn-out scenes of the title character lumbering through the desert felt too disconnected for me to latch onto. They just sort of drag on, even considering the film's extremely short running time.
That is, however, a cool GIF, well worth however much time it took you to post it.
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Post by guttersnipe on Oct 18, 2020 17:01:54 GMT -8
We never did get MST3K here, though I've seen/heard enough fan dubs and commentaries to gather the idea. I don't expect everyone to take to the film; I don't even mind if they genuinely argue for it being one of the worst movies of all time. But believe me, I've ridden far lamer horses from the same stable (some this month, as the ratings will attest). And now that I've finally found a compliant image hoster, I'm going to share some Target Earth for no other reason that this one took less than ten minutes to cook up (I like that it seems to be peeping-tomming it at the start):
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Post by Jeremy on Oct 20, 2020 20:30:50 GMT -8
Did you sit through the entirety of Shark Exorcist? That is some badge-of-courage level stamina.
It looks like MST3K is my prime conduit for several of the films on your list (Eegah and The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? being the most obvious examples). But I have watched Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! unironically and quite enjoyed it.
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Post by guttersnipe on Oct 21, 2020 6:15:22 GMT -8
Handily Shark Exorcist was barely an hour long, which is just as well when you're turning in a film you'd be embarrassed to release if it was made by anyone other than a group of five-year-olds. I like that the (fairly impressive) box art of a priest attempting to hold back a huge possessed shark with the power of faith never actually happens in the movie.
I liked Incredibly Strange more than I expected to. It's true from a lot of the talk I've encountered over the years that it's low on the actual horror quotient, but I disagree that Steckler was as inept as he's made out to be. There are far too many extended sequences of burlesque dances and roll n' roll gigs, which suggested to me that he had access to a handful of performers and simply decided to use them to pad his picture out beyond its very thin conceit, but his actual framing, editing and use of colour was pretty good. There's nothing like Ed Wood's stiffness (I do like Glen or Glenda) or Herschell Gordon Lewis' alarming lack of expertise. The general atmosphere and the hypnosis sequence put me in the mindset that had he simply been born European, he might have yielded a bit more respect (albeit strictly in cult circles, like Jess Franco).
And Tomatoes was also a fairly pleasant surprise. It's amateurishly made, to say the least (there's a moment when a woman starts a conversation with her sunglasses falling off her head that looks like a total accident with no time for a second take), but that added somewhat to the "let's put on a show" vibe. A lot of the gags are very much from the ZAZ school (and rarely have anything to do with tomatoes), such as the black guy going undercover as Hitler or the random police officer taking a shower in the station's corridor, but the one that really made me laugh out loud was when a would-be assassin's hit is foiled by a passing train because he's the one who took the opportunity to cut and run.
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Oct 21, 2020 11:42:46 GMT -8
Never heard of this film before, but now I kind of want to see it! Snipes, are you aware Steckler directed the music video for "White Rabbit" ??
I wonder what would've become of him if he'd started his career ten years later and could've gotten in on the early days of MTV, instead of the golden age of porn...
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Post by guttersnipe on Oct 21, 2020 12:50:26 GMT -8
I discovered that the very day I watched it. He actually made a small handful of music videos, which makes him something of a pioneer.
I find it really hard to find a consensus on what was the first music video(s). It's usually attributed to Dylan or Buggles depending on broacast criteria, but you don't have to look far to find others in the interim by the Stones, The Velvet Underground, Queen etc that had visual ideas beyond just a performance, plus a bunch of Beatles-esque bands using nouvelle vague techniques for messing around in a park and the like. I reckon there were probably hundreds of them made as visual backdrops for nightclubs and stadiums that didn't merit enough attention or respect to maintain by the time MTV rolled around and created a permanent archive.
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Post by Jay on Oct 21, 2020 13:02:16 GMT -8
I should re-watch Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, which holds a strange place in my childhood, remembering the animated series on FOX. Maurice LaMarche and Kathy Soucie did a bunch of the voices in it, which seems surprising and also not.
Some have also had The Residents as one of the pioneers of the music video format, although they were mostly there to buy up weird advertising slots and exploit the fact that so few bands did them in MTV's early days. I doubt most here would find their music to be palatable, or even music, but hey, I love to name-drop those boys in the eyeball masks.
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Oct 21, 2020 16:43:09 GMT -8
I should re-watch Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, which holds a strange place in my childhood, remembering the animated series on FOX. Maurice LaMarche and Kathy Soucie did a bunch of the voices in it, which seems surprising and also not.
Some have also had The Residents as one of the pioneers of the music video format, although they were mostly there to buy up weird advertising slots and exploit the fact that so few bands did them in MTV's early days. I doubt most here would find their music to be palatable, or even music, but hey, I love to name-drop those boys in the eyeball masks.
I am a huge Third Reich & Roll fangirl, I'll have you know - one of the all-time great comedy albums.
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Post by Jay on Oct 21, 2020 17:16:58 GMT -8
I am a huge Third Reich & Roll fangirl, I'll have you know - one of the all-time great comedy albums. Unexpected, but also hell yes. It's among their finest and probably the most successful when used to troll others.
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Post by Jeremy on Oct 21, 2020 18:48:11 GMT -8
Handily Shark Exorcist was barely an hour long, which is just as well when you're turning in a film you'd be embarrassed to release if it was made by anyone other than a group of five-year-olds. I like that the (fairly impressive) box art of a priest attempting to hold back a huge possessed shark with the power of faith never actually happens in the movie. There is an entire genre of dime-store shark movies generated in the last few years (presumably inspired by the success of the Sharknado franchise). Just a few of them include Land Shark, House Shark, Ghost Shark, Zombie Shark, Ouija Shark, Sharkenstein, 6-Headed Shark Attack, and Santa Jaws. Not a single title in that previous sentence was made up. See, the fact that the production on Killer Tomatoes is so amateurish is what really sells it as a parody of a '50s B movie. The film is unquestionably meant to lampoon bad movies, but it manages to pass itself off as an example of the genre very well, which is what ultimately makes the experience so funny. (As opposed to something like Killer Klowns from Outer Space, another "meant to be bad" film that has a more polished production and thus feels more distractingly self-aware in its intentions.)
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Post by guttersnipe on Oct 22, 2020 9:44:18 GMT -8
You seem to be more comfortable and au fait with this genre than I expected.
Part of the problem with modern retro B-movies is that over the course of the last twenty-thirty years, digital has not only more-or-less replaced celluloid/acetate, but it's now become the much cheaper medium. So it's undoubtedly easier for amateurs and fringe directors to have a crack at it, but beyond the typical lack of skill (these details work in tandem to explain the popularity of found-footage), they look too sharp and naturally-coloured to resemble an actual vintage grindhouse.
I don't care for sweeping generalisations about eras (of any medium), but I'm reminded of a pro-film stock guy who was interviewed for the documentary Side by Side who reacted to the question "Digital has made the medium easier to make more films, so surely that's a good thing?" with "No, because there's more bad".
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Post by Jeremy on Oct 22, 2020 11:00:20 GMT -8
Honestly, I rarely watch bad B movies by themselves - I just tend to be well-versed in riffs of them (either through Joel Hodgson's commentary or the many YouTube channels that snark on lousy cinema).
But yeah, bad movies will always exist, as long as there is the tech to make them. And I will still sometimes watch and mock them, because that's what makes the Internet fun.
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Post by guttersnipe on Nov 5, 2020 15:29:01 GMT -8
I totally should have found the time for The Robot vs. The Aztec Mummy last month but better late than never: One of these days I must treat myself to a crummy robot marathon.
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Post by Jeremy on Nov 5, 2020 21:15:21 GMT -8
62 films in 31 days. Amazing. I probably couldn't manage that even if I broke the Sabbath rules.
The only crummy robot movies I've followed to any great degree are the Transformers films. Definitely marathon those one day and let me know how many of your brain cells survive the experience.
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Post by guttersnipe on Nov 6, 2020 1:20:20 GMT -8
It becomes real easy when you consider that only four (?) of them were anything like two hours long and I dealt with most of them in the first week. The majority of the titles (particularly the '50s ones) were barely an hour or so, so it often felt like watching a couple of episodes of something, and could easily be squeezed into a post-dinner period when I had little else to do. If I hadn't already seen all the Val Lewton films they'd make ideal pushed-for-time fodder. The Robot vs. The Aztec Mummy was 64m but was so undynamic it felt twice that (there's a scene in which the protagonists are jumped by hoodlums and taken hostage that contained about as much adrenaline as getting a key made).
I have seen the first Transformers actually, and I remember doing something I never normally consider which was to text a friend about forty minutes in to ask if it gets any better. It didn't, just noisier.
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