Starcrash (1978), by Luigi Cozzi

It's time.

As far as I understand, Starcrash is an equal of Troll 2 and Birdemic as far as Famous Bad Movies go. Maybe it's not as famous--but until Troll 2 kicked off its reign as a Bad Movie Prince, Starcrash was possibly the most famous Bad Movie made by someone from Italy. Nearly everything about Starcrash is done badly in some way, but the cohesive whole is never annoying or agonizing. Far from it--the film is pure trash fun, in a nearly classical sense, and some parts are even done (mostly) well. Of course, there's the fairly obvious caveat--see that title? See that release year? Hope you're ready to take the fast train to Cashinsville.

This movie opens with a shot which has by now become classic--thanks to a different movie. Hmm, what other science fantasy motion picture came out in the late '70s that opened with a spaceship flying away from the camera, descending off the top of the screen? The name escapes me at present. Anyway, our decently impressive starship is manned by a bunch of guys who look like the Time Lord Chancellery Guards from Doctor Who. We will learn later that they serve the Galactic Emperor...who is a good guy in this one! See, this movie is totally original. The Imperial crew are wiped out by flashing red lights, which the film's characters insist on calling "red monsters." Um, sure. They use the same effect to make the stars of the space scenes, changing the red lights to white. Anyway, after the rampage of the "red monsters," we cut to our heroes, smugglers Stella Star and Akton. They are on the run from the Imperial authorities, represented by a green, bald, human-like alien named Thor and a robot named L. Thor's green skin ends at his neck in some shots, and L speaks with a Yosemite Sam accent. Later, he'll turn out to be a coward because they couldn't have him roll around and speak in beeps. Stella and Akton escape but end up at the border of "the Haunted Stars," a deathzone of uncharted cosmic territories. Here, they find the Imperial ship, with a single survivor left aboard. Before he dies, Akton reads his mind, because as we will learn wayyyy later in the movie, Akton has the Force PSYCHIC POWERS. Stella and her friend contemplate contacting the Emperor to let them know what happened on one of his missions, because they are the Good Samaritan sort of smugglers. The choice is removed from their hands when it turns out Thor and L managed to track them after all. They are arrested and tried by what I swear to God is the thing from the end of the 1953 Invaders from Mars, stolen wholesale and dubbed and greenscreened over. What's weird about this trial is that the not-Martian sentences Stella to 200 years hard labor, but then sentences Akton to life imprisonment as well as hard labor. This is odd because normally 200 years is a life sentence, but this is the future, so who knows.

Speaking of the future, did you know that leather bikinis will become standard for female prison laborers in the centuries yet to come? Well, actually, it's just for Stella Star. Don't know what makes her special, but she'll keep on wearing this outfit for damn near the rest of the movie. There are multiple opportunities for her to change, but she just sort of doesn't. I guess it would be comfy if you did a lot of running on planets where modesty wasn't a huge issue. Stella is surprised when Thor and L show up to collect her--she and Akton are no longer the Emperor's prisoners, but his guests. They were the ones who met the dying guard, after all, which gives them at least a tangential reason to meet with the ruler of the galaxy. The Emperor--whose privileged, uncertainly-ironic air gives him a strange resemblance to Prequel Palpatine--asks Stella, Akton, Thor, and L to go into the Haunted Stars and looks for the "phantom planet" of his evil counterpart, the wicked Count Zarth Arn. Indeed, it was Zarth Arn who sent the "red monsters" to attack the Imperial ship, which was one of several being sent into the Stars to combat the Count under the command of the Emperor's son. As with all the crew of all the ships who sought Zarth Arn's planet, the Prince has been lost, and the Emperor fears the worst. Stella promises to bring him back one or another, and the quartet leaves, with all prior grudges seemingly erased.

The first planet they go to sets up a formula which will follow for much of the rest of the film. Stella and L take the ship's shuttle down to the planet, while Akton and Thor stay aboard and uh. Tend to the machinery, I guess. Or maybe they "tend to the machinery"--hey, it's a great way to deal with boredom. When we do cut to Akton in the ship, he's practicing making plasma rings or something with his psychic powers. As she explores the beach, Stella utters one of the best lines of a movie made up of best lines: "Oh my God! Amazons on horseback!" L's reply is relaxed, despite his newly-acquired and oft-proclaimed nervousness: "I hope they're friendly." They are not. They take the pair back to their queen, an ally of Zarth Arn's, and when they try to escape they attack L en masse. This movie is another occasion outside of Death Note where I must be careful spoiling that L dies. Except not really--he just gets back up and saves Stella, but not before the smuggler learns from the Amazon queen that Zarth Arn's planet is protected by two guardians. The movie does remember this later, but the payoff is really stupid. Stella and L try to go back to the ship, when they are attacked by--and I'm not kidding here--a giant humanoid stop-motion robot with enormous spherical tits, complete with giant blown-out industrial nipples. The not-Harryhausen creature stumbles after them but they manage to get away safe and sound. Of course, they have to shoot down some Amazon fighter ships along the way, in a sequence which is similar to the TIE fighter scene from A New Hope in spirit if not in totality.

The next planet is an ice-world, just like in Star W--wait, hold on. This movie came out before The Empire Strikes Back. Surely it's just a coincidence, and not an instance of George Lucas having seen this movie. Anyway, it turns out Thor is a traitor, and he plans to leave Stella and L on the planet to die, after having seemingly killed Akton with a single karate chop. Akton is a little bit stronger than that, though, and shoots lasers out of his hands to kill Thor (making a creepy murder-face in the process); he saves Stella and L, but not before they have a genuinely cute bonding moment where they call each other friends and reminisce about how far they've come since the days of fighting each other. It turns out Akton knew Thor would betray them because he has future-vision. When Stella reasonably asks, "Why did you never tell me about this before?" his reply is totally amazing: "Because if I told you the future, that would be changing the future, and that is against the law." (Emphasis mine, but some words don't need to be spoken intensely to be emphatic.) I assume this is a weird dubbing thing, and they mean, like, the laws of reality, but I love the idea of the Emperor meticulously studying the future and then enforcing its flow no matter what, including the parts of it which don't go well for him, and dispatching time-cops--dressed perhaps even more ludicrously than their chronally-bound counterparts--to punish those who try to change the future. All while pretending not to know what's going on.

In orbit over the third planet, the heroes' ship is attacked by the "red monsters," but Akton reveals that they are actually a psychic illusion. While on the planet, Stella and L are attacked by cavemen. While the pair hold their own, the cavemen are great in number, and they attack L en masse. This movie is another occasion outside of Death Note where I must be--oh goddamnit! This movie needs to stop repeating itself. This time, L is really, truly dead, at least for now. Stella has been kidnapped and is about to be cooked and eaten when she is rescued by a figure in a fish-man mask. He takes the mask  off of his head, and reveals his true identity: DAVID HASSELHOFF. Again, I am not kidding, it is actually Hasselhoff. Hasselhoff with a fuckton of eyeliner, no less. This is Simon, and he is the only surviving Imperial from the original wave of ships that entered the Haunted Stars. He and Stella run into Akton, who whips out a lightsaber (there's no other name for it) and cuts down the cavemen who were chasing them. He then says that the red monsters and the cavemen were the twin guardians spoken of by the queen of the Amazons--thus, the planet which contained the last survivor of the Emperor's mission was conveniently also the base of Zarth Arn's they were looking for. Those are not interesting guardians, although the Count has a pair of really shitty stop-motion robots to protect him--a simple dialogue transplant would have fixed some things, because it's more likely to me from a story perspective that these robots are the guardians, and not two unrelated, random menaces. It turns out that Simon is, of course, the Prince, and the Count is using him as bait to come to the phantom planet--whereupon he will blow it up in his face, killing the galactic ruler alongside his son and the two smugglers. But Akton breaks loose and kills the robots with his lightsaber, sustaining fatal injuries in the process. He refuses to save himself because changing the future is against the law and everything. But he dies giving the universe a better chance.

It seems that Stella and Simon are doomed to die anyway, because they can't escape the planet--however, the Emperor appears and announces he has powers of his own. At that, he commands: "Imperial Battleship...stop the flow of time!" That ship can suspend time, alright, but it can't suspend my disbelief. The Emperor announces the final plan, which involves crashing his flying city into Zarth Arn's fleet--a Starcrash, as it were. The last battle begins, pitting good against evil in a fight to the death.

Starcrash does its best to do good with plundered loot. While there are countless scenes and moments shamelessly plucked from the vine that grew from Star Wars, the sets and costumes usually have some sort of creative image apparent in them. It is entirely possible that the design team had seen episodes of Doctor Who, as that aesthetic is present too. There are odd European touches here, as well as Flash Gordon. Yet all of these elements work in their own pulpy goofiness--this is a space opera, after all, and opera is nothing if not garish. This movie is surprisingly sexless for an Italian film of this vintage. But like the model it "borrows" from, Starcrash is more concerned with an unquestioning, un-cynical world which could appeal to children as well as adults, rather than the universes of anything that the Umberto Lenzis and Bruno Matteis of the world would ordinarily turn out. Hope is valuable in Star Wars, and that Starcrash preserves the hopeful atmosphere of its better counterpart is vital. It's a bit easier to believe in the cheapness, because at no point do you feel that the characters would get annoyed watching their own movie. The scene with Stella and L on the ice-planet is, as I said, genuinely affecting, and while Akton was kind of a tool who did mysterious things for dumb reasons, his death is upsetting because we care about Stella and we know by this point how dear Akton is to her. Also, with lovable robots being more popular than ever, it's hard to watch L's longer-lasting second death, even if he does come back in a new body for the finale. A lot of people, including myself, like to say things that try to synopsize cinema as a whole, and I want to avoid universal conclusions because I love movies for how amorphous they are--all the shapes they can take, all the games they can play. But I will abide by a broad and general maxim that Good Characters + Entertaining Events = Good Movie. I don't know what I need aside from compelling characters and interesting things for them to do. Throw in a Good Message and we've got something going here.

Of course, Starcrash is very funny, and not on purpose. I think my favorite scene is the one in the final battle where Zarth Arn's idea of leading his men is standing on a catwalk shouting "Kill! Kill!" over and over again. Maybe that's all I need. I don't know what I need, actually, but I seem to keep finding great things in life anyway. Starcrash is most certainly one of them.

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Mutilations (1986), by Larry Thomas

Cattle mutilations, Roswell, the Tunguska Blast. And amazingly bad claymation. Welcome to Mutilations!

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Night Train to Terror (1985), by John Carr, Philip Marsak, Tom McGowan, Jay Schlossberg-Cohen, and Gregg G. Tallas

With this review, I have now reviewed this movie three times over--and we're not done yet. When I was talking about Gretta and The Nightmare Never Ends, I may have alluded to the fact that the third piece of this anthology was never finished or released. Well, I was wrong. When I made that statement I knew that third movie as Scream Your Head Off, with a 1981 production date. A meager amount of research on my part would have unearthed that Scream Your Head Off was released eleven years after it began production, under the rather odd title of Marilyn: Alive and Behind Bars. But that movie is for another day; we're here to talk about Night Train to Terror, the primary reason why any of the three movies it was slashed out from are remembered.

God, Satan, and a mysterious third party who may be Death, are aboard a train. Also aboard is a REALLY shitty '80s pop band, whose lives are on the line: the train is due to crash at midnight, and God and Satan are here to debate the nature of humanity in order to determine whether the band will go to Heaven or Hell when they die. In order to convince God that humanity isn't worth saving, Satan tells God three stories, each of which supposedly prove humanity's evil. In "The Case of Harry Billings" (aka Scream Your Head Off), the titular Harry Billings kills his wife with drunk driving and ends up in a weird mental institution which chains up naked women for the purposes of rape (I think?) and organ harvesting. The main doctor there turns Harry into his drugged/hypnotic agent to abduct women for this purpose. The head nurse is also banging Harry and plans to have him help her lobotomize the head doctor so she can take over the hospital. It's pretty fucking weird.

Next is "The Case of Gretta Connors," aka Gretta. Things are kept pretty much the same, but they try to make Gretta seem more like a victim and George seem more evil; the primary focus is on the Death Wish Club. The main oddity of this segment is that they never explain why Gretta becomes Charlie White--she just suddenly looks like a guy for some reason. While they prominently feature the beetle scene, they also add on new footage of the beetle (rendered with claymation) escaping the room and killing a random makeout couple in a scene that totally doesn't have different video quality. By kill them, I mean it stings them, and this makes their faces explode.

Finally, we have "The Case of Claire Hansen," cleaved from the meat of The Nightmare Never Ends. I saw very few differences here and it actually told the story much more efficiently than the original film did. However, there are some scenes which appear to be of the same type of tacked-on claymation gore as that which appeared in the Gretta segment. I suspect similar sequences were added to the Scream Your Head Off bits, but we'll find out when I finally get around to Marilyn: Alive and Behind Bars.

I cannot imagine what it would be like to watch Night Train to Terror without context, aside from the obvious fact that it would be a headrush of unparalleled vertigo. Even with context, Night Train is a heady brew of Doris Wishman-esque cuts, unexplained plot threads, and hidden surprises. Every segment is discombobulated, with traces of subplots floating here and there and yet meaning nothing. This includes the new footage shot for the film. They try to make the pop band on the train into actual characters, despite the fact that all they do is sing the same songs over and over and over again; there's a mention of, "Oh, man, it's too bad our van broke down and we had to take this train!"--as if we could possibly care. How does that even make sense? Trains have to go to very specific places, and even if one was going to where I was headed I'd still worry about leaving my van behind to jump one! To me, that's like saying, "Shit, my motorcycle is out of gas. Might as well charter a cruise ship home then." It's ditching one line of vehicle for another. But I'm getting off-track: again, we're supposed to believe that there's an actual story to this frame story besides the God-Satan thing, and one line is supposed to cover the whole depth of that story. That's a perfect synecdoche for the entire movie. That line is patchwork and so is the rest of the film.

Perhaps I'll have more of a chance in the future to delve into this genre of patchwork remakes, which has existed since forever. For now, both Night Train to Terror and The White Gorilla are fine additions to my A-List, and I'll be returning to their uniquely Burroughsian madness time and time again. In regards to Night Train specifically, I will be returning to it in a stranger sense, when at last the time comes to review the third movie from its twisted catalogue.

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Weasels Rip My Flesh (1979), by Nathan Schiff

I think I finally boiled it all down. People are nostalgic for their childhoods--or have a tendency to be. They want to see their childhoods represented in media, and this includes teenager-hood. The problem is there's a barrier between adolescence and adulthood, so that when one tries to represent one's lifestyle as an adolescent in adulthood, it comes out garbled, nonsensical, and embarrassing. It's best to leave representing kids to the kids themselves. That's where Kids Goofing Off comes along--the subgenre of horror-trash cinema that is magical and excellent. A lot of us made horror movies when we were kids, when we had no money but a reasonable number of friends, and a bottle of expired Karo syrup. Not a lot of us, however, had the courage and integrity to see to the release of their work. Welcome back once more to SPOOKYWEEN, my friends, and for the '70s, we'll be looking at white Afros, awkward 'staches, gore, and, of course, good ol' nihilism.

I'm so happy I get to talk about Nathan Schiff. In his late teens and early twenties Schiff decided to put together three backyard Super 8 horror flicks, beginning with Weasels Rip My Flesh and continuing into Long Island Cannibal Massacre (1980) and They Don't Cut the Grass Anymore (1985). A later entry in a similar vein called Vermilion Eyes was made in 1991, and with the other three movies was scheduled to be released by Image Entertainment--however, it was nixed at the last minute, probably due to the fact that Vermilion Eyes is a hard fucking watch. You see, Nathan Schiff's films carry a very particular brand of nihilism. The seriousness of it is hard to discern. Here, in Weasels, philosophical musings take second place to yucky monster gore. Later, as we'll probably see, we see thematic arcs regarding the death of hope, the uselessness of dreams, the inevitability of an awful fate--but let's start light. Let's start with weasels.

We open with some pretentious narration a la Criswell from Ed Wood's movies. This is followed by a murder scene that has no bearing on the film that follows, a la the opening strangulation scene from Beast of Yucca Flats. A space probe from Venus collects some radioactive goo. The probe goes down near Long Island, and when a rabid weasel bites two New Yawk kids, they take vengeance on it by pouring the slimy contents of the crashed probe into the weasel burrow. The weasel mutates and begins to spread its rabies plague. Enter Inspector James Cameron, who must have directed Terminator 2. He and his partner investigate the weasels but are kidnapped by Dr. Sendam (put it in a mirror, then you'll get it), who promptly reveals that mutant weasel blood is the secret to eternal life. I dare not reveal more. It's a tight film and I leave its secrets to you.

Weasels Rip My Flesh is a fascinating movie on almost every front. It is a better movie than I could ever write or direct at 16 (and trust me, I know from experience), and yet it is also rife with amateur's mistakes that enforce a certain layer of charm. You can sometimes hear the direction ("c'mon!" most commonly), and the special effects speak for themselves. The weasels are blobs of clay and sausage, and occasionally sport tentacles. Sometimes they melt into puddles of gore for no reason, and sometimes they go all Night of the Lepus, biologically morphing into zoomed-in hamster stock footage. They add surrealism to the film, surely. But so does everything else. Especially the mustaches. We all remember the folks who would try to grow mustaches in high school. If you ever missed taking a hard look at high school mustaches, this movie will take you back. As will the Dirty Harry references.

Crowning off all this is the fact that it is captured on Super 8, which the late '70s equivalent of whatever the hell was used to shoot Five Across the Eyes. All sound is post-dubbed, all music borrowed from the library cues that haunt the halls of '60s Something Weird fodder. The auditory and visual crackling marks this as a relic from the past, a valuable glimpse into a long-gone era. All media is valuable, in its own sense, as signifiers of the things we lose with the death of generations. Now we can see what they were doing in Long Island in the summer of '79.

Weasels Rip My Flesh is mostly hilarious, and but also a touch spooky. I consider it one of my Spookyween classics. You can spare 63 minutes, can't you...?

Winterbeast (1991), by Christopher Thies

There is no better time to watch this movie than during the winter. Read that sentence again and strike it from your memory, because it's wrong. There is no better time to watch this movie than anytime. Watch it constantly, because it is a tremendous flaw in space that must be observed continuously. New information pours from it constantly that makes our lives better. Winterbeast is charming, funny, atmospheric, and friendly. While also somehow managing to be rather sleazy. If movies that balance those many qualities evenly and consistently are considered to be well-made, then by George, this movie be well-made indeed. Let's get right to looking at what makes it great, but remember...flaw in space. It cannot be adequately described (much like most of the movies that crop up on this site, as you mighta noticed). But I will try.

The plot is relatively simple: two park rangers are trying to look for one of their missing team members and keep being blocked by the suspicious Mister Sheldon, who runs the last of the old Borscht Belt style vacation lodges on the mountain. (I am one of the queers who has nearly perfect gaydar, but I don't need to tell what's up with Mister Sheldon.) Meanwhile, one of the rangers is having dreams about a Native American human sacrifice idol, while is tied to the various claymation monsters wandering the woods, killing many people, including topless women. Several topless women appear in this movie but most of them are photographs. If you can't get your actresses to take their tops off, just put porn in your movie. That'll make up for it.

Anyway, yes, it turns out Sheldon is a servant of these ancient Native American demons, as demonstrated by his keeping several bodies in his house, and by the fact that his head melts. He ends up creating what is easily one of the most perfectly calculated "what the fuck" scenes" in cinematic history, which is what instantly sold the movie to me. You'll know the scene when you see it. The good guys win, of course. I'm okay with spoiling that, but I will not spoil the scene. When you see it, it will sell the movie to you too.

That murky cloud of cinema that people call "bad movies" often hold some truly great treasures. There are the movies that never tried, the movies that did try but failed, and the movies that tried and succeeded. Those that don't try are the worst, of course. The second category, the failures, are often magnificent in that they are the ones that are alienated from human experience and reality. Those are the ones that let us remember that sometimes the things we think matter really don't--things like realism and physics. The third category is sometimes not as purely entertaining as the second group, but it is still awesome to see a batch of people take on that ultimate foe of the capitalist society, pennilessness, and come out on top with a fulfilling, professional creation. Winterbeast is of the third category. It is clearly "cheap" and I think that, to a degree, that influences its obscurity. (Obviously some low-budget movies still make it to the top as "great" movies, but this blog is dedicated to greatness of a different sort. The winners have their prize by merit of winning--I want to help the losers win too.) But it's not amateurishly made, in regards to cinematography, acting, or effects. In fact, the effects really do rival those of Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans, and I don't need to specify which Clash. Were these effects too cheesy for 1991? I've read here and there that this movie took an incredibly long time to make, and in fact had its origin when Clash was being made. I'm always happy to see this stuff, and it looks better than a lot of the other stuff I've seen in the early '90s, that's for sure.

I don't think I'm alone when I consider this movie to sort of be in a trilogy with a couple of other movies. The first one is Equinox and the second is Evil Dead. Those two are classic horror movies that feature isolated forest settings wherein a group of average Joes have a brush with the supernatural, usually in the form of stop-motion animation. This particular style of movie always comforts me. Forests are some of the spookiest places on Earth and if you stir that in with some Harryhausenesque shenanigans, you've got a good thing going. These movies are serious but don't take themselves terribly seriously. They always preserve some degree of innocence, even as things like tree-rape and porn obsession leech into the narrative, changing with the times. They tend to remind me greatly of the monster movies of the 1950s, except unbound from the censors of their times. It really makes you think about what those movies could've looked like if the values had been different.

I guess if there's one thing this movie gives me, it's hope. If my memory serves me well and this is the movie that took, like, ten years total to shoot, I like to believe to believe that any of us unprivileged filmmakers can accomplish similar dreams if we have enough patience. As I've said in some previous entries, I'm about to give it another crack soon. But real life is upon. I have to work hours and do taxes and all that. So I must be patient if I'm to make this a reality. I must hang onto my passion. Winterbeast is a movie about passion, and because of how stupendous the final product is, it is a movie that shows the greatness of passion in turn. Do what you love. Allow yourself only your own rules, and you will do right. Just as long as you're not a dick about it.

Anyway. I don't know if my perspectives will be valuable to anyone or not. I'm at the point in my life where I want to be useful, but fear I'm not, while also wanting to do what I love. I'm scared that none of this stuff, the stuff I love, matters. Even if I know that that shouldn't matter to me. I do think these films can help people, if they're open to guts, gore, dicks, and general tastelessness. It's not about the content of the films, though. It's what they leave with you.

Winterbeast has left a lot with me. It helps me rest, knowing it's there no matter what the season.