#73a The Horror of Party Beach (1964) (Colin)

Our next movie is Danes Without a Clue (1997), or rather it isn't.  You see we have come across our first movie which we have been unable to get hold off.  It is not on DVD, (certainly not in the UK) or online and according to Wikipedia was only ever watched by 756 paying customers!

Danes Without A Clue stars 2 Danish comedians, Timm Vladimir and Gordon Kennedy and is regarded as the worst Danish film ever made, (although I am hard pushed to name another Danish film!).  It follows the 2 on tour telling awful jokes and singing terrible songs, (A kind of Nordic Underground Comedy Movie).  Even Vladimir and Kennedy have admitted it is awful and have pretty much decided not to mass release it.  For that I say thank you to them both.

So we had a dilemma about what to do now.  It was important that we did not miss any movies off the list, but this has become unavoidable as this film is not actually available!  When I made the list, I did have around 125 movies which I trimmed down to 100 based on IMDb scores.  This meant that in the background I have a list of about 25 movies doing nothing and minding their own business.  This gave us an idea.  In the now quite likely event that we can not get hold of a bad movie on our original list, we can sub it for a movie from the list of 25 films that did not originally make the list.  Perfect!

But that was too easy, there had to be a punishment for not being able to watch a movie on the list and for having to substitute it for another movie.  We decided the most suitable punishment was to swap the movie we could not find with not 1 but 2 bad movies from the 'subs bench' list of 25.

Our first from the subs bench is a 1960's Sci-Fi B movie, which to me is fantastic news and so I added my 2 new Dane friends to my Christmas card list, (they were subsequently removed when I discovered what the 2nd movie was, but more about that in my next blog).  Regular readers will know I do like a bad Sci-Fi B movie.  I love the wobbly sets, the campness and the aliens which are quite clearly just a bloke with a gorilla suit on and a goldfish bowl for a helmet.

And so it was with some relief and a feeling of optimism that I started to watch a movie, which I hoped would join Plan 9 and Robot Monster as one of my favourites.

Unfortunately, it did not work out that way.......

#73a The Horror of Party Beach (1964)

The Horror of Party Beach is a Sci-Fi B movie based on the beach party movies of the 60s.  Trying to be very much of the time, it fused pop surf music with 50s style monster movies.  The movie features a band called The Del-Aires, who are actually really good and an atomic monster, who is actually really bad.

We begin with the hero of our movie, Hank Green, (John Scott), taking his girlfriend, Tina, (Marilyn Clarke) to the beach.  Tina is a fun time girl and is knocking back copious amounts of booze and is ready to pahrtay!  Hank also used to be fun, but it appears that he would rather stay at home and alphabetise his vitamin collection as he scolds Tina for being a bit of a laugh.  To get away from her whiny fella, Tina runs off down the beach to a party which is in full flow with garage surf music and silly dancing.

Meanwhile, some men are dumping radioactive waste from a boat just off the coast of where the mad party is going on.  The barrels they dump sink to the bottom and because they were sealed with Pritt Stick and chewing gum, break open and release their black goo.  The radioactive treacle lands on some human skulls on the sea bed and a reaction occurs.  The skulls form into horrifying atomic monsters, hideous, ugly and grotesque in appearance, they are a bit like Piers Morgan, only with more personality.

Back at the party and Tina's flirting with the leader of a motorcycle gang, (Mike, played by Agustin Mayor, which sounds a bit like a council official with wind).  This does not go down to well with Hank and fisty cuffs break out as he tries to prove to Tina he is still fun and a bit butch.  Unfortunately his fight with Mike is so camp it makes the WWE look like all in bare knuckle cage fighting.

Jolly well miffed, Hank decides to leave and Tina decides to go for a swim.  Whilst sunning herself on some rocks out to sea, she runs into the atomic monster and quickly becomes the first victim.

Hank is gutted, if there was any killing of Tina to do, he was the one to do it, presumably by nagging her to death.  He soon gets over it though and begins flirting with Elaine Gavin, (Alice Lyon).  Elaine decides to cancel attending a slumber party that evening as she is worried about Hank and what has caused Tina's change of status on FB from 'living' to 'dead'. 

The slumber party goes ahead and a good time is had by all.  That is until the atomic monster turns up and promptly kills the 20 or so slumberettes!  It's fair to say this rather takes the mood out of the party and the celebrations come to an abrupt end.

The monster's numbers grow and next they kill 3 women who were having a changing a flat tyre by the side of the road party.  As their numbers grow, however, their intelligence seems to shrink as their next victims are shop mannequins.  Not only are they thick enough to mistake these for humans, they are so forgetful that they leave one of their arms behind after slicing it off on the broken shop window.

Hank takes this arm to Elaine's dad, Dr Gavin, (Allan Laurel), who is a consultant on all sciencey stuff for the police and has been trying to find a way to destroy the monsters.  Dr Gavin is an intelligent man and speaks a lot of scientific sounding words throughout the movie and wears a very nice crisp white coat.  None of them make sense and the various explanations of the existence of these atomic monsters seems to change in each scene.  No-one seems to notice and they regard him as a genius, after all he is wearing a white coat.  Dr Gavin goes on the Eddie Izzard principal that people pay attention to 70% of how you look, 20% how you sound but only 10% to what you say.

The answer on how to destroy the monsters is not resolved by Dr Gavin, but by his very stereotypical black housekeeper, Eulabelle.  Eulabelle accidentally knocks over a beaker of sodium and the arm bursts into flames and is destroyed.  Hank then proceeds to buy every ounce of sodium in a 100 miles radius of New York City.

With the knowledge of how to kill them in hand, the team set about trying to locate all of the monsters.  Elaine is the unlucky one to find them and is attacked, fortunately Dr Gavin and Hank, who by now has a dustbin full of sodium, arrive in time.  They fling the sodium and the monsters explode in a nice firey mess.

The film ends with Elaine and Hank sharing a kiss as The Del-Aires play us out.  Tina is by now a very distant memory.

I have to admit, I am not sure if I love this movie or if it was disappointing.  I have seen a lot of bad Sci-Fi lately and maybe this just came at the wrong time and I am suffering from bad Sci-Fi overload, (which is impossible, so it must be the movie!).

The acting in the movie is bad, by no means is it Madonna bad, but it's borderline.  And that is a problem, because the acting in say, Plan 9, is truly awful but entertaining.  Tor Johnson's mumbling nonsense, for example, is brilliant to watch and the cops scratching their heads with their guns and knocking over polystyrene graves is hilarious.  In Horror Beach, however, the actors in this are just lifeless, dull and uninteresting.

The actors are not completely to blame though as the characters they are given are one-dimensional, stereotypical and there is not a character in this movie that I warmed to or was even remotely interested in.  Hank comes across as an arrogant, boring ex-jock who has all the charm of a cheese sandwich.  He is stereotypically male from a certain era and you do expect him to say to all the ladies, 'don't worry your pretty little head about it'.  The ladies would not be offended however, but only because not one of them has been given a brain cell by the writers.  Even Elaine, who is supposed to be very smart, just goes all gooey eyed in the presence of Hank and unable to comprehend what her father is saying, (although to be fair, no one understands what he is bloody saying).

In a movie set in the swinging 60's with feminism, anti-racism and a wave of liberal attitudes emerging, this film is very much stuck in the past.  Even though this was made in 1964, I can imagine at the time that it would have felt very outdated and stereotypical and that the surf pop sound was just shoe horned into it so that the movie appeared to be 'down with the kids'.

Eulabelle's character is by far the worst.  Having a black servant in your picture, probably wasn't the best idea, but to then make her speak slowly and appear backward is just ill judged.  Having Eulabelle carping on about voodoo and the like throughout the movie, is just plain insulting.  Even the writers of 'Mind Your Language' or 'Soul Plane' probably couldn't believe what the director, Del Tenney, was trying to do here.

The monster itself is awful.  This is a good thing and makes me like the movie a bit more because a 'good' bad B movie, should have a daft looking monster.  Trying to explain what it looks like is tricky and indeed the movie itself does not know what to call it.  Monster, Sea Creature, Atomic monster and even Zombie were used to describe it in the movie and various posters for the movie.

To me, the monster is like Jar Jar Binks with the Cookie Monster's eyeballs.  Or the costume which Hannibal Smith wears in the opening credits to the A Team, (please see below).  My friend actually thinks he looks like Arsenal mascot, Gunnersaurus, (please see below) and you know what, I think he may have nailed it!

Either way the monster is crap, and in no way scary whatsoever.

The best thing about this movie by a country mile, is the soundtrack.  I really do like The Del-Aires music and one song in particular, 'Zombie Stomp', is incredibly good.  I was humming this song for days.  This creates a problem for the movie in that I would rather have watched The Del-Aires for 90 minutes than the piece of crap Tenney dished out.

So did The Horror of Party Beach join my growing list of B movie films which I really love?  Well the problem is I don't know, I want to love it but it just doesn't hit the mark for me.  It misses the charm and warmth of the Plan 9 or Robot Monster movies, it's bad, but not funny bad.  It never really catches me and apart from the music there is nothing I would want to visit again.

But I know I should like it as the ingredients are there, crap monsters, awful acting, no storyline.  The problem is, you can have all of the ingredients but if you don't know how to put it all together you could end up with a 'soggy bottom'.  The stale characters, the fact half of the movie seems to have been shot in pitch black, (it may just be my copy, but for much of the movie I could not make out a damn thing on screen) and the lack of any warmth or entertainment make this movie truly hard to like.

In trying to make a hip version of a typical B Movie, Tenney unfortunately was without a clue.  Still, it could have been worse, it could have been Danes Without A Clue.

#74 Troll 2 (1990) (Colin)

We have been doing this blog for over 10 months now and the most common question I get asked is 'Why on Earth are you doing a bad movie blog?'.  I must admit 60 minutes into a movie with John Wayne trying to be Genghis Khan and I do ask myself the same question.

I have mentioned in other blogs the reasons, so apologies if I am repeating myself, but essentially it would have been all too easy to have done a blog about the top 100 movies.  You know any list you make would involve Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Star Wars etc and I would have ended up watching a bunch of movies I have already seen, that I know I like and would offer nothing new to me.

A bad movie list, in theory, should contain films I have never seen or wanted to see and offer something new to me.  I also thought it would be more interesting and good fun taking the piss out of bad films on Twitter and through our blogs, than to keep going on about how great a film was, how wonderful the plot is and the fantastic cinematography.  I can only praise how good a movie is so many times before it becomes repetitive, whereas because I am a cynical person, I have a million ways  to 'slag something off'.

However that has not always happened.  For our #80 film, Inchon, I stared at the computer screen for about an hour and I had absolutely nothing to say about it.  I was going to cut and paste the word 'shit' 1,000 times, which would have been quite dull, but far more exciting than watching the movie itself.  In fact the blank screen staring for 60 minutes was far more entertaining.

For every 4 or 5 Inchons though, we have come across some bad movie gold so far.  The fabulous Ed Wood's transvestite 'information' film, 'Glen or Glenda' or his low budget, camp, sci-fi classic, 'Plan 9 From Outer Space' or Tommy Wiseau's mumbling nonsensical classic 'The Room', (Oh hai!), are all brilliant movies and are my favourites so far.  These movies fall into that 'so bad, it's good' category' and are the type of movie that I hoped this list would unearth.  Yes, we had to watch a lot of crap to get there, but boy, was it worth it!

Our next movie was pointed out to me by Wes near the beginning of our bad movie journey as a film which very firmly fitted into that category.  In fact I think he said something like, 'Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, that film is awful, it is bloody brilliant.  You MUST watch it!'.  A ringing endorsement indeed and if you haven't read his blog on this movie yet, then please do as it is brilliant and you do get the feeling he sort of likes the film :)

You see Wes knows that I like the 'so bad it's good' movie and Troll 2, the next movie on our list, fits the bill.  In fact it is part of a documentary called, 'Best Worst Movie Ever' and is considered to be just that by a very large following of fans.  I have to admit, I had not heard of it, which was a good thing, because this means the bad movie list is working.

So is Troll 2 really the 'Best Worst Movie Ever'?

#74 Troll 2

Troll 2 centres on a young lad called Joshua Waits, (played by Michael Stephenson) who is warned by his dead grandfather, Seth, (Robert Ormsby) about nasty little creatures who turn humans into vegetation, (a bit like Glee does) and eats them. Seth appears to Joshua like the ghost of Orson Wells Christmas past. In case you're wondering it's not Citizen Kane Wells but wine advertising Wells.

Joshua's family go on vacation to a small town called Nilbog. The family consists of dad Michael, (George Hardy), mum Diane, (Margo Pret) and big sister Holly, (Connie Young). Holly's boyfriend, Eliot, (Jason Wright) also follows them to Nilbog in a camper van with his pals, Arnold, (Darren Ewing), Drew, (Jason Steadman) and Brent, (David McConnell).

Along the way, Joshua sees a hitchhiker who Seth possesses to warn Joshua that Nilbog is in actual fact a town filled to the brim with those nasty vegetarian Goblins. This leads us into the first thing you'll notice about Troll 2 in that it contains absolutely no trolls whatsoever, none, nada, not a blinking sausage. The eagle eyed amongst you may have already spotted that the town of Nilbog is in actual fact Goblin spelt backwards. Presumably the lack of trolls explains why the town is not called Llort. Also if it was called Llort then the entire filming would have had to be moved to Wales, so logistically not practical either. Mlifparc was also rejected.

The Waits arrive at Nilbog and meet the family with whom they are going to house swap with for their vacation.  On entering the house they find a feast of yummy food all laid out for them as a 'welcome' present from their fellow house swapees.  The fact the food is covered with a green toothpaste like substance that resembles the colour of Puff the Magic Dragon's snot, does not seem to put them off and the Waits sit down to eat. 

Seth appears again, freezes time and warns Joshua that the food they are about to eat will turn them into vegetation which the Goblins will then eat.  He warns Joshua to find a way to stop them eating the food.  This leads to the funniest part of the movie as Joshua comes up with a very unique way to stop the family from eating the food.  It probably gives it away, so I'll put *spoiler alert* here, but this does lead to my favourite line from the movie as Michael scolds Joshua for spoiling the dinner they were about to enjoy and shouts, 'you can't piss on hospitality'.  Classic line!

Meanwhile, Arnold tries to help a woman called Cindy, who is being chased through the woods by Goblins.  They seek shelter in a chapel and meet the baddie of the movie, Creedence Leonore Gielgud, (Debroah Reed).  Creedence is a gothic cackling witch pantomime baddie, who, we are told, has come from Stonehenge. We could have guessed she was of British decent due to the state of her teeth. (I just thought I'd do that gag before our US readers beat me to it!).  Creedence is the Goblin Queen and uses magical whatsits to control the Goblins.  She displays her power by promptly giving Cindy a refreshing drink which turns her to green slime which the Goblins then yum right up. Arnold's quick mind realises something may be afoot here but it's too late as Creedence turns Arnold into a half man half tree combo.  Unfortunately his acting was so wooden from the start, you probably wouldn't notice.

In the morning, Michael and Joshua go to the store to purchase some non urine soaked food.  Joshua goes wandering and finds a church in which the locals are attending a sermon.  The locals are in fact Goblins too in human disguises and when they spot Joshua are none to pleased at his sneaking around and decide to force feed him some nice turns you into green slime ice cream.  Fortunately Michael finds Joshua in time, the preacher convinces everyone it was all a silly misunderstanding and by the time Michael and Joshua return home, the town has taken a quick short cut ahead of them and has laid on a lovely feast.  All food is topped with some more of the contents of a used tissue from Jurassic Park.

Joshua is having none of this malarkey and so runs off to find his dead grandpa, finds him, grandpa throws a lightening bolt at the preacher, (Har Nu Ken!), and the preacher, now dead, turns back into a Goblin.  Finally this convinces the Waits that they are indeed in great danger and they lock themselves in the house.

Meanwhile, Creedence turns herself into a saucy minx and sets about seducing Brent.  For some reason she brings some corn on the cob with her and I must admit my eyes did start to water as I let my imagination run wild.  Fortunately the worst that happens is that whilst Brent and Creedence get all steamy, the corn on the cob turns into pop corn!  I will admit, Creedence is looking mighty fine in this scene and I suspect many a lad popped his corn in the cinema during this part of the movie.

Back at Creedence's chapel, Joshua and Seth set about trying to destroy Creedence and her Goblins and do so in the most boring way possible.  Eating a bologna sandwich and touching a stone.  (The meat eaten by Joshua makes him unappealing as a veggie dish and the touching of the stone, does some sort of magic thingy.  Stop me if this is too technical).  Creedence and the Goblins are no match for processed meat and stone touching and are destroyed.

The world is saved from veggies once more and the Waits head on home.  Joshua's mum celebrates by eating a nice juicy apple, turns into green sludge and is eaten by more Goblins.  Joshua screams 'Stop eating my mommy' and I wet myself laughing.  And so ends one of the worst movies I have ever seen.  And I absolutely loved it!

Yes Wes got it totally right and this movie was right up my, (corn on the cob free), alley.  The acting is terrible, the Goblins look like a bunch of Ewoks going to a austerity Halloween party and the script feels like it was written in crayon.  The fact Troll 2 contains no trolls either is the icing on a 'how to make a movie so bad it becomes good' cake and sets the film up for ridicule from the off.

The blame for this awful film lies in 2 camps, the studio and the director, Claudio Fragasso.

The studio is to blame for the fact that Troll 2 has no trolls as they changed the title of the film.  The movie was originally called Goblins, which makes complete sense, but the studio decided to tie Goblins in with a movie released a few years earlier called Troll.  Fans from the Troll film will then watch Troll 2, they concluded before disappearing up their own backsides.  They were right, Troll fans watched and then wandered out of the movie theatre 10 minutes later once they realised it has sod all to do with Troll.  On the basis of this studios idiocy, I will call my next movie Star Wars: Episode 7.  It has jack all to do with Star Wars but what the hey, (it can't be any worse than Star Wars: Episode 1).

But it is Fragrasso who has to take nearly all of the blame for this fiasco as every other thing which is wrong with the movie, comes back to him.

Let's start with the acting and believe me this will not take long as there is no real acting to talk about.  With the exception of Deborah Reed who is fantastically over the top as baddie Credence and Michael Stephenson who despite being the youngest, gives the most mature performance, the rest of cast feel like they have just turned up on the day and got thrown into the movie.  This is because that is exactly what happened!

George Hardy, (Joshua's dad), for example, was a dentist and turned up expecting to be an extra in the movie!  He is then given one of the largest speaking parts in the movie!  I feel sorry for Hardy as he delivers the lines as if he is reading them for the first time, (he was) and like he is stumbling from scene to scene not knowing what is going on, (he didn't).  Fragasso has obviously not been to the dentist for a while because he would have known that they are simply awful actors.  I can not remember the last time a dentist was a good enough actor to convince me that, 'this isn't going to hurt'.

I don't mean to pick on Hardy, the rest of the cast are just as bad.  Margo Pret, (Joshua's mum), for example, is far more scary than the Goblins for most of the movie.  She stares intently throughout the movie and must be followed by weeping angels as I don't think she ever blinks.  Her lines are also delivered as if she is reading out aloud from the back of a cereal box and she displays as much emotion as a teaspoon.

The poor delivery and performance are not the 'actors' fault, it is Fragasso's.  They did not audition for the roles but nevertheless Fragasso handed them out like flyers for a golf sale.  It reminds me of Guy Goma.  If you do not know who he is, Guy went to the BBC News Channel studios in 2006 to apply for a job but was mistaken for another chap called Guy and ended up being interviewed live on air about the Apple vs Apple court case, (If you would like to see this, here is the link, his face is a picture once he realises what is going on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYg2Z73_KfY. ) I have this vision of all members of the public stumbling onto set asking for directions to the next town but ending up being cast in the movie!

Fragasso spoke little or no English, but wrote the script.  He insisted that the actors stuck to the script and did not stray.  After all, what does a native English speaker know about the English language!  This explains why the cast speak as if reading for the first time and why some sentences don't make sense or are full of grammatical errors.  They don't speak proper like what we does.

The rest of the production team did not speak much English either and communication to the actors was difficult.  This is why in various scenes you will spot the cast members looking directly into or just behind the camera.  They are desperately trying to work out what the flapping arms signal Fragasso is giving actually means.

And then we come onto the Goblins themselves.  Wes and I have a running gag about the bad movies that we have seen so far, in that these bad movies seem to insist on showing clips from way better movies. In Myra Breckingridge, (to pick one at random), there are many clips of good movies, (Laurel and Hardy, for example) and all this does is remind you how bad the actual film you are watching is and how much you actually would rather watch the other film.  Troll 2 has many pictures of Goblins which are far better than the actual Goblins we have on offer.   This is not saying much as a picture of a pile of horse manure would look closer to a Goblin, but does highlight how truly awful the costumes are.

The masks appear to be from a 99p store which are fire damaged and have 99% off the marked price.  It is very obvious that they are masks and not some clever CGI trickery as you can quite clearly see the actors mouths and cheeks behind the mask.  When they do try some animatronics with the Goblins they are painfully slow, for instance, when they are 'talking' the sound is traveling much faster than the mouth and looks like some badly dubbed foreign movie.  It is so bad that it makes Jaws from Jaws The Revenge look like a James Cameron epic.

Thanks to Fragasso's poor casting, awful script and staggeringly bad Goblins, the whole movie feels very cheap.  It truly is a terrible film, but the day Fragasso released it, I hope he also bought a lottery ticket because he has been incredibly lucky and made a film so bad it's good.  Is it the best worst movie ever though?  For me it's in the top 3 definitely.

The recent popularity of Sharktopus, Pirahnaconda or Sharknado on SyFy has shown that there will always be a place for a truly bad movie in our hearts.  That's why Troll 2 quite rightly has a large fan base and why it will continue being some people's best worst movie.  For me, unfortunately, we have another 74 bad movies to watch, so for now I'll have to take a rain check on where this is on my final favourite bad movie list.  I will say though, that if you do get a chance to watch it or if someone offers you the DVD or invites you to a Troll 2 showing, take it, you will not be disappointed.  Also it would be rude not to, after all 'you can't piss on hospitlity'.

#74 Troll 2 (Wes)

 
Troll 2

It happened with Plan 9 From Outer Space, so it was bound to happen again sooner or later, we get to watch a movie that I genuinely love. Troll 2 is one of these, and is one of the rare movies that isn’t just so bad it’s good, but is actually a film that is so bad that it’s a work of pure, unadulterated genius (like The Room).

Directed by Drake Floyd (a pseudonym for Claudio Fragasso – an Italian low budget horror movie writer/director), Troll 2 follows the tribulations of Joshua Waits (Michael Stephenson) and his family as they take a family swap vacation in the town of Nilbog. The movie starts with Joshua being told the story of goblins by his (dead) grandfather Seth (Robert Ormsby), and how they turn humans into plants so they can eat them. The next day Joshua, his sister Holly (Connie McFarland) and parents Michael (George Hardy) and Diane (Margo Prey) drive to Nilbog, followed by Holly’s boyfriend Elliot (Jason Wright) and his friends. When the Waits family get to their summer home, they find a huge meal waiting for them, which Joshua prevents them from eating (more about that later), after Seth warns him that it’s how the goblins turn them into food. As the goblins slowly capture and kill Elliot’s friends, it comes down to Joshua to save his family and defeat the goblins and their queen Creedence Leonore Gielgud (Deborah Reed).

 

  

I’m sure the observant reader will have noticed something about this movie that does make its title a little misleading… There are no trolls in this movie. It was originally produced under the name Goblins, but in a desperate attempt to try to get people to watch this movie, it’s distributers renamed it Troll 2 in an attempt to market it as a sequel and capitalise on the 1986 classic Troll (Strange fact: Troll featured an actor (Michael Moriarty) from another of my favourite films, The Stuff, playing a character called Harry Potter. Strangely The Stuff is one of Rupert Grint’s favourite movies too. Grint is famous for playing Ron Weasley in the Harry Potter movies. Coincidence?).

So apart from the fact that there are no trolls in a movie called Troll 2, what else is wrong with it? Well try pretty much everything. It has a ridiculous story, some of the worst monster make-up seen since the B-movie heydays of the 50s and 60s, acting that wouldn’t be good enough to be in a late night infomercial and a script so bad that even Madonna would turn it down. So why do I love it? See all of the above and so much more.

  

This movie is actually so bad that it has a documentary about it called Best Worst Movie. Made by Michael Stephenson, it follows George Hardy as he travels to screenings and conventions promoting the now cult movie. It’s actually a genuinely good documentary, which is funny, touching, and quite tragic at the same time, and is well worth tracking down.

As you watch this documentary, you discover how bizarrely inept the making of Troll 2 was. The first thing you learn is that none of the actors in this movie were actually professional actors. Of course this is absolutely no surprise if you’ve seen Troll 2, the acting is on a level with the worst of any local amateur dramatics society. In fact it’s so bad, that it makes the next random popstars foray into a film look like an Oscar worthy performance. The actors who were cast in the lead roles actually went to the auditions hoping to be cast as extras. George Hardy was, and still is a small town dentist (he actually still did dental work whilst the movie was being filmed), which just brings Ed Wood Jr’s casting of the chiropractor Tom Mason in Plan 9 from Outer Space (for more about that see our previous reviews) to mind. Don Packard (the store owner) was a resident at a local mental hospital, who was on a day trip. For most of the other actors too, this was their first film. For the majority it was also their last.

I would like to think that maybe the actors could have done a little better had the script not been so bad, but I think I’m maybe just being generous because I want to believe this. According to many of them in Best Worst Movie, they weren’t given a full script beforehand, claiming that they were given scenes just before they were due to film them. Claudio Fragasso vehemently denies this in the documentary, but it would explain a lot. The actors quite often deliver their lines like they’re reading them off of cue cards, speaking with all the emotional range of Judge Dredd. If the cast aren’t just speaking the script, then they are overacting worse than William Shatner ever could dream of. The worst for this by far is Deborah Reed, her performance can best be described as “stoned goth girl”. With a bizarre Eastern European accent and her wide-eyed acting, she steals every scene she’s in.
  

Claudio Fragasso and his wife Rosella Drudi, who weren’t fluent in English at the time, wrote the script itself. Rosella said that the story was based on a lot of her friends becoming vegetarian, which annoyed her at the time, which explains why the story itself is so bizarre. It also explains why it contains some of the most unintentionally funny lines that I’ve ever seen in a movie. I really don’t want to spoil it for you, so rather than tell you about these I think it’s probably best to give you a couple of links so you can see these for yourself. The first involves the aftermath of Joshua’s efforts to stop his family from eating the meal left for them by their goblin exchange family (I mentioned this earlier, and from this clip you can work out HOW Joshua stops his family eating the feast. This can be seen here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OiD6IlBmtk), the second shows Arnold (Darren Ewing) realising how the goblins turn humans into something that they are able to eat (and is here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyophYBP_w4).

  

To turn the humans into something edible, then the goblins must feed them with some weird food that transforms their bodies. At no point in the movie do any of the characters actually stop to question why all the food and drink that they’re offered is a lurid green, The sort of green that’s never associated with food, and is only ever seen in the gunge (or slime for our American readers) that so often appears in Noel Edmonds TV shows, charity fundraisers and Nickelodeon. In fact once the humans are turning into vegetable matter, they look just like they’ve been gunged, or perhaps hugged by a giant slug with a really bad cold. Which brings me nicely onto the films make-up effects.

To say the make-up, or goblin costumes in this movie are bad is quite an understatement. They have to rank as some of the worst costumes made since the heydays of the 50s B-movies. They actually look like they’ve been made from papier-mâché and would have fitted in with a lot of the monsters from those movies, whether it was the sea-monsters with ping-pong ball eyes from The Horror of Party Beach, the rubbery walking tree stump from From Hell It Came, or the dogs wearing pointy teeth in The Killer Shrews. The costumes are so bad, that they actually make many of the monsters from the 70s episodes of Doctor Who look scary. 

Don’t let that put you off though. Like all movies with dodgy monsters they just add to the charm (would the Godzilla movies have been half as much fun without a man in a crappy rubber costume?), and charm is something that this movie has in abundance. How can you not love a movie that features a bizarre sex scene involving a trailers worth of popcorn? Or a mother who’s favourite song seems to be “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”, yet doesn’t seem to know how to sing it. Or that has a child save the day with a sandwich (seriously). This movie has everything you’ve never wanted to see in a movie and it triumphs because of it.

I said at the beginning of the review that I love this movie and it really is true. I watch it at least once a month, and will happily watch it more often if I find someone who’s never had the joy of seeing this film. I also watch this whenever I’m feeling really down, as it’s just impossible to be unhappy watching this movie. Does this film deserve to be considered one of the worst movies ever made? Of course it does, but really don’t let that stop you from buying a copy right now. If there was ever a movie that deserves it’s cult status it’s this one. It truly is a film which was made to be enjoyed with friends over pizza and beer and that is a triumph for everyone involved. Just don’t eat or drink it if it’s bright green.

 

#75 Meet The Spartans (2008) (Colin)

I can not remember which I saw first, the incredibly daft and fast paced Airplane! or the equally daft and very clever Police Squad!  Either way, from my first experience of the spoof, I was hooked.  When I was younger, it was the visual slapstick or silliness which captured me and kept me entertained.  As I grew up it was the clever use of the English language or the subtle send ups of other movies / pop culture.

Airplane! was a spoof of the airport and airplane disaster movies of the 1970's and remains one of my firm favourites today.  Classic lines such as 'Surely you can't be serious?', 'I am serious..... and don't call me Shirley' or 'This woman has to be gotten to a hospital'. 'A hospital?  What is it?'.  'It's a big building with patients, but that's not important right now', will probably make me smile every time I hear them (yes, I am actually grinning now).

The people responsible for all this funniness, were Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker and during the 80's they were really at the top of their game.  I have already mentioned Police Squad! a spoof on the cop shows of the 50's and 60's, but to this we can also add the big screen spin off, The Naked Gun, Top Secret, (a spoof on the spy films such as the James Bond movies) and Hot Shots, (a spoof of action movies such as Rambo).  Some or all of these 3 were involved in these movies and I consider them to be some of the funniest movies ever produced, (OK, maybe not Naked Gun 33/3.  The joke had worn off by then!).  And then the 90's came along and the spoof seemed to go quiet....

In 2000, Scary Movie, was released, a spoof on the horror genre which mainly sent up the 1996 movie, Scream, (ironic in that Scream was also a parody of the horror genre!).  Now I have to admit, I did quite like this film even though it was written by the Wayan brothers, who, I am not really a big fan off, (see my blog on Dungeons and Dragon if you need proof!).  However, I think they were on song with this movie and although not a classic, it's still a humorous spoof nonetheless.

Scary Movie also had other writers, notably Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer.  This ties in rather nicely as they are also the writers of our next movie.  Frideberg and Seltzer seemed to have picked up the spoof baton and are churning out spoof after spoof of movies such as romcoms, natural disaster movies, vampire movies such as Twilight and coming up next year, a spoof of The Hunger Games.  With so many films released so far, I was quite surprised that I have not seen any of their other movies.  Surely for a lover of spoof films this is not right and should be remedied? Well, now I have no choice, because it's in our Top 100 worst movies list!

So have they picked up, where Abrahams, Zucker and Zucker have left off?

Surely you can't be serous..........?

#75 Meet The Spartans (2008)

Meet The Spartans is a spoof of the 2007 Frank Miller movie 300.  For those, (like me I'm afraid), who have not seen it, 300 is the story of the Battle of Thermopylae.  It focuses on King Leonidas and his Spartan army of 300 who take on the mighty Persian army of 300,000 soldiers led by the god king, Xerxes.  The Persian army suffers huge losses and Xerxes himself is injured by Leonidas, but ultimately their fight is futile and all the Spartans are killed.  The sacrifice of the 300 inspires the Spartans and demoralises the Persian army and a year later 10,000 Spartans attack the now weakened army of 30,000 Persians and the battle that follows spells the beginning of the end of the Persian army's occupation of Greece.

Meet The Spartans' plot is essentially identical.  King Leonidas (played by Sean Maguire) also raises a Spartan army against the Persians, although he can only muster 13 Spartans. This is due to a rather specific requirement of Mediterranean good looks and a 6 pack. Cue a ton of homo erotica jokes repeated ad infinitum.

Like 300, the Spartans are ultimately defeated and killed. One year on and a new Spartan army is formed and goes to battle against the Persians equipped with a blue screen. This is so thousands of Spartans can be CGI'd on to even the odds and the movie finishes on this lame gag. 

So as you can tell from this brief plot overview, there really is not a lot going on with this film. At 67 mins, it's incredibly short, (but believe me, still too long), and I can't help feeling cheated despite the fact the DVD cost me 26p from Amazon. 

Maguire gives a surprisingly good performance hamming up his role as the fearless King. Last seen by myself as Aiden from Eastenders and one failed pop career later, Maguire has good comic timing and seemed to enjoy not taking himself too seriously. One criticism is that he did seem to veer into a Sean Connery impersonation at times, but considering Connery's Spartan accent would have sounded like Connery's normal voice anyway, Maguire can be forgiven. 

Kevin Sorbo plays The Captain and it's quite obvious he is the only real actor as he stands out like a sore thumb amongst the rest of the unforgettable cast. Top of the crap pile is Carmen Electra, who is Leonidas' wife and man eater Queen Margo.  She brings nothing to the movie except for something for the younger lads in the audience to recall in a more private setting. She can't act, has no comic traits and even worse, can't seem to pull off sexy in this movie. For those wondering what Electra will being doing after the acting jobs dry up, flipping burgers is probably the answer. 

The movie itself, starts well and one scene which did have me laughing, involved Leonidas training and preparing his son to become a fighter. This involves a lot of slapstick comedy and the young pretender is subjected to punches, kicks and WWE like leg drops and body slams. The slapstick is cranked up as weapons are used, each getting bigger and more absurd as the scene carries on. A chair, vase, paintball gun and chainsaw are all used in a scene reminiscent of the hysterical woman in Airplane! being slapped to calm her down and the queue of people with increasingly exaggerated weaponry waiting for their turn. 

That is where the similarity ends and soon this promising start goes flatter than a pancake whose lights have been left on overnight.  Essentially the film drags on over 2 very lengthy scenes. Firstly, at the Pit of Death and finally when they stop their journey at some unrealistic valley borrowed from the set of Lost in Space.

The Pit of Death scene starts by Leonidas throwing 2 messengers of Xerxes into the pit as an act of defiance.  However, this then shifts into throwing annoying 'celebrities' of the time into it. We start with Britney Spears, well I think it's Britney Spears, (I must mention at this point that all celebrities are impersonated......rather badly).  I only know that it's Britney Spears, for example, because she is shaving her hair off and 'Hit Me Baby, One More Time' is playing in the background.

The next trio of celebrities are Randy Jackson, Paula Adbul and Simon Cowell.  Again at least I think it is as they look, sound and act nothing like them.  The only clue I have is that they are all sat in front of a massive 'American Idol' sign.  (All of the impressions are awful and most of them do not even look like the person they are supposed to be.  Paris Hilton, for instance, I only got because Maguire went up to her and said, 'Paris Hilton?').  I get what they were trying to do here, wouldn't it be great if we could also chuck annoying celebrities into the pit of death?  Well yes it would, but this scene really does not work and it's just dragging on now.

It also marks the beginning of the major problem with this movie.  The total over-reliance in trying to show the audience how cool and tuned in the writers are, by constantly throwing in reference after reference of pop culture, circa 2008.

The Pit of Death bit sort of works as it ties in with the story and the next part when they go to see the Oracle who turns out to be 'Ugly Betty', sort of works too in that at least we are still following a linear path.  But then we get stuck at the valley of bad set design and the references get chucked in and everything just becomes a jumbled mess.

We start off with the judges from 'Dancing With The Stars' given scores for a really long and protracted dance off scene, which then goes into a spoof of the Budweiser ads, (Here's to you, real men of genius), then the US version of Deal or No Deal is spoofed.  We go on with Spiderman 3, Toy Story, Borat, America's Next Top Model, Rambo, Rocky, Transformers and for some unknown reason, Ghost Rider.  I mean Ghost bloody Rider, seriously, if you feel the need to spoof this movie then you really are scraping the bottom of an already, by now, see through barrel.

By the time we get to a very poorly done recreation of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, I just wanted to grab Friedberg and Seltzer by the collar and shout, 'I fucking get it, you are aware of a lot of things which are currently going on in pop culture.  Now try to write some decent fucking gags to go with it.'.  They didn't.

So do Friedberg and Seltzer pick up the baton from Abrahams et al?  Yes they do, in much the same way that the Great British 4 x 400 relay team picks up the baton.  They make a false start, drop the baton and then fuck things up.  The problem is that they are lazy writers and if you are going to spoof something, you have to be clever with it.  It's simply not good enough to throw a load of spoofing into a movie if there are no good send ups or interesting observations of how a particular thing can be lampooned.  You have to be better than the thing you are spoofing, otherwise you just look like a poor version of the actual thing you are trying to spoof.  Unfortunately in this movie, they are a very poor version of the spoof genre altogether, (they are a very poor version of the spoof genre).

Friedberg and Seltzer's work appears again on our list, so I'll stop now and save some bile for later. I must admit though, the idea of having to watch another movie from these idiots just makes me feel so down.  In fact, I'm feeling really depressed.

Readers voice: Depressed, what is it?

Colin: it's a mental condition whereby a person feels incredibly low and unable to cope. But that's not important right now. 

#75 Meet The Spartans (Wes)

Meet The Spartans

Oh joy. After having the pain of watching An Underground Comedy Movie we have another comedy to enjoy. Meet The Spartans is a spoof movie based around the story of 300, Frank Miller’s epic tale of the Battle of Thermopylae, where King Leonidas led 300 Spartans against an invading Persian army. As parodies go, I really wasn’t sure there’d be enough to mock in the historical war genre to make this a worthwhile movie. Was I right? Of course I was.

Leonidas (Sean Maguire) is trained from birth to be the king of the Spartans until he is eventually cast out into the wilderness to survive not only a harsh winter, but also a dancing penguin. Having survived he takes his place as king. He marries Margo (Carmen Electra) and they have a son who he then starts to train to become the future king. Whilst this is happening he is informed by Captain (Kevin Sorbo) of the arrival of a Persian messenger, who comes with the demands of the Persian king Xerxes (Ken Davitian) for Sparta’s surrender. Leonidas kicks the messenger into the Pit of Death, along with his guards, the judges of American Idol, Britney Spears (Nicole Parker) and several other people. Having decided to go to war with Persia, Leonidas gathers his army of Spartan warriors, who only number 13 due to the strict requirements for joining (“Hunky, with deep Mediterranean tans, hot bods and well-endowed"). At the Hot Gates they meet Paris Hilton (Nicole Parker again), who is horribly deformed, who tells them of a secret goat path above the Hot Gates. Leonidas rejects her wish to join his army and they soon face the first of Xerxes troops, whom they beat in a dance off. Paris Hilton eventually betrays the Spartans to Xerxes, and a mass battle between the two opposing armies ensues.

However just when you think this diabolical movie is over, another six minutes is inexplicably added post credits. None of this expands the story though, and just seems to be scenes that weren’t deemed good enough to be in the actual movie itself (and that really is saying something). They include George Bush jr. Tom Cruise and Ellen DeGeneres (Nicole Parker strikes back) being kicked into the Pit of Death, the Spartans celebrating with Hooters girls and Donald Trump firing Spider-Man in The Apprentice!

Everything about this movie that I was apprehensive about came true. In the past when spoof movies were made they’d be written with either terrible jokes that you just couldn’t help but laugh at (Airplane, The Naked Gun) or would be filled with brilliant references to genre specific films (Spaceballs). Now it seems that writers have so little imagination or skill they have to fill these films out with pop culture references that have absolutely nothing to do with the story itself. For example, Xerxes secret weapons in his army are Ghost Rider and Rocky Balboa. It’s almost as though the people writing these are less interested in making an audience laugh, and just want to prove how aware of pop culture they are. If any further proof of this is needed, there are also pointless references to Transformers, Grand Theft Auto and Ugly Betty.

I’m ashamed to say that I actually laughed a little at some of these at the beginning of the movie. When Leonidas is born, he is the third baby. The first is a talking ogre baby (Shrek 3) and the second is Vietnamese, which is adopted by Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. Next up is a parody of Casino Royale and then there’s a Happy Feet fight with a gangsta penguin. Unfortunately this is where the laughter stopped and the film descended into its expected blandness.

Many of the jokes in this movie revolve around the homo-erotic nature of these gladiatorial style movies. Twice in the movie the Spartans skip into battle singing I Will Survive. It’s as though the writers (Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer – who also directed) couldn’t be bothered to think of more than one gag, and thought that nobody would realise that they were recycling the same joke over and over again. In fact they do this a lot in the movie. The kicking people into the Pit of Death joke is so long and overplayed, that what could have been slightly amusing, descends quickly into the joke version of a relative that comes for breakfast, but stays until Christmas.

 

As far as the acting goes, Kevin Sorbo seems sorely wasted in this role as does Sean Maguire, both of whom actually seem to have good comic acting in them, perhaps with a little better writing they could actually made something of this movie. Carmen Elektra however has never been particularly good in anything I’ve ever seen her in, so her one-dimensional performance here came of no surprise.

Meet The`Spartans is a lame duck in a world where spoofing genres in movies and on TV has become a lot more intelligent. It dumbs down its jokes to a level where it’s just insulting to the movie watching populace and really shows how little some movie-makers think of its audience. I can’t see how this could amuse even the biggest lover of spoofs in anyway, and would urge you just to dig out your Mel Brooks or Jim Abrahams DVDs to remember the days when writers actually understood how to make somebody laugh.

#76 The Underground Comedy Movie (1999) (Colin)

When it comes to describing comedy sketch shows, the term 'Hit and Miss', is often used.  This refers to a show where some of the sketches work and are belly achingly funny but some are painfully bad and totally forgettable.  For a show to be regarded as 'good', you either have to have more sketches which work than ones that don't or you have one sketch that's so pant wettingly genius, that the rest of the dire content can be forgotten or forgiven.

Personally, I think most sketch shows are 'Hit and Miss' and one in particular springs to mind; 'That Mitchell and Webb Look'.  I'm a big fan of David Mitchell and I really do like 'That Mitchell and Webb Look', but for 1 cracking gag, there are 3 or 4 lame ones.  What makes the show good is that the really good sketches are memorable and work well. For example, their sketch about the Nazi soldier who, upon seeing that the uniform has a skull and crossbones design, questions whether they are 'the baddies?'. This sketch is well written, brilliantly executed and often quoted. The misses, fortunately, are forgettable and so overall the show is perceived, quite rightly in my mind, as a good sketch show.

In fact, one of their funniest sketches is playing up to those of us who called it Hit and Miss. David Mitchell and Robert Webb are discussing what the running order of the show should be.  Mitchell glances down at a piece of paper and replies, 'I was thinking hit, hit, miss, miss, hit, miss, miss, hit, miss, miss, hit'. Genius!  In fact the whole sketch sums up the whole Hit and Miss thing really well and if you want to see it, click here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmYC7r4dViI

This is not a new phenomenon and is a condition that has affected sketch shows since their incarnation. Even Monty Python can be labelled 'Hit and Miss'. Controversial? Not really. For every parrot sketch there was an unfunny skit which tried to be too clever or just fell over. Season 4, after John Cleese left, is truly awful and if Monty Python's legacy was based on this season, then I very much doubt students would have been quoting it ad nauseum for the last 40 years!

So even those shows considered the best, groundbreaking or classic can be hit and miss, but why, in a movie blog, am I mentioning this? Well, our next movie isn't really a movie at all, it's a series of sketches. Therefore, this blog is going to be slightly different as there is no plot to dissect and no story to examine. This blog, will look briefly at each sketch and will ask the question:

Was it a hit or was it a miss?

#76 The Underground Comedy Movie (1999). 

The Underground Comedy Movie started life as a show on cable in the US at the end of the 80's. The brainchild of Vince Offer, this was a sketch show that was rude, crude and offensive.  The fact it was a cable show, I did not know until the end credits, but it did explain why the whole feel is that off a cheap amateur production.  In some ways, I respect Offer for keeping the very essence of his original production for the big screen adaption, but did it work?  Well, as this is a bad movie blog you can probably guess the answer, but let's examine the skits more closely before we jump to conclusions......

The movie starts with a definition of 'satire' and a guarantee to offend.  I personally think they should have started with a definition of funny as they don't seem to understand that particular word.....

Marilyn Monroe Parody It starts with Vince Offer's first character which looks like a cross between Shaggy from Scooby Doo and Mumra from Thudercats.  Offer goes underground, turns an industrial fan on and points it upwards towards a grate. The camera goes above ground where a Marilyn Monroe style scene awaits. A woman walks over the grate, her dress is blown up by the fan and she looks like she's enjoying the sensation.  Shag-ra looks up, makes some grunts and then starts filming the event.  NoFx then blasts out and the movie begins. As it raised a snigger and the music was kickass it starts with a HIT.

Biker's Opening Credits Throughout the NoFx opening credits, Vince and his biker mates are cruising down the highway.  We pan out and the Harleys we thought they were racing, are in fact push bikes with high handlebars.  OK, I laughed at this, so another HIT.

Batman and Rhymer  I won't lie, I found this sketch very funny.  This is about a character called the Rhymer, who is a based loosely on The Riddler and speaks only in rhyme.  He goes to rob a bank, but doesn't realise it's a sperm bank, (the sign is being worked on and said 'Bank' when he went in, but the second half of the sign, 'Sperm', is fitted after).  Upon his escape he runs into Batman, a baseball uniform wearing crime fighter, (yes, I did laugh at the play on words, I must have been very hungover when I watched this) and promptly throws his loot into an old ladies shopping trolley.  Batman, naturally, believes the old lady is the thief.

The old lady is hilarious and can not act.  This would be bad, but is part of her charm as she just speaks straight from a script, with absolutely no emotion, punctuation or variance of pitch.  She is then subject to some hardcore slapstick humour. She gets beaten up by Batman and pushed in her shopping trolley into oncoming traffic and ends up in a mobility scooter tearing down the road towards Batman.  Batman takes a swing, connects with an obviously fake version of the old lady and sends her head towards 2 hungry rottweilers.

I really liked this sketch, it's daft, full of slapstick and has some genuine laugh out loud moments.  Without a doubt this sketch is a HIT.

Baywatch Spoof Oh dear, oh dear oh dear, this gag revolves around the fact that Baywatch sounds like 'Boobwatch'.  Eh? It doesn't. Awful. MISS

Orchard Sketch involves a redneck catching Gena Lee Nolin stealing oranges and then speaking (shouting) insanely to her.  It is really weird, not funny weird, but where the heck are they going with this weird.  Not every sketch has to have a punchline, Python proved that, but it's got to at least attempt to be funny.  This just involved the redneck blowing raspberries and talking loudly.  Oh and Vince Offer being naked and scratching dirt.  MISS

Batman and Rhymer Returns A not as funny follow up to the earlier sketch, sees Batman and his arch nemesis, old lady, do battle. She is armed with a walking stick, he with a dildo.  The old lady finally gets her revenge when she knocks Batman out with a baseball bat.  It really is not as funny as the first time around, but there is still some good slapstick. For instance, Rhymer swaps a baseball for a grenade which then blows a catcher's hand off. This is quite funny and done rather well.  A not as good as before HIT

I Hate LA Song OK, Vince Offer seems to have good taste in music, as the soundtrack proves, but he can not sing.  This song is however, observant and quite funny.  It talks about aspects of LA often ignored, such as the slums and the red light districts or the violence and drug problems.  It lampoons the wannabes in LA and the plastic silicon fakery of Hollywood.  Not laugh out loud as such, but I thought quite clever, so another HIT

The Godmother As you may guess is a spoof of The Godfather.  This sketch sees a turn around in the movie, unfortunately for all the wrong reasons.  We start to see the side of Offer that believes in order to be funny, all he has to do is offend.  He is so painfully wrong.

The premise is that some mafia type proposes to The Godmother to substitute beef mince in her restaurants for foetuses.  I am afraid you have read that correctly.  There is no gag here, no punchline and needless to say, if he is trying to be funny he is way off the mark.

Offensive is easy, any dick can do it.  The clever bit is making it funny.  I am sorry to repeat Wes, but South Park, Something About Mary, or Team America, all could be offensive, but all have a wonderfully clever sense of humour.  Often the offensive part is just a ridiculous stereotype that is mocked. Or the offensive material becomes so ludicrous it can not be taken seriously.  Offer proves he just has not got that extra something to turn bad taste to humour.

We're half an hour in and if Offer had finished with the I Hate LA song, it would have been a good sketch show and he would not have been found out.  He didn't and we were subjected to the most crass, unfunny piece of shit I have ever had the misfortune to watch.   A colossal MISS

The Adventures Of Dickman Is about a superhero who has a huge penis for a head.  It involves big titted women getting their big tits out and Dickman spunking all over them.  This is the high brow point of the show and was written by Professor of Subtle humour at Cambridge University, Sir Stanley Smythe.  Thankfully, it was a short skit but I have to admit that the sight of a man with a large penis for a head wearing a hat and oversized glasses was funny.  Overall though, MISS.

Watt's Up Talk Show A brief sketch about a talk show presented by a fictitious black DJ, who invites a member of KKK onto the show and blows his head off.  I assume Offer is trying to say here, 'hey look, I'm cool really, see I hate real bad people too', but he just comes across as an idiot by this point. MISS

The Miss America Bag Lady Pageant is an unfunny sketch about a beauty pageant for the homeless.  It is set in the 'humourous' location 'The Toilet Bowl', (The Hollywood Bowl, geddit?) and involves tramp type old ladies taking part in a beauty pageant.  It stars Slash from Guns N Roses as the MC of the pageant.  I think he is supposed to be acting really pissed and stumbles and wanders over the set.  What I can not understand is how bad he is at acting pissed, considering it was his natural state for 20 years.

There are no laughs to be had, it really is just based on the idea that the The Hollywood Bowl is The Toilet Bowl and wouldn't it be funny if the park dwellers and homeless types held their very own beauty pageant.  The answer is no.  MISS.

Flirty Harry Hey look, Flirty Harry rhymes with Dirty Harry. Ha ha ha ha.  This sketch involves Offer completely getting his stereotypes confused.  Flirty Harry is gay and apparently likes to wear women's clothes.  Hang on, oh never mind, I would try to explain to him that gay does not equal transvestite, but hell Offer has gone off on his own little bigoted tangent and not only is he lazy offensive, he is now being lazy at being offensive.  MISS

The Porno Review is a spoof film review show, specialising in, yep, Porno.  First up is Sushi Mama, a Chinese style, Bruce Lee dubbed porno film, (Offer is now confusing the Far East countries).  Funny in places, but goes on for too long in the same vein, (a big purple headed one, tee-hee, see Offer, that's how it's done).

Next Donna of the Dead, a zombie necrophilia porno.  Again, Offer spent 2 seconds finding a not so good pun and then wrote a far too long sketch to go with it.  This basically involves porn actor, Arnold Swollenpecker, (OK, I'll give you that one Offer), getting all sexy and aroused over his dead lover.  It drags and drags and the initial humour soon evaporates.

Finally, Spermlake.  Another bad pun this time on Swan Lake and involves very ugly people doing ballet and a very long jizz scene. This entire sketch is just too long and feels like I really am watching a very boring film review show.  Unfortunately, I have had enough of boring film reviews which try to be funny but are not. Ahem.  MISS

OJ Simpon Trial Spoof I can not work out if this is clever or not.  It basically involves an all black jury, bar 2 white jurors, who try to be hip and cool and find OJ not guilty as 'the brother has been framed', but who get shouted down by the rest of the jurors.  After one juror threatens to give 'honky' a slapping, they change their minds and the OJ character is found guilty.

I don't know if this is clever or just very racist.  The white jurors were trying to be something they are not and was quite well done, but the rest of the jury was just a very outdated stereotypical mess that dragged Norbit's stereotypes into the 21st century.  MISS

The End 'I don't think anyone will sit through the end of the movie unless there is someone famous at the end' proclaims Offer.  He was partly right, no-one will sit through to the end of the movie, unless off course you write for a bad movie blog.

We end with clips from their original cable show, which in some ways looked better than the movie.  Then we go back to Shag-ra from the first scene who is still looking up through the grate at 'Marilyn Monroe'.  Unfortunately, lots of men have now formed around 'Marilyn' to watch and are jerking off.  Cue Shag-ra getting covered in spunk and we end.  MISS

Well, not quite the end as throughout the movie are little snippets entitled 'Things You'll Never See' and are supposed to be humorous observations about society. Here's a brief overview:

Things You'll Never See - Supermodels taking a dump.  This involves 2 models in toilets with fart noises and splashing dubbed over. Seriously, this is just lame. MISS

Things You'll Never See -  A big black gay bald virgin.  This sketch stars Michael Clarke Duncan and I really wonder why he put himself through this.  It is not clever or funny.  You get the feeling by now that Vince Offer just chucks a load of offensive terms into a hat, pulls them out to form a nice long offensive sentence and then just lamely shoves it into the movie.  This snippet is revisited several times throughout the movie and gets no funnier.  MISS

Things You'll Never See - A beautiful young girl, dating an older man, who is poor.  This is a humorous observation although the skit to accompany it is not.  It is the best of the bunch though and is a HIT.

So overall was it a hit or a miss? There is a funny 22 minute sketch show trying to get out of this movie. Unfortunately it's suffocating under a pile of filler, lame jokes and offensive for offensive sake guff. The bad stuff just went on for way too long and the funny bits became forgotten. 

At the end of the movie there is a message to the Farrelly brothers to give back their promotional copy of Underground Comedy Movie as they have already stolen enough jokes from it for Something About Mary.  Personally I think this is a case if sour grapes as they are just more clever and successful than Offer, but if there is some truth to this, then maybe this highlights the problem. 

In Underground Comedy Movie there are some good ideas and I'm sure if done correctly, could have worked better. Maybe Offer's strong point is that he's an ideas man. Perhaps he should pitch ideas, bring in someone for the writing and script producing and then make a movie with them.  If people like the Farrelly Brothers, who can actually write comedy had been brought in, then maybe this film would not have made our list.

Things you'll never see: Vince Offer making an Oscar acceptance speech. 

Verdict: a definite hit and miss, but more hit and miss. 

#76 The Underground Comedy Movie (Wes)

The Underground Comedy Movie

When you get a DVD and it firstly claims that that the movie is guaranteed to offend and secondly that it follows in the traditions of The Kentucky Fried Movie, then you may start to question why this movie has made our 100 bad movies list. I know I did. Then I watched it.

This is the part where I’d usually give you a synopsis of the plot of the movie, but this is actually really hard to do with The Underground Comedy Movie, as there is no plot. It’s merely a collection of skits each trying to offend or parody various movies/situations. There’s a Godfather parody (The Godmother), a series of superhero sketches (with Batman – a man who carries a baseball bat and the criminal Rhymer and then later with Dickman), a series of “Things You Never See”, a bag lady beauty pageant (co-hosted by Slash), the gay virgin (Michael Clarke Duncan), a porn review show and lots of other immediately forgettable sketches.

Directed, written and starring Vince Offer, this movie misses the point in the most spectacular fashion. I get the feeling that he called it The Underground Comedy Movie, just so that people realised that it was supposed to be a comedy. It actually starts off with a few laughs, but it loses its way faster than the film students in The Blair Witch Project.

The first proper sketch, the Batman/Rhymer skit, is actually quite funny in a juvenile way. The Rhymer robs a sperm bank (they have no cash, so he steals the sperm), and soon runs into Batman. He throws the sperm into an old lady’s shopping cart and Batman beats her up instead. Not exactly highbrow material, but it provides a few laughs. Unfortunately they’re the only laughs you get (except for one porn stars name – Arnold Swollenpecker). Everything else in this movie is so poorly written that you start to believe there wasn’t actually a script involved. Rather that Vince Offer just plied the cast with alcohol and told them just to improvise.

The scenes of  “Things You’ll Never See” are just abysmal, and seem like filler of the worst kind. Two supermodels sitting on toilets next to each other taking a dump really aren’t that funny. It’s true that you’re never likely to see this, but then again, I don’t actively go out of my way to watch anyone curling one out, so that's hardly a surprise. Vince Offer though seems to think this moment is hilarious and slots in these farting and straining ladies at regular intervals.

In theory this movie has a few good ideas, which maybe would work well in a TV sketch show, but they really need to be developed by people with an actual talent for comedy. Unfortunately Vince Offer seems to make the very basic error of thinking that being offensive for the sake of it is funny. Being deliberately offensive is one of the easiest things in the world to do, doing it without coming across as just being a nasty, racist, homophobic piece of trash isn’t. Other filmmakers who do this well understand exactly how far you can push things with regards to gross out humour or stereotyping (eg Matt Stone and Trey Parker or The Farrelly Brothers), Offer has no idea how to handle this. His jokes all come across as nothing more than playground level toilet humour. Even the gay steward in Soul Plane was done with more taste and humour, and that’s something I never thought I’d be typing. 

When I learnt that this movie spun out of a Public Access TV show then it all started to make a little more sense. It’s like an amateur Saturday Night Live, but with absolutely none of the humour (basically like a post mid-90s Saturday Night Live). The fact that they have the audacity to compare this film to The Kentucky Fried Movie is just insulting. Yes it has the same basic premise, but The Kentucky Fried Movie was made by people with actual talent, who went on to make some of the funniest movies ever. Vince Offer has gone on to make a sequel to this movie (An InAPPropriate Comedy – which somehow stars Adrien Brody).

The only good thing I can actually say about this movie is that it has a decent soundtrack. Featuring songs from NOFX, Guttermouth and Snuff, it was the only thing that stopped me from throwing my Macbook through a window to escape this pile of turgid crap.

If you want to watch something offensive then I really suggest that you stick on South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut or watch the TV show It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. If you really want to be completely offended then maybe you should just pick a random video on YouTube and read the comments underneath. Just don't waste your time watching this. At this point I feel I can actually help Vince Offer with an idea for his next sequel, "Things You'll Never See": Me watching this pile of steaming crap again.

#77 The Garbage Pail Kids Movie (1997) (Colin)

The 80's was a simple time. If, like me, you grew up in this decade, then you know that we did not have PS Vitas, Nintendo 3DS's or iPhones to occupy ourselves in the playground. We had to, (and I know this is an alien concept today), communicate with each other face to face.  Interaction, speaking to and acknowledging each others existence was part of daily life and one example of how this was achieved is through sticker collecting.

We had short lived phases like yo-yos which Coca Cola gave away and bore the soft drink of your choice on the side or the Rubik's magic which we all managed to do in about 7 seconds. But sticker collecting carried on throughout school, mainly thanks to Panini's football sticker album which came out once a season.  The only album I ever managed to complete was Panini's Football '87 and I'm still proud of this today, (yes, I'm quite sad!).

The social element of all this was the swapping off any sticker doubles you had. Basically, every lunchtime, you would carry a wad of stickers you did not need and would try to find others who had stickers you wanted and who you could bargain and swap stickers with. Lunchtime then, would involve a group of kids in a circle, whilst one kid rifled through his stickers one by one, getting stopped by someone once a sticker they needed was on show. So the soundtrack to our school was:

'Got, got, got, oh need'

'Ok, what do you have? Got, got, got, oh need.'

Pride of place in the sticker collection were the foil stickers. These shiny ones usually had a football team's badge and were rarer than the normal stickers. So rare that this dialogue was not uncommon. 

'Got, got, got, oh need. What do you want for the Tottenham foil sticker?'

'20 stickers plus your Leeds United foil badge'

'Fuck off'

Then along came a new sticker collection, quite different from what we were used to. They came with a free chewing gum, which was rock hard and broke your teeth, (I believe the chewing gum is now used as an tougher alternative for diamond tipped drills), but above all they were a little rude and a bit naughty.

Based loosely on the look of the Cabbage Patch Kids, the Garbage Pail Kids were deformed and screwed up versions.  Each sticker had a drawing of a Garbage Pail Kid, usually vomiting, full of snot or farting, and underneath was their name. The name usually related to the drawing and was a pun or play on words. For example, my namesakes Croaky Colin or Semi Colin, (I have put these at the bottom of my blog, so you can see what I mean!).

Parents wanted them banned, some schools did ban them and the media was outraged that this filth was being peddled to kids. For this reason we loved them and they became hugely popular. Usually when we are about to review a movie, we get blank looks and shrugging of shoulders, however when I mentioned the GPKs nearly everyone my age had heard of them and remembered the stickers. Not many remembered that there was a movie, in fact neither did I.  

It turns out there's a reason for that......

#77 The Garbage Pail Kids Movie (1987)

Unfortunately when something in pop culture is at it's height of popularity, film studios start seeing dollar signs and aggressively seek to peddle any crap loosely associated with it. Fortunately, for those of us who enjoyed Transformers in the 80's, Michael Bay waited nearly 20 years before destroying it. Unfortunately GPK were not so lucky and whilst they remained very popular, a movie based on some of the characters from the stickers was released, or should I say rushed out.

The film focuses on Dodger, (Mackenzie Astin), a 14 year old weakly type, who helps out in an antique shopped owned by likable English eccentric Captain Manzini, (Anthony Newley).  Dodger fancies out of his league, cheerleader type, Tangerine, (Katie Barberi) and when Dodger attempts to chat her up, (rather badly), her boyfriend, Juice, (Ron Maclachlan) and some one-dimensional bullies take offence.  A tussle breaks out and they knock over a garbage can, (dustbin to us Limeys), which omits some nasty looking green slime. From this vile substance Piers Morgan is born. Also, the Garbage Pail Kids. 

Each GPK has a particular gross habit and are based on their pictures on the original stickers. There's Nat Nerd, incredibly spotty, wearing a superhero outfit and constantly weeing himself. Ali Gator, an alligator, (surprise!), who likes to eat eye balls and fingers. Valerie Vomit, who pukes, but thankfully only once, in the movie. Greaser Greg, who is the bastard son of John Prescott and The Fonz. Messy Tessie, who snots a lot. Foul Phil, who has incredibly bad breath and Windy Winston, who farts. A lot. As you can see from these characters, the humour is very high brow and subtle.

The GPKs, for some reason, make Dodger a jacket, which he wears when he goes to see Tangerine. Tangerine, who is a wannabe fashion designer, is impressed with the jacket and asks Dodger if he can get more which she hopes to sell at a fashion show. Dodger asks if the GPKs will do this and they agree. They then set about making the clothes whilst singing what has to be the most annoying tune known to man. The song is about working together or something and comes straight out of the Disney vomiting section of feel good songs with important moral messages.

Tangerine learns that the GPKs make these clothes and because they are ugly, feels just fine about exploiting them.  On the day of the fashion show, she locks them in the basement and Juice kidnaps them and takes them to a home for Ugly people. It's OK though, because Manzini and Dodger rescue them and they promptly go and ruin the fashion show, which seems to involve ripping clothes off models. This concludes with lots of models running around in bras and a lawsuit from Robin Askwith and Benny Hill. 

Having saved the day, Manzini explains how the GPKs need to go back into the garbage can as 'normies' will never accept them.  He attempts to magic them back in by singing a song backwards, but this fails. The GPKs sneak out and ride off promising us new adventures. Which they never do as the planned sequel and cartoon series was shelved based on the reception of the movie.

I was kind of dreading it, but unfortunately the movie was a bitter disappointment for fans of the original sticker series. The acting was OK, Manzini is a very likable English eccentric and Dodger also comes over as a character you can care about and you kinda hope things work out for him and Tangerine, but you can't help feeling we've seen it all before. 

Original is definitely not a word associated with this movie. Dodger really is the stereotypical 80's loser who's unlucky in love but has a good heart. Tangerine is the 'A' typical bitch who prefers jocks to kindness and judges purely on appearance and Juice is the 'A' typical jock boyfriend of said 80's bitch.  The bullies are cut and paste from any college movie of the 80's and lack anything new or remotely interesting. Overall the underlying message that you should not judge people on outward appearance is a good one, but unfortunately it is a message we have heard in numerous other movies in numerous better ways.

In my Ecks vs Sever blog, I speak about how game tie-ins are often just generic games which have already been written but which have a new skin put on to portray the characters in the movie.  This is what comes across to me in this movie, in that it really is a lazy film, with a plain script which could have been shoe horned into any popular franchise of the time.

The biggest issue with the GBKs is their look, it is truly awful.  The animatronics of the actual puppets are incredibly poor and they make Jaws from Jaws: The Revenge look like Avatar.  The GBKs look weird, but not weird good or weird funny as in the drawings on the original stickers, but just plain freaky. When each GBK speaks you can almost see and hear the steam pistons trying to operate the mouth, but failing miserably and with each sentence uttered the mouth moves only once, sometimes twice.

As I mentioned earlier, the drawings were loosely based on the look of Cabbage Patch Kids and if you scrunched your eyes you could clearly see some vague resemblance, albeit after a dog has chewed it.  The GBK puppets look like the dog has then subsequently shat the Cabbage Patch Kid out and then Satan has pushed some tortured souls into them.  They have all the appeal and charm of an maggot infested open wound.  Or Piers Morgan.

Overall, this is a very 80's movie which has not aged at all well.  The synthesiser sounds like a Casio keyboard in which someone has pressed the demo button and superglued it into position.  The synth, off course, was a staple soundtrack to most 80's movies, but unlike the catchy theme tune of Beverley Hills Cop, for example, the music in this movie is more Axel F- (must try harder).

The best thing to come out of this movie was the fact that I rediscovered Garbage Pail Kids the stickers.  They brought a lot of laughter to me in my youth and I will always look back on them with a smile.  The GPK movie did in some way evoke emotions I used to feel whilst collecting them.  Unfortunately it was how you would feel after opening your pack, finding out each sticker was one you already had and then dropping the rock hard chewing gum into the mud...... the feeling of disappointment.

'got, got' got, bollocks that was a complete waste of my time'.