In 2012 -- a definite Bad Movie We Love -- the Earth is being superheated by "mutant neutrinos" supposedly linked to a planetary alignment predicted by the Mayans. First, Gaia explodes in a fiery rain of molten B-movie cheese, and then a magnetic pole switcheroo causes a tectonic boogaloo that unleashes tsunamis big enough to inundate the Himalayas. It's the very best in schlock science and mysticism from Roland Emmerich, whose last picture, 10,000 B.C., had it that the mammoths built the pyramids. But while 2012 shamelessly appropriates sequences and tropes from just about every major disaster movie of the past, oh, forever, there are still a few crapocalypses too silly for even Emmerich to pilfer. Or maybe... just maybe... he's saving them for 2013?
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Looking for a new movie accompaniment to Halloween, I recently unearthed a $10 second-hand VHS of Godmonster Of Indian Flats. It's an ultra-obscurity, made in 1973 in Nevada, and putatively about a mutant killer sheep. I'd caught a clip about a year ago, and I thought if I liked the actual movie well enough I might sling a couple of old car-seat covers over me and be the Godmonster this Halloween. Easy -- and he's proven at freaking out the kids.
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Yesterday, the debut glimpse of a New Moon werebeast brought much-welcome laughter to a world wearied by Glenn Beck likening progressives to slave owners and worries about which network will finally hire Richard Heene once the helium clears. But, horrific and half-finished though the leapin' lycanthrope was, we have to admit it's not the worst wolfman we've seen. Here, then, from the Bad Movies We Love archives, a brief history of furry freaks.
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When the combined star power of Couples Retreat rolls over the box office this week, what's also taking place is the second act of an American life. While the film's stars, producers and writers are indelibly Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau (enthusiastically abetted by Kristen Bell, Jason Bateman, Malin Akerman and others), the man behind the camera is Peter Billingsley, best known to America as Ralphie Parker from 1983's A Christmas Story -- which in the quarter-century since its release has become the definitive yuletide classic.
That Billingsley has called the shots on such an A-list project as Couples Retreat comes down to his ability to transcend a childhood spent as a star and his enduring friendship with the film's drawcards. But an important factor is also Billingsley's barely known sci-fi horror film from 1993.
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The undead (and theme parks!) are back in the spotlight this week thanks to Zombieland. And vampires have Twilight and True Blood keeping them in perpetual vogue. And Aussies, always aces, are surging after a bloody ripper showing at Toronto. But how, how to tap all these zeitgeist-y elements into one package? Too late -- because Zombie Brigade got there in 1988.
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Despite having a miraculous 8.8/10 user rating on IMDb, this week's Pandorum has been hidden away from critics more efficiently, say, than an alien egg in the chest cavity of a British character actor. Which led me to prowling the archive's ventilation shafts in dismay until I kicked across a copy of It! Terror From Beyond Space, the schlocker that inspired the whole stalked-on-the-spaceship genre, leading to Alien and countless imitators -- from Horror Planet and Event Horizon to this week's creature feature in which Dennis Quaid, Ben Foster and Cam Gigandet perhaps stir themselves from cryosleep to face the horror of mutants aboard!
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While Jennifer's Body reaffirms the status of its leading lady Megan Fox (yes, she can act, at least in this role!) and writer Diablo Cody (Juno and The United States of Tara weren't flashes in the pan, honest to blog!), the person with the most to win or lose is perhaps director Karyn Kusama. After her indie debut Girlfight was praised to the heavens, she was KO'd by her follow-up, the 2005 flop Aeon Flux. Kusama's long since written it off as studio meddling, but I thought this week it'd be the decent thing to take another look at what went wrong -- and perhaps a little bit right -- with the live-action adaptation of the beloved 1990s anime.
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This year marks the 50th anniversary of the release of Plan 9 From Outer Space, Edward D. Wood Jr.'s legendary turkey in which alien humanoids in model-kit flying saucers resurrect Earth's recently deceased... in a peaceful bid to convince humanity not to develop a weapon that'll destroy the universe... by exploding sunlight. That famous plot, while an oddball cross between The Day The Earth Stood Still and Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, is the least schlocky element of Wood's opus, which, among its litany of cinematic sins, features a cemetery of toppling cardboard gravestones, blinking dead people, boom mic shadows so frequent they ought to credited as supporting players, stitched-in footage of by-then-dead Bela Lugosi and lines like, "A flying saucer? You mean the kind from up there?"
Wood wrote and directed his sci-fi schlocker in 1956, but it didn't limp into cinemas for almost three years, and then only about 20 prints were struck. And it would take another two decades hence before a new generation (and later, of course, Tim Burton) enshrined it in the cult canon once and for all. So take a minute or two in this anniversary year to reflect on the Bad Movie We Love that, more than any other, taught us to love bad movies.
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What happens when you entrust a Korean actress and cosmetics model to a Luc Besson protege, recruit them to adapt a celebrated Japanese anime title in English, and give them a visual effects budget that makes Megan Fox's ghetto demonface look extravagant? Blood: The Last Vampire happens. And boy, am I glad it did.
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Despite some serious consideration by Movieline's blue-ribbon panel of camp aficionados, you will not find The Da Vinci Code in our deep, distinguished, and recently revived canon of Bad Movies We Love. It fell more into the less-auspicious Bad Movies We Can't Stay Awake Through, resulting in one hung jury after another. But its follow up Angels & Demons is a relative firecracker of a film, all pulp, pomp and grisly spectacle in the nerve center of the Catholic Church. For its sheer improvement over its predecessor, this one probably doesn't deserve BMWL enshrinement, either. But for its operatic treatment of Tom Hanks saving Rome, Vatican City and all of their faithful from annihilation in about six hours flat? Welcome to the club, boys!
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Wherein we revive one of Movieline's finest, most enduring legacies, Bad Movies We Love:
The Bret Easton Ellis canon has yielded more than its share of outré screen adaptations since 1987, when Less Than Zero, effectively capped that go-go decade with now-dated, debauched thrills. The graphically unfilmable American Psycho wore its campy excess with pride in 2000, giving way two years later to the sordid mixed bag (at best) that was The Rules of Attraction. "We get it, already" viewers say, bleary eyes rolling into the back of their heads. But that's exactly the thing: Until The Informers, director Gregor Jordan's spectacularly misbegotten take on Ellis's 1994 short-story collection, it was impossible to know just how much you didn't get. Or rather, couldn't get.
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