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Dec. 24th, 2010 10:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsDecember is the season of travel. Last weekend I went to Boston to crash with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
shati, who is a much better friend than a cabbage. Today in an hour and a half I have to be on a bus for Philly, where I will be spending the rest of 2010 for my annual Fake Winter Break. So naturally instead of doing the last of my dishes and leaving a pristine apartment, I am writing up a booklog.
Normally I don't read many of the 'I did x ridiculous thing for a year and a publisher paid me to write it up' books, largely because I am bitter that no publisher is likely to pay me to do a ridiculous thing for a year and become a famous author on the strength of it. HOWEVER, I had to read Showgirls, Teen Wolves and Astro Zombies: A Film Critic's Year-Long Quest to Find the Worst Movie Ever Made because . . . I mean . . . okay, you guys all know my love of terrible, terrible things! This isn't a difficult one here!
Basically the premise is the author watched one notoriously awful movie a day, for a year, and then wrote about them. Which makes this book something like three hundred pages of gleefully shocked LJ-review - probably not the best LJ-review, and you can often see where the author is trying too hard for his jokes for publication, but on the other hand, there is so much bad-movie goodness in here that I don't even care. I needed to know that there were ostensibly serious movies titled Howling II: Your Sister Is A Werewolf and Death Bed: The Bed That Eats. My life was not complete without these facts. I am going to give you five sample quotes from five pages:
It's about an outback girl who flees her incestuous clan of marsupial werewolves to live in Sidney. But she's pursued by assassins, hunters, and her sister werewolves, disguised as nuns.
Fans shouldn't get too excited because Travolta's just another eyeless cultist with one line, "Blasphemer! Blasphemer!" Then he melts.
Several hippies are drawn to the Death Bed and it doesn't just eat them but also drinks their wine, chews up their luggage, and, when indigestion strikes, chugs their Pepto-Bismol.
It's about roller skaters. More precisely, roller-skating nuns from the cosmic order of Roller Blade. Who skate in G-strings. And red wimples. Decorated with iron crosses and smiley faces. . . . The combination of dud acting, soft-core nudity, po-faced "skate or die" mysticism, and postapocalyptic back alleys and stormwater drains have a strange cumulative and substantially comic effect. The dialogue - "Halt, ye sinner," "on thy skates, it is only a flesh wound," "tears will cause thy wheels to rust" - adds to the otherworldliness, not least because most of it is postdubbed by the same few people.
I've had my eye on this movie for some time. That's because it's a female 8-Mile raps-to-riches story inspired by the Diary of Anne Frank.
I won't lie, I totally want to see some of these movies. My greatest sorrow is that it was published a year before he could include The Last Airbender for competition.
shati, who is a much better friend than a cabbage. Today in an hour and a half I have to be on a bus for Philly, where I will be spending the rest of 2010 for my annual Fake Winter Break. So naturally instead of doing the last of my dishes and leaving a pristine apartment, I am writing up a booklog. Normally I don't read many of the 'I did x ridiculous thing for a year and a publisher paid me to write it up' books, largely because I am bitter that no publisher is likely to pay me to do a ridiculous thing for a year and become a famous author on the strength of it. HOWEVER, I had to read Showgirls, Teen Wolves and Astro Zombies: A Film Critic's Year-Long Quest to Find the Worst Movie Ever Made because . . . I mean . . . okay, you guys all know my love of terrible, terrible things! This isn't a difficult one here!
Basically the premise is the author watched one notoriously awful movie a day, for a year, and then wrote about them. Which makes this book something like three hundred pages of gleefully shocked LJ-review - probably not the best LJ-review, and you can often see where the author is trying too hard for his jokes for publication, but on the other hand, there is so much bad-movie goodness in here that I don't even care. I needed to know that there were ostensibly serious movies titled Howling II: Your Sister Is A Werewolf and Death Bed: The Bed That Eats. My life was not complete without these facts. I am going to give you five sample quotes from five pages:
It's about an outback girl who flees her incestuous clan of marsupial werewolves to live in Sidney. But she's pursued by assassins, hunters, and her sister werewolves, disguised as nuns.
Fans shouldn't get too excited because Travolta's just another eyeless cultist with one line, "Blasphemer! Blasphemer!" Then he melts.
Several hippies are drawn to the Death Bed and it doesn't just eat them but also drinks their wine, chews up their luggage, and, when indigestion strikes, chugs their Pepto-Bismol.
It's about roller skaters. More precisely, roller-skating nuns from the cosmic order of Roller Blade. Who skate in G-strings. And red wimples. Decorated with iron crosses and smiley faces. . . . The combination of dud acting, soft-core nudity, po-faced "skate or die" mysticism, and postapocalyptic back alleys and stormwater drains have a strange cumulative and substantially comic effect. The dialogue - "Halt, ye sinner," "on thy skates, it is only a flesh wound," "tears will cause thy wheels to rust" - adds to the otherworldliness, not least because most of it is postdubbed by the same few people.
I've had my eye on this movie for some time. That's because it's a female 8-Mile raps-to-riches story inspired by the Diary of Anne Frank.
I won't lie, I totally want to see some of these movies. My greatest sorrow is that it was published a year before he could include The Last Airbender for competition.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-12-24 03:51 pm (UTC)I should just go to the Farmer's Market.
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Date: 2010-12-24 05:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-24 05:43 pm (UTC)The Travolta one, the name escapes me, but it's a 70s horror movie with a blob like thing. Or is it the laser one? I think it's the blob one!
The roller skate vs roller blades one I HAVE SEEN, and it is just as you think! Don't ask me the name. But there are lady in bikinis, skating to save the world.
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Date: 2010-12-24 05:48 pm (UTC)Is it cheating to turn "on thy skates, it is only a flesh wound" into a catchphrase if I haven't actually seen the movie in question?
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Date: 2010-12-24 04:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-24 04:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-24 05:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-24 06:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-24 04:11 pm (UTC)*ded*
Am I the only one who now desperately wants to see the roller skating nuns bit? I mean, it just sounds too hysterical to be believed.
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Date: 2010-12-24 05:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-24 06:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-24 06:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-24 05:26 pm (UTC)Yes, it is a very ridiculous suggestion!
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Date: 2010-12-24 06:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-24 05:25 pm (UTC)On that note, it's time to sit down to the annual Santa Claus Conquers The Martians.
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Date: 2010-12-24 05:31 pm (UTC)(This movie: also mentioned! Still not as hilarious a title as Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla.)
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Date: 2010-12-24 05:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-24 05:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-29 01:05 am (UTC)*KIND AND GENEROUS*
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Date: 2010-12-29 03:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-24 09:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-24 09:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-25 04:41 pm (UTC)...
...
I WOULD WATCH IT.
OH GOD, I'M SO SORRY.
I WOULD WATCH IT.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-25 04:45 pm (UTC)