So sayeth Roger Ebert about the latest movie from Peter Farrelly. When Ebert says a movie is worse than Freddy Got Fingered, you know that all lower bounds of the barrel have been breached.
More nuggets:
Farrelly was going for a 21st century version of “The Groove Tube” and “Kentucky Fried Movie,” two very funny, very raunchy and very influential sketch-comedy flicks of the mid-1970s.
The only thing “Movie 43” has in common with those movies is it’s in color.
Also:
Academy Award winner Halle Berry no longer can cite “Catwoman” as the low point of her career.
Ebert gave it Zero Stars. Yet, for some reason, his readers have given it four. Go figure.
Here’s a film I’ve never heard of, that never got a U.S. theatrical release, that cost some €25 million to make, that sounds not just like a train wreck, but like horrifying, misconceived, epic train wreck.
The premise, from IMDB:
Cheyenne, a wealthy former rock star, now bored and jaded in his retirement embarks on a quest to find his father’s persecutor, an ex-Nazi war criminal now hiding out in the U.S.
Well, they doesn’t sound very promising right off the bat. But then you see who’s playing the lead role:
That’s right: Sean Penn, 50-something EMO rocker. That moves it from merely bad to legendarily bad. You look at the IMDB listing and think: “Well, it has David Byrne playing himself. That might be the only thing about this film that doesn’t suck.” And then you watch the trailer:
And think: “Well, it has David Byrne playing himself. That might be the only thing about this film that doesn’t suck.”
This may be the most ill-conceived film involving Auschwitz since Jerry Lewis’ The Day the Clown Cried.
But unlike The Day the Clown Cried, This Must be The Place was actually released. And I’d be willing to watch either of them once.
Once.
Edited to add: Though it’s played in Europe and Sundance, it doesn’t seem to have had a general U.S. release, so it might still pop up at art houses across the country this year.
It does seem to have gotten mostly good reviews from the kind of people who give films like this good reviews…
The seven words (which may be gleaned from the title of this post) are 100% from Guy Flick titles. And, you know, fair enough. But you could probably come up with a similar list for Chick Flick titles (“Heart” and “Love” both come to mind).
Even by that standard, I bet there are more crappy movies with the “Fighter” than “Ninja” in the title.
Horror movies are insufficiently represented. “Dark” and “Blood” (Blood Simple and a few others excepted) would likely yield a crapload of crap. And don’t get me started on “Shark”. Has there ever been an actual good movie with “Shark” in the title?)
Despite what the article says, any Hong Kong movie with “Cop” in the title starring Jackie Chan is pretty much guaranteed to be awesome.
(Hat tip: Bill Crider, though his link is a little off.)
Even though it’s been on Fark, I feel I would be remiss in not mentioning that a man has found the workprint for Manos: the Hands of Fate. He intends to restore the film to all it’s, um, glory, and sell Blu-Rays of the newly remastered version.
Once again Japan brings us a classic piece of the “What the Fuck?” cinema at which they excel. Noboru Iguchi, the director of The Machine Girl, which was your typical “girl picked on and humiliated, girl gets machine gun grafted onto her arm, girl racks up serious body count” film, is back with a film that makes that one look like an exercise in good taste and restraint.
After an insane beginning of RoboGeisha-on-RoboGisha combat, we jump back to a flashback that, it turns out, will take up the entire rest of the movie. Two sisters, one older, pretty, and working as a geisha, the other younger-and-even-prettier-but-we’re-going-to-pretend-she’s-homely-for-the-sake-of-the-plot who gets bossed around, exhibit the usual sibling rivalry. Then they get kidnapped by your generic evil corporation and are forced to train as geisha assassins. Oh, as you just might possibly be able to surmise from the title, they sport all sorts of deadly robotic devices implanted in their body.
The biggest difference between this and Machine Girl is that that film was (with a few allowances) a reasonably realistic, conventional film until it went all machine gunny in the third act, while RoboGeisha is pure WTF from start to finish. Just in case you were worried that RoboGeisha would be a deep, introspective examination of sibling rivalry in modern Japan, the shurukens flying out of the female penis goblin guard’s asses and the circular saw blade popping out of another robogeisha’s mouth should convince you of the film’s pure over-the-top, mutant cinema goodness. Swords pop out of deeply unlikely places (as in the quote in the title), breasts sport guns, shattered buildings bleed digital blood (albeit more convincing than the digital blood than found in Ugandan action films) and a cyborg geisha tank takes on a giant robot. Add off-balance dubbing, the hilariously maudlin sister story, and a ridiculously small cast (the same guy gets killed at least four or five times), and you have a strong candidate to show at your next party.
Here’s the trailer, which pretty much puts all the virtues of the film (such as they are) on display:
And it beats the hell out of Wild Zero or Kibakichi.
Don Webb alerted me to the existence of Hotel Torgo, a documentary on Manos: The Hands of Fate. It features commentary by El Paso SF fan Richard Brandt (a regular Nova Express reader, back in the day), and memories by cast member Bernie Rosenblum.
Warning: You do have to put up with annoying, intrusive Microsoft ads.
Your normal moviegoer isn’t going to touch this with a ten-foot pole, so this review is aimed at fellow freak-cinema aficionados, the sort of people who see a trailer for a film about a murderous telekinetic tire, and go “Oh yeah! I have to see that!”
You might want to reconsider.
I am totally down with the idea of a film about a murderous telekinetic tire, but Rubber disappointed me. About half the film, the scenes of the tire itself, its slowly building murderous rampage (it starts out with small animals before going all Scannners on various humans unfortunate enough to cross its path), and it stalking a random hot French chick, work almost as well as I hoped they would. All it needed was some recycled Michael Bay music for the perfect over-dramatic touch.
Hot French chick included. Sadly, it doesn't really help.
Unfortunately, the other half of the film ruins the tire-rampage sections, by imposing an arty-farty, post-modern, metafictional framing device whereby a bunch of slow-witted redshirts are lured into the desert to watch the tire’s rampage through dispensed binoculars as part of some sort of…what? Performance art? These parts serve only to pad out the film (and it’s a bad sign when an 82 minute film feels badly padded), provide a few (far too few) laughs, and heighten the artificial nature of the whole endeavor.
This is the wrong narrative strategy.
The way to make a film like this work is never to wink at the audience. Minoru Kawasaki provides great example of how to do this in The Calamari Wrestler and Executive Koala. The more absurd the actions, the more serious the actors played it. No one pointed out the combat boots sticking out of the giant squid, or the obvious zipper on the back of the koala’s head. Unlike Rubber, nobody comes out and gives a speech at the beginning about why things are done for “no reason.” Or, to pick a domestic example, no one walks on screen during Team America: World Police to point out how all the characters are marionettes.
Some things in the film work. The scene of the tire sitting in the hotel room watching NASCAR really captures the absurdest vibe the director seemed to be aiming for. The opening bit where the car knocks down every single artfully disarrayed breakaway chair almost works as a sort of white trash Jacques Tati cinematic tone poem. It’s got well-executed exploding heads. And you get to see Roxane Mesquida’s very shapely French ass for a few seconds while she takes a shower, which would be a big deal if it wasn’t for, you know, the Internet. (NSFW. You’re welcome.)
About the only way I can recommend seeing this is as part of a viewing party for weird films, especially if you give out a prize for whoever can come up with the most tire-related puns. But even in that context, it’s not remotely as inventive (or interesting) as the far-less-technically-competent Die, You Zombie Bastards!, which delivers steady doses of WTF throughout.
My advice? You shouldn’t see any films about murderous telekinetic tires until a better one rolls along.
Here’s the trailer, which includes most of the best scenes:
They’re going to be filming in El Paso, just like the original.
Wait, it gets better: The film stars Jackey Raye Jones, who played the little girl in the original Manos: The Hands of Fate. Plus a character played by Joe Warren, the son of original Manos director Harold Warren.
The kicker? Tom Neyman is back as The Master.
And yes, there’s a poster:
You could say that making a sequel to one of the worst films ever made is a bad idea, but frankly, the entire enterprise is beyond your puny mortal concepts of “good” and “bad”…
