Tag Archives: Bad Movies

November 11, 2014 · 12:34 am

BEAUTIFUL CASEY JAMES AND BALLADEER’S BLOG’S BAD SUPERHERO MOVIES

Special thanks once again to the extraordinarily lovely Casey James, Balladeer’s Blog’s Official Movie Hostess! This time around Casey is helping present the first of my reviews of bad and weird superhero movies.

The Golden Bat: the ugliest superhero in the world.

The Golden Bat: the ugliest superhero in the world.

THE GOLDEN BAT (1966) – Ogon Batto is the name of this film in its native Japan. The movie was based on the title character, Japan’s very first comic book superhero who debuted in 1930. That 1930 date puts him years before Superman and Batman in the west!  

At any rate for the 1966 movie Japan’s perennial action star Sonny Chiba played the leader of a group of science-oriented commandos in what looked like aluminum foil suits. Chiba and his gang have fancy aircraft like England’s Thunderbirds and their debut mission finds them trying to save the Earth from collision with a rogue planet called Icarus. Continue reading →

14 Comments

Filed under Bad and weird movies, Sex Symbols

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

October 27, 2014 · 8:53 pm

THREE MORE BAD MOVIE CLASSICS FOR HALLOWEEN

Blood SongHalloween month continues here at Balladeer’s Blog! In previous years I’ve run my list of The Top Eleven Neglected Bad Movie Classics for Halloween and even a followup list of eleven more. The links to those lists are below. Right now here’s a look at three more classically bad horror flicks for the season.

BLOOD SONG (1982) – Singer Frankie Avalon as a 1980’s- style slasher villain! The godfather’s Luca Brasi (Lenny Montana) as a co-star and co-producer! Who could possibly resist that? Frankie plays a homicidal maniac who escapes from an insane asylum with his beloved flute/recorder type thingee.

Turns out years earlier a girl played by Donna Wilkes – soon to star as Angel herself – got a blood transfusion from Psycho Frankie. In this movie’s logic-free universe that means that she has a mental link with our mad slasher. This link is causing him to track her down to kill her with the single-minded fury that Mike Myers showed toward Jaime Lee Curtis in the Halloween movies. Continue reading →

22 Comments

Filed under Bad and weird movies, Halloween Season

Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,

October 15, 2014 · 9:49 pm

CROSS OF THE SEVEN JEWELS (1987): HORROR FILM REVIEW

Halloween month continues at Balladeer’s Blog!

Cross of the Seven Jewels 1CROSS OF THE SEVEN JEWELS (1987) – Where has this film been all my life? I want to have this movie’s children and I’m a guy!

Cross of the Seven Jewels is easily the worst and weirdest werewolf movie I’ve ever seen. Forget The Werewolf of Woodstock, forget Face of the Screaming Werewolf, forget Werewolf vs the Yeti and all of Paul Naschy’s other lycanthropy flicks. You can even forget the muddy-faced wolfman from Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein. Marco Antonio Andolfi starred in this film under the name Eddy Endolf plus wrote and directed it as well.

Andolfi was openly influenced by Paul Naschy’s werewolf films from Spain, but produced a cinematic mess that captured neither the eroticism of Naschy’s Waldemar Daninsky movies nor their goofy charm. Marco’s depiction of a werewolf is a bit … eccentric … and can only be described as “just a little something for the laaaadieeessss.”  

Personally, I would have titled this film

Personally, I would have titled this film “Ya Call THAT a Werewolf?” but I’m kind of weird.

When Andolfi transforms into a wolfman he somehow loses his clothes (which illogically reappear on his body when he reverts back to human form) and he sprouts long bushy hair in only a few places. The first place is around his face with his mouth left bare, making him look like he’s wearing a big hair-mask with eye-holes. The second place would be his hands and the third place is his crotch, which conveniently becomes bushy enough to block out the sight of his genitals. The rest of his well-built body is butt naked.  Continue reading →

2 Comments

Filed under Bad and weird movies, Halloween Season

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

October 7, 2014 · 10:03 pm

SPOOKIES (1986) – A NEGLECTED BAD MOVIE CLASSIC

Spookies 1SPOOKIES (1986) – Halloween month continues here at Balladeer’s Blog with a look at a bad movie classic that deserves a Plan 9-sized cult. I mean who does this movie have to sleep with in order to be better known?

Spookies is loaded with laughable and outrageous monsters, acting that porn stars would dismiss as amateurish and gore effects that go from wincingly realistic to childishly weak and back again throughout the flick.

The reason for the uneven tone is that Spookies is yet another example of a bad film that was not completed and then was later combined with new footage to slap together a movie with a long enough running time for theatrical release. They Saved Hitler’s Brain, Monster A Go-Go, The Pink Angels plus Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny are four of the best-known examples of these hybrid monstrosities.  

For obvious reasons the characters in the original footage and the completion footage can never interact in the film and part of the fun for lovers of bad movies lies in the awkward lengths the filmmakers go to to try to hide the cut-and- paste nature of their movie. Continue reading →

8 Comments

Filed under Bad and weird movies, Halloween Season

Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,

September 9, 2014 · 9:20 pm

DR STRAIN THE BODY SNATCHER (1989)

Dr StrainJUST SAY NO to this pathetic ripoff of a movie. Regular readers of Balladeer’s Blog know that I can often love even the worst movies because of their bad movie charm so it takes something beyond mere cinematic ineptitude for me to recommend that viewers steer clear of a movie altogether.

DR STRAIN THE BODY SNATCHER – This revolting celluloid con job was made 1n 1989 but released on video in 1991. I’ll start off with the worst part of this movie and point out that IT HAS NO ENDING. The movie ends in the middle of a chase scene with the hero of the story being pursued by Dr Strain in the newest body he’s inhabiting.

I have no idea how this amateurish piece of garbage found a distributor in the first place given its clearly incomplete condition. I’m not being sarcastic by speculating that it’s possible nobody who rented or bought it even bothered watching it all the way to the end. The movie is THAT lame, boring and unoriginal.  Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Filed under Bad and weird movies

Tagged as , , , ,

September 3, 2014 · 7:52 pm

BLOODBEAT (1982) MOVIE REVIEW

Bloodbeat BIGBLOODBEAT (1982) – The presence of a female slasher adds a fresh (but not uprecedented) feel to Bloodbeat. This film is so obscure people seldom if ever get its year of release correct let alone the storyline. Even in the world of weird film premises this little honey manages to stand out. Bloodbeat is about a woman who goes to spend Christmas with her boyfriend’s family in Wisconsin only to find herself possessed by the spirit of a dead samurai warrior who forces her to go on a killing spree with his sword.

bloodbeatExcept for the confusing fact that many of the killings are commited BEFORE the samurai possesses her body but even those murders are – for some unexplained reason – synchronized with the possessed woman’s orgasms (No, I’m NOT kidding). Even more confusing is the fact that at least one of the samurai’s killings was committed BEFORE the woman even showed up in this Wisconsin town. Anyway, the samurai’s sword is a war trophy in a trunk in the home of the main characters. The fact that we are never even told the last names of any of the main characters should give you a hint about the storytelling ineptitude on display in this flick. Continue reading →

4 Comments

Filed under Bad and weird movies

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

July 10, 2014 · 10:42 pm

BAD MOVIE SHORT: THE FINISHING LINE (1977)

Trainspotting it's NOT!

Trainspotting it’s NOT!

Yes, it’s the infamous British safety short titled The Finishing Line and it plays like a 20 minute Monty Python sketch rehearsed in Hell. Forget America’s Driver’s Ed films like Red Asphalt or Signal 30 … forget the complete works of Sid Davis … you can even forget the entire library of Union Pacific Railroad flicks. Prepare for tastelessness beyond belief! 

And is it just me or is the P.A. announcer the guy who played Field Marshall Montgomery in Patton? At any rate here it is, the Railroad Safety Short most likey to be masturbated to by Freddy Krueger — THE FINISHING LINE!

Continue reading →

10 Comments

Filed under Bad and weird movies

Tagged as , , , , ,

June 13, 2014 · 12:01 am

FRIDAY THE 13th: THE ORPHAN (1977)

Friday the 13th The Orphan biggerFRIDAY THE 13th: THE ORPHAN (1977) – H.H. Munro must have turned over in his grave at this adaptation of one of his short stories. This quasi-horror film was re-released in 1979 as just The Orphan and despite the original title it has no connection to the Friday the 13th series of slasher flicks. At least, no REAL connection. I’m surprised some unscrupulous distributor never tried sneaking this into theaters in the 1980’s as a “prequel” to the slasher movies by presenting the insane young boy in the movie as the grandfather of Jason Voorhees.

Even so the title makes it hard not to think of our wealthy young protagonist “David” (Mark Owens) as an ancestor of the hockey- masked slice and dice man from Crystal Lake. In the 1920’s David’s mother accidentally shoots his African Big Game Hunter father Kevin to death during an argument about his frequent overseas trips. David not only witnesses this but sees his mother put the gun in her mouth and kill herself immediately afterward. Next David gets VERY disturbed when a presumed family member (an uncredited Christopher Lloyd in a “blink-and-you’ll- miss- him” appearance) forces him to kiss his dead father as he lies in his coffin. Continue reading →

10 Comments

Filed under Bad and weird movies

Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,

June 9, 2014 · 5:31 pm

BEAUTIFUL CASEY JAMES PRESENTS BALLADEER’S BLOG’S OBSCURE SPAGHETTI WESTERNS

Balladeer's Blog's Official Movie Hostess, the legendary Casey James

Balladeer’s Blog’s Official Movie Hostess, the legendary Casey James

Casey James is as lethal as she is lovely and among her many roles in life she is kind enough to be Balladeer’s Blog’s Official Movie Hostess. This time around this voluptuous embodiment of men’s and many women’s desires is presenting the first in a series of my reviews of the more obscure Spaghetti Westerns – the ones not well known to viewers who are only familiar with Sergio Leone’s films. 

THE PRICE OF POWER (1969) –  There were literally more than 550 Spaghetti Westerns made in the 60’s and 70’s since when the Italians do something they do it in a big, big way. Those hundreds of films vary in quality from pretty good to hilariously awful and the creative talents behind them often tried to outdo each other in terms of colorful heroes and oddball plots. My favorites include those movies where the Italians took more liberties with Western history than American filmmakers ever dreamed of. 

That brings us to The Price Of Power which was also released under the title Texas. The point of this film is … well, it’s hard to say really. Even after repeated viewings. It’s difficult to determine if the filmmakers were trying to make a statement about the alleged conspiracy behind the assassination of President John F Kennedy or about the civil rights movement, or about capitalism’s impact on the political process in a free society or what. Whatever they were trying to do the end result is like a history lesson taught by Ed Wood himself. Let’s compare the historical record to the plotline of this very odd movie.  Continue reading →

4 Comments

Filed under Bad and weird movies, Sex Symbols, Spaghetti Westerns

Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,

May 11, 2014 · 2:39 pm

MOTHER’S DAY BAD MOVIE: HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY – LOVE, GEORGE (1973)

Despite the movie poster's warning this flick won't even untie your shoelaces.

Despite the movie poster’s warning this flick won’t even untie your shoelaces.

HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY! LOVE, GEORGE (1973) – Category: Bad movie elevated by kitsch value in the casting.

Directed by THE Darren McGavin and featuring his wife Kathie Browne in a small role, this hilariously bizarre film is also known as Run, Stranger, Run. “Run, Potential Viewer, Run” would be a more appropriate title. Happy Mother’s Day Love, George (henceforth HMDLG) is often described as a psycho-sexual thriller but actually it is nothing more than a melodramatic soap opera with a few murders and VERY few scenes of blood and gore. Those blood and gore scenes are so over-the-top they are completely at odds with the Continue reading →

2 Comments

Filed under Bad and weird movies

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , ,