WAR OF THE WORLDS (2025) – A new chapter has been added to the history of H.G. Wells adaptations. Ice Cube stars in Amazon’s feature-length product placement for itself. In a moment of Cosmic Comedy, Amazon straight-facedly attached the tagline “It’s worse than you think” to this flick.
Yes, obviously that was meant in the sense that the crisis involving invading aliens is worse than you think, but my God you’d have to be an idiot or have the proverbial balls the size of church bells to approve that tagline for your own company’s movie production.
Master thespian Ice Cube stars as a government surveillance operative who abuses his position to violate people’s civil rights all day long while also obsessively spying on his own family members on taxpayer time. AND HE’S OUR SUPPOSED HERO!
Ice Cube Makes Faces should have been this thing’s title, since he does nothing but sit in a chair exercising his facial muscles while spending face time with us and absurdly playing his Big Brother Will Protect You role to the hilt. And lest you fear that this adaptation will be less than faithful to the source material, the filmmakers even included the part where one of H.G. Wells’ characters says “Get your skinny ass over there!”
I now want to see an entire Cinematic Universe of Ice Cube starring in movies made from H.G. Wells stories. I’m sure the Invisible Man’s reaction to his condition would be something like “DAAAMN!” Continue reading
PAGANINI HORROR (1989) – Directed by Luigi Cozzi, better known to us fans of psychotronic movies as the Italian Ed Wood. Three women and one man constitute a heavy metal band desperate for a hit song. They strike a Faustian bargain with the mysterious Mr. Pickett, played by Donald Pleasence. 
Playing the piece while filming at the mansion causes Paganini to rise from the dead and lets loose other forces of Hell. Those characters not butchered by the masked, undead maestro via a knife that pops out of his violin are slaughtered by the supernatural forces now at large in the house. 
WEREWOLVES ON WHEELS (1971) – You just knew this was the movie I would start with. A biker gang hassles a group of Satanists in the usual biker way in films. The Satanists get revenge by cursing some of the bikers to start turning into werewolves and preying on the others. 
Here at Balladeer’s Blog my love of enjoyably bad movies has been well established. You can count me as one of the many “Human Breens” as fans of filmmaker Neil Breen are called. 
As with the best of the bad auteurs Neil churns out productions that are uniquely his own. There is no mistaking a Neil Breen film with a film made by anyone else. Picture The Room’s Tommy Wiseau trying to make a David Lynch movie. But with a LOT more needless violence against laptop computers. 
DOUBLE DOWN (2005) – Neil Breen starred, wrote and directed this movie – and quite obviously he or an associate even wrote the IMDb description of the plot. That description calls Double Down “an edgy action thriller,” which would certainly come as a surprise to anyone who has actually SEEN the film. 
PLEASE DON’T TOUCH ME (Filmed in 1959, released in 1963) – Buy this for the Lash La Rue fan in your life, but mostly for the Ron and June Ormond fan in your life. For people outside of us lovers of Bad Movies I’ll point out that Ron and June Ormond were the famous husband and wife team of low-low-low budget filmmakers. 
Though Please Don’t Touch Me sounds like it would be a sexploitation flick, lurid assault film or Nudie Cutie, rest assured there’s nothing in this 67-minute oddity that your grandmother couldn’t handle. Well, maybe your mother, instead of grandma. 
THE TERRORNAUTS (1967) – Simon Oates of Doomwatch fame stars as yet another maverick scientist in this effort from earlier in his career. Oates is running a British version of the SETI project and is forever trying to intercept signals from space … signals that might indicate intelligent life forms. 
Wild coincidences like that are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of this ridiculous movie’s plot holes, inconsistencies and lack of logic. 
SANTO VERSUS THE RIDERS OF TERROR (1970) – Called Santo Contra Los Jinetes del Terror in its native Mexico, this is one of my all-time favorite hidden gems among the wacked-out movies about the Mexican wrestler called El Santo. 
HITLER – DEAD OR ALIVE (1942) – You’ve heard of grindhouse movies? Well, you could consider this a GRINDE-HOUSE movie, because it was directed by Nick Grinde and produced by Charles House. 
Hitler – Dead or Alive starts out with a pair of stereotypical hungry reporters who bluff their way into a face-to-face meeting with eccentric, unorthodox, Howard Hughesesque tycoon Samuel Thornton. Thornton has just donated a million dollars worth of fighter planes to the war effort, and the snooping reporters ask if there’s any connection to the million-dollar reward he offered for Hitler a few months earlier. 
MURDERCYCLE (1999) – Okay, I want a Ghost Rider vs Murdercycle film! ESPECIALLY with Nicolas Cage as Ghost Rider. Anyway, despite the title, this movie is a nice throwback to the days before so many low-budget filmmakers were trying to be intentionally over-the-top and campy with their productions and titles in hopes of garnering sales from a reputation for being so-bad-it’s-good. 
Let’s take this from the top – an object from space lands near a Top Secret government facility concealed within a seeming shack in the middle of nowhere. It’s not a meteor but an alien weapon and when a man on a dirt bike draws near the fallen object he falls victim to its jack-in-the-box/ face-hugger tech. 
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