Tag Archives: B-Movie

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE DUNGEONMASTER (1984)

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AKA Ragewar

DIRECTED BY: Charles Band, Rosemarie Turko, John Carl Buechler, David Allen, Jeffrey Byron, Peter Manoogian, Ted Nicolaou

FEATURING: Jeffrey Byron, , Leslie Wing

PLOT: A demon sucks a computer expert into a dream world where he puts him through a series of tests, each directed in a different genre style.

Still from The Dungeonmaster (1984)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: With its bespectacled hero with a laser-blasting artificial intelligence best buddy who defeats Satan in hand-to-hand combat to save his super-hot aerobicized girlfriend from demonic bondage, The Dungeonmaster may be the apotheosis of 1980s nerd camp. Objectively speaking, however, it’s no more than a guilty pleasure.

COMMENTS: The Dungeonmaster starts out in medias R.E.M., with a dream in which the hero chases a red-robed woman through a misty corridor; he catches her, she drops her dress for a full frontal shot, they start to make love, and then a bunch of aliens break in and abduct her kicking nude body. This has absolutely nothing to do with anything that follows, but it does earn the movie that super-cool R-rating all the awesomest B-flicks get (besides this pre-credits sequence, The Dungeonmaster is strictly a PG affair).

Actually, in a funny Zen koan sort of way, the fact that this preliminary fantasy sequence has nothing to do with anything that follows has everything to do with everything that follows, because the rest of the movie is made up of strung-together fantasy sequences with no real logical connection between them. Paul is a computer scientist with an early prototype version of Google glasses that allows him to hack the traffic light cycles as he’s jogging and take money out of his ATM without entering his PIN number. Gwen, his aerobics-instructor girlfriend, is jealous of Paul’s relationship with a female artificial intelligence named CAL (short for her serial number, X-CALBR8), but when the Devil abducts her and chains her to a concrete boulder on a studio back lot, she learns to appreciate what she’s got.

You see, Old Scratch is impressed by Paul’s skill with computers, which he regards as some form of arcane wizardry, and so has devised seven tests (each directed by a different one of Charles Band’s pals) for Paul to conquer in order to win Gwen back. One representative quest involves Paul finding Einstein’s ice grenade to throw at the figures in a frozen wax museum. Other challenges include facing zombies and their puppet king in the Land of the Dead, defeating a stop-motion animated jungle statue, and solving a neo-noir mystery. In the most terrifying trial of all, Paul finds himself in a W.A.S.P. video directed by Charles Band, and must fight his way past a bunch of leather clad groupies with big hair to stop an Alice Cooper wannabe from sacrificing his fair maiden on a pointy stage prop.

Paul defeats almost every challenge simply by zapping the boss baddie with CAL, whom Satan has helpfully transformed into a wristband laser. He also utters the immortal line, beloved of “Mythbusters” and teenage solipsists alike, “I reject your reality and substitute my own!” The art direction, while admittedly cheap, is actually pretty good throughout, colorful in that bright 1980s way with plenty of sub-Industrial Light and Magic glowing laser beams and electrical arcs turning up everywhere. The Dungeonmaster zips from one underdeveloped adolescent fantasy to the next, with zero logic and seven layers of cheesy spectacle. It’s kind of great! If I had my way, I would totally reject this reality and substitute The Dungeonmaster‘s.

Remembered fondly by few, The Dungeonmaster was a very late arrival in the DVD format, only showing up in 2013 on Scream Factory’s “All Night Horror Marathon Vol. 2” set alongside inferior but equally unloved Charles Band productions Cellar Dweller (1988), Catacombs (1993), and Contamination .7 (1993).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“If this really was a D&D adventure I’d venture that the Dungeon Master desperately needs new medication. Or much less medication. I haven’t seen anything this weird and stupid since I read the Castle Greyhawk module.”–Noah Antwiler, The Spoony Experiment

Canonically Weird (The List)

160. ROBOT MONSTER (1953)

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“[CROW T. ROBOT and TOM SERVO are complaining to JOEL ROBINSON that the incoherence of the movie Robot Monster is making them physically ill. JOEL kind of likes it.]

JOEL: No, you don’t get it. Isn’t it kind of weird? There’s, like, a guy in a gorilla suit, and he’s got a robot head, and inside he’s got kind of a bunch of clay. I mean, I’ve seen Dali paintings that made more sense than this movie does.

TOM: Yeah, but I think there’s a fine line between surrealism and costume store closeouts!

CROW: I don’t get it, Joel. Is it cool to make no sense? Is it hip to be vague?

JOEL: No, it’s not cool, but it’s surreal…”

–“Mystery Science Theater,” episode 107 (Robot Monster)

DIRECTED BY: Phil Tucker

FEATURING: Gregory Moffett, George Barrows, Claudia Barrett, George Nader, John Mylong

PLOT: Young Johnny is playing spaceman when he encounters a pair of archeologists on a dig. Later, he is struck by lightning, we see footage of dinosaurs fighting, and Johnny awakens in a future world where mankind has been wiped out except for his own family and a few surviving scientists. The remnants of humanity are being hunted down by a Ro-man, an emotionless alien with a gorilla’s body wearing a diver’s helmet.

Still from Robot Monster (1953)
BACKGROUND:

  • Robot Monster was originally released in 3-D (which may explain why the producers thought floating bubbles were imperative to the story).
  • The film was shot in four days, mostly in Bronson Canyon, with no interiors. It reportedly cost $16,000 to make (which would be about $140,000 in 2013 dollars). As bad as it was, Robot Monster reportedly grossed over $1 million in its initial run, even before it became a cult item.
  • The inserted dinosaur footage comes from One Million B.C. (1940) and Lost Continent (1951).
  • The music is by composer Elmer Bernstein, who was just starting his career. Bernstein would go on to be nominated for 14 Oscars, winning once.
  • According to “The Golden Turkey Awards,” director Phil Tucker attempted suicide due to the negative critical reaction to Robot Monster. Although Tucker did try to kill himself after the movie was released, the idea that bad reviews drove him to it is likely to be wishful thinking on the part of Harry and Michael Medved. The story is usually repeated—with the kind of cheap irony that suggests an urban legend—as some variation of “upset over bad reviews, the director tried to shoot himself, but missed!” Bill Warren gives a more balanced account of the scandal in his 1950s sci-fi primer “Keep Watching the Skies!“
  • Robot Monster is a mainstay on “worst movie ever” lists, including the Medveds “The Fifty Worst Films of All Time.”
  • Included as one of the experiments of “Mystery Science Theater 3000” (Episode 107).

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The “robot monster,” with his diving helmet topped by a rabbit ear antenna, all perched on top of a shaggy Halloween ape costume—especially when he’s framed by the swirling soap bubbles arising from his atom-age alien technology.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: It’s the bubbles that put it over the top. An incompetent apeman alien in a diving helmet I can accept. Dialogue like “I must—but I cannot! Where on the graph do must and cannot meet?” is absurdly awful, but period-appropriate. The random appearance of battling dinosaur footage is common detritus when you are digging around in the scrapyards of cinema. But the unexplained presence of the bubble machine—a piece of equipment important enough to get its own mention in the opening credits—nearly breaks the weirdometer. Where on the graph do “apocalyptic alien invasion” and “happy little bubble machine” meet?


“Trailers from Hell” on Monster from Mars [AKA Robot Monster]

COMMENTS: Plan 9 from Outer Space has long been recognized as the ultimate so-bad-it’s-good unintentional sci-fi comedy of the 1950s, and Continue reading 160. ROBOT MONSTER (1953) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: SHARKNADO (2013)

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DIRECTED BY: Anthony C. Ferrante

FEATURING: Ian Ziering, Cassie Scerbo, Jaason Simmons, Tara Reid

PLOT: Global warming causes shark migrations and storms with heavy winds that pick up angry sharks and hurl them through the streets of L.A.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: C’mon… Sharknado? Really? When you’ve got the weird movie review sites scoffing at the ridiculousness of your premise, you know your movie has issues.

COMMENTS: There have been high concept movies before, but Sharknado has streamlined the process by inventing a title that’s so high concept it makes the rest of the movie superfluous. In case you missed the point of the clever portmanteau, the movie is about a tornado that contains sharks. The problem here for the filmmakers that you really can’t fit more than five, ten minutes at most of actual sharknado footage into your movie, and you have an obligation to fill out the rest of the running time with a plot that doesn’t suck. Not to spoil Sharknado, but they can’t. In Mega Python vs. Gatoroid, Mary Lambert at least included a Tiffany/Debbi Gibson rivalry subplot (culminating in an old-fashioned hair-pulling catfight that actually one-upped the giant reptiles). Here, we only get a lame, barely realized domestic drama to fill in the stretches between flying shark attacks. The two male leads are bland. Alleged protagonist “Fin” (groan) acts like a self-sacrificing hero who values his family’s safety above his own life, but his ex-wife and daughter keep insisting that he’s a selfish jerk. It’s like they’re reading their lines from a different draft of the script. Fin’s surfin’ sidekick, “Baz,” is Tasmanian, and that’s all there is to say about his character. Tara Reid’s only purpose in the story is to be miffed and bitchy—she doesn’t even kill a single shark—and she looks bored in an underwritten role that will do nothing to get her stalled acting career back on track. Other than beach barfly John Heard, who seems like he will have a major role until he becomes an early victim, only Cassie Scerbo (who looks fantastic in a bikini, even with a shark scar on her upper thigh) gives it her all and has the kind of fun an actor should when romping around in something called Sharknado.

Besides the suspiciously selective-for-sharks cyclones (why couldn’t a tornado dump a bunch of lobster on us, preferably during a drizzle of drawn butter?), there are many deliberately dumb moments in the script that will have you shaking your head in either delight or disgust. For example, there’s a scene where the heroes are driving around the flooded streets of L.A. in their SUV and we are told that a full grown tiger shark is swimming under the car. Later, these geniuses scheme to destroy the sharknadoes by flying a helicopter into them and dropping a bomb, reasoning that “tornadoes happen when cold and warm air meet. If you drop a bomb head right in the middle of it, you just might equalize it.”

But, you must resist testing your wits by looking for the plot holes in Sharknado. That’s just what the filmmakers want you to do—to congratulate yourself for being smarter than the people who made this movie, while they in the meantime lounge on the Santa Monica beach, drinking fruity beverages with umbrellas and slices of pineapple in them and texting their financial advisers to see what investments they should buy with the money people like you paid for the DVD. Although these shark movies made by the studio known as the Asylum can be fun in a junk-food cinema sense, they are basically a scam; they profit off hastily churning out shoddy shark product and marketing it as camp. Critics were surprisingly kind to Sharknado. But the praise only rewards the filmmakers for being dumb, and encourages them to try to be even stupider next time out. I very nearly gave this schlock a “” rating, and only relented because, if by some miracle you have managed to avoid the Asylum’s other aquatic monstrosities like Mega Piranha and Sharktopus, Sharknado will seem original and mildly amusing. Enough said.

Much like contemporary children can’t comprehend how “Fonzie” could ever be considered cool, future generations will find it hard to believe that the television debut of Sharknado was a pop culture event. Archive this report from The Verge of this compendium of tweets from the Huffington Post and show them to your grandchildren to prove to them that, yes, a movie about a tornado full of sharks was a big deal for a couple of hours in 2013. Hopefully, that generation will look back at Sharknado as the point at which the seafood horror genre (please forgive me) jumped the shark.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the movie signals its determination to efficiently get you the balls-out-crazy mayhem you want and not let narrative, budget constraints, or the laws of science get in the way.”–James Poniewozik, Time (TV broadcast)

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

ROGER CORMAN’S A BUCKET OF BLOOD (1959)

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The cult favorite Bucket of Blood (1959) was ahead of its time, literally pioneering the phrase “supplemental feature.” Having finished A Bucket of Blood ahead of schedule, Corman fashioned his supplemental material in a second cult favorite feature, Little Shop of Horrors (1960), shot on an old  set.  As a producer, Corman’s oeuvre is, naturally, outrageously varied, from Z-grade potboilers to arthouse films. Corman’s output as a director was almost as varied, but the quality of his work took an improved turn with this film (with no small assistance from writer Charles B. Griffith, who also penned Shop). Corman’s directing career essentially ended with 1971’s Von Richthofen and Brown, although he returned nineteen years later  for Frankenstein Unbound (1990), which was mostly panned. Like the director himself, Frankenstein Unbound may be underrated; as underrated as some of Corman’s Poe films are overrated.

Still from A Bucket of Blood (1959)Producers Samuel Z. Arkoff and James Nicholson challenged Corman to break his own record of a six day shoot, quality be damned. Despite the five-day shoot, Bucket of Blood remains one of Corman’s best efforts. It is essentially a reworking of House Of Wax (1953) transplanted to a beatnik coffee shop.  (in his only starring role) plays the geek busboy Walter who wants to become as hip as the beatniks, poets, jazz musicians, and artists at the Yellow Door Cafe. Walter not only want to impress his customers, but also his unrequited love: hostess Carla (Barboura Morris). He gets his opportunity when he accidentally kills a cat, panics, and covers up the evidence in clay. He becomes an artistic sensation. Before you can say “Sweeney Todd,” Walter’s next masterpiece is of the two-legged mammalian variety. An irksome detective joins the list of victims turned masterpieces; and, naturally, Walter’s posthumous fame will supersede his homicidal proclivities.

Although Griffith’s humor is obvious and caters to two-dimensional stereotypes of artists and beatniks as insufferably pretentious, the movie wins due to admirable cynicism in the writing, combined with Corman’s staid directorial style and a cast with personality. Although Little Shop of Horrors is probably the better film, Bucket of Blood has earned its status as an authentically quirky cult film.  What may be Corman’s most ambitious “B” film was three years away: The Intruder (1962), a different type of horror altogether, which will appear in this space next week.

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

I BURY THE LIVING (1958)

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 exemplifies the star of yesteryear. He was not a twenty-something, pretty Twilight boy chiseled out of wax. He was craggy and already middle-aged when cast as Paladin in “Have Gun Will Travel,” television’s greatest westerns series. Boone was a perfect anti-hero and a memorable, complex villain in countless films, including ‘s The Tall T (1957). Despite his rough exterior, Boone was an erudite actor, and his proudest accomplishment may have been the tragically short-lived “Richard Boone Show” (1963) which brought repertory theater to small screen American audiences (even if, predictably, the fare was too original for that audience). Boone’s way to starring roles from character parts was a slow one, and his early body of work included low budget genre films, such as the quirky, flawed gem, I Bury The Living (1958).

Boone, one year into the iconic “Have Gun Will Travel,” is as understated in I Bury the Living as the movie’s title is trashy. The film was directed by prolific Z-movie director Albert Band (father of Full Moon Productions’ Charles Band), who gives it a brooding, British noir milieu, employing psychedelic montages (shot by cinematographer Frederick Gatelyand) and expressionist sets (from Edward Vorkapich). It plays like an extended “Twilight Zone” episode with one noticeable difference: an ending which almost kills it.

Still from I Bury the Living (1958)Bob Kraft (Boone) inherits the family graveyard. Former groundskeeper Andy McKee (, who gives a good performance despite an awful Scottish accent) is retiring after 40 years. McKee shows Kraft a large map of the cemetery. The map is basically a pin board: white pins indicate an empty plot, and black ones an occupied plot. When Kraft accidentally places a black pin in the plot assigned to a living person, that person dies. And so it goes. Kraft goes mad after multiple deaths, believing he has the power of life and death via those pins.

What is most remarkable about the film is its low budget style (shot almost entirely in a L.A. cemetery), including what may be the creepiest map in celluloid history. The map transforms several times, growing menacingly. It is like Doran Grey’s canvas as if painted by Franz Kline. In one effective vignette, the map looks like a giant mirror adorned in black pins. Kraft’s mental state and Gerald Fried’s thrashing score parallel the mirror.

A film like this should have gone out in a blaze of glory. Instead, a cop-out finale unconvincingly reveals a disgruntled employee and we don’t buy it one bit. The final montage pulls out all the “Twilight Zone” stops in a imitative way. Despite the flaws, I Bury the Living  is deserving of its sleeper status. Unfortunately , the producers did little to promote it, and the film became buried until it became a mild cult favorite, fell into the public domain, and was lauded by that Fort Knox of obscure genre gold: Sinister Cinema.