Tag Archives: So bad it’s weird

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE HUNGRY SNAKE WOMAN (1986)

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Petualangan Cinta Nyi Blorong

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DIRECTED BY: Sisworo Gautama Putra

FEATURING: , Advent Bangun, George Rudy, Nina Anwar

PLOT: A criminal seeks out the Snake Goddess (also called the Snake Queen), who promises him wealth if he kills three women, drinks their blood, and eats their breasts, but instead, at the instigation of a rival Snake Woman, he betrays the Snake Goddess by sticking a pin into her neck while making love, changing her back into a snake.

Still from The Hungry Snake Woman (1986)

COMMENTS: Mythology is weird, but mythology seen through the eyes of exploitation film directors is even weirder. Hungry Snake Woman feels at least loosely connected to feverish legends from the Indonesian jungles, but it adds a lot of sex, blood, and kung fu. It cares not a whit for logic, dropping plotlines as if they were squirming scorpions and rushing off to the next diversion.

This is the kind of movie were it’s tempting to give a simple recap of the plot, but it’s probably better to let the viewer discover the madness for themselves. Still, running through a few of the highlights should be enough to pique your interest. We can’t pass up the major spoiler, because it’s too tempting: the Snake Goddess literally turns the film’s antagonist into Dracula at one point—not into a generic vampire, but the public domain Count himself, complete with black cloak, plastic fangs, and cheesy bat-transformation. The only alteration from the traditional template is that he now dines on the breasts of maidens after drinking their blood. It’s also worth noting that, indicative of the script’s short-attention span, our intrepid antihero quickly abandons his bloodsucking role after getting rudely stomped on the foot by a potential victim. Also keep an eye out for a menacing stock footage giraffe, incongruous day-for-night shooting, sex with a snake, centipede vomiting, and an Indonesian mullet. And kung fu. And a chainsaw. It’s that kind of movie. Hungry Snake Woman has everything a film fanatic could ask for, except for purpose or meaning. As one of the characters says midway through, “If you ask me, this doesn’t make much sense.”

Despite its indifference to logic, its mediocre acting, and its general cheapness, Hungry Snake Woman has some genuine visual appeal. The special effects are chintzy—usually just editing to make things disappear and reappear—but the costuming, makeup, set design, and lighting are superior, verging on sumptuous at times. The Snake Queen/Goddess glitters in her bejeweled regalia; her harem girls tantalize in their sheer chiffon tops and colorful bikini bottoms; and the Snake Woman looks dramatic painted head-to-toe in mottled green. The Snake Goddess’ entrance, levitating in front of her cave wall like a sexy Buddha, is imposing. These points of visual interest suggest divine grandeur, when things on the ground otherwise get totally absurd.

Suzzanna (who plays a double role here) was a huge horror star in Indonesia and is credited onscreen before the title appears; she was 46 when this was released, but still looks glamorous (and even has a nude scene, though shot at distance). The Hungry Snake Woman is actually a sequel to 1982’s The Snake Queen, which is essentially lost (although you might be able to track down a low quality VHS copy). I suspect you won’t miss anything by not having seen the first one. The Mondo Macabro Snake Woman Blu-ray is restored in 2K and looks fantastic, with vibrant colors and no visible damage. The voices on the English dub sound familiar from Hong Kong movies of the period; subtitles are also available, but this is the type of schlock that actually benefits from a dub job. And a six-pack.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a 1986 Indonesian stunner that fits right in with some of [Mondo Macabro’s] essential weird world staples like Mystics in Bali and Alucarda… it involves plenty of macabre and grotesque imagery (including a bit of animal mistreatment, mainly some scorpions), but it flirts with fantasy and comedy as well when it isn’t just utterly unclassifiable surrealism.”–Nathaniel Thompson, Mondo Digital (Blu-ray)

The Hungry Snake Woman [Blu-ray]

The Hungry Snake Woman [Blu-ray]
  • The world Blu-ray premier of a wild Asian horror movie!
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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: COOL CAT SAVES THE KIDS (2015)

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DIRECTED BY: Derek Savage

FEATURING: Derek Savage, Erik Estrada, , several innocent children who don’t deserve to have their good names sullied by mentioning them here

PLOT: Cool Cat, a human-sized bipedal feline who loves you and himself in equal measure, spends his days learning important life lessons, watching Daddy Derek engage in various self-improvement pastimes, and creating rock songs about love, friendship, and the general awesomeness of being Cool Cat. 

COMMENTS: This is potentially the most perilous review I’ve ever written. After all, when the video blog “I Hate Everything” decided to share its assessment of Cool Cat Saves the Kids, the helpful feline’s caretaker, Derek Savage, launched an all-out assault on them, allegedly impersonating a lawyer to issue threats and soliciting a DMCA takedown order from YouTube. (Another YouTuber with whom Savage sparred, YMS, produced a follow-up video to explain copyright law and the Fair Use doctrine.) So while I’m hopeful that the passage of a decade will have softened Savage’s feelings toward critical opinions, one can never be sure.

So let’s tread carefully, because we rarely venture into the genre of children’s safety videos. As anyone who has had a child anytime in the past two decades knows, there is a massive market for peppy, carefully-worded productions that use some sort of animated or costumed character to import crucial lessons about staying alive in a dangerous world, covering topics from traffic safety to home safety to stranger danger. They are often amateurish, frequently unbearable to the adult mind, and sometimes very effective with their young audience. So if we’re being charitable, we could say that Savage spotted an opportunity to use his skills as a Hollywood extra and Playgirl model to advocate on behalf of the kids. If we’re less than charitable, we might say that he saw a marketing opportunity.

What gets Savage mentioned in the same sentence with legends like Ed Wood and Tommy Wiseau are his deeply lo-fi moviemaking skills. Beginning with the goofy Comic Sans opening credits (which include a credit for Cool Cat himself as, of all things, associate producer), the whole production has big Vegas-suburb energy, with plenty of scenes located in someone’s guest bedroom that has been decorated with pictures of Cool Cat and signs reading “Cool Cat Loves You,” desperate improvisation that take the form of characters describing every action they take, some wonderfully melodramatic child acting, and a hero whose primary action is to holler “Yay!” at every opportunity. Cool Cat is happy about absolutely everything, and every dicey situation is resolved with Cool Cat’s commitment to just, you know, not do the bad thing and then launch into a green-screened musical interlude about being cool. So repetitive and unengaging is the film (which is actually a mashup of three separate Cool Cat shorts) that it Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: COOL CAT SAVES THE KIDS (2015) →

Capsules

CASPULE: NINJA TERMINATOR (1986)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Jack Lam, Jonathan Wattis, Jeong-lee Hwang

PLOT: Three renegade ninjas each capture a part of a golden statue that will give them magical powers; they frequently call characters in a completely different movie who, through the magic of re-dubbing, deal with assassinations and kidnappings that appear to tangentially involve ninjas.

Still from ninja terminator (1986)

COMMENTS: Pity poor Jaguar Wong. He just wants to be a too-cool-for-school ass-kicker rescuing, then bedding, hot chicks, but he keeps being interrupted by telephone calls coming from another movie entirely from disinterested ninja Richard Harrison. Adding insult to inconvenience, the incoming calls are made from a Garfield phone! That’s right, Godfrey Ho is at it again, taking an undistinguished ninja-free catalog film (in this case, Korean chopsocky The Uninvited Guest) and adding newly shot footage to make an all-new movie all about then-trendy ninjas! Or at least, that’s the idea. As always, the plots of the two badly-fused movies make about as much sense as an owl’s head stitched onto a turtle’s body.

I have watched this film multiple times and am still not 100% certain how the theft of the ninja statue is supposed to fit into the Korean guys’ plotline1. I just know that Richard Harrison telephones the good guy (on a Garfield phone) and Jonathan Wattis telephones the bad guy (not on a Garfield phone; Garfield phones are reserved for good guy ninjas). But most of the time, Jaguar Wong just does his thing, and the ninjas do their thing. From the viewer’s perspective, it’s like flipping back and forth between two UHF channels showing competing martial arts flicks on a Saturday morning in 1986.

Absolutely no one is watching Ninja Terminator for the plot, anyway. They’re watching for the action scenes and for the bizarre directorial decisions that continually crop up. And the film disappoints on neither score. Of all the Godfrey Ho cut-and-pastes, Ninja Terminator may have chosen the best fighting to paste in. Jack Lam has a Bruce Lee (or at the very least a Bruce Le) quality about him. He fights effortlessly, moving as little as possible, letting assailants waste their energy before knocking them down with a standing kick to the head. No one’s a match for him until he faces endboss Jeong-lee Hwang (Drunken Master, a fighter so legendary that it is said he once killed an attacker with a single kick to the temple—in real life). All the fights are athletic spectacles, and the final battle is both epic and ridiculous. (Meanwhile, the ninja battles are athletic enough but look more like gymnastic exhibitions, with ninjas doing a lot of pointless cartwheels in the middle of combat). As far as strange touches go, take your pick, from the infamous Garfield phone to toy robots delivering messages from the evil ninja empire to a crime boss in a blond Prince Valiant wig to ninjas slicing watermelons for target practice to a random domestic crab attack to ninjas who wear more eyeliner than J.D. Vance. To top it all off, the film is scored by Pink Floyd, Tangerine Dream, Ennio Morricone, and others (without their knowledge, of course—Ho’s musical taste greatly exceeds his scruples).

Ninja Terminator is the rare movie that’s impossible to recommend—yet everyone should see it.

Ninja Terminator sits in an odd situation regards our Canonically Weird List. Ho’s work is already represented there by Ninja Champion, which lacks the wind-up toy robot but has a shot of the iconic Garfield phone along with other highlights, such as ninjas who wear headbands reading “Ninja” and dialogue that is absurd even by Ho standards. Terminator, however, is probably the best-known, best-loved, and overall most-watchable of Ho’s ninja franchise. You can substitute Terminator for Champion in a pinch and still earn full credit on your weird-movie transcript.

Cauldron Films’ 2025 Blu-ray edition of Ninja Terminator has all Ho fans could ever want and more, including two (!) commentary tracks and interviews with Godfrey himself.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an incoherent mess that someone manages to engage and entertain throughout.”–Michael Den Boer, 10K Bullets (Blu-ray)

1. Wikipedia actually does a good job of reconstructing the plot, but, inspired by the spirit of Godfrey Ho, the summary includes nonsensical sentences like “Meanwhile, Ninja Master Harry and Ninja Master Baron, each the other has already tried to assassinate them.”

Ninja Terminator [Blu-ray]

Ninja Terminator [Blu-ray]
  • Years after being assaulted, a young woman (Juliet Chan) seeks bloody revenge on the five men responsible.
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List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: FURIOUS (1984)

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DIRECTED BY: Tim Everitt, Tom Sartori

FEATURING: Simon Rhee, Phillip Rhee, Arlene Montano

PLOT: After “Mongol” warriors kill his sister, Simon’s karate master summons him to avenge her death—but all is not as it seems.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: All is literally not as it seems—from its opening credit sequence featuring a black-clad actor’s disembodied hands performing card tricks against a black background, Furious wants to be clever with sleight of hand symbolism, but absurdly unsubtle dialogue then robs the film of any mystery, heavy-handedly spelling out the plot. The result still baffles viewers through what must be the most random appearances of chickens in a movie since Death Laid an Egg.

COMMENTS: Furious seems to have been largely forgotten by mainstream movie culture. Only five people have bothered to write user reviews on IMDB; they either love it for its insane creativity or hate it for its stupidity. Both are valid reactions. Whatever chance Furious had to tap into the ’80s zeitgeist must have been lost forever when the original The Karate Kid was released in the same year. A weird gem kept alive through the devoted efforts of a small cult following, perhaps the time has come for its own resurgence from the astral plane.

Relying on the conventional plotline of a martial artist seeking vengeance for the death of a loved one, Furious manages to be a painfully amateurish effort. Either that, or it’s supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek homage to badly dubbed imported films. If so, the effort falls flat, like a guy falling off a bridge into four inches of water. The many fight scenes feature wooden and uninspired choreography, a cardinal sin in any karate movie. The cheap special effects hardly dazzle, but they occur at such bizarre moments that they still amaze.

In the fifteen minute long dialogue-free introductory sequence, fur-wearing warriors chase Simon’s sister up a mountain and into a “Mongol” cave. A broken tusk guides her way and she discovers a box guarded by a skull. Unfortunately for her, some strange power makes this compass bone spin wildly, and after fighting off all but one of her pursuers, the final warrior kills her and steals the bone. The scene then cuts to Simon lighting candles for her on his family altar. It’s all the backstory we’re going to get.

Shortly thereafter, the “Mongol” warrior arrives at Simon’s house and gives him a card which turns out to be a key to Master Chan’s corporate headquarters/karate dojo. When Simon obeys his summons, Master Chan solemnly tells him he’s “between the hammer and the anvil.” His magician henchman illustrates his predicament with a dove and red and white silk scarves. After a brief test of Simon’s skills, he’s given an amulet and told that if he wants to avenge his sister he must find the man who wears the same symbol.

Outside the building Simon runs into friends who conveniently inform him that the symbol appears in the sign for a restaurant, apparently run by some evil chicken concern. The friends are attacked, and most of them killed, when they try to investigate. Simon later returns to dine and discovers the restaurant specializes in chicken served by masked waiters who perform magic tricks, while shirtless martial artists demonstrate karate with swords and nunchucks.

You’d think seeing the magicians would give Simon pause, especially after the trick they pull on him (and the random chicken wandering around Master Chan’s offices). Just in case this hint didn’t get through, a whispering waterfall warns Simon to “beware” because “traveling in the spiritual void can be dangerous.”

Traveling in the spiritual void can be dangerous. This line repeats multiple times while Simon experiences an agonizing series of flashbacks. Finally, he suspects Master Chan might not be who he seems. The plot proceeds, with the mystic waterfall providing spoilers to the audience along the way.

This consistent balance between what’s wrong and what’s right makes this film so bad it’s weird and so weird it’s good. The directors (a special effects technician and editor) make some very strange choices, but the high degree of WTF-ery proves to be their greatest strength.

The rapid cut editing in the montage sequences adds needed energy when the action starts to flag. A darkly lit office corridor effectively portrays Simon’s descent into the void (where he just happens to overhear his nemesis complaining that Simon is too powerful and must be stopped).

The score begins as typical operatic orchestral stings, but whenever what little suspense builds, synthy electronics pulse underneath. One of many inexplicable scenes reveals the music is coming from a room in Master Chan’s corporate empire where his white jumpsuited lackeys perform in a band. Why does a karate master have a techno band? In this life there are questions without answers, but in Furious all will be revealed (by a pig), so just wait for it. At only 71 minutes of runtime, you won’t have to wait very long.

Simon’s final showdowns against the magician and Master Chan must be seen to be believed. All those lingering close-ups of elderly ladies happily eating chicken in the restaurant while watching karate suddenly make wonderful and terrible sense, and yet in the end, Furious still makes no sense at all.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“To say that continuity and reason go out the window with Furious is an understatement. . .Its nonsensical and ridiculous plot, terrible acting and badly-scripted fight scenes are ripe for riffing. The entertainment value on that alone makes it a recommendation. Anyone looking for anything else will be sorely let down and outright confused at what they’re watching.”–Mike Wilson, Bloody Disgusting

Furious [Visual Vengeance Collector's Edition] [Blu-ray]

Furious [Visual Vengeance Collector's Edition] [Blu-ray]
  • The cult martial arts classic, first time ever on Blu-ray. Mystic aliens from the astral plane fight Kung Fu warriors for control of the universe!
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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: FELIX THE CAT: THE MOVIE (1988)

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DIRECTED BY: Tibor Hernádi

FEATURING THE VOICES OF: David Kolin, Chris Phillips, Maureen O’Connell, Peter Newman, Alice Playten

PLOT: When Princess Oriana is kidnapped by the sinister Duke of Zill, only Felix the Cat and his magical bag of tricks can save the day—so long as his arch-frenemy The Professor doesn’t interfere.

COMMENTS: It’s fun to imagine a Sunset Boulevard scenario wherein Felix the Cat hearkens back to better times, angrily reminding anyone who will listen that, back in his heyday, he was bigger than Mickey Mouse. He’d go on about how he moved so much merchandise in the silent era, but faltered when talkies came in. How he got his groove back when television snapped him up, jump-starting his career with a voice, new supporting characters, the introduction of his iconic bag of tricks, and an insidiously infectious theme song. How the lack of a deep-pocketed studio to protect him and dust him off every so often (like that infernal mouse had) left him floundering, and how his chief animator and owner of his copyright, Joe Oriolo (and later Joe’s son Don), struggled to keep Felix in the game with ever-growing levels of desperation, including a bizarre misguided attempt at a live-action series and even a Baby Felix cartoon made exclusively for Japanese television. And here’s where Felix would ball up his fist and pound it on the table, lamenting that if anyone knows him at all today, it’s as a clock.

Maybe that can be the scenario for Felix’s next feature. For now, we’re stuck with this one, probably his thirstiest bid at a revival. Felix is a simple character, a monochromatic feline with a classic stretch-and-squash movement and a seeming immunity to misfortune. But to wring 80 minutes out of him, it’s essential to complicate, complicate, complicate, first with a prologue presenting a proto-CG version of Felix’s disembodied head, then by launching an elaborate plot to save a fairy-tale kingdom from an evil overlord, with a panoply of odd characters including a heavily rotoscoped princess, a gun-toting yokel, a host of psychedelic wildlife, and an army of robot trash cans led by what appears to be an ape with a bubble for a head.

The animation, from Hungary’s Pannonia Studio, is wildly erratic, veering from elaborately detailed landscapes and imaginative creature designs to obvious looped animations and jumpy movement. Case in point: Princess Oriana is sometimes shown in the kind of fine detail one associates with the Disney Renaissance, but then is seen in a herky-jerky, poorly drawn style one associates with direct-to-truck-stop mockbusters. But even at its best, the animators’ work is undercut by a script that spends inordinate amounts of time on exposition and setup, forcing the artists to vamp to fill time. In fact, Felix the Movie is almost allergic to anything that stays focused on the plot. The vile Duke is supposedly seeking to conquer the kingdom as revenge against the Princess, but instead of showing us his schemes, we watch him make her do interpretive dance. Numerous scenes are dedicated solely to watching one cartoon beast or another go about their business, even while we’re aware of an impending danger happening somewhere way offscreen. Even the musical numbers seem completely separate from the proceedings, such as a showcase for a family of foxes who have nothing to do with anything, or an extended dance break for a pair of rat/lizard hybrids. (This latter sequence lasts for more than two minutes, almost 3% of the film’s runtime.)

Adding to the muddle is the decision to include two of Felix’s foes from the TV series, the nefarious Professor and his hyper-nerdy nephew Poindexter. They have the potential to throw another obstacle in Felix’s path, but they spend most of the film trailing behind their quarry and end up helping once they finally catch up. One presumes they represent the movie’s attempt to cater to Felix nostalgists, but they’re meaningless to the young, adventure-hungry kids who are the most likely audience for this kind of thing. The movie aims for everyone and hits no one.

Given how uninterested it is in anything logical and linear, it’s fitting that the movie just sort of stops, with Felix saving the day by throwing a book at a giant robot. (That’s literally the whole solution. Deus ex libro. He doesn’t even use the bag of tricks.) Felix the Cat: The Movie should have been a chance for the once-famous feline to get his groove back, but the film never finds a way to let him be the hero he once was, and it doesn’t have a solid idea of what it wants to do instead. So somebody buy the old guy another drink and let him rant and rave about his cruel fate. He deserves another shot at the big time, and this ain’t it.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The original Felix cartoons were always surreal in some way, but not in a studied manner, more of an organic, natural development out of the character’s quirks and goodnatured ingenuity. Here, however, there is an attempt to plonk him down into a world that is already weird, almost a post-apocalyptic version of a fairytale land that suffers too many digressions into strangeness for its own sake without furthering the plot… You can see it entertaining the very young who are not aware of Felix’s history, but as a tribute to him it falls flat when it really could have been any generic character starring here: he doesn’t even take off his tail and use it as a cane.” Graeme Clark, The Spinning Image

(This movie was nominated for review by Jayzon. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.) 

FELIX THE CAT The Movie DVD (USA Format) 2003

FELIX THE CAT The Movie DVD (USA Format) 2003
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