Tag Archives: So bad it’s weird

Capsules

CAPSULE: MEGA PIRANHA (2010)

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DIRECTED BY: Eric Forsberg

FEATURING: Paul Logan, , Barry Williams

PLOT: After genetic experiments get out of hand, the US government must battle giant, flying,

Still from Mega Piranha (2010)

exploding, cannibalistic, hermaphroditic, mutant piranhas.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Mega Piranha is absurd and ridiculous enough for a few giggles over a beer or two (or six), but nothing more.

COMMENTS: Juts a small sampling of things I learned from watching Mega Piranha:

  • The State Department doesn’t consider knowledge of Spanish to be a prerequisite for a investigative mission to Venezuela.
  • Knowledge of kickboxing is a prerequisite.
  • People remember who Tiffany was.
  • There are coral reefs along the bottom of South American rivers.
  • Piranhas explode when they contact building materials.
  • Genetic mutations are always favorable.
  • In the navy, you can wear whatever hairstyle you like.
  • Steering a helicopter makes the veins in your neck stand out.
  • Nuclear weapons have no effect on large fish.
  • Piranhas will attack boats, submarines and helicopters because they know there’s meat inside.
  • There’s nothing to eat in the ocean, so sea predators need to attack settlements on the coast.
  • Fat girls can be love interests, but not until the very last scene.

This list could go on indefinitely (feel free to add more observations in the comments).  The point is, Mega Piranha is a self-esteem movie.  No matter your age, intelligence, social status, or education, you can feel superior to the folks involved in this production.  Not that, for a moment, I believe the filmmakers could possibly be as dumb as the script makes them seem.  It’s just that they would obviously rather spend their limited funds on bargain bin piranha CGI and washed-up stars with names that might ring a bell with someone, somewhere, than to waste it on meaningless extras like second drafts and continuity.  Writer/director Eric Forsberg has no illusions (I hope) that he’s creating great art here; he understands it’s not plot but mega piranhas that are the draw, and keeps things moving quickly so he can get to scenes like Special Agent Fitch lying on his back booting away the fish that fly directly into his feet, while in the South American riverside village other (much larger) piranhas are jumping into buildings, either exploding or simply sitting there halfway through the roof, with their dorsal fins wagging in the breeze.  Forsberg does at least one thing smartly: he keeps the camp tone correctly deadpan, resisting the urge to have the players break character and laugh at their own shenanigans.  The lack of winks makes it a much more effective parody: this seriously looks like a script that Michael Bay might have considered, with a few minor script rewrites and a lot more explosions.  So, it’s dumb, but is it dumb fun?  I’ll put it this way: if you’d ever entertain the idea of watching a movie titled Mega Piranha, you’ll probably be satisfied with this offering.  This is the most entertaining movie about mega piranhas, and quite possibly about mega aquatic creatures as a genus, it would be possible to make.

Mega Piranha was a co-production of sorts between The Asylum (makers of microbudget “mockbusters” like Transmorphers intended to rip off box office successes like Transformers) and the SyFy channel (which airs so many made-for-TV losers like Mansquito and Dinsoshark that they probably should rebrand themselves “the Sigh-fi Channel”).  The version that aired on television (also the version available on Netflix streaming as of this date) is PG-rated, at worst.  The “special edition” DVD adds some gratuitous topless shots and naughty words for an R-rated product.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…wilfully preposterous cod B-movie… initially amusing but swiftly outstays its welcome as the piranhas develop the ability to fly like fanged double decker buses and the whole caboodle tries just a bit too hard to be knowing.”–Tim Evans, Sky Movies (contemporaneous)

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: THE APPLE (1980)

The Apple has been promoted onto the List of the 366 Weirdest Movies ever made. Comments are closed on this post, please visit the Certified Weird entry to comment.

DIRECTED BY: Menahem Golan

FEATURING: Vladek Sheybal, Catherine Mary Stewart, George Gilmour

PLOT: An innocent pair of Canadian folk singers/lovers split up when the female falls under the spell of a Mephistophelean pop music promoter in this “futuristic” (set in 1994) musical fantasy.

Still from The Apple (1980)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: How do you solve a problem like The Apple?  This science-fictiony musical satire/religious allegory is an obvious attempt to cash in on the camp credibility of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but with the disco sensibility and glittery production values of Xanadu (also made in 1980).  The results are spectacularly uneven: the bizarre costuming, choreography, and psychedelic production numbers are actually pretty good in their deliberate excess, the songs range from annoying to quite hummable, and the rushed, out-of-nowhere messianic ending is an unforgettable cinematic disaster.  With RHPS already taking up a spot on the List in the “fantastical outré musical” category, I’m not sure that this similar (but less entertaining) movie is worthy of making it on the first ballot.  It’s more of a second tier midnight movie; but I wouldn’t rule The Apple out altogether.

COMMENTS: The Apple pulls you in many different directions: you’re never quite sure whether to tap your toes, roll your eyes, drop your jaw, or bring up your lunch. The plot, which mixes old MGM backstage musical themes with the Faustian corruption of show-biz innocents and a touch of dystopian literature, is familiar and easy to follow; it’s the production numbers that strangify things. The easiest way to simulate the insanity of The Apple is to take a track-by-track guided tour of the film.

“BIM’S on the Way.” (Representative lyric: “there ain’t no shame…”).  A full scale glam rock concert anthem, complete with dozens of backup singers, flashing multicolored lights, a disco ball, and a sheep-like chanting audience armed with green glowsticks, as two pop stars in sequined skullcaps screech out a propaganda ode to their corporate sponsor (B.I.M. Continue reading LIST CANDIDATE: THE APPLE (1980) →

Canonically Weird (The List)

65. MANIAC (1934)

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AKA Sex Maniac

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“Unless you regularly do mushrooms and go to Lady Gaga concerts with your good friend Crispin Glover, then watching Maniac is guaranteed to be the weirdest experience you have ever had.”–ad copy for the Rifftrax version of Maniac

DIRECTED BY: Dwain Esper

FEATURING: Bill Woods

PLOT:  An on-the-lam vaudevillian kills and impersonates his mad scientist employer, driving himself mad in the process.

Maniac (1934)

BACKGROUND:

  • Dwain Esper was a successful building contractor who, it is rumored, only got into the movie business when he came into possession of a cache of filmmaking equipment that was abandoned in a foreclosed property.  He worked outside the film distribution system, taking his exploitation movies on the road and showing them in rented venues, accompanied by lurid advertisements promising forbidden fruit for “adults only.”  Esper obtained the rights to Tod Browning’s Freaks from MGM for a song, and took the movie on the road with his other exploitation hits.  Other films he directed or produced had titles such as Marihuana, the Weed with Roots in Hell and How to Undress in Front of Your Husband.
  • Made outside of the Hollywood system, Maniac was not subject to the Hays Production Code, although it probably ran afoul of most local censorship laws.  Audacious directors like Esper deliberately put racy material into their films that the major studios could not touch.  Maniac contains a scandalous amount of nudity, which had been extremely rare in motion pictures up until that time and was banned outright when the Hays Code began to be enforced in 1934.
  • The film incorporates (steals) footage from Maciste in Hell (1925), and reportedly also from Häxan (1920) and Fritz Lang‘s Sigfried (1923), for its delirium sequences.
  • Named one of the 100 Most Amusingly Bad Movies Ever Made in The Official Razzie Movie Guide.
  • One gruesome scene involving a cat’s eyeball appears to be a real case of animal abuse, but is almost certainly a convincing illusion.
  • The movie’s ending rips off the Edgar Allen Poe short story “The Black Cat.”

INDELIBLE IMAGE: There are lots of strange, unexpected sights to be seen in this time capsule of man’s freakish desires, but you won’t forget the cat’s eyeball.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Maniac promises to show us the life of a madman as a shameless pretext for delivering multiple shock scenes in an “educational” context, but the final product is so disjointed, feverish and crazily assembled that it seems to be the work of an actual madman.


Scene from Maniac

COMMENTS: Most bad movies are just bad.  A rare breed are so bad they’re “unintentionally” Continue reading 65. MANIAC (1934) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: BIRDEMIC: SHOCK AND TERROR [2008]

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DIRECTOR: James Nguyen

FEATURING: Alan Bagh, Whitney Moore

PLOT: A “romantic thriller” from writer/director James Nguyen, the film explores the impact of widespread eagle attacks on software salesman Rod (Alan Bagh) and up-and-coming model Nathalie (Whitney Moore), whose romance has just begun to blossom.  It all plays into writer/director Nguyen’s Tippi Hedren fandom.

Still from Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2008)

span style=”text-decoration: underline;”>WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s so bad it’s good, and it’s a real hoot in a theater with an enthusiastic audience, but Birdemic isn’t actually all that weird.  The fusion of workplace drama, eager romance, and disaster movie is well-meaning but heavy-handed, and the strangest (and funniest) thing about the film is seeing grown men and women flailing around in fear of atrociously-animated birds, which end up resembling animated .GIFs.

COMMENTS: With production values worthy of a commercial for your local grocery store and a script riddled with non sequiturs, the story of our boring-as-hell heroes unfolds quite slowly.  Yes, it’s true that environmental degradation from humans has caused the area bird population to exact a feathery and surprisingly explosive revenge, but before the carnage hits the audience is treated to a large amount of Rod and Nathalie’s work-related endeavors and tepid early dates.  Luckily, their stilted performances and poorly-written conversations are enough to keep anyone laughing merrily along until the anticipated birdpocalypse, at which point the fun continues when they team up with a gun-crazy neighbor and two particularly useless children.

As a movie itself, Birdemic is just awful: the dialogue and acting are equally amateur and laughably awkward.  The script is poorly structured, thematically very blunt, and often nonsensical.  The effects are the lowest of the low, amounting to bird attackers that resemble animated .gif’s from 1997 and adorably tiny explosions popping up out of nowhere.  The score is suspiciously repetitive, there’s a host of randomly-appearing characters who serve little purpose in the story, the visual quality and camera work are noticeably sub-par… there’s quite a long list of negative elements.

Of course, it’s all those things and more that make Birdemic a wholly satisfying film-going experience.  The (presumably) unintended comedy of the characters and script are so engaging that the addition of horribly CG-ed birds flapping their way around real-life objects just heighten an already-entertaining movie.  There’s something terribly endearing about the whole affair, from Rod’s delayed reactions and extended shots of people driving, to uncoordinated camera movements, completely un-erotic sex scenes, and the most unrealistic forest fire I’ve ever seen.

It may be one of the worst movies ever made, but definitely in the most enjoyable way possible.  Plus it’s got an environmentalist message, so that’s heartening.  And an anti-bird message.  Screw those guys, you know?

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“But no matter how many f***ed up viral videos we’ve collectively seen or how desensitized we’ve become to high weirdness, the rowdy New York midnight premiere of writer-director James Nguyen’s self-proclaimed ‘romantic thriller’ Birdemic: Shock and Terror proves that there’s room—alongside Ed Wood’s entire oeuvre—for one more in the pantheon of beloved trash-terpieces.”–Aaron Hill, The Village Voice (contemporaneous)

NOTE: This review is also published in a slightly different form at Film Forager.

Reader Recommendations

READER RECOMMENDATION: WILD, WILD PLANET [I CRIMINALI DELLA GALASSIA] (1965)

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The fifth submission in the June review writing contest: by Andreas O. Stoehr.

DIRECTED BY: Antonio Margheriti

FEATURING: Tony Russel, Lisa Gastoni, Massimo Serato, Franco Nero

PLOT: In 2015, the space police fight to stop an organ-miniaturizing mad scientist from

Still from Wild, Wild Planet (1965)

building a utopian community.

WHY IT DESERVES TO MAKE THE LIST: Although the synopsis might make it sound like a typical space opera, Wild, Wild Planet is anything but. Everything about the film simultaneously screams “bad!” and “weird!” The dubbed dialogue, for example, is as laughable as any Toho monster movie, with a mix of technobabble and would-be ‘60s clichés like “That’s the wildest, most way-out I’ve ever heard!” The grandstanding villain, Nurmi, constantly repeats his ill-conceived master plan, and his kidnappings are carried out by beautiful women teamed with bald, four-armed mutants.  This is 1960s Italian sci-fi at its wildest and most way-out.

COMMENTS: I’m not sure why Margheriti (who was credited as “Anthony Dawson”) hasn’t become more of a cult figure, though being name-checked in Inglourious Basterds might raise his status among film geeks.  Wild, Wild Planet displays much of the same untalented passion you might expect from Ed Wood or Coleman Francis, and with the screenplay so awkwardly translated into English, it feels even more delirious.

The film’s futuristic aesthetic, which was already outdated in 1965, involves bad model cities and psychedelic dresses; it’s like “The Jetsons” meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers by way of “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.”  TVs advertise “Computo-dolls,” and the only remaining form of art has performers dressed as butterflies prancing around in a circle.  When the mutant henchmen attack, they do so by suggestively enclosing victims in their trench coats; one scientist escapes in the midst of this process, and ends up as a comatose midget.  It may be ridiculous, it may be cheap, but it sure ain’t predictable.

Who, after all, could guess that the climax would take place on a resort planet amidst an exploding river of blood (that looks suspiciously like cranberry juice)?  With its bizarre interior design and enough hilarious non sequiturs to rival Plan 9, Wild, Wild Planet is a weird, weird movie.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The Wild, Wild Planet has a colourful bizarreness to it… But despite throwing up such an outre and colourful plot, the way Antonio Margheriti allows it all to transpire on screen is really rather pedestrian and dull. This rather wild skew of ideas ends up as a rather murky plot.”–Richard Scheib, Moria: Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review