BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: THE FIRST FAMILY OF MARVEL

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: once again, it has proven impossible to make a remotely decent movie out of the seminal comic book Fantastic Four. Let us travel back in time to the movie that, against all odds, is still the best attempt that anybody has yet made.

This is a story wherein, if you're the sort who'd interested, you already know everything I'm about to say. But please bear with me anyway, because the backstory is the heart and soul of understanding how things could have ended the way they did. Once upon a time, the idea of making movies based on Marvel comic books was at best a pathetic joke, and because of this, German producer Bernd Eichinger was able to snag the rights to the oldest of all Marvel titles, Fantastic Four, for a mere pittance in 1986. This was after one studio, Universal, had already sat on the option long enough for it to run out, and Eichinger would do no such thing: he actively pursued big studios to partner with his Neue Constantin Film to make a Fantastic Four movie that all would be proud of, or at least profit from. But in those days, there had only ever been successful feature films made with Superman and Batman, and they were much too fussy and costly for anybody to roll the dice on such an uncertain project as a superhero movie.

As the deadline on Eichinger's option, 31 December, 1992, approached, he finally concluded that since no proper movie would be made, at least he could make an improper one, and thus retain his option for several more years. Wisely, he teamed up with Roger Corman, film history's greatest artist at stretching a budget to the breaking point and then beyond, to help produce his minimum opus, which went into production on 28 December. Their target was a release date in fall 1993, eventually bumped to January, 1994, but before that could happen, forward-thinking Marvel executive Avi Arad found out about the project, and rather than allow the release of such a tiny piece of shit dilute the brand name of one of his company's toniest titles, he bought out Eichinger and Corman, essentially paying them more than the production cost of their movie not to release it. The option remained, though, and some 22 years after all of this happened, any new Fantastic Four movie is still a co-production with Constantin Film.

And so that explains why the officially-unreleased The Fantastic Four, the story of a man who can turn into a fireball, a translucent woman, a man made out of a pile of rocks, and a man with long-stretching elastic limbs would have such an enormously insufficient budget as $1 million, and why it is now only possible to watch it in the form of bootlegs copied from a single full-frame VHS tape that leaked somehow. That does not explain why, for all of its flaws, those forced by its outrageous poverty and those which were simple the result of sloppy B-filmmaking, it's still the best Fantastic Four feature in existence. But it certainly is, and by my lights, it's no particularly close battle. It's insane to use the phrase "good faith" to describe any aspect of this particularly cynical production, but I truly do suppose that the filmmakers put in a good-faith effort to make the strongest and most respectful adaptation of the comic book that $1 million could buy in 1993. Whereas none of the big-budget films attempted since then have had much in the way of respect for the material, or even basic human decency.

The poor bastards tasked with turning this business proposition into a movie were writers Craig J. Nevius and Kevin Rock, and director Oley Sassone; between them, Sassone's work on the Don "The Dragon" Wilson picture Bloodfist III is the closest anybody comes to an earlier film credit that suggests that they even actually exist. What they turned out is about as thoroughly generic as an origin story gets; in college, Reed Richards (Alex Hyde-White) and Victor Von Doom (Joseph Culp) were best buddies, and they decided to perform an experiment tied to the closest approach of a comet-like energy object called Colossus, which goes badly awry, killing Victor. Or does it? Of course not, but Reed won't find that out for ten years. During that time, he and his other best buddy Ben Grimm (Michael Bailey Smith) work on perfecting that experiment so they can execute it again when Colossus returns, this time without killing anybody. This involves flying Reed's experimental spacecraft right up next to the object; for reasons that honestly seem to be solely sentimental, they're bringing with them the now-adult children of Reed's college landlady, siblings Sue (Rebecca Staab) and Johnny Storm (Jay Underwood), and for a totally unnecessary dose of creepiness, it's clear that A) Sue joins the mission because she's been harboring a desire to jump Reed's bones ever since she was a child and he was a college student, and B) he's happy to have her join because he's now harboring the same desire, though thankfully it seems unlikely that he's been doing so for the intervening decade.

Things go amiss, they all get blasted with cosmic radiation, and they crash back on Earth with a new array of superpowers: Reed can stretch, Johnny can flame, Sue can disappear, Ben is a big strong rock dude (and is now played by Carl Ciarfalio in a suit). This is iconic stuff, Comic Books 101, I don't need to belabor it. Bitter that his condition alone can't be turned on and off, Ben leaves, and encounters the weird subterranean Jeweler (Ian Trigger), who has stolen a large gemstone vital to harnessing the power of Colossus, as well as kidnapping Alicia Masters (Kat Green), a blind sculptor, to be his bride. And Victor, now styling himself Dr. Doom and wearing a metal face mask to hide his scars, has popped back up trying to build a weapon using Colossus, and the four heroes must learn to channel their abilities to stop both villains.

All of that is messier when you're actually watching it, with the subplot around the Jeweler in particular feeling like it could have benefited from another draft or two. And, frankly, it could have benefited even more from having a more clearly defined villain than this original creation (there's no readily apparent reason not to have used the Mole Man, the very first bad guy in the Fantastic Four comics, who would have required only a little tweaking to the script). But for the most part, this is boilerplate superhero origin story shenanigans, albeit from a time when there were just a few superhero origin stories that had been filmed. The details, though, are anything but boilerplate: the stupefyingly low budget and fast-paced production schedule gives The Fantastic Four a boldly amateur charm, like watching a middle school play with infinite ambition to go with its near-complete lack of resources. The one place, surprisingly, that the low-scale production doesn't betray itself is in the costume used to turn Ben Grimm into the Thing: it doesn't really resemble a man of rocks very much (he looks like a '70s linoleum pattern come to life), but the mechanics of the face are surprisingly functional in the mouth and eyebrows, and Ciarfalio's physical performance is the best in the movie, making the suit itself seem flexible and organic.

The rest of the effects are, unsurprisingly, quite dreadful, with the Human Torch realised primarily through judicious cutting and Mr. Fantastic's stretching arms a comically awful rubber prop (transforming Sue Storm into the Invisible Woman is pretty straightforward, using techniques pioneered in the 1900s, but it's also totally unimaginative). And the costumes, sets, and makeup (the garish white patches of hair designed to make Hyde-White look old are especially unpersuasive) are plainly not up to the demands of a broad-scale superhero movie, looking like a bunch of Midwestern ladies whipped them up over the weekend.

Where the cheapness shines, though, is in the unmodulated, one-take performances, ranging from the professor (George Gaynes) in the first scenes whose enunciation is delightfully stiff and formal (pronouncing "radioactive" as two discrete words is my favorite), to the '50s sitcom bigness of the doctor (Robert Beuth) who overreacts to the team's curious physical conditions, to the leads themselves. Hyde-White is generically unctuous, and Smith is actually good, insofar as the role gives him anything to be good with. But the other leads are all over the map, with Underwood screaming like a tweaked-out junkie and Culp hamming and camping it up like Dr. Evil from the Austin Powers films, only done deadly straight. The sheer ebullience of the performances is totally unacceptable, but so joyfully bad and low-rent that it gives the film a genuine personality as the kind of bad movie that everybody involved plunged right into rather than felt their way through cautiously. And that is the best kind of bad movie. It's hokey as all hell, the final act is made of pure idiocy (culminating with the Human Torch, in the form of ghastly CGI, outraces a laser beam) reliant on clichés every step of the way, and there's simply no way for the action to look like anything but people bumbling about in underlit sets, but through all of this, The Fantastic Four is surprisingly cheery and committed to the cheap world it barely builds. And this is better than can be said for any of the subsequent attempts at doing the same material on a halfway-decent scale.

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: WATCHING OTHER PEOPLE PLAY VIDEO GAMES

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: the notorious insta-flop Pixels is an adventure about a group of competition-level video game players. It's also pandering to '80s nostalgia, so let's go ahead and travel back to that decade

The dominant criticism of The Wizard when it was new in 1989 was that it was transparently a commercial for Nintendo, crudely fashioned into a simulacrum of a feature film, and the idea was this was somehow a filthy trick to play on the children in its target audience. Having been exactly the right age with exactly the right interests to care, I would like to promise those worried adults: we knew. The fact that it was a commercial was in fact exactly the draw - this was the movie which would offer North America its first opportunity to see footage from Super Mario Bros. 3, and it was advertised on precisely that basis. If you were Nintendo-playing grade schooler in '89, this was about on par with Christ returning to play Himself in a movie before inaugurating the end times. That being said, despite being the exact sort of person who this movie was made for, I never bothered seeing it - I mean, hell, it was a feature-length commercial.

A quarter of a century later,* The Wizard looks no less like a commercial, and its single-minded commitment to the style and attitude that children of the late 1980s perceived as cool leaves it feeling very much like a communication from some alien species. The last half-hour of the movie, in particular, is an incomprehensible frenzy of sound and noise and color that feel like a bad acid trip. Or perhaps a really, really good acid trip.

Not that you would know this at first, for among the film's many peculiarities is its earnest desire for almost its entire first hour to function as a mordant domestic drama. The opening image, underneath the credits, is a telephoto shot of nine-year-old Jimmy Woods (Luke Edwards) walking along a featureless desert road, arriving nowhere and doing it slowly. It's a dead ringer for something out of a '70s movie, and it's frankly rather presumptuous for an '80s kids film of any sort, let alone one that has every intention of trying to sell us video games. And this will very much continue on as the film sketches its rather bitter family scenario: Jimmy is the autistic son of the divorced Sam Woods (Beau Bridges) and Christine Bateman (Wendy Phillips), the latter of whom has since remarried a snappish control freak (Sam McMurray), and retained custody of Jimmy. Having finally concluded that he's too difficult for his and everyone else's own good, the Batemans have made the hard choice to put him in an institution. This makes Sam unhappy, but it really pisses off his second son, Corey (Fred Savage), from his first marriage, who decides to spring Jimmy from the institution and run away from home with him. The Batemans hire a sleazy bounty hunter, Putnam (Will Seltzer), to track the boys down, while Sam, anxious to keep Corey from their punitive hands (we are assured that Christine, in her days as Corey's stepmother, didn't even feign affection for the boy), takes his eldest son, Corey's full brother Nick (Christian Slater), on a trip with him to track the boys down.

So far, so good: a little over-plotted, and you need to pay a bit of attention to catch all of the nuances of how these people are related and what they think about each other, but if the world actually required a serious '70s style domestic drama about the ugly fallout from a divorce done up as an adventurous road movie for children - and I really do not suppose that it did - this is good enough to get the job done. But this is merely the overture; the warm-up, even. From here, thing start to get enormously weird, and they do it fast. Trying to buy a bus ticket, Corey and Jimmy encounter Haley (Jenny Lewis), a girl Corey's age who seems to be some kind of '30s Depression-comedy vagabond in the body of a 1989 13-year-old. It's astonishing. She throws out punny, cutting quips, delivered at a rapid-fire clip in a snarky tone that the young actor is visibly confused by herself; it's like director Todd Holland took her aside on the first day of shooting to demand that she play her character as Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve and refused thereafter to listen to any of her questions as to what the hell that meant.

As the quick-witted dame with a con artist's soul, it's Haley who figures out how to monetise Jimmy's newly discovered skill at video games, by betting against businessmen and tough skaterboarders and the like. It's at this point that it's impossible to stop noticing that The Wizard is no less than Rain Man with children, and thus at this point The Wizard turns into a mostly surreal experience. Not totally surreal; we still have to get to the final act for that. Before that happens, our plucky trio has to cross paths with Lucas (Jackey Vinson), the ballingest video game hot shot in the Southwest, who introduces them to the holiness that is the Nintendo Power Glove, and after quietly slipping around in the background, with a little music from Super Mario Bros. 2 here, or a little flash of the NES controller there, the movie explodes into its truest self, as a shameless plug for buying things from Nintendo, playing Nintendo, idealising Nintendo as the pinnacle achievement of human technology and society. For the Power Glove. One of the most notoriously awful video game peripherals ever built. "I love the Power Glove. It's so bad" the boy says with the self-satisfaction of a dreadful yuppie from the era's sex comedies, and it at least half of that is the truest statement in this entire movie.

The shameless wallowing in Nintendo prowess and ownership as the keenest of all social dominance markers, plus Holland and screenwriter David Chisholm's constant inability to treat this kids' movie like a kids movie, forcing the poor child actors into positions of pantomiming adult behavior in their conversations about video games, or sometimes accusing innocent bystanders of being pedophiles ("He! Touched! My! Breast!"), plus the dazzlingly dated costumes and hairstyles, are all enough to make this an extravagantly weird viewing experience, now that we're a generation past its sell-by date. But we're still not to the part where the movie goes off a cliff. That happens at Universal Studios Hollywood, where Video Armageddon, the nation's premier Nintendo gaming competition, is held. For starters, the set of Video Armageddon looks like a combination of the boiler room on an aircraft carrier and an athletic shoe store. Second, the event's announcer (Steven Grives) declaims lines in a manner not compatible with any dialect of English, dancing about and grinning manically like he is the actual Satan and this is some particularly tacky corner of Hell. Third, there's not even a cursory relationship between the proclamations of gameplay and points scored announced over the loudspeaker, and what we can actually see with our own damn eyes.

In short, what is most mystifying about The Wizard isn't that it's a movie set up as a feature-length ad for video games despite being welded onto an emotionally lacerating domestic drama: it's that it's an ad for video games that makes video games look like a peyote hallucination, throwing fragments of game imagery up on screen in ways that make the games themselves seem like jagged, incomprehensible masses of arbitrary movement and the players all puppets in the grip of some helpless madness. It makes videogaming look like the most unpleasant, frenzied activity on Earth, better suited to punishment than entertainment

It's shockingly bad, and coupled with the enormous tonal shifts that happen throughout the movie, it feels basically like The Wizard has an aneurysm right as we're watching it. This is an appallingly jagged and messy film, ugly to look at and saddled with narrative developments that simply happen because the film knows that its end point has to be a video game competition. Everything within it is incongruous to everything else. For those who grew up in the video game culture it depicts, I think it probably serves as a fascinating enough snapshot to serve as a kind of hell-dimension nostalgia trip; but for everyone, its completely batshit insane concept of what human beings are like and what kind of physical spaces the inhabit makes it a thoroughly mesmerising So Bad It's Good spectacular.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: THE SLASHER FILM - A REAL NAIL-BITER

So you'd have to be such an idiot that there's not a word for it in English to expect a film titled Nail Gun Massacre to be even a little bit classy. Still, the speed with which it reveals the incorrigible depths to which its not-classiness reveals itself caught me by surprise - it's not just any movie that opens with a gang rape, and by "opens with a gang rape", I don't mean that's what happens in the first scene. I mean that's what happens in the literal first second of the film's running time.

And with that jolly kick-off, I welcome you to the absolute dregs of human artistry: direct-to-video horror movies in the 1980s. The great slasher boom had largely exhausted itself by the end of 1984, just in time for the newly expanding home video market to create a new, if even cheaper and more threadbare opening for for savvy producers with a halfway decent make-up artist and a couple young actresses willing to take their tops off. It was a grubbier world with fewer rules and smaller budgets, attracting and thriving on a lower tier of talent than was necessary to pass theatrical muster. This resulted in some of the tackiest, tawdriest movies in the history of the medium as well as some of the most impossibly ill-made. Even within that company, though, Nail Gun Massacre is something special. There is not a more inappropriate word than "special". I'm sorry. That's just horrible writing.

But faced with the garishness of a movie depicting a rape in its opening frame, and only gets worse and more exploitative from there, language itself starts to break down a bit. You know that feeling when you're watching a movie for the first time, and you can already tells that it's one for the ages? Nail Gun Massacre is the opposite of that. In my notes I had written down "this is the fucking worst" before the 10-minute mark, and "this is THE FUCKING WORST MOVIE IN HISTORY" around an hour in. That's probably hyperbole. It is, however, the worst movie of the 1980s. I'm very comfortable and confident in making that claim, and I don't give a shit if I haven't seen every movie of the 1980s yet.

An attempt to describe in prose the experience of watching the film would be titanically boring, since there is virtually no plot, and the little bit that scrapes its way through, the film tries very, very hard to keep hidden. So it begins, a propos of nothing, with a gang rape, yes? And then people start dying? Unless this was to be some manner of confrontational, experimental anti-narrative, in which unrelated events take place in an arbitrary order, we can be forgiven for assuming that the murders are an act of vengeance for the rape. That's basic, 1+1=2 logic. Even the briefest, monosyllabic summary of Terry Lofton's heavily reduced script implies that motivation for this particular massacre. The movie pretends that we haven't figured that out for almost 70 minutes. This movie is a grand total of 85 minutes long. That's a repellent amount of stalling for a story that literally could not function without its "secret" being obvious from the opening, and the scene in which Doc (Rocky Patterson), the thirtysomething doctor in a small Texas town who is the closest the movie has to a hero, explains his realisation is static, maddeningly dull, and criminally mis-performed by Patterson, who like every member of the cast seems to be reciting lines that he can't begin to parse and never memorised. Elsewhere in the film, two men who were part of the original crime say their goodbyes to the visibly hostile owner of a lumberyard (Beau Leland), who mutters under his breath "I'll see you sooner than you think" with a snarl on his face. GEE I WONDER WHO THE KILLER MIGHT BE. And the film acts as though we didn't notice that, either.

There is one possibility I can imagine that might justify all this as anything but rank incompetence: co-directors Lofton and Bill Leslie were aware that the audience only cared about the killing scenes, and gave the plot away to let the audience stay ahead of the story and enjoy the ride, like Hitchcock and Vertigo. It's certainly the cast that Lofton and Leslie were only interested in staging murders; God knows there's little enough else that happens in the movie. I've already punted on trying to explain the story, but if I were going to, it would be something like this: men, usually two, who presumably had something to do with the rape - the movie doesn't try very hard to make sure we recognise characters from the opening scene, up to and including the victim, and the killer attacks plenty of people who had absolutely nothing to do with, including no fewer than five women, which I think spoils his feminist bona fides - are in an isolated location. They are approached, in a comically abrupt fashion, by a wiry little man in camouflage and a jet black motorcycle helmet with the eyepiece covered in gaffer tape, and with a ludicrous synthed-up voice that sounds like a cross between Darth Vader, Jeff Foxworthy, and Ben Stein. He quickly kills one of them with the nail gun he has handy, and then spouts several sentences. Some of them quips; fewer of them puns than you'd think. "You should never hitch a ride with a hearse, unless you're dying", he snaps to a hitchhiker to tried to thumb a ride, which is A) not funny and B) not wordplay. Oh, and the bit about the hearse is because the killer drives a hearse that has been painted bright gold. It says so much about Nail Gun Massacre that I almost forgot to mention a detail like that. He then kills the other person, if there were two, and quips some more.

As a palate cleanser in between these evocative scenes of people slumping to the ground with the heads of nails glued unpersuasive to their faces with red food dye being dribbled on their skin, we encounter Doc and the Sheriff (Ron Queen) executing the most aimless murder investigation in the annals of crime, which consists mostly of swapping the observations "[chaws thoughtfully] We nev'r used ta have this many killin's". "[nods, or just stares glassily for about ten seconds] Lot of 'um happening on Old Lady Bailey's property. Wonder if we should go to th' house". "Aww, you don't think Old Lady Bailey has anything to do-" "Course not".

Along the way, we're introduced to a panoply of non-actors of the most awe-inspiring sort. I'm particularly fond of the helpless soul who delivers the line, "Well Tom, in your infinite wisdom, I'm sure you will figure it out in due time" without seeming to know the meaning of any word in that sentence other than "Well" and "I'm". But the clear standouts are Frances Heard (Terry Lofton's grandma!) as a shopkeeper who keeps adjusting her glasses and fearlessly marches on through her pointless expository lines even after she fluffs some of them, and an old man whose identity I cannot certainly attest to (the credits are full of vague descriptions with #1 and #2 following almost all of them) who loudly mumbles with the most impenetrable Southern accent I've encountered in movies in a long while.

Not helping the actors at all, the scenes that don't involve people dying have a nasty tendency to stretch to several minutes a moment that could have been dealt with in half of a line, and frequently could have been snipped out of the film entirely. Such as the great "getting directions" scene, with the dialogue being largely drowned out by background traffic noise. But slamming the film for its technical limitations would be like kicking a beagle puppy. And insulting the directors for their lifeless camera would be pointless, almost as pointless as losing interest in the action altogether to blandly zoom into a naked pair of breasts.

Oh! That's another thing, the porn! Twice, the movie stops being an addled collection of shoddy death scenes and a glacial depiction of the minutiae of human conversation to watch people having simulated sex. And in real time. In fairness, assuming that the cast was hired because of their experience in regionally-produced rural Texas pornography answers most of my objections to the acting, but I don't think that's fair to assume. Anyway, the end of the first sex scene is my favorite part of the whole movie: the dude is lying there dead, and the woman falls on top of him, and the image simply refuses to move or cut for tens of seconds, all while the framing pretty much insists that we notice that their pubic hair is extremely visible in both cases.

This is the most bitterly functional kind of slasher movie that could possibly be: a weak pretext that's only followed about half of the time for a lengthy chain of killings with almost nothing else that could possibly constitute a narrative. It is vile, and it is sleazy, and it is insufferably slow moving nearly all of the time. There is one and only one saving grace to any of this: it is also indescribably ill-made. The acting, the writing, the staging - it's amateurs and first-timers, mixed with an awful degree of cynicism about the market sector the film is targeting. It is, frequently, truly impossible to believe that the thing onscreen could possibly have been made, and it's so daft that it manages to be weirdly compelling even though the whole thing is rotten, from the core to the surface. I have never seen such a reprehensible slasher movie in all my days, but that's not to say that it's not transfixing.

Body Count: 16, and impressively, only one of those does not involve a nail gun. Truth in advertising!

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: B-HORROR IN THE 1960s - PARTY MONSTER

There was always going to be a mash-up of the nuclear monster movie and the beach movie sometime in the mid-'60s. B-movie producers, as a breed, are too good at mimicry and chasing the latest fad with Terminator-like focus for the two biggest subgenres of cheap drive-in programmer to go unwed for too very long. It just happened to be Del Tenney, a moderately successful stage actor who reinvented himself as a filmmaker in the 1960s, who was the first of those producers off the post, releasing The Horror of Party Beach (which he also directed) in June of 1964, about ten months after American International's smash hit Beach Party first made the film a possibility. And how grateful we all are that Tenney shouldered his way up to the bar before anybody else could. It's easy to imagine a beach party horror movie made with bland competence, generic junk food that's a bit dopey and mostly forgettable, like dozens upon dozens if not hundreds of other horror movies in the '50s and '60s that aren't bad, certainly aren't good, basically aren't anything at all.

Thankfully, The Horror of Party Beach isn't any kind of forgettable generic anything: it's one of the great fun-bad movies of the 1960s B-movie circuit, high octane camp that's so ridiculous in so many ways that it's impossible to suppose that Tenney and screenwriter Richard L. Hilliard weren't at least slightly doing it on purpose. You don't cram that many unbelievably awful gags into a movie's opening 15 minutes if you don't want your first impression to be one of unrelenting corniness and fearless stupidity. For that matter, you probably don't lead off with the film's opening credits either, with all their stilted, hip flashes of car racing edited together with uncommon messiness and incoherence, while the soundtrack bellows out with singularly inauthentic surf rock.

It could also just be unbridled incompetence, mind you, an impression much sealed by the material that comes in after those credits are done. The driver of that racing car is teen-ish adult Hank Green (John Scott), who has in tow his girlfriend Tina (Marilyn Clarke), and the second the film properly starts up, they launch into a conversation that's a concentrated blast of badly-written exposition ("I know about your experiments in that laboratory!" is a line, and it ends up meaning absolutely nothing like you suppose it might) and deeply uncomfortable close-ups that appear to be trying to zoom all the way into Clarke's pores. Anyway, the film's inanities start hard and fast, and they don't let up. Not even five minutes from the start - that's five minutes including the credits, mind you - we've already seen the local radioactive waste dumping crew tipping big metal barrels into the ocean, and we've seen that toxic goo start to congeal over a skeleton in a shipwreck, forming into the film's monster with what I confess to be impressive effects work for a low-budget joint, though the comically severe "you should be terrified right now" music makes it rather more funny than even a little bit creepy. Nor do the superimposed fish help.

The first sequence is something like a codex of beach movie tropes as they had already congealed into existence, intercut with Tina's murder by the newly-created sea monster. So we get lots of alarmingly bad surf rock played with anxious determination by local band the Del-Aires, lots of alarmingly bad dancing as the extras Tenney tossed together gyrate randomly and with no obvious organic connection to each other or the music, and lots of ancient, wheezy jokes, presented as insert shots of people we'll never see again. At one point, the camera stares, hungrily, at a girl's bikini'd ass for several seconds before crash zooming out to a pair of filthy boys doing the staring. One turns to the other and says, with unfounded alarm, "That reminds me, did I bring my hot dog buns? That kind of wheezy joke. Hank and the local biker gang get into a fight over Tina, who retaliates by going swimming alone, where she gets assaulted by a suit that plainly didn't come cheap, but looks regrettably goofy, with giant Muppet eyes and a mouth that's all full of... like... feelers, I guess? It looks like a bunch of cigars stuffed into a novelty Gill Man dispenser. And despite the profound inadequacy of the monster and the appalling effects - the stuntman rubs chocolate syrup on Clarke's abdomen, and that's enough for the "violent attack" - Tenney stages this with extreme gravity and menace, all long-ish shots of Clarke flailing and screaming while the music goes hard. The tonal shift between the wacky beach shenanigans and the grisly killing could almost be brilliant, if it was handled with even the smallest measure of artistry.

The most amazing thing about this extended beach party opening is how much it has almost nothing to do with the remainder of the film. Hank comes back, and the monster comes back of course, but the great majority of the remaining movie essentially starts from scratch, with Hank's mentor Dr. Gavin (Allen Laurel) trying to figure out what the creature is so it can be stopped, while his daughter Elaine (Alice Lyon) balances her desire to make out with Hank and her sense of abashment that he's only on the market because his girlfiend was just horribly murdered. That's making it sound rather more clean and streamlined than is the case: in fact, the screenplay of The Horror of Party Beach is a deeply inelegant affair, a series of disconnected anecdotes roughly shaped into a plot-like substance. Some moments, like an extended sequence of three women lazily trying to escape this murderous hellhole for the safety of New York City, don't even have the decency to involve the characters or settings established anywhere else in the film.

Tenney charges through this aimless material, with its nonsensical technobabble (Gavin declares that they can use carbon-14 dating to determine the genetic makeup of the monster at one point, in one of the most overtly wrong things I have ever encountered in a movie that wasn't making a joke of it), casual racism (Gavin's made Eulabelle, played by Eulabelle Moore, is a cringing black maid of a sort already years behind the curve in '64, going on and on about voodoo), logic gaps, and colossal tonal shifts, and makes a movie that is, if never remotely satisfying as drama, at least frantic enough in its pacing to only rarely be boring. He's terrible at the nuts and bolts of directing: the performances are variable down to the level of individual line readings that end someplace different than they started, while there are obvious flubbed takes left in the finished film. And where any clever B-movie director would work hard to keep monsters that looked this stupid as a background threat, hanging around in shadows and fragmentary quick cuts, Tenney puts it - them, in fact, a detail the script doesn't explain - front and center, with even the most moody, atmospheric shots lit such that no matter how dark and threatening the backgrounds get, the monsters themselves are bright and wholly visible.

This is in keeping with the overall feeling of The Horror of Party Beach, which is that's some kind of ersatz object, barely a movie at all. It was shot on the beaches of Connecticut, but everything about it borrows from the vocabulary of Los Angeles-based beach movies, the original sin from which it never recovers: it explains the overcompensation of the opening sequence, the shrillness of the music, and the general uncertainty that crowds out every actor and plot beat. Movies of this sort were cranked out in the L.A. metropolitan area on a weekly basis, and the people there knew how to do them; Connecticut had no native presence of cheap-ass indie productions, and a constant feeling of "are we doing this right? Is this how we do this?" coats everything: the production, certainly its approximation of surfing culture.

I say all of that like it's a bad thing, but of course it is the film's chief strength. Lousy B-movies are thick on the ground, and rarely were they thicker than the 1960s; The Horror of Party Beach is weird enough and vividly incompetent enough to feel genuinely special and - I will not say "unpredictable", since every last thing about it has been taken from the nuclear monster handbook. It has an unconventional feeling, though, one that's not to its credit as a beach comedy or a horror movie, but is manna to the lover of weird, colorfully dysfunctional bad movies.

Body Count: 7, along with the entirety of a slumber party numbering "over 20", plus apparently dozens or hundreds of bodies during the monsters' reign of terror - the film is alarmingly bad at chronology among its other sins, and we have only the alarmist newspaper headlines to go on here.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: SCI-FI HORROR - A BAD CASE OF CRABS

In looking at the vast corpus of American movies made between 1945 and 1968 that are typically considered under the umbrella of horror, one thing that leaps to mind is that, almost without exception, they aren't scary. Nor, in a great many cases, does it seem like trying to make them scary was ever the goal. The definition of "horror" is and ought to be broader than just "scary movie", which is why the goofy dipshittery that makes up almost all of American cinema's genre work during the Atomic Age still counts. Still, it's easy to be endlessly frustrated by dumbass giant beasties and unconvincing make-up jobs and the whole nine yards, and wish that any of it was tense enough that a viewer over the age of 9 or 10 might genuinely find it terrifying, or at least creepy, or at least unsettling.

Enter Attack of the Crab Monsters, a 1957 ditty directed and produced by Roger Corman Allied Artists, from a script he extracted from one of his all-time greatest collaborators, Charles B. Griffith (the legend goes that Corman gave him a title and the directive that every scene should include action, without any of the pauses or layovers responsible for so many itchy asses in so many B-movie audiences, and Griffith came up with all the rest). This was at the very dawn of Corman's career: he'd only been producing for three years and directing for two, and this was just his eleventh feature as director. Because you know what Roger Corman did not do? He did not fuck around. And that applies to his movies as much as to his moviemaking: Attack of the Crab Monsters doesn't meet that platonic ideal of having absolutely no down time, but it gets right to business and it doesn't really waste any more time than it has to in plowing through its brief little running time, hardly more than an hour.

What I'm about to say next will sound stupid, and it is stupid, really. But here it goes: Attack of the Crab Monsters is that one shining exception to the rule I started off with. Look, it has that title, and it has that title for precisely the reason you might guess: there are giant, intelligent, mutant crabs, and they kill people. When we see them, which Corman endeavors to make sure doesn't happen too often or for too long, they look like hell. The characters being hunted by these freaks of nature are serviceable stock types played with a bare minimum of competence, and really not even that in the case of anybody with a strong accent. The shift from the second to the third act is carried on the shoulders of a tower of technobabble so confidently expressed by the script - and delivered by a dude with a fake German accent, to make it even more sciencey - that you can almost fail to notice what staggering, incoherent nonsense it is. And yet, when we know what those crabs are up to, the film manages to become honest-to-God unsettling. On top of the taboo-busting gore scene in the movie, that's enough to make this the one and only micro-budget independent trashy B-horror movie of its generation that I would actually be tempted to claim still sort of works, here in the 21st Century, as horror.

That being said, it still works better as a hilariously chintzy piece of fearless low-grade bad filmmaking. There is, for one thing, that most parsimonious of opening gambits, the stock footage montage - following the surprisingly lovely, hand-painted backdrops for the opening credits, it's ever bit of four minutes before we see anything that was actually shot for Attack of the Crab Monsters. First, we get a luxurious, unhurried array of atomic explosions, then we get a series of effects shots of a boat being swamped that, I suppose may have been original to this movie, but I'd like to think more highly of Corman than that. There's also a portentous Bible quote that makes no sense given the rest of the movie's content, but it involves killing things with water, so it makes sense as far as that goes.

With all that out of the way, we get to meet our team. Six specialists have been sent to a Pacific atoll: the leader is Dr. Karl Weigand (Leslie Bradley), a nuclear physicist, and along with him are geologist James Carson (Richard Cutting), botanist Jules Deveroux (Mel Welles, who never met an ethnic accent he couldn't chomp onto like a pit bull attacking a soup bone), radio man Hank Chapman (Russell Johnson), and a pair of biologists in love, Dale Drewer (Richard Garland) and Martha "Marty" Hunter (Pamela Duncan), because nobody would take a lady scientist seriously if she didn't have a boy's name, duh. They've been assigned two missions: one is to see what has happened to the flora, fauna, and structure of the atoll as a result of radioactive fall-out, and the other is to investigate the disappearance of the last team assigned for the first mission.

Things start going awry almost immediately: the Navy team assigned to protect the scientists suffers a gruesome casualty when Seaman Tate (none other than Charles B. Griffith) falls halfway out of the boat and thrashes around until his crewmates are able to pull him up, and find that his god damned head has been bitten off. We've seen so much more graphic and explicit things than that in the intervening half-century, but when you're watching a black-and-white movie made in this style, you expect a certain level of breezy frivolity: seeing a man's god damned head get bitten off remains just as much of a violation of the unspoken contract between the audience and the movie now as it would have in '57, and it's the first point where the viewer perks up to realise that this is going to be somewhat different than we were led to expect.

Meanwhile, the island is shaking violently at irregular moments, and when a portion of the naval mission prepares to leave, their seaplane explodes without warning. And the discovery of the previous mission's journals indicates that their disappearance had far more violent causes than the "lost in a typhoon" theory the Navy is forwarding. Something is clearly Mysterious and Dangerous on this island, and that's before the echoing, disembodied voice of the previous mission's commander starts drifting across the island at night. As the scientists, radioman, and two remaining seamen (Beach Dickerson and Tony Miller) start investigating, they're taken down at a feverish pace, by an unseen thing with barely glimpsed crablike parts (it's hard to say whether Corman was trying to create a sense of mystery - not a winning strategy in a film with "Crab Monsters" in its title - or simply avoiding showing more of the crabs than he had to), and everybody who vanishes comes back the same night in the form of another echoing voice.

Between the no-nonsense script and the even more no-nonsense direction, Attack of the Crab Monsters blazes by so quickly that its basically a whirlwind of shocking deaths, later to include a dismemberment that makes the first decapitation seem utterly banal. It's a terrific gambit, not least because it prevents us from lingering over the film in a way that reveals its shortcomings, which include at a minimum the snoozy characterisations - Marty is at the center of a romantic triangle that totally refuses to land - and the fact that the film has the indication of a story more than the actual details and fullness that really are a story. Or how much the setting does not resemble a Pacific atoll beyond the presence of an ocean.

Also, the film's pace serves a more abstract function: it keeps us out of balance, and makes us more susceptible to the eeriness inherent in the film's best element, those disembodied voices. It's a cheap trick (they're all cheap tricks), but just modifying the sound to give it a hollow, metallic edge makes those voices feel truly wrong on an instinctual level, even before we learn exactly what's causing them. The reveal of that is another one of the film's most unsettling elements, though it takes some wading through the worst of the pseudoscience to get there - the crabs, who have been nuked not just into gigantic size, but also into a quantum state where they are made of pure energy, or whatever it's supposed to be, can absorb a person's identity by eating their head. It is so dumb as the defy believe, but there's also something skin-crawling about the matter-of-fact way the film drops it in, a form of body horror before there was body horror. "Once they were men; now they're land crabs" is a loopy bit of dialogue, but it speaks to a sick notion, much bleaker than the average for a giant nuclear monster picture. Especially as Griffith lays the groundwork by referencing the real-life tendency of land crabs to devour wounded humans left unattended on the beach.

The film foregrounds none of this: it's all buried beneath some delightfully campy idiocy typical of the genre, with that extra spin of dazzling showmanship that separated Corman from all of his peers. He wasn't all the way there, yet, except in his wisdom in showing just enough of just the right parts of the crabs - when he can't keep hiding, and we can see their big cow eyes, it's all over but the laughing. It's a sturdy piece of B-movie filmmaking with a crowd-pleasing energy that's much more enjoyable than most other films on this model. It's a terrible, terrible movie - any film that gives its giant crab monster a threatening climactic line like "So, you have wounded me, and I must grow a new claw. Well and good, for I can do it in a day. But will you grow new lives when I have taken yours from you?" isn't ever going to be anything but terrible. But it is the zesty, vital kind of terrible, and this most dodgy and dimwitted of all subgenres was rarely more fun in its all-encompassing badness, or more effective in mining something memorable out of its stock elements.

Body Count: 9, though it is at least possible that we didn't see everybody who was on that seaplane.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: SCI-FI HORROR - THE JUNGLE! IS MY HOME!

When horror came back to American cinema in a big way in the 1950s, it was after receiving a face-lift: gone were creaky Mitteleuropean castles and villages, banished were old dark houses, and even the outright lifts of Expressionist aesthetic techniques were mostly snuffed out (though a genre that gets so much mileage from a well-placed patch of inky shadows as horror will never, ever be entirely free of Expressionism's influence). This was the Atomic Age, the Space Age, the era of the post-war explosion in scientific advances that everybody could see and touch in their own homes, thanks to the concurrent post-war economic boom. And so the refreshed horror films of the period were, by and large, oriented more toward science fiction than myth and fantasy. By the end of the decade, Britain's Hammer Films would prove that there was still a market for classic Gothic forms of horror, but Hollywood and the American independent scene wouldn't start to move back in that direction until the 1960s.

But I shouldn't skip ahead. Let us stay in the early years American horror's Atomic Age with a film that was very nearly titled Bride of the Atom, with hellaciously clumsy line of dialogue supporting that title left in the finished film. It was changed at executive producer Donald McCoy's insistence to Bride of the Monster for its 1956 release, but the hints of nuclear paranoia still make themselves perfectly clear. At the same time, the movie is a huge, enthusiastic throwback: it's a science fiction parable that secretly wants to be a '30s mad scientist picture, and its status as a love letter to the horror of a previous generation is all the clearer given the admiring position given to the long-since washed-up former horror icon Bela Lugosi as the wannabe Frankenstein. It is a modern (or, was modern, in the '50s) film made by a passionately nostalgic film buff, weirdly combining two eras. I mean, it has to be weird, given that the cinephilic writer and director was Edward D. Wood, Jr.

Let's make one thing clear right off: yes, it's an Ed Wood film, and that shows, but if ever the most notoriously incompetent filmmaker in the history of world cinema made a movie that's not all that bad, it was this one. Forget what Tim Burton's giddy Ed Wood told you: Bride of the Monster might be embarrassingly cheap, and it might have a script full of one impossible howler of a line after another, and it might clank through its arbitrarily stitched-together scenes like a rusted-out Chevette dragging its muffler... Remember everything that Ed Wood told you, but also temper it a little bit. Much of the film is absolute crap. Some of the film is perfectly ordinary mid-'50s programmer boilerplate. And Lugosi's performance is genuinely enjoyable and one of his "best", allowing that "best Bela Lugosi performance" isn't entirely unlike "best Ed Wood movie" in terms of compliments that really don't mean diddly shit.

But for now, let me return to my initial point about the film's Janus-like straddling of horror epochs. Like most Wood films, the film's plot is remarkably convoluted and busy for something so utterly short (a mere 69 minutes), and that's even more impressive given that he was working from somebody else's first draft in this case, that of a certain Alex Gordon. But if we carve out the deadwood, there's an old mansion called Willows House on the shores of Marsh Lake, in the woods by the swamp, which everybody thinks is abandoned, but it's actually where Dr. Eric Vornoff (Lugosi) is busy with his human experiments. On one particular dark and stormy night, two hunters, Mac (Bud Osborne) and Jake (John Warren) run afoul of Vornoff and his hulking henchman Lobo (Tor Johnson). They become the 11th and 12th missing person cases in that region lately, and the persistent unflattering news articles penned by dauntless investigative reporter Janet Lawton (Loretta King), blaming a lake monster for the disappearances have finally shamed the local police department, headed by Captain Robbins (Harvey B. Dunn) into doing something about it. So he reluctantly assigns detectives Dick Craig (Tony McCoy) - who just so happens to be Janet's fiancé - and a fella just called Martin (Don Nagel) to the case. They in turn receive help, briefly, from a Professor Vladimir Strowski (George Becwar), a European cryptozoologist. None of these people move fast enough for Janet, who heads to Willows House on her own and ends up a hypnotised prisoner of Vornoff's, her sexual magnetism captivating Lobo. Prof. Strowski, meanwhile, also heads to Willows House, were we discover that he's in fact been hunting Vornoff across the world, ever since the mad scientist was banished from their home country for desiring to create a race of atomic supermen. For attempting to stop Vornoff's nuclear experiments, Strowski comes face to face with the Marsh Lake Monster: an enormous mutant octopus, the biggest success so far of Vornoff's super-strength ray.

That was a bad job of carving, I'm sorry. But I also did mention that Wood's scripts have a tendency to get far knottier than they should be, and I managed to avoid talking about the great many blind alleys the film pokes its head into, including the introduction of the inexhaustibly annoying Officer Kelton (Paul Marco), the whiny and enormously ineffectual cop who'd show up for larger roles in Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space and Night of the Ghouls, the autobiographical touch of Lobo's angora fetish, or the absolute fascination the early scenes have with exploring the minutiae of people asking other people to help them find information. Or the nominally tense stand-off between a man caught in quicksand and a stock-footage alligator.

The point, anyway, is that Bride of the Monster represents a most special mash-up of ingredients ranging from its old dark house to a conversation about the legitimate, real-world terror that nuclear testing might be affecting the world's atmosphere in unknown ways. And it is, I think, legitimately interesting for doing so, even though the film's interest has to compete with a lot of baffling and bad distractions. Besides the ones I've mentioned, there's the hypnotic, inexplicable business between Captain Robbins and a parakeet, which he's gently stroking in one scene, and allowing to sit on his shoulder in another, like a pirate with a parrot, without the script even slightly acknowledging it. This isn't even typical Woodian bad filmmaking; it's so at odds with anything else that happens in the movie, it's almost Dadaist.

But the outrageously awful touches are mostly in little random chunks, while the main body of the film is, dare I say it, simply average for a penny-pinching B-movie of the time. The sets are preposterously artificial, but Wood's cinematographers, Ted Allan and William C. Thompson, take care to shoot Willows House with enough darkness that it disguises the limits of the production without looking like a mistake (the rest of the movie, especially the scenes in the police station - now those look like hell).

And even when it's no damn good at all, Bride of the Monster has a couple of cards up its sleeve: Lugosi and Johnson. The latter has a big loutish screen presence like a doughier Lon Chaney, Jr, and when he's not talking - the mistake that Wood made when giving him a showcase role in Plan 9 - he's legitimately good at bringing in a sense of sad-sack pathos. His mooning over Janet is, in an undeniably weird and misconceived way, actually touching. As for Lugosi, he's just fun. It was the actor's last speaking part, and not meaningfully better than the dopey villain rules he'd been able to scrape up for most of the decade preceding this release, but some combination of a director who openly adored him, and a role full of thick and chewy monologues heavy with tragedy and rage, led to Lugosi being in a visibly better mood than he was at virtually any other point in his career. Moaning about his painful past, tinkering with smoking carafes of what are undoubtedly bright-colored chemicals like an especially nerdy child on Christmas, even gamely putting on a look of terror in close-up shots to be intercut with that notorious non-functioning octopus - through it all, Lugosi can hardly keep his glee tamped down. While it's not "good acting" - at no point does the actor disappear into the character - it's honestly the most enjoyable experience I've ever had watching him. And that goes a long way towards making Bride of the Monster an honestly rewarding bit of dumb movie fun, no irony necessary. Of course, irony helps, as does a taste for the corny, played-out crap Wood was so lovingly referencing. But any rumors you've heard about this being an all-time disaster fit only to be gawked at are entirely overstated.

Body Count: 5, on top of the ten previous victims of Vornoff's experiments.

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TAKE A BIIIIIIITE!!!!!

A review requested by Robert K, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

I'm greatly pleased that, when the time inevitably came for me to write about The Apple, it would be in the context of a fundraiser for the American Cancer Society. There's a deep connection between this film and my own period of sickness back in 2005. It was at that year's B-Fest in Evanston, IL that I first saw The Apple, where it stood out for especially personal reasons - of course, it pretty obviously stood out for everybody in that auditorium. But I knew that I was going to get a call on that Saturday from my oncologist, telling me whether my cancer had metastasised or not. I was barely able to focus on the parade of bad movies in front of me; only The Apple was so manic and stupefyingly incomprehensible that I was truly distracted from my health worries. As I started receiving chemotherapy the next month, I had a portable DVD player to while away the five-hour days stuck in a room, tethered to machines; the "get well soon" present I request from my parents was a copy of The Apple, and it became the first movie I watched during treatment.* Many years later, I've seen The Apple more times than is decent, and I always hear just the slightest echo of those bleak days, in its clamorous musical numbers. It is and will always be my cancer movie.

It's also so toxic in its badness that I wouldn't be surprised at all to know that watching it causes brain tumors. So that's the other reason it's a good fit for this fundraiser.

The 1980 film takes place in the far-flung world of 1994, where a record label impresario named Boogalow (Vladek Sheybal) plans to use a hybrid pop-disco sound to establish a musical dictatorship over at least North America, if not the whole world. At which point I should confess that a plot recap of The Apple is doomed to failure: it is simply not possible to express using the clumsy, limited matrix of English to communicate how fucked up this movie is. No, not even when the Devil wants to use disco to take over the world in 1994. Oh, right, because I skipped over that bit: Boogalow is symbolically equated with Satan, right up until he turns out to actually be the actual Satan. So let's skip back to the 1994 Worldvision Song Contest, which is like the Eurovision Song Contest only trashier. Here, Boogalow and his lackey Shake (Ray Shell) sit in the show's control room and gleefully cackle with triumph as Boogalow's top act, the duo Pandi (Grace Kennedy) and Dandi (Alan Love) hit record-setting levels on the biometric scanners they're all using to test audience response to the duo's new single, "BIM". Which stands for "Boogalow International Music", and will eventually be, more or less, the name of the future one-world government. Which makes it even more threatening when the singers lead the crowd in the chant "Hey! Hey! Hey! BIM's on the way!" As if it wasn't already threatening enough when they start off by reciting that in the world of BIM, "There ain't no good / There ain't no bad / There ain't no happiness / There ain't no tears". And you have to hand it to George S. Clinton, adapting the lyrics from Iris Recht's Hebrew originals (Iris and husband Coby, who composes all the music had originally planned a Hebrew-language stage musical before meeting the film's producers... but we'll get to the producers): it takes some truly, relentlessly appalling songwriting when you can legitimately declare that "There ain't no sad" would have been a much better line than the one they went with.

Pandi and Dandi are followed by Alphie (George Gilmour) and Bibi (Catherine Mary Stewart), a folk duo from Moose Jaw. They immediately launch into a syrupy love ballad that manages to sound even worse than "BIM", but somehow, this tribute to the most essential of human emotions - BIM, we find, has been hellbent on eradicating love songs - gets the audience so worked up that there biometrics go all the way up to 151. Whereas Pandi and Dandi topped out at 150. I mean, they're a whole 1 better!!! Boogalow knows a threat when he sees one, so he immediately invites Alphie and Bibi to BIM headquarters the following day to sign a contract. Alphie is far more untrusting than his partner and girlfriend, and when the contract is presented to him, he has a vision of thunder and storms. It gets even worse when Boogalow and his crew try to force Alphie to sign - from out of nowhere, he suddenly finds himself inside a smoke-filled cavern, with Boogalow suddenly dressed in long black cloak with a tiny gold horn on his left temple, and the rest of BIM's hangers-on dressed (or undressed) as trolls, snakes, zombies, and all number of hell denizens. And an oiled-up Dandi urges Alphie and Bibi, dressed in the chaste fig leaves of Adam and Eve, to taste the BIM apple, and seal their fate. Bibi doesn't see this vision, and signs herself over to Boogalow the Devil, but Alphie flees, and spends the next period of time hiding out and trying to avoid BIM's takeover of all society, identifying the BIM faithful with the metallic triangular stickers all citizens are required to show - the mark of BIM.

You guys, I think The Apple might be a religious allegory.

The film was made by producers Menahem Golan (who also wrote and directed) and Yoram Globus, Israeli cousins and masterminds behind Cannon Films. Now, this was early in Cannon's existence, so it's probably not fair to be as baffled by its place in the company as we must be: for Golan and Globus were the most savagely, mercilessly market-driven filmmakers of the 1980s. And The Apple is not remotely market-driven. It's a disco musical made at the ass end of the disco era whose message is that disco is the literal devil's music; it is a stunningly incoherent spiritual odyssey that ends with God showing up in a gilded Rolls Royce to Rapture up all the hippies who'd been able to hide out from BIM. It's a work of futurism that attempts to show a modestly dystopian world by throwing some banners up around concrete hyper-modern West German buildings and putting fins on cars. It has some of the most shitty original songs in the history of movie musicals. It feels for all the world like a mad auteur's highly personal vision gone wildly far off the rails, not like an attempt by two savvy producers to make a popular disco cash-in. But that's absolutely what it was, the last of 1980's three Hail Mary attempts to keep disco alive long enough for one more hit movie, following Can't Stop the Music and Xanadu. All three tanked and all three are awful, though The Apple is surely the most thoroughly demented and incompetent, and I am quite inclined to suggest that it's by far the most entertaining for those reasons. But not the kind of entertaining that Golan and Globus would have preferred.

No indeed, this is the entertainment that comes of pure unbridled madness. It's easy enough to latch onto the songs, and talk with baffled amazement about the inane lyrics which don't rhyme, don't scan, and don't make even the slightest narrative sense. Like, to name a conspicuous example, the film's most notorious line, "It's a natural, natural, natural desire / To meet an actual, actual, actual vampire", upon which a vampire (Francesca Poston) does indeed pop up and then just stand there, doing the gaping mouth "vampire snarl" face for, like, 15 seconds. It's not worth going through all of the dizzyingly horrible lines - the review is long enough already. Anyway, the deficiencies of the songwriting has nothing on the savage insanity of Golan's staging of the songs, all of them drifting headlong into big group numbers with virtually identical choreography, and inexplicable choices like the one where the bad guys ride on exercise bikes while Boogalow talks about how great it is to be a manipulative creep, right in front of of the woman he's manipulating, or the one with all the clowns and then the people twirling batons with streamers on the ends. Or the number I have fondly referred to, since 2005, as the Quaalude Tango (the actual name is "Made for Me", and it's a romantic ballad song by a date rapist), which in addition to its comatose dancers features the most deadeningly literal editing, crisply bouncing around precisely on the beats of the music and always showing us exactly what the lyrics are referring. Though painful lyrical literalism is pretty much found in every moment of every song. I mean, there's that vampire moment.

But focusing entirely on the songs, however tempting and easy to do, means missing out on much of the joy The Apple has in supply. It could be totally absent any songs at all, and be no meaningfully better, though it would be a hell of a lot shorter, and that could only help. But the godawful production design and erratic acting - Sheybal is the only person who comes even close to giving a functional performance; even Miriam Margolyes, who I generally love, is out-of-control terrible as oy gevalt, the most outrageous kind of Jewish landlady - and dogged commitment to its opportunistically New Agey message of how everybody but the hippies is in the grip of pure evil, and the totally incomprehensible closing moments with the gaudiest deus ex machina on record, all of this would make The Apple a transcendent bad movie experience even without the unclear satire of the "America loves drugs" song "Speed", the unacceptability of a song that tries to set the words "Life is nothing but show business in 1994" to music, or the outlandishly smutty double-entendres in a song whose subtlest couch is that it's title is "Coming".

Put it all together, and it's a completely unadulterated bundle of the worst of cinema all spun up into one ball of madness. It cannot be described, and it can barely be experienced; I assume that this is what a bad acid trip feels like, right down to the chintzy rendition of Hell. With all the sincerity I can muster, this is one of my very favorite bad movies, and not even with the "I kind of think I like it unironically" relationship I have with Xanadu. The Apple is utter, irredeemable trash, and it is a privilege to be part of the same species that could cook up something so totally imaginative and divorced from anything resembling rules, logic, good taste, or basic decency.

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BOTTOM OF THE SEVENTH

I do not, in general, believe in the phenomenon of actors being the solitary saving grace of an otherwise disposable movie, but I'll say this: Jeff Bridges is clearly the solitary reason that Seventh Son is an absolute blast of a bad movie, the kind that immediately upon departing, I wanted to start listing the names of everybody I knew that I had to force it on, and not just a slog through generic plotting and insultingly clumsy dialogue. I like to think that what happened is that they got through the first day of rehearsal, and after realising what kind of cod-Medieval RenFaire bullshit he'd gotten himself wrapped up in, Bridges decided "well fuck this", and concluded that if he could not act so well as to make the film good, at least he could act so poorly as to make the film hilarious. I have not yet figured out the proper way to describe the accent he's up to in this film, but it ranks right up alongside Dick Van Dyke's in Mary Poppins in the hallowed annals of Are You Supposed To Be From England? Because You Sound Like A Looney Tune. The closest I can come up with is that it sounds the Dude doing an impression of Woody Allen playing Sir John Falstaff. It's dumbfounding and precious and beautiful, particularly when he uses it to assault such Bizarro World dialogue as "Stone chuckers chuck stone, and cattle rippers rip cattle" or "There are witches that need killing. Fucking witches". The latter line doubling as the most wildly discordant swear word in a period movie in ages; it pleases me to assume that Bridges ad-libbed it.

At any moment when Bridges is onscreen, talking in his unplaceable drunken drawl, Seven Son is a triumph; the best comedy of the young 2015, and apt to remain that way for a long time. When he's not onscreen, things take an awfully precipitous tumble. There was some money thrown at this, no doubt, and you can see it in things like the shockingly good visual effects (not consistently so - there are some nasty, under-rendered and ill-composited beasties throughout), and Dante Ferretti's rich production design, creating a world that is physically plausible with visual hints of its own history and unexplored backstory like no high fantasy since The Lord of the Rings. It's like taking one of those hilariously crappy sword-and-sorcery pictures from the early '80s, and throwing money and resources at it that the genre had never witnessed, and no matter how rough the going gets, there's always something to look at with childlike admiration.

The going gets very rough, though. The story isn't particularly objectionable, just a by-the-numbers Chosen One story about Thomas Ward (Ben Barnes), the seventh son of a seventh son, and thus destined by God and numerology to be the ideal apprentice to Master Gregory (Bridges), the last of the "spooks", a line of holy soldiers tasked with rooting out the dark creatures throughout the land. The need for such an apprentice is dire: the once-a-century blood moon is about to rise, and it has freed from her prison in the bowels of the earth Mother Malkin (Julianne Moore), a powerful witch-queen who immediately sets to gathering her army, in order to use the power of the full blood moon to take over the world. But Thomas is a poor study, and he's far more interested in flirting with the mysterious Alice (Alicia Vikander) than do anything else, not suspecting (and probably not caring) that she's Malkin's niece and spy.

That's boring and overdone, sure, but nothing about that necessarily has to be very bad. That only creeps in because, for as much fun as Bridges is plainly having, and as ambitious and complex as Ferretti's sets go - and what the hell, let's throw Jacqueline West and her inventive Middle Ages BDSM couture for the witches - there's not another human soul involved besides those three who has anything but disinterest in the film they're all making. This is patently obvious with even a slight glance at the cast: given a chewy, flashy villain that should make for some splendid hamminess, Moore can barely be bothered to do more than spit out her overblown lines about being Evil and blood-this and blood-that; the CGI dragon she transforms into has infinitely more personality. Vikander can barely contain her disinterest in Barnes, who mistakes keeping his eyes very wide open for being innocent and overawed. Olivia Williams, in the thanklessly small role as Thomas's mother, puts in some effort to bring human warmth to the proceedings, but the proceedings do not want that, and spit her right back out.

The rot goes much deeper, though, all the way to the screenplay adapted by Charles Leavitt, Steven Knight, and Matt Greenberg from the first in a series of children's novels (there does not seem to be much of a fear that Seventh Son will end up sparking a franchise). In a stripped-down form, it seems perfectly, fine, but the way that the story ends up functioning as an aimless tour through underdeveloped aspects of its world proves to be a bit dispiriting; the effect isn't a Tolkienesque vistas-beyond-vistas feeling in which untold stories lurk behind every rock, but the sense that the writers kept throwing in unnecessary details to keep themselves from being bored. The central - in some ways, film-defining - relationship between Thomas and Alice is painfully underdeveloped, leaving an enormous hole that nothing could possibly fill.

Meanwhile, Sergei Bodrov directs with listless slack that benefits nothing and no-one other than Bridges, Marco Beltrami's score drones on in a generic fantasy mode, and Newton Thomas Sigel shoots everything in a rainy palette that almost gives a sense of dour gravity to the film, except that it lacks the dramatic weight to support that. It's outrageously dumb, reductive, and lazy, more boring than bad - but it is aggressively boring. Aye, Bridges comes along and gives exactly the right perversity to make things fun in a dippy, loopy way, and so the aggregate effect of Seventh Son is not, in fact, boredom. But it should take more than one actor trying to blow a movie up from the inside to make it worth watching.

3/10

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B-FEST 2015

Different cinephiles will have different measures by which they can tell that one movie year "officially" gives way to the next, but for me, the answer is always clear enough: the year starts with B-Fest, the glorious 24-hour celebration of awful movies, sleep deprivation, and the sweat of 200 moviegoers crammed into uncomfortable seats on the campus of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

The 2015 incarnation of the fest - the 33rd overall, and my 14th - was an awfully strong one, the latest in a pretty sterling run of years that started in 2012. It felt, overall, a bit lower key than most years in terms of audience participation, and it lacked the benefit of a truly spectacular bad movie that gave everybody a lot to bite into (a bad movie that was just bad, though, now that was very much present). On a personal level, it was particularly nice to have a B-Fest that was mostly made up of new titles to me - only three out of 13 total were films I'd seen, and those three were all exemplary B-Fest candidates - after 2014 had been so over-familiar.

Indeed, it was all so terrific that I could barely stand to go to sleep, and ended up staying awake for all but about an hour and 45 minutes of the 24-hour whole - the best I've done in a great many years. And with that, no further ado: I give you my 2015 B-Fest Diary

Friday, 23 January, 6:00 PM
The kick-off was a '50s sci-fi film, my favorite way for B-Fests to ramp up (it was, in fact, the only such film and one of just two black and white movies, ignoring the inked-in Plan 9 from Outer Space). Now, the film in question, Creature with the Atom Brain, didn't prove to be an exceptionally memorable example of the form: with Edward L. Cahn directing a Curt Siodmak script, it's too slickly competent to have been excitingly terrible, while the basic premise - a gangster and a Nazi refugee creating radio-control zombies - is daffy without being particularly outré.

It's short enough that it's not a slog, though, and its unexpected mix of the expected kind of B-movie with a very different sort of B-level crime picture gives it more interest than anything else I've said. Basically, it's a police procedural about stopping zombies, when zombies were much less interesting than they are now. A worthy little noodle all around for the fan of the form, not the sort of thing that I'd say you must go out and see, but absolutely worth stopping for if it ever crosses your path.

7:15 PM
Time for a little Charles & Albert Band, with Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn. I had high expectations for this one when I found out it was playing (I stayed blind on the schedule until about 30 minutes before we started), and I am sorry to say it didn't quite live up to them. Combining a Star Wars knock-off with a Road Warrior knock off is, at any rate, a noble impulse for a craven producer, and the unrepentant '80s-ness of this film is pure delight, as is the tawdriness of its 3-D effects (it was one of the earlier independent productions during the '80s 3-D boom). It's certainly bad enough for B-Fest, with its discohesive screenplay and cheap mutants in the wasteland make-up, and the charming presence of Richard Moll in the cast (he is, by far, the best actor involved), and the clumsily staged action, and the sequel hook that didn't work. But there are many fake Mad Maxes, and some of them are vastly more entertaining and not just confusing and incoherent.

8:45 PM
I have only two real problems with this year's B-Fest, and one of them is that the films tended to clump by decade. Here, we arrive at Frogs, the first of multiple '70s films right in a row. And I'm not dissing those films - it was also, maybe, the best sustained run of movies of the event, and certainly the point where things flipped decisively from "these movies are letting me down" to "these movies are amazing". Frogs, in particular, might have had the best energy from the audience all night, owing mainly to the inevitability of how we'd all scream in terror at every shot of frogs, but also to the way it inaugurated a surprisingly durable theme of barely-sublimated homoeroticism in many of the films to follow. Also, I am happy to say, I got my first solid riff of the night out, with "Cry havoc, and let slip the frogs of war!".

I shall modestly suggest that those who want to know my deeper thoughts on the film can find them in my full review from 2012.

10:25 PM
We now join the magical world of 1970s made for television thrillers, with 1974's Killdozer. A movie that boldly elects to join the world of Duel rip-offs by possessing a bulldozer with an evil alien spirit.

It's ridiculous as hell, as director Jerry London finds ways to frame the bulldozer leering over hills and stalking around corners like it's not tens of tons of loud metal. The writing, meanwhile, divides its five-man team (six, really, but one dies pretty much right off the bat) into the hoariest clichés available in '74, turning them loose on a Pacific island to run around, state things which make no sense and are not germane, and then die in unbelievably easily-avoidable death traps. All leading up to a fencing match between the killdozer and a human-operated crane. It's breezy nonsense that doesn't take itself seriously but also doesn't look down on its own scenario, and it's watchably goofy in the absolute best ways. It's very nearly my pick for the surprise success of the fest; it made it almost all the way to the end. Fingers crossed that this means that a '70s TV movie will become a permanent, or at least reoccurring, part of the schedule in years to come.

There then followed the usual traditions: the short Wizard of Speed and Time, followed by the midnight screening of Plan 9. As is also traditional, I left to sleep, but I didn't really succeed in grabbing more than 10 minutes.

Saturday, 24 January, 1:35 AM
The blaxploitation slot was filled by the not-really-blaxploitation Black Mama, White Mama, one of the women in prison films made by American International Pictures in the Philippines. It's not the best, but it might very well be the boldest: a grindhouse re-do of The Defiant Ones, in which Lee (Pam Grier, the black mama) and Karen (Margaret Markov, the white mama) escape from the lesbianic clutches of an abusive prison, and flee, handcuffed to each other, across a nameless island, where Karen wants to reunite with her revolutionary cell, while Lee wants to find the fisherman who's going to help her leave the country. Only they want to go to completely opposite sides of the island. Meanwhile, the cops, the revolutionaries, and the gangsters hired by Lee's old pimp, are all giving them chase.

Not a surprise - it's been on my radar for years - but this was probably my favorite movie of the whole event. Eddie Romero's directing perfectly splits the middle between tacky exploitation and actually thrilling suspense well, and the story (co-written by Jonathan Demme, no less) is one of the most inventive, thought-through, and complex in the genre's spotty history. In truth, Grier isn't at her best in this situation, which is a pity (Grier being the best thing about every film you see her in is one of those truths you get accustomed to), but the pace, the snarky comedy - much of it centered around a giddily camped-up Sid Haig - and the relatively sharp political commentary, for AIP trash like this, all make it a real blast. Glad I finally got to catch up with it.

3:10 AM
A brief respite from the '70s with the first South Korean giant monster movie, Yongary, Monster from the Deep, of 1967. It's a fairly transparent attempt to do a Godzilla movie with plot elements and a tone borrowed from Gamera, and an effects budget somewhere in the middle, and director Kim Ki-duk (a different one) handles the whole circus well enough, though like most daikaiju eiga, the opening act, when we still don't officially know what's going on, drags on a bit. What salvages it is the cheesy optimism of the Yongary effects, with a store-bought blowtorch almost visibly protruding out of its mouth to make its fire breath, and its simple, derivative design looking forlorn enough to be appealing. But it's a bog-standard giant monster film, and I hard forgotten, during my year of daikaiju eiga, how grating it is to have to watch them dubbed (the Korean original of Yongary is believed lost).

4:40 AM
Back to the '70s we go, with the Roger Corman-produced Avalanche. I was prepared to sleep during this one, but it ended up being too unexpectedly magnetic: Corman's attempt to a snowbound version of The Towering Inferno with a fraction of the effects and cast budget is certainly peculiar, far more than should be possible for something so hopelessly derivative of the already-waning '70s disaster craze. Rock Hudson, Robert Forster, Jeannette Nolan, and a zonked-out Mia Farrow headline, and the melodrama is surprisingly crude and sleazy for a routine trek through the typical "arrogant developer, no heed for the natural world, romantic triangles" formula, with some startlingly cruel-minded deaths. Did sleep deprivation make this one seem better than it deserved? Undoubtedly, but I think it's clearly worth a look as an overreaching oddity, if nothing else.

6:20 AM
But it did mean that I had to pay the piper. I stayed up for enough of Cloak & Dagger, the first '80s film of Saturday, to determine that Dabney Coleman notwithstanding, a kiddie-flick adventure and James Bond-lite shenanigans was not what I was up for. This turned out to be a terrible mistake, apparently, for as I got fitful, restless sleep, one of my friends had a great time with it, and the audience was clearly enthusiastic and ready to go after most of them had taken the last three films off.

8:15 AM
I finally gave up on my failure to sleep slightly before the halfway point of Andy Hardy's Private Secretary, the 10th of 16 Andy Hardy films, and, with a release date of 1941, by far the oldest film at B-Fest. As I could tell within seconds of re-entering the auditorium, the audience was ecstatic to be watching this one, and I would begrudge nobody their pleasure.

For my part, I would have given anything for it to not be there. Or for me to have been able to sleep. I've seen enough of the Andy Hardy films to know that I absolutely hate them (and since I mostly hate Mickey Rooney, that's hardly a surprise), but not in the "this is so irredeemably bad" way. It's basically the '40s equivalent to the Marvel Cinematic Universe: a formula-driven franchise that made huge money for one of the biggest spenders of any studio, for years on end. It hardly makes any sense at all for it to be at a thing like B-Fest, and the fact that I'm much too familiar with the formulas at play made it impossible for me to view it as any kind of novelty and have any fun with it at all, despite the gasping from laughter going on around me. It felt more like homework, honestly. Though I respect that habitués of '40s studio comedies do not make up a key component of the B-Fest audience, and I am in a unique place to have watched that film, in that context, and not enjoyed myself.

There followed a breakfast break.

10:35 AM
After breakfast, we caught up with Can't Stop the Music, the last of the infamous disco musicals of 1980 to show up at B-Fest, following The Apple in 2005, and Xanadu in 2008. It's the best of the three, owing to having by far the best music, sort of the best acting (mostly thanks to Valerie Perrine), and the only even slightly sane narrative of the bunch - it's a heavily fictional biopic of the Village People set years too late, but it lacks supernatural elements of any kind, and is thus incomparably more realistic than the other two combined.

This, sadly, does means that it's the least-suited to the environment of B-Fest, where derangement goes over better than intentional camp, and screaming ineptitude goes over better than clumsily-handled mediocrity. So the riffing was a bit muted, and the energy of the room quieted down more than it should at that time of day. I mean, it's hilarious and bad, but it's not that hilarious. I enjoyed it fine, but I enjoyed it more the other time I saw it.

There followed a lunch break.

1:30 PM
And then there followed, ten minutes behind schedule (the only time we got off the entire day), Albert Pyun's ghastly 1988 Alien from L.A., starring Kathy Ireland as a bespectacled geek with a helium-pitched voice, as the daughter of an archaeologist who goes into a bizarre subterranean world to find him. It's frightening close, in tone, plot, and visual style, to the five-years-younger Super Mario Bros., only even worse. For Pyun is a rare and daunting non-talent, even by the standards of weak filmmakers with no budget.

I tried to sleep through this one, and couldn't really; the upshot, I guess, is that I got to see nearly all of the year's clear-cut worst film. Shrill and dumb comedy (like casting Ireland as a gawky, squeaky nerd, which I think is meant to be funny, but is just nauseating, every time she opens her mouth), a story that makes absolutely no sense on any level, and ugly cinematography hiding impoverished sets, all add up to a really hard sit, and I think it would have made sense on a number of levels to swap this one with Cloak & Dagger - it would retain the clumped-up '80s-ness of it, but this would be a perfect last film of the generally agreed-upon sleep hours, and kiddie junk is a better fit for the after-lunch hour.

Anyway, it's a hell of a thing to experience, so I won't tell anybody not to, though I'd hate to be the reason anyone sought it out.

3:00 PM
The '80s conclude with Miami Connection, which I have now seen three times and adored more with each visit. It's an action musical written by and starring and directed by non-native speakers of English - it was the brainchild of taekwondo marketing guru Y.K. Kim, who stars as the lead - and by their own admission hadn't seen but a handful of movies prior to making it. And it plays like somebody who had heard of all the trends of shitty '80s independent genre films was trying to combine them into a '50s-style message picture. Basic version: a rock group of orphaned college students who also study taekwondo and live together is forced to fight a collection of angry rockers, drug dealers, and motorcycle-riding ninjas. Lyrics include "Bikers by day, ninjas by night" (they are, in fact, ninjas by day as well), and "Against the ninja, we will fight to battle the sin", followed by the back-up singers chanting "Tae-kwon, tae-kwon! Tae-kwon, tae-kwon, tae-kwon-DO!", while clapping out of time.

You must hunt it down, if you haven't already seen it. It was on Netflix for a spell, but no longer; Amazon streams it for a small cost, and it's a bargain at twice the price

4:30 PM
The end of the festival was also the film that took me by surprise the most: Viva Knievel! starring legendary stunt biker Evel Knievel as himself and a miserable, bored Gene Kelly as his sidekick and mechanic, in a story about foiling a drug smuggling plot that involves murdering Knievel and hiding the dope in his corpse. It's one of the last places to see pre-comedy Leslie Nielsen at his most villainous - this is, in fact, not a comedy, which I suppose I probably need to specific - and the second film at B-Fest with Dabney Coleman, which was also a nice surprise.

The film is endlessly fucking weird, in the best possible late-'70s way, when blending action, farce, and thriller just sort of happened (see also: Smokey and the Bandit, from the same year). I'm forced to admit that it's probably terrible, but it's terrible to a high level of confidence and competence, and Knievel has the stuff even as an aging stuntman, even if he has nothing resembling the stuff as an actor. I enjoyed it almost despite myself as a time capsule of a bizarre moment in pop culture that was wedged into a totally unacceptable generic framework; for all that the ingredients are individually sort of routine, the whole effect is like absolutely nothing else, and I thoroughly recommend it.

Also, I got off the best riff in my history as a B-Fest attendee: when the characters mistook a dead man dressed in Knievel's clothes for Knievel himself, and a few minutes of weird complications ensued, I breathlessly declared that they had chosen the lesser of two Evels.

On that note, I shall cut myself off. Next year can't come soon enough!

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BOY OH BOY

There's very little doubt that The Boy Next Door is a terrible movie. But it is so cheerfully overt about it that it offers the very real possibility that everybody involved in making not only knew just how terrible it was, but in fact that they might actually have signed specifically because of that fact. We've all seen the ads, I hope and pray, where a sexually predatory high school student played by Ryan Guzman, (who looks every millisecond of the 26 years he had spent on this earth at the time of filming) leeringly talks about how much he likes "your mom's cookies"; that's not just a snarky laugh line that an in-on-the-joke trailer editor decided to foreground, that's the level that the entire film resides at. Sadly, there are no lines quite as punch-you-in-the-face as that elsewhere in the screenplay, but the overall level of ripe camp promised by that moment? Oh, the film teems with it.

The plot: Claire Peterson (Jennifer Lopez) teaches classic literature to gifted high school students in southern California, and she is in a misery. As related in a flagrantly impossible opening montage that uses confusing mismatches of sound and image in a manner that might be regarded as artistic by a moderately gifted film school freshman, Claire is in the midst of a hell of a marital crisis, precipitated by her husband, Garrett (John Corbett), having an affair with one of the women who works at his company's headquarters up in San Francisco. She smells like cookies, was apparently the line in an accidentally-discovered love letter that pushed Claire over the edge. And by the way, if you end up seeing The Boy Next Door, just accept that the next time you eat cookies, you'll be thinking of vaginas. The film wants it that way, and there's nothing wrong with it.

Throwing the bastard out - but not so far that, months later, they're not cautiously feeling out the shape of possibly reconciling - Claire only has left a 16-year-old son, Kevin (Ian Nelson), and a catty best friend and boss, Vicky (Kristen Chenoweth), whose overly mascaraed face and loud way of talking give the impression that she has a blood alcohol level in the double digits. But life, overall, isn't so terrible, especially when the old cancer-ridden man next door (Jack Wallace) welcomes his nephew into the house for their mutual benefit. This is Noah Sandborn (Guzman), who is in high school, though the film stops itself cold to make sure we completely, absolutely understand that he's of legal age, owing to how he dropped out for a couple of years, in the most anti-dramatic scene about the legal bedrock of an adult/adolescent sexual coupling since the bizarre Romeo & Juliet laws scene from Transfomers: Age of Extinction.

For, you see, as much as Noah is interested in being the mentor and stable male figure in Kevin's life (the film's refusal to capitalise on the avalanche of hints it drops in the early going that Kevin has a crush on Noah is a tragic failure to up the stakes to ever further heights of tawdriness), what he really wants is to make sweet love to Claire, as anyone might, given Lopez's terrifyingly perfect, unaging body and face. And, one night, after some of the most ridiculous innuendo ("Those kinds of shoes are for a woman trying to be sexy. DOT DOT DOT. You don’t need to try." And trust me, you can absolutely hear that "dot dot dot" in Guzman's line delivery), they go right on ahead and make that love, and director Rob Cohen eagerly plunges in, framing it with all nudity-free filthiness - hands in panties, hands on boobs, protracted male butt shots - of the storied height of the erotic thriller in the early 1990s. It's hard to say whether it's more arousingly smutty or unrelentingly silly, but it's a whole lot of both.

Of course, it turns out that Noah is a crazy, sexually obsessed stalker psycho, and he spends the rest of the movie Glenn Closing in on Claire's life, eventually going full-on slasher movie crazy in a finale that takes place in a burning barn. A barn which the film, with only eight real characters to choose from, places under the ownership of Vicky, despite her seeming to be as much of an agriculturalist as the stars of Sex and the City. And in so doing, it also ramps the gore up from "none whatsoever" to "Lucio Fulci", going totally batshit for ten straight minutes before ending almost the exact second that the primary conflict is over. The Boy Next Door has, perhaps, heard of denouements, but it does not give a shit for them.

Cohen has the good sense to direct this all with snazzy pacing and the shameless sense of building dread of a cheap horror film, while writer Barbara Curry feeds all the characters a steady supply of hokey pronouncements to speak as they tromp through her scenario that has already become implausible by the 30 minute mark and keeps getting bigger and bigger from there, including overwrought car crashes and a full-on Se7en-style crazyperson lair before it even hits the third act. Given everything, it's difficult to say what "good acting" might even look like here, though the cast is, at any rate, providing exactly the right kind of action. Lopez flutters and gasps and looks bestruck; Guzman smolders and flairs his pecs and stares with lust and madness poring out of him, totally refusing to contain his hamminess; Corbett is pleasant, boring, and dad-like. As vessels for a very overcooked, very unmodulated set of emotional states, the leads are perfect, and though I can't imagine these parts being challenging for an actor of even the slightest talent, that doesn't mean that one can't do a good job with them, even so.

It's crap, of course: utterly arbitrary (Claire passes by so many chances to shut the whole thing down that one must assume that she secretly likes it), cut with a minimum of cohesiveness in favor of a maximum of startling shots, even when we don't really need to be startled, and it has absolutely no insight into the human condition (unless "teen boys will go to any lengths for sex" is an insight). But it's a blast: entertaining as any trashy thriller could hope to be, and hilarious as any bad movie in a long time. Is it intentional? Maybe. I don't care. I just know that I had a hell of a time watching it, and if this is the kind of movie year we can expect from 2015, I'm all for it.

3/10

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