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NEWS AND VIEWS - FEBRUARY 2021
WRITING NEWS Don't really have anything to report this month. I'm currently working on getting The Brassfire Fleet ready for publication, but I still haven't decided when I'm going to publish it...maybe this summer? We'll see. I'm also thinking I'm probably going to have to add a hyphen to the title, making it The Brass-Fire Fleet rather than The Brassfire Fleet, because (as I recently discovered to my chagrin) when you write out "BRASSFIRE" in all caps it looks very similar to the word "BRASSEIRE", and I, uhh, don't really want people thinking this book is all about bras. Sure, I'd probably sell more copies, but I don't want to disappoint anyone, you know? * * * * * * * * MY FAVORITE RIFFTRAX'D MOVIES A couple of years ago I made a list of my top ten MST3K episodes. Here, for the heck of it, are my top ten Rifftrax riffs. 1) R.O.T.O.R. R.O.T.O.R. is a RoboCop (and also Terminator) rip-off from the late 80's, and it's probably the most fascinatingly bad movie I've ever seen in my whole stinkin' life. I was a fan of this one long before the Rifftrax guys got ahold of it; my friend Ant gave me a VHS copy years ago, and I'd already seen it probably ten times before the Rifftrax riff came out. R.O.T.O.R. has it all: ludicrous action scenes, an absolutely insane script, and a killer robot with a porn mustache, pot belly, and "sensor recall" that allows him to see through time. I highly recommend reading Ken Begg's hilarious review/recap of the film over at Jabootu, to get the flavor of it. 2) Miami Connection. An oddball ninja movie from the 80's, this one was rediscovered in the early 2010's and quickly developed a cult following. Basically, it's about these five shirtless dudes, who are all Taekwondo experts, and who are also in a band called Dragon Sound, and who also all live together, and who eventually run afoul of some cocaine-dealing motorcycle ninjas. It's a strange, colorful, eye-popping film, full of weird stuff, and the acting is pretty dang bad. One of the five dudes is played by this guy Y.K. Kim, who speaks amusingly fractured English throughout the film (but everyone carries on like they understand him perfectly). 3) The Galaxy Invader. I have a soft spot for this film, which I reviewed on this very website back in 2019. A green, warty alien crashes his UFO (I guess?) out in the woods somewhere and finds himself on the run from a bunch of hollering rednecks. Joe, a crabby country hick in a scuzzy t-shirt, steals the alien's flare gun and tries to sell it to the Soviets. Joe's creaky-voiced performance (he sounds like an old prospector) is probably the most enjoyable thing about the movie. And the riffing is really good in this one. 4) The Guy From Harlem. An amusingly amateurish blaxploitation flick about a Miami detective who has to protect "the wife of an African head of state" from assassins, and then rescue a gangster's daughter from the usual white hoodlums. The description on the Rifftrax site sums it up: "It trades most of the sleaze, grime, and, well, exploitation that you expect from the genre for dopiness, sexual situations that fail to lead to actual sex, a clumsy confused sweetness, and more botched lines per minute than anything we've ever seen." And the riffing is some of the best the boys have ever done. 5) Wizards of the Lost Kingdom. This one's an Argentinian fantasy movie, for kids, produced by schlockmeister Roger Corman. A bored-looking Bo Svenson, obviously embarrassed to be in this movie, teams up with a wizard-kid to fight the forces of Thom Christopher, who plays a scenery-chewing bad guy. Back when I was a kid I was actually suckered into renting this movie from the video store, and I'm still bitter about it, because it's really dumb, but there's a lot of crazy stuff here for the Rifftrax guys to play with (Gulfax, for example, a giant Chewbacca-like sidekick whose language sounds like an old man's gargling). Much of the footage in the film was taken from some other movie and stapled into this one, and its inclusion makes no sense whatsoever. After the wizard-kid stabs an "insect-woman", causing some kind of fluid to pour out of the wound, Mike delivers my favorite riff of the film: "My body juice! No! I need that to stay in my body!" 6) The Brainiac. A peculiar Mexican movie about a smarmy sorcerer who comes back to life three hundred years after being burned at the stake, to take revenge on the descendants of the men who sentenced him to death. Occasionally he turns into this really weird-looking monster with a forked tongue, and goes around hypnotizing people and eating their brains. There's just a lot of strange stuff going on in this movie (why does the evil baron keep a bowl of intact brains in his cabinet?) and the dub is funny, too. 7) Birdemic. An unlikely romance between Rod, a boring nobody, and Nathalie, a gorgeous fashion model, is interrupted by some horrible CGI birds, who have apparently gone berserk over the harm humans are doing to the environment. This is a really silly movie, with long driving and parking sequences, incredibly bad special effects (the birds look like clip art), bad acting, bad writing, and several bemusing digressions -- the scene where Rob meets Nathalie's mother is completely unnecessary, for example (the Rifftrax guys get a lot of great jokes out of it, however). I usually prefer older movies to newer movies like this one, but Birdemic is special and it really has to be seen to be believed. 8) Samurai Cop. A really bad actioner from the 1980's, about a sinewy, long-haired cop (vaguely reminiscent of Riggs from Lethal Weapon) who goes after the Japanese yakuza in Los Angeles. He gets into gun fights, romances a blonde, and finally has to sword-fight Robert Z'Dar at the end of the movie. The dialogue is cringey and terrible, the ADR is a weird, and after star Matt Hannon cut his hair (thinking the shoot was over) the director had him wear a lady's wig for reshoots. A lot of bad movies are kind of dull and depressing to look at, but this one is bright, sunny, and oversaturated. 9) Neutron the Atomic Superman Vs. the Death Robots. Another Mexican movie, this one's about a crime-fighting masked wrestler called Neutron who tries to prevent the evil Dr. Caronte (another masked wrestler, but also a genius scientist) from obtaining the "formula" for a neutron bomb. Dr. Caronte revives the brains of several dead scientists to help him piece together the formula, but the brains need fresh blood, so every few minutes he has to send his sidekick Nick out into town to get some. Nick, a little misshapen guy with a unibrow and a very funny high-pitched voice, commands a bunch of shambling monsters. Neutron fights the monsters, and at the end of movie he fights Caronte. This one's full of bumbling police, goofy fight scenes, and dumb situations, and the dub is a riot. I think this movie would have made for a pretty good MST3K episode. 10) Wonder Women. A trippy 70's flick made in the Philippines, I think, about an evil female scientist who has figured out how to do brain transplants or something. She's got this huge fortress and a whole army of scantily-clad henchwomen, and even a couple of Frankenstein-like monsters on hand, but she's no match for the lumpy, leisure suit-wearing insurance agent who shows up to investigate her crimes. Lots of funny stuff in this one, including a very long fight/chase scene which just goes on and on. Honorable mentions: The Room, Ator: The Fighting Eagle, Death Promise, Suburban Sasquatch, Feeders and Feeders 2, Attack From Space, and Robo Vampire. |