The Scoop: Flora, a “class two asteroid” suddenly takes a left turn starts hurtling toward a collision course with Earth. The only man qualified to stop this menace and save the world is studly rocket jock Jack Rankin (Robert Horton), who must team up with arch-nemesis Capt. Elliott (Richard Jaeckel) to destroy the killer rock. They’re successful, but they find out on the way home that they’ve mistakenly picked up an alien slime that spawns silly tentacle creatures with a taste for human flesh. Meanwhile, in between rousing bouts of square-jawed heroism, Rankin and Elliott fight over sexy doctor Lisa Benson (Luciana Paluzzi).
So basically, this starts out as “Armageddon” and then turns into “Alien.”
This Japanese production is filled with the cheap effects and clunky performances you’d expect from your favorite Godzilla movie, but with a cast of American and Italian actors. It’s completely laugh-worthy, of course, but the best thing about it is the swinging title by Richard Delvy, quite possibly the best theme song of any movie ever.
Best Bit: Besides the theme song? It's the groovy welcome back party. It's too swingin' for Earth, so they had to hold it on a space station.
Side Note: All the extras are American military personnel who were based in Japan at the time.
Companion Viewing: "The Wild, Wild Planet" (1965).
The Scoop: Starring Stuart Whitman, Janet Leigh, DeForest Kelley, Rory Calhoun and some of the deadliest rabbits outside of Monty Python, “Night of the Lepus” is one of the pioneering films in the ‘70s wave of eco-horror films and, needless to say, probably the silliest.
When Arizona rancher Cole Hillman’s (Calhoun) land is overrun with rabbits, he gets his university president pal Elgin Clark (Kelley) to call in heroic wildlife researchers Roy and Gerry Bennett (Whitman and Leigh) to find a nonpoisonous, environmentally friendly way to control the population. Unfortunately, the couple’s daughter Amanda (Melanie Fullerton) switches around some of the rabbits her parents are experimenting on, resulting in a plague of giant man-eating bunnies terrorizing the desert Southwest.
Director William F. Claxton and writers Don Holliday and Gene R. Kearney (working from what must be an absurd novel by Russell Braddon) throw in just about every genre cliché available, and while there is the occasional good moment, it’s just not enough. The fairly talented cast just sleepwalks through every scene and the script lets a lot of important pieces of plot happen offscreen. And no matter how much the breathless introduction tries to convince us how threatening rabbits can be, it’s all undercut by the ridiculous premise and bad slow motion effects.
“Night of the Lepus” is definitely a must-watch, but for all the wrong reasons.
Best Bit: The bunny attack inside the miner’s shack.
Side Note: The studio was afraid that if the audience knew the movie was about killer rabbits, they wouldn't watch it. So the novel's title ("The Year of the Angry Rabbit") was changed and no rabbits appeared on the original theater posters.
Companion Viewing: "Kingdom of the Spiders" (1977).
The Scoop: Two of Hollywood's classic romantic leads, Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, team up for this great suspense thriller, their only cinematic pairing.
Hepburn is Regina Lampert, a widow who discovers that her dead husband had a secret past and a big stash of hidden loot. Pretty soon, all his old cohorts are chasing her through Paris and it's up to Grant to save her -- if she can trust him. Where's the money hidden? Who will the killer strike next? The viewer is kept guessing right up to the end and Hepburn and Grant keep the romantic sparks flying. The supporting cast is filled with familiar faces, including James Coburn, George Kennedy and Walter Matthau.
Produced and directed by Stanley Donen, best known for his musicals, "Charade" is smart, witty and stylish. The script by Peter Stone is great, as is the music by Henry Mancini. Top notch all the way. This is one of the best films Hitchcock never made.
Best Bit: Just pick any bit of banter between Hepburn and Grant. It's all great.
Side Note: At the British Academy Awards, this performance earned Grant a nomination for Best Foreign Actor -- even though he was born and raised in London.
Companion Viewing: "Suspicion" (1941) and "The Usual Suspects" (1995).
The Scoop: Can I cut to the chase here? This movie is a big old freakin' waste of time. As a serious horror/thriller, it's a complete pile of twaddle. As a campy bad movie laughfest, it has a few moments, but mostly fails at that too.
While on spring break in Cancun, a completely douchey womanizing film student cleverly named Adam (Robert Mann) meets a mysterious hottie cleverly named Lilith (Natalie Denise Sperl). When he returns home, she turns up at one of his parties and starts leaving corpses in her wake. Turns out she's a succubus, a female demon who consumes the souls of men. (In case you weren't tipped off to that by the title, it's literally spelled out for you in the movie. Literally. Because nothing says "tense climactic battle" like a little impromptu spelling bee.) Sperl isn't so bad as Lilith, and is even kind of sexy. But everything else about the movie is just plain wrong.
The brain child of writer/director Kim Bass (who got his start writing for "In Living Color," oddly enough) is completely amateurish on every level. The script is horrible and cliché-ridden, the direction and editing are muddled, and the acting is wooden at best. All the male actors look like they came out of the same cookie cutter from Pricks 'R' Us. And for a movie with a lot of sex in it, there's absolutely no nudity. You do get to see plenty of Mann's pasty, mole-filled back, though.
"Succubus: Hell Bent" is completely insulting to women, film students, ambulance drivers and most other intelligent people. Oh, and did I mention that there's a demonic fighter jet dogfight? Betcha weren't expecting that!
Save yourself and get out now!
Best Bit: Gary Busey's cameo as the whacked-out demon hunter. I'm not sure Busey knew he was really shooting a movie. Also look for really horrible cameos by David Keith, Lorenzo Lamas and Kelly Hu.
Side Note: Want a mythology lesson? Here are the real stories behind succubi and Lilith.
Take a Look: The trailer. You've got to love any movie in which the leads are the last two actors credited, and the first four combined have about 10 minutes of screen time, max:
The Scoop: Forget "Vegas in Space." Forget "Paris is Burning." Hell, even forget "Purple Rain." This is officially the gayest movie ever made.
It's the same old trying-to-be-a-star plot that's been rehashed far too many times, but this time is stars the Village People on the downside of their popularity. And the fact that they seem to be trying so hard to convince the world that they're not gay just makes the flames coming out of the screen that much more obvious. Add to that the bad dialogue, flashy disco costumes (which, the film would have us believe, the guys wear in their daily lives, too) and the career launch of Steve Gutenberg as a struggling composer, and you've got a righteous stinker. A flaming stinker, even.
Want to know who to blame? How about producer/writer Allen Carr, director Nancy Walker, and of course the Village People's musical svengali, Jacques Morali.
This is one of the quintessential bad movies.
Best Line: "James is the name, and flame's my game!"
Best Musical Number: The deliriously campy "Y.M.C.A." number, which is (sadly) the only one of their good hits that made it into the film.
Side Note: Gutenberg's character, Jack Morrell, is just a thinly-veiled version Morali.
Companion Viewing: "Breaking 2: Electric Boogaloo" (1984), "Purple Rain" (1984) and "Glitter" (2001).
The Scoop: For one brief, shining moment this was the quintessential Biker Movie -- until the release of the far superior "Easy Rider" a few years later.
Peter Fonda plays Heavenly Blues, the leader of a biker gang from Southern California. When his buddy Loser (Bruce Dern) gets his bike stolen, they try to retrieve it, only for Loser to wind up badly hurt in the hospital. The gang tries to bust him out, only to have Loser die in the process. They hold a makeshift funeral and have a mourning party in an old church, which eventually leads to a confrontation with the local upstanding conservative citizens. And that's it. Pretty basic, really. Nancy Sinatra and Diane Ladd co-star in the obligatory girlfriend roles, while the rest of the gang is made up of various B-movie misfits and hangers-on.
While the plot and characters of "The Wild Angels" don't amount to much, the attitude and celebration of biker culture shine through. Despite its poor production values, it is a classic of its kind.
Best Line: "We want to be free! Free to do what we want to do! We want to be free to ride! To ride our machines without being hassled by the man! We want to get loaded! And we want to have a good time! And that's what we're gonna do! We're gonna have a good time! We're gonna have a party!"
Side Note: Rumor has it that Laura Dern was conceived on the set of this one.
Companion Viewing: "Easy Rider" (1969) and "The Wild One" (1954).
The Scoop: Unlike “Bettie Page: Dark Angel,” this can be considered a true biopic of the iconic pinup queen. However, also unlike that film, “The Notorious Bettie Page” lacks a bit of sizzle.
Yet that’s not to say that Mary Harron’s film isn’t worth watching. Particularly exciting is Gretchen Mol’s performance in the title role. For all her fame and influence, Bettie Page is an idol who is frozen in amber for us. All we know of her comes from hundreds of still photographs and just a few film shorts, most of which are devoted more to particular fetishes rather than Bettie’s own considerable personality – and all of which came for just a short period of her life.
But Mol fills in the blanks wonderfully well. She bears a remarkable resemblance to Bettie and recreates the photogenic personality we know from all those pinups. But she also expands on that to bring to life a complex character who maintains a childlike innocence about her powerful sexuality, but who enjoys exercising it nonetheless. Plus, she’s not afraid to go the full monty with a refreshing exuberance.
The supporting cast -- which includes Chris Bauer as Irving Klaw, Lili Taylor as Paula Klaw, and David Straithairn as Sen. Estes Kefauver – is also excellent.
Also of note is the cinematography of Mott Hupfel. His rich black and white photography creates a gritty, noir-esque vision of 1950s New York that also faithfully recreates the look and feel of Page’s pinup work with the Klaws. For the Miami sequences, Hupfel switches to a brilliant, pastel-filled color palette that matches the sunny world of Bunny Yeager’s photos of Bettie.
So where’s the problem? Mostly it’s in the screenplay by Harron and Guinivere Turner, who also teamed up for "American Psycho." There is an evocative opening sequence introducing us to the world of 1950s adult bookstores, but the script quickly devolves from there into a clichéd naïve-country-girl-in-the-big-city take on Page’s pinup career. While we see all of the key moments in Bettie’s life from her start in modeling in New York in 1953 to her religious awakening in Miami in 1959, there is not depth or understanding to it. Also absent are all but a few hints of some of the darker, more extreme aspects of Page’s combustible sexuality.
Nowhere does the film really get under Bettie’s skin. So, consequently, it can’t get under the audience’s skin either. At the end of the film, Page remains just as much of a mystery to us as she was at the beginning, despite Mol’s best efforts to give us a glimpse at the real Bettie Page.
The film also avoids dealing with the mess of Page’s post-modeling life, which included evangelic missions, paranoid schizophrenia, an attempted murder trial, years in a psychiatric institution, followed by some messy copyright battles over her image in the 1990s. (She died in seclusion in 2008 at the age of 85). But that’s just as well, because that’s not the Bettie Page we want to remember.
We want to remember the Bettie staring back at us from all those classic pinup shots – energetic, confident and just as enticing to men as to women, generation after generation. “The Notorious Bettie Page” makes a spirited effort to capture that Bettie, but falls just a bit short.
Best Line: "I'm not ashamed. Adam and Eve were naked in the Garden of Eden, weren't they? When they sinned, they put on clothes."
Side Note: This film is filled with improper camera technique on the part of the actors playing the photographers. While most of the cameras being used are period accurate, the actors are just waving them around without any clue of how they were supposed to be handled.
Companion Viewing: "Bettie Page: Dark Angel" (2004) and "I Shot Andy Warhol" (1996).
The Scoop: Let's cut to the chase. Gavin Grazer and Joe Wein's film "Scorched" is just another one of those self-consciously quirky indie comedies that tries too hard to be clever for its own good.
In a nondescript California desert town (apparently named Desert, California), three disgruntled employees of the local bank each plot come up with their own plans to rob the bank, and execute their heists on the same weekend. There's Stewart (Paolo Costanzo) and his numbskull pal Max (David Krumholtz) who "borrow" $250,000 from the mini-vault to use on an all-or-nothing roulette bet in Las Vegas. Sheila (Alicia Silverstone) enlists new firefighter pal Max (Ivan Sergei) to empty out the ATMs to get back at her ex-boyfriend, the douchebag bank manager Rick (Joshua Leonard). And then there's Woody Harrelson in the role he was born to play -- Woods, the spaced-out desert rat assistant manager who wants to get revenge on infomercial con artist Mr. Merchant (John Cleese) by cleaning out his safe deposit box. Also mixed up in the shenanigans are new employee Doleman (Marcus Thomas) and his free-spirited pal Shmally (Rachel Leigh Cook).
The plot, which relies on such improbabilities as the banks lack of 24/7 video cameras and the fact that ducks live wild in the desert, plays out pretty much as you'd expect. The comedy is pretty half-baked, unless your idea of fun is watching Woody Harrelson try to hold his own while acting opposite various animals. And, except for Silverstone and Costanzo, everyone else pretty much mails it in.
Sure, there are worse ways to spend 90 minutes of your life. But there are also lots of better things you can do with your time than spending it on this well-meaning but forgettable trifle.
Best Bit: Jeffrey Tambor's cameo as the spaced-out bank executive.
Side Note: The horned toad Woods is talking to in the desert at the beginning is actually an Australian bearded dragon, which is not native to California.
The Scoop:
