Jaws: The Revenge (1987)

True confessions of a movie junkie: back when I was a teenager, I had an internship at a neighborhood newspaper. I was given a pass to go review Jaws: The Revenge and I was so excited about the prospect, I gave the movie a good review. Looking back, I am likely the only person in the world to have done so. Consider this post me righting a grievous wrong.

Most people who review Jaws The Revenge on their blogs nowadays seem to do so to prove they are intellectually superior to it. The problem is that proving you're intellectually superior to a movie this dumb is like proving you were born with a torso. Even someone with a zero IQ is intellectually superior to Jaws: The Revenge.

The movie starts with yet another Great White Shark invading the waters of Amity Island. It's Christmas time, so there's no swimmers which makes me wonder why the shark would even bother. Oh, that's right: because the Brody family still lives on Amity Island and youngest son Sean is a deputy. Deputy Sean is sent out on the water to move some driftwood and Mr. Whitey pops out of the water to say "Hello, my name is Sharkey Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die!" He then eats Sean, an ignoble end to a character who was always kinda treated shoddily in this series and yet who somehow went from being 5 years old in 1975 to 30 just 12 years later.

Oldest son Michael (Lance Guest) convinces mom Ellen (Lorraine Gary, reprising her role from the first two films) to come and stay in Bermuda with him, his wife and his daughter. The weather's better and there's no sharks. She agrees, so Mr. Whitey decides to follow her to Bermuda because he has more Brody family members to kill, you see. Yes, the shark is actually exacting revenge on the family for the death of the first shark in the original movie. I promise you I did not make that up and I am quite sober. In the novelization, the shark is an instrument of vengeance for a voodoo witch doctor who is pissed at Michael. That almost makes sense, unlike what we actually get.

Ellen meets roguish pilot Hoagie--Michael Caine proving he was willing to do anything for money--and is having a good time unaware that Mr. Whitey has arrived. Michael and his partner Jake (Mario Van Peebles) are aware of Mr. Whitey since he's already tried taking a bite out of Michael. Rather than worry Mom, they decide to try to track the shark. Eventually Mr. Whitey tries taking a bite out of Mike's precocious daughter (Judith Barsi), so Ellen steals Michael's boat and goes out on the ocean to do something, but I'm not sure exactly what. I don't think the writers knew what she was supposed to do either. Certainly she didn't know what she was supposed to do. Michael, Hoagie, and Jake go to the rescue. Hoagie swims but stays dry, Jake falls into the shark's mouth and survives, and the shark eventually roars before exploding once it's impaled. How a shark roars then explodes upon being impaled, I don't know.

If I've made the movie sound more entertaining than it actually is, I apologize. It's a bad habit of mine and I really should break it.

The problems with this movie would likely fill a book. For one, it decides to ignore Jaws 3-D (1983). As bad as Jaws 3-D is--and I fully recognize it's a terrible movie even though I love it--Jaws 3-D almost makes some sort of sense. This film is pure nonsense. On top of that, the acting is bad, the dialogue worse, and the shark looks ridiculous. There isn't even a good kill count in the film as only three people get attacked and one of them survives for reasons that make no sense. There's also an awful lot of time spent on the romance between Ellen and Hoagie. That's not necessarily a bad thing since it's actually a portrayal of an older couple falling in love, something surprising for a movie of this genre. However, there's also a lot of time spent on Michael being jealous and suspicious of Hoagie that drags the thing down.  In short, the main plot is stupid and the subplots are boring. Sure, there's some unintentional laughs in the thing but there's an equally large number of cringe-inducing scenes.

Exactly why I liked this film at 16 is something I'll never know. Especially when I had the common sense to hate equally bad movies. Maybe just because it was a Jaws movie and the original is one of my all time favorite movies. At any rate, if you read my review in 1987, I apologize. And for those of you thinking this thing can't possibly be as bad as I'm now saying...it is.

Serial Saturday: The Lost City (1935)

 I'm all for watching movies in the context of their times. I can watch something like the 1943 Batman serial and not lose my head when the narrator refers to "shifty-eyed Japs" since I'm aware that the serial was made a year or so after Pearl Harbor and we were at war with the Japanese. I'm perfectly willing to take the Looney Tunes cartoons at face value and am no more offended by Speedy Gonzales than I am Pepe Le Pew.Watching Peter Lorre or Warner Oland play Mr. Moto or Charlie Chan doesn't fill me with malignant hatred. After all, movies are not made in a vacuum. They are reflections of current events, trends, attitudes, and thoughts. But every so often, there comes along a movie so outrageous that even I can't reconcile it to anything other than pure out and out racial hatred. The Lost City, a 1935 serial from Sherman Krellberg, is one such unfortunate piece of celluloid history.

The Lost City opens with the coming apocalypse by bad weather. More specifically, stock footage of really bad storms ravaging the world opens the serial. Electrical Engineer Bruce Gordon (Kane Richmond) discovers that the source of the storms is in Darkest Africa, so he gathers four greedy scientist friends and one of the more annoying sidekicks in movie history (Eddie Fetherstone) and off they go. They eventually find The Lost City. Yes, that's the name of it. Not The Lost City of...just The Lost City. Even the denizens there call it that. The Lost City is ruled by power mad Zolok (William "Stage" Boyd), who wants to rule the world. Or destroy the world. Or do something. We're actually not quite sure what. Zolok is holding scientist Dr. Manyus and his daughter hostage. Manyus (Josef Swickard) looks to be about 108, so naturally daughter Natcha (Claudia Dell) is 20-something. Because of course she is. Creepy old scientists in serials always had 20-something daughters.

Manyus has a machine that turns short black men who scream like little girls into giant muscle bound black men who hoot and grunt. I'm sorry to say that I'm not making that up. These black giants will figure into Zolok's plan for the world, whenever he figures out exactly what that is. Manyus, for his part, protests this evil doing since his machine is meant for the good of mankind. How a machine that turns short black men that scream like little girls into giant black man who grunt is for the good of mankind, I don't know. You will find there are many things in this serial I can't explain.

The heroes escape with Manyus and his daughter around chapter 3. The serial then goes into an absolute exercise in pointlessness. The greedy friends who you thought might figure into something are all dead by chapter four, having done absolutely nothing to advance the story in the slightest. Our heroes wander aimlessly around the jungle (which looks more like the park around the corner from me than an actual jungle, but whatever). They meet various people who want to use Manyus' machine for their own purposes: an arab named Ben Ali (who doesn't even have the short black guys to start with) and an alarmingly flat chested Queen Rama who wears an outfit obviously designed for someone with a sexier build. Point in fact, all the men in the serial have larger chests than the women and all the women wear outfits designed for people with better builds.

For you prudish people who think the above comment was out of line, trust me. By the time you get to Queen Rama in this thing, you too will be thinking these thoughts.

Zolok sends particularly incompetent henchman Appolyn (Jerry Frank) after our heroes. Also chasing them are weird little Gorzo (Billy Bletcher) and huge, indestructible grunting black henchman Hugo (Sam Baker).

It all comes to a bizarre end where our heroes are recaptured, returned to the Lost City, escape again, and Zolok stumbles around drunkenly for ten minutes before blowing himself up.

A little over ten years ago, The Lost City was the center of an internet controversy. A so-called magazine writer, wanting to cash in on the upcoming movie version of The Producers, wanted to do an article linking producer Sherman Krellberg and the fictional Max Bialystock. This writer posted his proposed idea on a movie serial message board, which led to a huge fight with the owner of said board. Said owner not only ranted about the evils of The Lost City, he basically declared any conversation about the serial verboten unless it was in agreement with his stance. Following that, a number of serial fans, probably just to be contrary, decided that The Lost City not only wasn't racist, it was a great serial! Now, while this particular board owner is wrong about a great many things, even I have to say he wasn't 100% wrong about The Lost City.

For one thing, it is racist. Outrageously racist. You may be tempted to dismiss it as a product of it's time and say that the natives aren't any different than what you would find in your standard Tarzan movie of the time. But that's a fallacy. If there's one scene in the entire 12 chapters that hammers home the racial attitude of the serial, it comes up in chapter 8. Our heroes come across a tribe of Spider People. One of the Spider People approaches Manyus to "cure him of his blackness". God help me, Manyus has a serum that is able to turn black people into white people. After Manyus does this--I mean actually turning a black person into a white person--he is heartily congratulated by the hero! It is a scene that when it was over I actually said out loud "I did not just see that". Oh, but I had!

Even if you squeeze your eyes shut, cover your ears, and go "La la la--I don't see no racism here!", the serial is still awful. The above mentioned scene goes on for what feels like forever. The pacing in the entire serial is awful. The pacing can best be described as lethargy meets apathy with a cure for insomnia tossed in. Nothing--and I mean nothing--of consequence happens in this serial. You can literally remove chapters 3-11 and not miss a beat. Then again, you can also remove chapters 1, 2, and 12 at the same time and not miss a beat. One chapter starts with the entire last half of the previous chapter! Then there's the dialogue. Somebody actually got paid to write "That sounds like a white woman's scream!"

Come to it, the only thing worse than the dialogue and pace is the acting. Kane Richmond is usually pretty good in these things, but even he looks like he bored with the whole affair. Everyone else is that much worse. The scene where Kane proposes to the heroine at the end? Her immortal response is "Why--umm--yes, Bruce".

Some of you may have gotten the crazy idea that this might be fun to watch after all--a so bad it's good affair. No, just no. If you try, you'll wonder why you spent four hours of your life watching this instead of doing something more fun like doing laundry or clipping your toenails. It's a rotten, hateful serial that's just plain bad all around. It isn't fun, it isn't funny, it isn't even remotely entertaining. Is it the absolute worst serial ever? Maybe not. There are a couple that are more boring and lacking the "what the hell was that?" moments that this one does on occassion manage. Problem is, it isn't worth suffering the whole thing for those few moments.

3D Thursday: Robot Monster (1953)

Back in 1978, Harry and Michael Medved wrote a book called The 50 Worst Movies of All Time. In it, they listed  1953's infamous Robot Monster as the worst movie of all time. They changed their minds two years later when they wrote The Golden Turkey Awards and gave the title of worst movie to Ed Wood's equally infamous Plan Nine From Outer Space. To not put too fine a point to it and yet still try to sound somewhat diplomatic, the Medveds were wrong.

Let me qualify that. The book ultimately is their opinion of what the 50 worst movies are. All movie criticism is ultimately that. However, the movies in the book, while undeniably bad, really don't deserve that title. Truly bad movies are boring and unwatchable. Try watching something like The Phantom of 42nd Street or The Clutching Hand. Both of those were directed by a man named Albert Hermann. Unless you're a serial geek like me, you've probably never heard of Albert Hermann, and for good reason. Albert Hermann was a man who could take a 60 minute B-movie like The Phantom of 42nd Street and make it feel like it ran for 60 hours. Considering the fact that his serial The Clutching Hand runs over 5 hours, you can extrapolate how long that one feels. Albert Hermann made boring, seemingly never-ending dreck and he did it with shocking consistency.

Robot Monster, if nothing else, is not boring. It can probably best be described as crack cocaine for the brain and eyes. It's a dizzying 66 minutes of "wait, what?" that no mere synopsis could ever do justice to. It's a movie you need to see to believe, you won't believe you've seen, and you'll have to see again just to believe that you've seen it. That, my friends, is Robot Monster.

The plot has the earth invaded by an alien named Ro-Man (George Barrows). Ro-Man is basically a guy in a gorilla suit with something vaguely resembling a space helmet on his head. Ro-Man has managed to destroy all but six hu-mans. Actually, there's eight people still left on the planet, but two of them had common sense enough to not actually appear in the movie. The six are a Scientist (John Mylong), his wife (Selena Royale), his oldest daughter Alice (Claudia Barrett), his two young kids Johnny (Gregory Moffett) and Carla (Pamela Paulson), and his assistant Roy (George Nader). Great Guidance Ro-Man (Barrows again) orders his underling to seek out and destroy the pesky hu-mans. Ro-Man does his best, which is usually pretty inept. He does manage to strangle Carla and pummel Roy, but then he falls for "Al-lice" and kidnaps her instead of killing her. This annoys Great Guidance, who kills Ro-Man and unleashes earthquakes and prehistoric reptiles to kill all who remain. In the film's twist ending, ripped right off of the same year's Invaders From Mars, we find out this was all a dream of Johnny's. Then Ro-Man comes out of a cave.

Actually, the only a dream ending is telegraphed five minutes into the movie. You just have to pay even half-attention to know what's happening. Though that does raise a few questions about what type of kid Johnny is. I mean, seeing as to how his dream involved his younger sister being strangled and his older sister being tied up and almost forced to have sex with a gorilla spaceman, well...

Like I said before, Robot Monster is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a good movie. You won't confuse it with the likes of Dial M For Murder. However, it's also not the worst movie ever made (neither is Plan Nine for that matter). It's not even the worst 3D movie ever made, even if you take 3D porn out of the equation. It's not even the worst 3D movie of the 1950s. I can make a pretty strong argument that Flight to Tangier and Jivaro go on far too long and are far more boring for the 50s movies. I can make a better argument that Domo Arigato, Run For Cover, and Camp Blood are all far worse 3D movies.

What it is, however, is excessively entertaining. Once Ro-Man shows up, you just sort of hold on tight and go along for the ride. It's lunacy is an undeniable part of it's charm, too. Lines like "I must--yet I cannot. How do you calculate that? At what point do must and cannot meet on the graph. I cannot--yet I must", "you look like a pooped-out pinwheel!" (!) and "you're so bossy you should be milked before you come home at night" abound. That's bad? No, my friend, that's  brilliant.  Do you know why? Because we know those lines and probably a couple dozen more. Anyone who has ever heard them knows them and is likely to quote them. Truly bad movies like Domo Arigato don't have lines like that. Name me one memorable line from a crapper like Hillbilly Monster. You can't, probably because you've mercifully never heard of Hillbilly Monster and even if you had, you'd be hard pressed to come up with a quotable line from it!

Contrary to popular belief, Robot Monster was shot in 12 days (not four like the Medveds claim) for a budget under $20,000. It was shot with a new, never before (or since) used 3D camera rig called Tru Stereo Three Dimension, mostly in Bronson Canyon. Funny enough, a far worse 3D movie in the 80s was also shot in Bronson Canyon (Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared Syn). Despite these conditions, the cast tries there best, even if they do get defeated by the dialogue sometimes. And stunningly enough, the 3D is actually really, really good. In other words, this isn't the incompetent piece of garbled mess you may have heard it is.

Robot Monster has been a fixture on home video for nearly 30 years. The late, lamented Rhino Video even had a (horrible) anaglyphic videotape release in 1991 that had a couple of looped in joke lines. Mystery Science Theater 3000 did the film. This is a film that won't die. Unfortunately, the greatest crime against the film--besides the Medveds' ill-informed books--comes from the so-called rights holder, one Wade Williams. Whether or not he actually owns the rights to Robot Monster, like almost every film he claims to own the rights to, he doesn't care about any sort of restoration of the movie. He's content to let this and it's spiritual sister movie Cat Women of the Moon rot away instead of preserving them and getting them on 3D Blu Ray. That's a shame, since the 3D is so good, the movie deserves to be released on 3D Blu Ray. It's mind-boggling to me that something like The Flesh and Blood Show will get a 3D Blu Ray release, but not this.

If you truly want to appreciate this movie, see it in a theater in 3D with a packed audience. I've done that three times and outside of a couple of cranky old people, the majority of the audience loved it. They laughed with it.They were entertained by it. And isn't that the ultimate purpose of any movie? To entertain it's audience?