Posted by jukkahoo
Last weekend was a Great Feast of some Appallingly Bad Movies. There are motion pictures men are not actually meant to see. That's why some strong, silent types, the very ones that keep this planet sane and whole, are needed, in order for the rest of you to live your daily humdrum in relative easy and peace of mind.
Have you ever seen a movie starring Fabio? Or a Pakistani horror musical? Or a film starring William Shatner, Ernst Borgnine, John Travolta and Tom Skerrit, where the last twenty minutes contain mostly devilworshippers melting in the rain, in a very graphic way? Or a movie with over 500-year old giant conqistador, that snaps out of his deep slumber and starts to terrorise Southern California? Or a cheapo remake of a really cheapo barbarian movie, where the most impressive bits are the ones they ripped from the original movie, ghastly bad Deathstalker? Or how about something weird and far-out, like Queen Kong, a movie that was released 25-years after it was made and features not only female Giant Ape, but is also a musical, a comedy, a feminist spectacle and stars a skinny little blond guy as Ray Fay? Or...
Needless to say, the films in question were very entertaining and should be consumed with maximum amounts of alcoholic beverages. Beer is the best, but cheap whisky is a jolly good "kyytipoika".
21 movies in 48 hours. Not a lot of sleep. Tired now.
I finished with the The Assassins of Tamurin by S. D. Tower. She (the author) is apparently an internationally published author of espionage thrillers. Good for her. The book was a mixed bag of good ideas and solid writing, and some silly padding plus mediocre plotting. I have never liked books that tell "what is going to happen next" in two lines and then take fifty pages in order to "flesh it out".
But I was more pleased than aggravated with this one. It reads a lot like a romantic YA novel, but is a bit more "adult" than that. I liked most of the characters, even thou not that many were "fleshed out" enough (the protagonist was good). Little bit of everything you'd expect from a fantasy novel was in this one. The setting "sounded" more like Far East, than it actually "felt" like, but it was a pleasantly different from the "normal" pseudo medieval setting of phat phantasy. Recommended with slight reservations, entertaining.
I may live to regret this but my first thought is that a movie with William Shatner, Ernst Borgnine, John Travolta and Tom Skerrit cannot be bad.
Jukka will now proceed to tell me how wrong I am.
Posted by: Anna | February 17, 2004 at 10:41
The movie in question is called The Devil's Rain. It tells a story of some (three hundred? years old deal with the Devil (itself!) by these pilgrim-lookin' folks. Some of them break their deal with Ye Olde Wihtahousu and since this is a no-no, they are cursed to eternal damnation or summat. How this is any worse than the so called "normal contract" one makes with the old Beelzebub, is beyond me.
In any case, cue some years to nowadays (or about 1975) and Bill Shatner's wife(?) gets kidnapped and turned into a Devil-worshipping eyeless zombie-lookalike. Curiously enough, Kirk gets pissed off and decides to end this tomfoolery and save his wife. Umm, no can do and then Ernst Borgnine (fot it is he!) grows some antlers and turns captain into a mindless zombie. Without eyes.
Hail to the conquering hero, enter Tom Skerrit, who masquerades as a devilworshipper, but lo!, here comes (eyeless) young Stravolta and screeches and points out the Roman sheriff as an intruder. Exit Skerrit.
In the end, it looks like it might just be the Dawn of the End of the World, so Tom gets help from Eddie Albert who happens to be a priest (or so I gathered). Eddie knows great a deal about things, he even has the book where all those people from the historical part of this motion picture have signed their names in blood.
The end is just plain silly. The devilworshippers have this thimgumybob calld Devil's Rain, which Eddie steals from them - only to lose it to eyeless Kirk. Who in return... destroyes it. With the added downsize of bringing down the roof, so that (the real) rain can come down on all these hapless devilworshippers. Who'll start melting, in a most gruesome way. And this is a PG-movie!
This goes on for about twenty minutes, while the heroes Tom, Eddie and this one girl the devilworshippers were about to sacrifice or s-g escape. For some reason, the old church them evil satanists have been using as their place of unholiness, explodes. Borg has in the meawhile fallen down this deep Pit.
But wait, it'n not ´the end'! Nononono. You see, when Tom and the girl are holding each others, the girl suddenly transforms into Ernie Borgmeister! Gasp! Horror of horrors! A set-up for a sequel!
Interesting detail is, that Anton Szandor LaVey, the founder of the Founder of the Church of Satan and author of "The Satanic Bible" and "The Devil's Notebook", was a consultant with this movie and even played a small role (was he a high priest?) in it too.
Posted by: jukkahoo | February 18, 2004 at 14:13