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The Shape of Things to Come (1979)
Ah, such awful crap! How can you NOT love it!
Yeah I know .. this film hits the fan pretty hard an spray's its cinematic excrement all around as it starts with what looks like a promising beginning (it's what it's promising i didn't like :P).
The opening theme is ballsy enough and all to the visual of a big explosion. Should be good right?
The start of the film actually looks like it'll be pretty sweet but very quickly you get to understand that this film is going to hurt. DEEEEEP HURTING!!
Lazy script writing, bone headed plot devices, boring performances. It's pretty clear that the biggest problem here is that no one .. not the actors, not the crew .. and certainly not he script writer .. knew what film they were trying to make. Everyone's trying pretty hard to look sincere but this was a story that needed about $40,000,000 to tell, and not $3,000,000.
Lets look at the good points:
Cinematography and editing is pretty solid. At least the camera crew knew what they were doing, and the editor definitely did his best with the material provided.
At least there's some familiar faces even if they're not utilized any where near their potential.
Ermm ... I guess that's it :P I gotta admit personally I LOVED the music score. It's hard to discern why, it's just got something that I like. I've seen a lot of B movies and most suffer from mediocre music score .. whereas this one I just enjoy listening to that crazy title theme.
Bottom Line .. this movie is f***ing awful, but it's one of those kinds of movies you'll love if you're a nut for B movies. It's soon bad that it's positively good. As someone else suggested .. it should be a cult classic for being bad. It's still not as bad as anything that Bert I. Gordon .. or Colman Francis made. And this film totally should have been riffed by MST3K .. I guess the only reason it wasn't was because of licensing rights.
You won't be missing anything if you skip this title. But it's awesome for a crap-fest.
Anno zero - Guerra nello spazio (1977)
Can't believe MST3K didn't riff this one?!
Yup .. this piece of cinematic doodie, is terrible. Why, Oh why, do I have soft spot for crap movies .. we'll never know. At least I'm not the only one. Apparently this is a kind of follow on from "Planet of the Vampires" .. which although low budget, was quite an entertaining and atmospheric film. It's definitely NOT a Star Wars rip off as it has nothing to do with that.
It starts badly, teeters off in the middle, and the less said about the end the better. Best thing to do if you want to see this is with it on youtube .. there's a few places that have it. I certainly wouldn't buy it unless it's on one of those sci-fi movie box sets that contains 100 awful movies.
I won't dwell on the 'story' .. but needless to say it's badly made. Awful script ... if awful even comes close to describing it. One can't help but blame the director for a lot of the dumb performances because .. well .. it's his fault! Editing is okay, considering the crappy material they had to work with.
But hands down the biggest offence in this film is the music score. Ouch!! .. like being rogered with a prize winning cactus. John Barry proved you could have awesome music in a goody film (Starcrash 1978), so there's no excuse to phone in the score like they did here.
Watch it if you dare, or if you're a sucker for bad movie .. like me! This movie could have been saved if the boys and bots at MST3K had riffed it, sadly it wasn't awful enough for them :P
Would be a good film for a crap-fest!
Space Raiders (1983)
Marvellous Mellarchy!
I can't help it, I love this film. Yes all the FX, sounds music etc are pinched from Battle Beyond the Stars, but they are expertly pinched! The music is actually a combination of the scores James Horner wrote for "Humaniods from the Deep" and "Battle ...", scores which incidentally got him hired to do Star Trek II .. so he owes a lot to these pictures.
Frankly this is the kind of film the entertains me, it's not clever but it's not trying to be it's simple an adventure and I personally think the editing and reuse of shots from Battle Beyond ... are very well done. Also you might be interested to know that all those FX shots, and the ships themselves were built and filmed by James Cameron !!, back before he'd done his directorial debut of "Piranha". So they're shots that deserved a bit of reuse. For sure only Roger Corman's company could get away with this .. but lets face it we all get a kick out of seeing the 'ship with the boobs'!
Personally I hope this comes out on Blu-ray with a tonne of makings of and extras .. I'd be happy to watch that. I want more films that are in this vein of adventurous fantasy! And the reused stuff in this film is testament to the fact that Corman's company produced awesome material for previous films.
Loved it, watched it and will be watching it again no matter how much it's trashed by everyone else.