Hubri5Ween 2017, Day 20: Terrordactyl (2016)

Before we get started talking about the movie it belongs to, just take a look at that title. It's amazing, isn't it? It's so beautiful and simple that you kind of feel angry that you didn't think of it, right? Hell, right now you're probably thinking there's no way the movie it belongs to could possibly live up to that title, like even if you went in with low expectations you'd still be let down.

Well, I'm here to tell you that your expectations are wrong.

You're not just going to feel let down, you're going to be pissed off, too!

Okay, okay, I'm overstating just a little bit. The sad truth is that Terrordactyl is not the worst movie I've reviewed this year, but it is bad. Not only is it bad, it's "horror comedy that can't do either of those genres properly" bad, which means that any humor you might get out of its incompetence is ruined by the film also trying to be funny.

So, exactly how bad is it, really?

Well, first off our film starts off by utterly confusing the audience because right from the prologue its story makes no sense. We see a random trucker get his truck destroyed by an egg-shaped meteorite the size of a football. And then, after he reacts by assuming it was an alien ship crash landing (?!) and that they owe him a new truck, a fully grown pterosaur appears perched on the truck next to his. (I'm just going to call the creatures "Terrordactyls" from here on in, since they doen't bear any resemblance to a single actual pterosaur species) The trucker runs away but is overtaken by the Terrordactyl and carried off.

See the problem? If the Terrodactyls are already implied to hatch from meteorite eggs, where did the adult come from?!

At least the creature design is cool.

To tell you the truth, I don't even care enough about this movie to go into the actual plot synopsis as I normally do. Usually, if I see a movie and then decide to review it later, I try to watch it again at least once more so I can be reflecting on it with a clear memory.

However, the prospect of watching this film again was about as attractive a prospect as having to do math homework. So I'll just save some time by listing the official synopsis and then talking more about why I didn't even feel like this movie deserved a second look:

When a meteor shower rains down outside Los Angeles, Jonas (Jason Tobias) and Lars (Christopher Jennings), two friends stuck in tired, boring lives, head out to find a meteor and strike it rich. After recovering one, they start being stalked by terrordactyls, ancient flying reptiles that launch a full-on assault on the city.

Trying to survive, they go on the run where the unlikely heroes, along with Candice (Candice Nunes), a tough-and-sexy bartender, Valerie (Bianca Haase), her sultry roommate, and Sampson (Jack E. Curenton), a constantly drunk and brash ex-marine, soon discover that there’s more to the meteor than meets the eye…

Well, frankly you can kind of already see why I didn't care just from that blurb. It's rather like someone took Sharknado and Big Ass Spider and tossed them in a blender. Let me tell you, it feels that way when you watch it, too.

It's not even that this movie is bad. I mean, it is bad, but so is The Bye Bye Man and you already know I adored that piece of shit. No, this movie is bad in the same way that the average SyFy Channel Original Movie is bad: it just feels like they didn't even try because they knew they were making a bad movie so it didn't matter if actually did more than the bare minimum.

In some ways it's worse than that, however, because the film also decides it would be funny to have a running gag where Sampson, the drunk ex-marine, keeps getting killed only to be revealed to still be alive. Except that such a gag only works if either we are happy to see Sampson alive again each time or the gag builds to a truly whacked-out death that actually takes. Except Sampson is an odious character and the film fails to pay off the running gag because he still survives his final "death" at the end!

I am loath to say anything positive about a movie as shitty as Avalanche Sharks, but at least it actually made that same gag work.

I think the protagonists just saw their own movie.

Naturally, poor Valerie is killed off very early on because God forbid a film like this not kill the sexually promiscuous female character. I have to say, if they had given the "surprise, I'm not dead" running gag to her it might actually have been funny--so naturally they missed that opportunity.

I will give the film credit on two scores. One, the terrordactyls are actually pretty well-realized effects. Two, at least they appear to have actually been trying for something more like the much better Big Ass Spider, which actually aims to be a horror comedy instead of trying to assume you'll just laugh at its awfulness like Sharknado.

Okay, and I suppose I also have to give it credit for actually delivering on a kaiju-sized terrordactyl, even if not much comes of that.

Sadly, Rodan's brother Stu never amounted to much.

I went in to this film genuinely hoping I would love it, especially given its amazing title. Alas, it was not to be.

Maybe someday someone else will give the title another shot and actually make something awesome with it. Until then, you should really do yourself a favor and just watch Big Ass Spider instead.

Welcome to the Day Twenty of Hubri5Ween 2017, the fifth year of this nonsense! Click the banner above to see what everyone else did for T!

Hubri5Ween 2017, Day 19: Screamers (1979 / 1981)

Roger Corman was never above out-right lying to sell a film. And, boy, with Screamers he managed to lie twice when trying to sell it to American audiences.

See, when Corman got his hands on the Italian film, Island of the Fishmen, it came at a time when violent and explicit horror films were where the money was at. Blood and tits, you might say. However, the film he got was more of a light-hearted adventure film that could easily have been released to a general audience.

Since that wasn't where Corman was at, he had Miller Drake write and direct a new opening for the film with make-up and creature effects by Chris Walas. (There were a few other new inserts later in the film, as well) The film was then re-titled Something Waits In The Dark, given a slasher-style poster, and then a hilariously dishonest trailer that added footage from Humanoids From The Deep and narration that sold the film as another story of lusty fishmen raping women.

Notice that this poster, at least, actually hints at a gillman.

Of course, even in the alterations he asked for, Corman didn't have Miller Drake add any scenes that suggested the fishmen had any libidos at all. They certainly didn't add any gratuitous nudity.

Corman liked to test his films in certain markets and see if additional changes were necessary to sell them better. (This is how so many of his films in the late 70s and early 80s ended up with multiple titles, in fact) And Something Waits In The Dark was not selling.

Corman turned to Jim Wynorski, then merely in charge of cutting trailers, to re-brand the film to make it successful. Wynorski came upon the demented idea to retitle the film Screamers and sold it as a story about men who have been turned inside out, but are still alive. He had a poster quickly commissioned that showed just that--complete with a warning label promising that audiences would see a man turned inside out--and he filmed and edited together a new trailer in a weekend.

The new trailer contained exactly zero seconds of footage from the film. Instead, it centered around a gooey monster in a high-tech lab menacing an attractive redhead, while an ominous narrator tells us more about these men turned inside out.

The story of drive-in audiences rioting when the movie didn't have a single man turning inside out is probably apocryphal, but can you blame them?

I suppose if you squint they look sort of inside-out...

Of course, the blatantly false advertising apparently worked well enough. Perhaps word of mouth was slow to get out and nobody actually realized how badly they'd been swindled until the film was almost over. (Wynorski claims Corman had him splice the trailer monster into a scene randomly in order to satisfy the plebes, but since it was only done on a handful of prints and not the source negative, this bizarre edit never ended up on any home video releases) Certainly the new prologue is much more in line with American horror films of the period.

Ironically, Island of The Fishmen was directed by Sergio Martino of The Great Alligator and also starred that film's leads, Barbara Bach and Claudio Cassanelli, as well as featuring Richard Johnson. This ironic because the new footage that Miller Drake filmed featured Mel Ferrer, who had been the ruthless resort tycoon in The Great Alligator but had not been in the cast for Island of the Fishmen.

Guess you just can't escape once Italian exploitation gets its claws on you.

In our new footage, we open in the Caribbean Sea in 1891 on a mysterious island with a notorious reputation. Captain Decker (Cameron Mitchell) has been hired to bring Radcliffe (Mel Ferrer) and his younger sister Samantha (Eunice Bolt) to the island in search of its fabled lost treasure. Decker and his first mate wait on the beach while Radcliffe and Samantha enter a mysterious cave.

For some reason they decided to search the island in the middle of a very foggy night, so we know it's not going to go well. Oh, sure, after being startled by a starfish landing on her shoulder (?!), Samantha finds a piece of gold on a skeleton--but while she's finding small trinkets, a half-glimpsed gillman is carving up Decker and his first mate. It isn't long before it does the same to Radcliffe, and then Samantha bizarrely finds herself accosted by a zombie (!) while fleeing the gillman.

"Hey, do I look inside-out enough?"

Samantha escapes the inexplicable zombie unscathed, but the gillman catches up to her after she finds the first mate's severed head in the boat. And I have to give Chris Walas serious props because we actually see his gillman costume full-on at this point, and it looks a lot like the fishmen from the original. Of course, it also looks way better.

Now we're into the original film, as a lifeboat drifts through the same foggy seas. The occupants of the boat are survivors of a sunken prison ship and, with the exception of Lt. Claude de Ross (Claudio Cassinelli) the ship's doctor, they're all prisoners. This understandably makes for a tense environment, as while some of the prisoners are grateful for Claude saving them, the others resent the fact that he'll just put them right back in prison as soon as they're saved.

Of course, it's a moot point if they're not saved at all. And any chance of rescue appears to evaporate when a huge dorsal fin charges at the boat and then they find their boat roughly dashed against the rocks. Whatever the fin belonged to also has claws (which, based on the prologue, we can safely assume is a gillman) and it kills two of the prisoners as they all scatter for shore.

Claude luckily meets up with the sympathetic Jose (Franco Iavarone) in time to save him from drinking from a poisoned pond. However, several other prisoners have managed to get carved up by the fishmen. So when the remaining survivors all meet up, things are understandably tense even before Claude and another prisoner unwittingly walk into a tiger trap. The other man is killed, but Claude only just caught hold of a root.

Jose wants to save Claude, but Peter (Roberto Posse) suggests they let him fall. Jose wins out, but only barely. Still, Claude tries not to hold a grudge and continues to guide the other two remaining survivors through the island. They find an eerily abandoned native village, where even the graves are empty, and Jose freaks out because he sees what he claims is a voodoo altar. However, the biggest upshot of finding the village comes when someone shoots the patently harmless snake slithering toward Claude.

Claude's "savior" is quickly revealed to be Amanda Marvin (Barbara Bach), on horseback. She warns that the island belongs to Edmond Rackham and he does not welcome trespassers. Rather than take her advice, they follow her and get to meet this Edmond Rackham (Richard Johnson) for themselves. Rackham runs some kind of a plantation on the island, largely staffed by Caribbean natives led by by the strikingly gorgeous Shakira (Beryl Cunningham).

Yes, at one point her name is said twice in succession.

Rackham is obviously a weasel even at this point, with Richards Johnson affecting an extra nasally accent in the role, but he's also as charming a gentleman as he can be. He invites Claude to dinner and explains away the deserted nature of the island by claiming that the island's natives fled in fear of the volcano, even casting their dead into the sea. Claude mentions having seen evidence of voodoo on the island and, to my delight, Rackham tells him to talk to Shaira about that because she hails from "Hie-ee-tay," which has to be the most astounding mispronunciation of "Haiti" that I've ever heard.

Of course, while Claude is trying to play a good guest, his two companions are still convicts. Jose is content to toe the line, but Peter is a different story. Seeing Amanda sneak out that night, he follows her. He someone fails to see the part of her midnight stroll that involves giving a strange milky fluid to a gang of gillmen and attempts to rape her on her way back from the water. Luckily for Amanda, one of those gillmen quickly kills Peter.

Gillman keggers take some getting used to.

Claude tries to confront Rackham about Peter's disappearance, but that goes nowhere and then Jose tries to flee. Claude follows him, but is too slow to keep up. Unfortunately, Jose ends up captured by Rackham and secreted off to places unknown. And Claude finds himself face-to-face with one of the fishmen. The fishman does not like him and it's only Amanda's intervention that saves him.

Amanda tries again to tell Claude he needs to leave. However, he just becomes more obsessed with finding out what the hell is going on and he opens a secret door--and discovers that Professor Ernest Martin (Joseph Cotten) has been hiding in the walls. Martin is Amanda's father, but he's not doing well--and Rackham reveals he kept Claude alive because he needed a doctor to keep Martin alive.

You see, Martin is the secret to Rackham's operation because he has figured out how to communicate with the fishmen. Rackham reveals to Claude, via diving bell, that this island is the highest peak of the sunken continent of Atlantis. And several thousand feet below the water, the ancient sun temple is filled with treasure but no human can reach it. Luckily for Rackham, the natives of Atlantis had evolved into fishmen and Martin was able to concoct a drug to make the creatures obey him and bring their treasure up for him.

"Can you believe someone was just throwing this stuff out?"

Sounds a little too convenient, doesn't it? Claude sure thinks so, especially when he remembers how he had heard of professor Martin previously: he was caught conducting illegal experiments.

Claude leads Amanda into her father's secret lab. It's full of strange creatures (all added to the American cut), but the centerpiece is a tank where a human is in the process of transforming into a fishman (which was also altered for the American cut). Claude realizes the hapless bastard is Jose, which means that all the other fishmen also used to be humans but were transformed into monsters...

"Actually, I'm much happier this way!"

To say that Screamers is a rip-off of the 1977 adaptation of Island of Dr. Moreau is pretty plain, though it obviously takes pains to alter the story just enough to make it distinct. It's also pretty obvious that the film it started off as is very different from the movie Corman had it altered to become.

And yet, in spite of all that, the only Corman addition that really doesn't fit is the inexplicable zombie. I'm actually kind of amazed that the edits to the film were as restrained as they are, since it means that the spirit of the original film remains largely intact. Hell, it would have been very easy for Corman to insist on a quick flash of breasts be hastily inserted in the scene where Rackham walks in on Amanda in the bath--or to find a way to insert footage that made good on the first trailer's promise of raping fishmen.

Thankfully, Corman either resisted that impulse or it never actually occurred to him. The result is that Screamers is just a bloodier version of the original film, with a few marked improvements in the effects here and there. Frankly, that's for the best, as sometimes it's nice to get a more old-fashioned monster-centered adventure story instead of a hyper-exploitative one.

Of course, old-fashioned can be a bit of a double-edged sword. This movie is more than a little racist, as you may or may not have noticed. All the black characters in the film are either mindlessly loyal to Rackham or, like Shakira, they are secretly violent voodoo fanatics who want to sacrifice the white woman to appease the Gods. Yet the part that gets me is the fact that the fishmen are clearly supposed to be the island's missing natives.

I mention this because of what happens after Claude finds Jose the fishman and kills him out of mercy. Martin storms in, too late to stop Claude, and yells at him that in killing Jose he killed the first specimen with "actual human intelligence." There's more than a few ways you can interpret that, but I can't help but feel Martin means that it's because Jose started off as a white guy. Sure, a movie can have a racist character without being racist, but this ain't one of those times.

However, if you're able to get past some of the film's more unfortunate implications, Screamers is a lot of fun. Of course, my opinion is swayed more than a little bit by the fact that I find the film's fishmen to be adorable.

Welcome to the Day Nineteen of Hubri5Ween 2017, the fifth year of this nonsense! Click the banner above to see what everyone else did for S!

Hubri5Ween 2017, Day 18: Raw (2016)

Even in this day and age, there is a weird assumption that women are more squeamish than men. Perhaps it's playground taunts that we never outgrew, or a need for men to somehow prove we are better at something at all times. Like all sexist generalizations, it naturally forgets that women (and men, for that matter) are not a hive mind.

Case in point, the French-Belgian film Raw, which is one of the most brutal and disgusting horror films I've seen in a while. It's also one of far too few I've seen directed by a woman, and unsurprisingly it gets a lot of its power by building on horrors that women can uniquely relate to.

Not in the way you might necessarily think, either.

Justine (Garance Marillier) has been a vegetarian all her life, though not solely by her choice. In fact, we see quite plainly that it's a diet strictly enforced by her overbearing mother (Joana Preiss) and her only slightly less strict father (Laurent Lucas), when they stop to eat at a cafeteria. When Justine finds a single meatball in her mashed potatoes, her mother goes ballistic on the poor server.

Justine's parents are driving her to her first day of veterinary school, which seems to be something of a tradition in the family. Not only did her parents go, but her slightly estranged older sister Alexia (Ella Rumpf) is currently attending the school.

The first day goes awkwardly, as the hazing sets in before Justine even has time to process the odd fact that she has been given a gay male roommate named Adrien (Rabah Naït Oufella) instead of the female roommate she requested. And the hazing at this school is extreme, to say the least. Like, "These upperclassmen sure loved the end of Carrie" extreme.

This will not be the last time our heroine will find herself drenched in blood.

Worse, they make all the rookies eat raw rabbit kidneys. Justine objects that her family are vegetarian, but Alexia oddly claims that isn't the case when Justine asks her to back that fact up. So Justine gets to eat a raw bit of rabbit, and we're off to the races.

First, Justine gets a rash all over her body that won't stop itching. The nurse chalks it up to a food allergy and gives her some cream to help with it. However, Justine finds herself oddly starving and nauseated all at once, with bizarre cravings for meat so powerful she tries to steal a hamburger patty from the school cafeteria and takes a voracious bite of a raw chicken breast Adrien had in their fridge.

She also finds herself struggling in her classes. After her professor accuses her and Adrien of cheating off of each other, she finds herself in the bathroom and...

...look, I generally think of myself as pretty strong-stomached when it comes to horror movies. However, I am not exaggerating when I say I came close to vomiting at this point. Justine had been her gnawing on her hair while talking to the professor, and now she proceeds to pull handfuls of it out of her mouth and throat.

It's one of the most disgusting things I have ever seen, like seeing someone clean the hair out of a shower drain with their hands: except the drain is their mouth.

Luckily, it seems nobody has screencapped that bit, so here's our heroine sniffing raw chicken instead.

Feeling even more of an outsider than she had previously, Justine tries to spend more time with her sister. However, after a night of fun Justine notices her sister has the same topical ointment in her medicine cabinet that she has been using, and then Alexia notices her little sister has hairy armpits.

Alexia suggests it is high time that Justine get a "Brazilian" and, being a good sister, decides to do it for her. Let me tell you, the Saw franchise could learn something from this torture sequence.

NO, NO, NOOOOO

Worst of all, the wax gets stuck and Alexia gets a pair of very sharp scissors to cut it loose. Understandably, Justine freaks out at the thought of those being so close to her genitals and reflexively kicks her sister away.

Unfortunately, this causes her sister to cut her own finger off with the scissors. Alexia passes out and Justine calls for an ambulance, but can't find any ice to put the severed finger on. It gets so much worse, however, because suddenly that meat craving hits Justine again and before she can really stop herself she is gleefully chewing the flesh off the severed digit.

So you can imagine an awkward conversation is in store when Alexia comes to, and sees her sister eating her finger.

"Mmm, lady fingers!"

Oh, but it's so much more awkward than that. Alexia covers for her sister by claiming her dog ate the finger, even though this means the dog will be put down for it. However, she demands that Justine talk with her by the roadside as they walk home from the hospital.

Whatever Justine is expecting, it can't be for her sister to suddenly run out in front of a car to make it crash into a tree--and then take a bite out of the dead passenger.

Yep, whatever made Justine turn into a cannibal got to her sister first, and Alexia is trying to show her how to deal with it. Unfortunately, Justine and Alexia have different ideas about how to handle their strange cravings and sibling rivalry becomes a lot more intense when it's between two wannabe wendigos.

Sisters, am I right? ...no, I honestly don't know, I'm an only child.

There's naturally a lot to unpack in Raw. It's been referred to as a feminist horror film, and it would not be incorrect to look at it from that perspective.

Like many women-helmed horror films, this plays on fears and experiences that are primarily experienced by women. Not especially subtly, either, since the parallels between adult onset cannibalism and a struggle with eating disorders are made blindingly clear in several scenes--like after Justine's hairball incident when another student in the bathroom tries to advise her of a faster way to purge.

There's also, as you'd expect, a sexual undercurrent to Justine's struggle. She begins to embrace her own sexual being after she begins to transform into a cannibal, but she also is too violent with a few possible suitors (who frankly deserved it), and a video of her drunkenly snapping at a cadaver is played like a sexual violation gone viral. There's also the confusion that happens when she discovers she wants Adrien both as a meal and as a sexual partner.

That isn't helped by Adrien becoming her first sexual partner in a moment of weakness for both of them. That's a slightly thornier issue that I can't fully wrap my head around, since Adrien is explicitly shown to be gay and not bisexual. In fact, he angrily shouts at her in a classroom later when she keeps pushing him to talk about the encounter because of the frustration of finally being able to be out after 20 years, only to find himself having sex with a woman.

It's a character arc that manages to almost make sense, but also rings a bit false for me.

Speaking of sexuality, this film does have a lot of female nudity in it, but I'm always pleased to see what it looks like when such scenes are filmed from a perspective that is almost totally divorced of "the male gaze." Even a male director can shoot naked women in a manner divorced of titillation, of course, but it's a lot less frequent. It almost never looks like this film's nude scenes, which simply remind us that, hey, humans are naked under their clothes.

I have seen many movies that decided the story absolutely called for two women to take a shower together, but never have I seen one that pulled such a scene off without any sense of exploitation the way this one does.

If you have a strong stomach, then I definitely recommend Raw. In terms of story, it must be said that it's pretty slim, but sometimes that's perfect enough. I'll be damned if I wasn't riveted almost immediately and thoroughly enjoyed it even when I was recoiling in horror and disgust.

Just, seriously, don't watch it while you're eating.

Welcome to the Day Eighteen of Hubri5Ween 2017, the fifth year of this nonsense! Click the banner above to see what everyone else did for R!

Hubri5Ween 2017, Day 17: Q: The Winged Serpent (1982)

Larry Cohen is a filmmaker who really needs to be talked about more often.

Oh, sure, in the kinds of circles I hang out in, he's mentioned in the same breath as someone like John Carpenter, but if you ask me he deserves that kind of reverence everywhere. He has had a wide-ranging career as writer, director, or both; from Blaxploitation to monster movies to thrillers, and even his lesser works tend to have something incredible to offer a viewer.

Of course, my love for Cohen is helped by the fact that my introduction to him was through today's film. I was already pretty predisposed to like a film about Quetzalcoatl setting up shop in New York City and going on a rampage, but Cohen delivers so much more than even that amazing premise would imply.

New York City in 1982 is not exactly the safest place to live in general, but everyone is still understandably baffled when people begin dying mysteriously in a variety of ways. The only common like between the victims is they were high up on skyscrapers when they were killed--a window washer who was beheaded, a sunbather violently snatched from her roof, a construction worker killed while trying to find his stolen lunchbox. It doesn't help that pieces of these victims start raining down on the streets and sidewalks.

No one has seen what did it, since whatever was responsible flies in line with the sun.

Even more bizarrely, people are also turning up dead in what appear to be ritual murders. First a flaying, then someone with his heart cut out. Homicide detective Shepard (David Carradine) and Sergeant Powell (Richard Roundtree) are naturally at a loss, but Shepard finds his mind unexpectedly opened when he researches the deaths and finds they fit the pattern of ritual sacrifices in ancient Aztec culture to appease Quetzalcoatl. More alarmingly, this means the victims had to be willing sacrifices.

Nowadays, this would all have started with a Craigslist ad.

Shepard begins to wonder if maybe there is a connection between the seemingly unconnected cases. What if whomever has been bumping off people in the Aztec fashion actually succeeded in calling forth the ancient feathered serpent? And how do you go about killing a God in the first place?

Well, Shepard's going to end up with a truly unexpected lead on the best way to exterminate a pesky deity--petty crook Jimmy Quinn (Michael Moriarty). Quinn plays wheelman for a diamond robbery, but when he is forced to take part in the actual robbery things go South. He manages to get himself hit by a cab while trying to escape and loses the briefcase of diamonds.

While fleeing from his accomplices, Quinn finds himself in a part of the Chrysler Building's spire that doesn't see much use. And in that spire are human remains and a huge nest, housing a huge egg.

"Welp, there's your problem."

Quinn uses his new discovery to rid himself of his accomplices by feeding them to mommy Quetzalcoatl when they come looking for those diamonds. However, he is also both a clever bastard and not as clever as he thinks, since he realizes he has information that everyone is going to want. So he goes to the police with the intent to blackmail the city into giving him what he demand in exchange for the location of the monster's lair.

It may not actually have feathers, nor does it really appear to be a serpent, but it's my favorite Quetzalcoatl.

There's a famous story where, after a screening of Q: The Winged Serpent, notorious film critic Rex Reed came up to the film's producer, Samuel Z. Arkoff. Reed enthused to Arkoff, "What a surprise! All that dreck--and right in the middle of it, a great Method performance by Michael Moriarty!" Arkoff simply replied, "The dreck was my idea."

Well, Reed was half-right. Moriarty is amazing in this film, and his performance puts the film on a whole other level. But Arkoff had the right idea with all that dreck. Whether you mean the awesome stop-motion monster, some truly effective scare scenes, or the hilarity of moments like an undercover cop dressed as a mime gaping in silent horror as another cop is picked off by the monster.

This is both a wonderful monster movie and, much like Wolfen, a fascinating snapshot of what New York was like when it was filmed. It's also, as Rex Reed suggested, a fascinating portrait of the kind of weirdly sympathetic loser like Jimmy Quinn. Whether true or not, Quinn claims he was framed for drug possession as a teenager and "the city owes me one," even though the rest of the items on his rap sheet he's genuinely guilty of.

There's no question that Quinn is a crook and an asshole, though, and yet he's incredibly compelling. He's definitely the final key to the film's success, but I still say there are so many other reasons to watch this film. If you haven't seen it yet, you owe it to yourself to check it out.

Welcome to the Day Seventeen of Hubri5Ween 2017, the fifth year of this nonsense! Click the banner above to see what everyone else did for Q!

Hubri5Ween 2017, Day 16: Power Rangers (2017)

When Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers hit American television in the 1990s, it did so juuuuust when I was too old to immediately fall under its spell. I watched a handful of episodes and I thought some of the robots and monsters were cool, but I found the whole enterprise just too silly for a fourth grader like myself.

So I hadn't expected to care when a big budget, nostalgia-exploiting cash grab reboot hit the scene earlier this year. I mean, why should I care about a property that I had so little investment in?

And yet, I found myself getting angry at each new trailer or bit of news about the project. Rita Repulsa is no longer going to be played a Japanese (or even Asian) woman? The Zords not only look like hideous Michael Bay Transformers rip-offs, but the Mastodon looks like a bug? Goldar is now a huge monster literally made of molten gold? It's trying to play this whole thing as dead serious?

Still, I heard mixed things about the final film and my son had become something of a Power Rangers fan around this time. So I knew I would be watching it. However, what I didn't expect was that I would end up loving it and hating it, in near equal measure.

Confused? Well, you should be.

The film's opening sequence actually perfects sets the tone for my feelings on the film as a whole because of how it both annoys and delights me. It annoys me because it tells us we are on Earth in the "Cenozoic Era" and yet the first thing we see are Pteranodons in the sky, despite them having been extinct by that point. It delights me because, in this film's lore, Zordon (Bryan Cranston) was the Red Ranger who fell when the Green Ranger, Rita Repulsa (Elizabeth Banks) betrayed her fellow rangers.

"Look, we all know that anyone who gets ahold of a staff turns evil. It's inevitable!"

This is a nice bit of lore, and as far as I can tell is unique to this film, so that's a nice divergence they chose there. At any rate, now that all the rangers but Zordon are dead and he's currently dying, he buries their power coins and orders Alpha 5 (Bill Hader) to send a meteorite to his location. Unfortunately for Rita, she chose that location to gloat over Zordon and the blast shreds her armor and tosses her into the ocean.

Presumably this is supposed to have been the meteorite that killed the dinosaurs, in which case we were still in the Mesozoic in that prologue.

At any rate, in the present the film takes a strange turn by actually giving us "a group of teenagers with attitude" as the original show promised. Of course, it does this by effectively ripping off The Breakfast Club as most of the kids who will become our rangers meet in Saturday school detention. Jason Scott (Dacre Montgomery) ends up there for a prank he pulled that destroyed school property, Kimberly Hart (Naomi Scott) ends up there for a bullying incident that won't be explained until later, and explicitly autistic nerd Billy Cranston (RJ Cyler) has gotten himself detention after accidentally blowing up his locker.

When Jason stands up for Billy against a bully who also got himself Saturday school, Billy invites Jason to his house with the promise of a way to disable his house arrest anklet. Of course, it turns out that Billy needs someone to drive him out to an old quarry where he is trying to dynamite the rock wall to find...well, something. Kimberly was already out there swimming in a nearby pond when Jason happened to find her, and Billy's explosion brings the attention of Zack (Ludi Lin) and Trini (Becky G) who were in the area for their own odd reasons.

To be fair, these "teenagers with attitude" will probably seem extra ridiculous in 20 years, too.

Sure enough, after a rock slide nearly kills poor Trini, they all find something: a weird wall of glass-like stone. Zack impulsively hammers at the wall and uncovers the power coins that Zordon had hidden. Everybody takes one, but they are forced to flee when mine security shows up. Yet the van crash that follows not only fails to kill them, but leaves them all discovering the next day that they seem to suddenly have inhuman strength and agility.

Unfortunately, those coins probably found their Rangers because they sensed the antagonist was returning. Jason's dad runs a crab boat and his crew unexpectedly recovers a mummified corpse of what they think is a woman. Naturally, it's none other than Rita Repulsa and her reanimated corpse quickly goes on a killing spree, both to revive her body and to retrieve large amounts of gold.

"Hi, I'm an eldritch abomination from beyond the stars. Isn't this kooky?"

Why gold, you ask? Well, our rangers will get an answer when they all go back to the quarry and find a strange underground lake that hides a hidden chamber that seems to disobey the laws of physics--and an ancient spaceship, half-buried in the rock. Inside they meet Alpha 5, who first terrifies them before they realize he's actually pretty goofy, and then he introduces them to Zordon.

Zordon's intellect has been preserved in the ship's matrix, which translates to "now he's a huge talking head trapped in a wall." Zordon explains that they are the Power Rangers and they are here to stop Rita before she can rebuild the monster Goldar and destroy the Zeo Crystal. Said Zeo Crystal is buried somewhere under the town of Angel Grove, and if Rita destroys it she will destroy all life on Earth. Worse, they have only eleven days to stop her.

Because this is a movie from 2017 and, at some point, it was decided that every hero must be reluctant, the rangers say "fuck that" and go home.

However, they all find themselves drawn back and Zordon tries to get them to access the morphing grid in order to access their armor, but for plot reasons they can't. So it's training montage time, where Alpha 5 conjures holographic versions of Rita's minions, "Putties", for them to fight. It's actually a great montage, especially since it's set to "Hands Clap" by Fitz and The Tantrums.

It helps that Becky G is cute as hell. ...did I say that out loud?

And it must be said that the characters of the rangers are all genuinely engaging and the actors, despite being relative unknowns, are all great. Which is good, because aside from one moment when Billy accidentally turns on his Blue Ranger armor, the film will be well over 75% of the way over before we actually get to see our Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers actually do any damn morphin'.

However, this doesn't mean that we have to wait that long before they face Rita. Oh no, Rita confronts Trini in her bedroom in a scene that is uncomfortably close to sexual assault--especially given the film has already implied that Trini is bisexual--and, from what I can tell, was even worse in some of the deleted footage.

I'm sure many folks already "ship it," but people also want to fuck a killer clown demon so...

At any rate, Rita made her appearance to tell Trini to have the rangers to meet her in a shipyard. Which they do, with pipes and chains as their only weapons against an ancient being they already know killed off an entire squad of rangers who actually had their armor and much more than a week of training. Predictably, it goes bad. After Billy reveals that he has figured out that the Zeo Crystal is beneath Angel Grove's Krispy Kreme franchise to try and save Zack's life, Rita kills Billy and leaves the others to grieve.

Here's where the movie takes a turn for the bullshit--as it has done and will do several times--when they take Billy's body back to the ship. Zordon somehow has the chance to bring his essence back through the morphing grid to regain his body, but he decides instead to bring Billy back to life. This is bullshit because up to this point, the movie has done an excellent job of showing us that its Zordon is a selfish asshole who dislikes the new rangers and just wants a chance to get his body back. Then, suddenly, he shows a bit of selflessness that is utterly unearned.

Now it's finally time for the rangers to figure out how to morph and to pilot their Zords into battle, just in time since Rita has already formed Goldar and an army of Putties, and she is marching right into the heart of Angel Grove. To my delight, the film sets the Zords advancing on Rita to Kanye West's "Power", which is a genuinely clever idea in my opinion. Others might groan, of course.

Yes, that's Goldar. Yes, it's pretty ridiculous.

But here's another point where the film kind of fails. Angel Grove in the TV show was pretty obviously a cover for Tokyo or whichever major Japanese city the original effects footage is supposed to be taking place in. (I have seen a few episodes of Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger, but long enough ago that I have forgotten where they take place) So Angel Grove was actually a city, with tall buildings. Here it's a mostly flat town with not a single building taller than maybe three stories.

As a result, that renders the giant monster fight of the climax somewhat underwhelming, and in fact this climactic battle feels like nothing so much as the battle with the Destroyer in Thor. That really doesn't fit for a Power Rangers movie, if you ask me.

At any rate, Goldar is too much for the rangers and their individual Zords--but the reveal that the Zords can form into a Megazord comes as a total surprise to the rangers. That's an odd choice, but not really much odder than making Goldar into a damn gold golem.

It wouldn't be Power Rangers if the Megazord didn't do a silly dance.

I'll be honest, of all the Zord designs in this film, the Megazord is the only one I actually liked when I first saw it and I still do. Even if, unlike the original series, there is no way of telling how the hell the Zords combined into this thing. It's also a little bit underwhelming that the final battle is resolved when the Megazord uses its wings as twin swords and stabs Goldar. Yes, somehow being stabbed kills a being that is composed of molten metal.

Oh, and then the Megazord slaps Rita into outer space. That's basically the end of it, aside from an ending reminding us that the studio is game for a sequel if we are (the box office for this film suggests we aren't), and also a mid-credits scene implies that a new Green Ranger is already in Angel Grove.

"I realize it's crucial that we keep our identities secret, but the audience wants to see our pretty faces!"

The biggest failing of this film, aside from the idea that the best way to create conflict is by having your characters be pricks to each other for no reason, is definitely the feeling that it has no idea who it was made for.

On the one hand, you have the sense that this is trying to follow the trend set by Michael Bay's Transformers of taking a property aimed at children and making it largely inappropriate for children to watch. For starters, Rita is literally a monster for most of the running time and is guaranteed to scare young children and possibly even older ones. More astoundingly, though, the first human characters we see in the film are part of an extended joke about someone jerking off a bull because he thought it was cow.

No, I'm not making that up.

On the other hand, this is also a very childish film. Alpha 5 is still played up as an excitable goofball, if a much less androgynous one. Rita is also a complete ham and, again, is defeated by being slapped into orbit.

There's also the fact that so much of the film seems calculated to piss off anyone who is a diehard fan of the original series, only to turn around and make references for the fans. Not only does the actual Power Rangers theme is played when the Zords first charge into battle, but there is a cameo from the original Pink and Green Rangers in a crowd scene.

As a result, the film is such a tonal mess that I was left unable to decide if I loved it or hated it. The truth, as I said earlier, is actually both. There is much of this film that is simply terrible, and there is also a huge percentage of it that I loved.

The biggest strength is definitely its cast. All of the rangers, as I said before, are genuinely engaging and as a result the film is genuinely at it's best during their character scenes. It's also great to see a genuine attempt at representation with these characters, in ways that aren't beholden to stereotypes. It's a sad statement on Hollywood that it's notable to have a diverse cast that doesn't feel like tokenism.

(Though, while I appreciate the film's attempt to get away from the inadvertently racist decision of the original series to make the black man the Black Ranger and the Asian woman the Yellow Ranger by shifting the ethnicities around a bit, it's still a tiny bit racist for the Latina to be the Yellow Ranger)

Bryan Cranston and Bill Hader do a fine enough job with their characters as well, but Elizabeth Banks is the real standout there. I still find it a bit awkward to have Rita played by a white woman, although if you must whitewash a character I'd rather it be the villain than the hero, but it must be said that Banks nearly steals the show in most scenes. That's not an easy task since the film is not quite sure what it wants Rita to be from scene to scene, but Banks manages to be just as silly and as intimidating as the script asks her to be, while also making sure to dial everything up to eleven.

In the end, it's a little bit sad that the film had only a lukewarm showing at the box office as I feel like a sequel might have been able to find its footing a bit better and really play up the good points of this film. At this stage, that's unlikely--though not impossible--so we have to make do with what we did get, I suppose.

Taken as a whole, then, I have to say that I actually kind of think Power Rangers is a good movie. Sure, it has some major flaws but once you're able to look past those you'll find it has some pleasant surprises in store. It's far from required viewing, but it's a perfect way to pass a Saturday afternoon.

Welcome to Day Sixteen of Hubri5Ween 2017, the fifth year of this nonsense! Click the banner above to see what everyone else did for P!

Hubri5Ween 2017, Day 15: One Million Years B.C. (1966)

Humans and dinosaurs lived millions of years apart, and even by 1940 this was sure to be a well-known fact. However, pop culture does not require its entertainment to reflect reality, so I doubt anyone involved in One Million B.C. really gave a shit that their movie about cavemen fighting for survival against dinosaurs was utter bullshit.

If there's any doubt of that, consider that they also didn't give a shit that the "dinosaurs" in their movie were just lizards and alligators with stuff glued to them. (As we have seen elsewhere) I have never seen the film myself, but it is famous for both its animal cruelty and the fact that its "dinosaur" footage has been reused by countless films since its release.

In 1966, however, Hammer Studios decided to remake the film--but this time boasting the special effects of stop-motion maestro Ray Harryhausen. This time at least the audience would get some actual dinosaurs with their cavemen. Of course, while that was a great decision, what really put the remake on the map was putting relative newcomer Raquel Welch in a fur bikini.

Yes, the other promotional still is more famous but this one is so much more fun.

And the rest, as they say, was total bullshit pretending to be history.

In fact, we open with a portentous narrator trying to set the scene for us of life one million years ago. He does so in the vaguest terms possible, however. He then introduces us to Akoba (Robert Brown), the leader of the stone tribe, as the man gets a warthog to chase him so it can be trapped in a pit. Then we are introduced to his sons Sakana (Percy Herbert) and Tumak (John Richardson), and the narrator promptly leaves us with, "And that is our story."

Actually, our story starts with Tumak winning the honor of wrestling and killing the now patently rubber warthog. However, while Sakana is still holding a grudge against Tumak, it actually is Akoba who decides to pick a fight with his son that night over a piece of the roasted boar and throws him off a cliff.

Tumak survives the fall but decides he would be better off elsewhere. Of course, given he nearly gets himself devoured by a giant iguana, runs afoul of vicious ape men, and narrowly avoids a giant tarantula--maybe he isn't better off on his own. Luckily, he staggers his way to the land of the shell tribe, where he finds Loana (Raquel Welch) spearfishing with a group of other women. He collapses and is almost run over by an Archelon--a giant sea turtle--on its way to the sea. Luckily, Loana gets him out of the way in time while her fellow tribesmen annoy the poor turtle a bit with their spears.

"Come on, guys, just get out of the way! I just laid my eggs and I don't feel like dealing with your crap."

The shell tribe welcome Tumak, even though he's kind of a dick, and try to teach him how to spearfish. There's a vague hint of a love triangle between Tumak, Loana, and Ahot (Jean Wladon) but it sure looks more like Ahot would like to make their relationship into a trio if you ask me.

However, Tumak's time with the shell tribe is cut hilariously short. A rather puny Allosaurus, presumably a juvenile, appears and attacks the tribe. As the shell people flee to their cave, leaving behind the man the dinosaur catches first, Tumak springs into action and his heroism means that only one other tribe member is killed before the beast is put down for good.

The gritty, live-action Neopets movie was not well-received.

Yet, Tumak manages to almost immediately piss away the good will he earned by being the hero. During the funeral for one of the slain men, Tumak decides to try and steal another tribesman's spear and Ahot catches him. After the two fight, Tumak is banished from the tribe--but Loana agrees to go with him.

Tumak and Loana together prove almost as incompetent as Tumak alone. After nearly getting caught by the ape men, they manage to blunder right into a Triceratops and piss it off. Worse, it chases them into a Ceratosaurus. Luckily for the two humans, the dinosaurs forget all about them and decide to fight it out.

Fun fact: These two encountering each other is actually more absurd than humans and dinosaurs being together.

Tragically, the Ceratosaurus loses. However, Loana and Tumak end up in Tumak's tribe and...

Look, I'll be honest with you, I kind of stopped caring what happens after this point. Oh, it's not that what follows is boring, exactly. I mean there's still a cat fight between Loana and Nupondi (Martine Beswick), as well as the famous sequence of Loana being carried off by a Pteranodon with bat wings. However, it simply must be said that this film does not do a good job of properly establishing its stakes and making you care about its characters.

So from this point on it's petty caveman squabbling until the volcano finally erupts and kills most of the cast.

Also, tragically, the iguana dies in the eruption, too.

Part of the problem, of course, is that the film uses a "caveman" language for its characters. This means that most of what they are saying is nonsense, but other movies have done this and been more successful at it. This film basically just tries to have its characters grunt and mime at each other and it's only occasionally successful.

However, this doesn't mean that the movie is bad, but it does mean that any scene in which Ray Harryhuasen dinosaurs aren't on screen can vary from "okay" to bordering on tedious.

Some of this may be because this is one of the few movies of this type I was not able to watch until I was well into adulthood. A movie like this is also going to do best when viewed at such an age that the viewer is primed to absorb it into nostalgia. However, I saw it well into my 20s and found it to be much less fun than I had predicted based on the trailer I had seen many, many times as a child.

If you're coming to this film for the dinosaurs, however, you will not be disappointed. It's rather clear that this was one of the lower budgets that Harryhausen had worked with, given the usual melodramatic stop-motion monster death scenes here are just "dinosaur falls over and breathes heavily until it stops." Yet even with that obvious handicap, Harryhausen does his usual exceptional job of bringing life to the prehistoric beasts of the film.

If you're willing to be patient with the film through its slower moments, it can be pretty rewarding. I would have to say I can't rank it as one of Harryhausen's best, and in fact--as we'll see in a few more days--I actually prefer a different Hammer-produced "cavemen and dinosaurs" movie to this one.

Still, there are far too few films that feature Ceratosaurus, one of my top favorites, so I'm obligated to recommend this based on that alone.

Welcome to the Day Fifteen of Hubri5Ween 2017, the fifth year of this nonsense! Click the banner above to see what everyone else did for O!

Hubri5Ween 2017, Day 14: Night of the Demon (1980)

Imagine for a moment that Bigfoot is real--though statistically at least some of you reading this probably already believe he is. Now imagine that Bigfoot is a massive, perpetually grouchy asshole.

That's essentially the core conceit of Night of The Demon.

Hell, based on the many, many flashbacks to stories about deadly encounters with Bigfoot in this film, you begin to wonder how anybody has ever come out of the film's setting alive.

Really, flashbacks are the name of the game in this film as we open in a hospital where anthropology professor Bill Nugent (Michael Cutt) has been taken after he was found in the woods. His face is bandaged because it was badly burned, but the doctor caring for him has determined that he is well enough to tell his incredible story to the police. See, Nugent didn't go into the woods alone and the cops would like to know exactly what happened to the students who all followed him out there.

Well, as Nugent tells them, the inciting incident was the death of a man on a fishing trip. So our first flashback is Nugent relating an event he was not present for, which won't be the first time. At any rate, the man was minding his own business at his campsite when a red-ringed POV cam snuck up on him. (Note that, per this film, Bigfoot has an appalling case of tunnel vision) In shadow we see a hairy figure yank his arm out by the roots, and then the poor man's blood fills in a footprint next to his body--which is a genuinely cool shot.

Auteur!

Well, the daughter of the fisherman joins Nugent's class later, since for some reason Nugent's curriculum is currently focused on Bigfoot and specifically cases where people have been killed or gone missing after encountering the beast. (Also, don't ask me to try and figure out which students are which because I almost immediately gave up trying) Nugent is planning to go camping with the students, something his poor wife is not too keen on, in order to find the truth of the matter.

This involves many shared "hey, did you hear about this story" flashbacks over the course of the film. You'll see a couple be interrupted in the middle of sex when Bigfoot kills the man, Bigfoot casually axe murder a guy who really overacts his death scene, Bigfoot effectively force two girl scouts to knife each other to death by swinging them into each other, and the film's notorious highlight--a biker getting his dick torn out by the roots when he stops to take a leak by the roadside.

If that's not enough, when the group is settling down for the first night, we watch a totally unrelated camper get killed when Bigfoot finds his sleeping bag and then swings him around above his head before launching him onto a pointy tree branch. It is glorious, and rivals the sheer delight of the goofy sleeping bag kill in Prophecy.

I'm not even sure a GIF could capture the sheer lunacy of this moment.

At any rate, Nugent did have a plan to first visit a man who had talked to the police about Bigfoot, but that guy is suddenly mum. However, he does let slip about someone deep in the woods named "Crazy Wanda." Asking around in town, the heroes learn that Wanda was the daughter of some backwoods religious fanatic who ended up burning himself alive after his daughter gave birth to a deformed child. Wanda sure sounds like someone worth talking to...

Finding Wanda requires taking their boat deep into the woods. That night Nugent and another student witness some bizarre cult engaged in a ritual that involves a man preparing to have sex with a woman before an effigy of Bigfoot. Taking the woman's participation in the ceremony to be nonconsensual, Nugent fires into the air to scare off the would-be rapists. This succeeds in one of them accidentally setting the Bigfoot effigy on fire, but Nugent shrugs off the concern that it could start a forest fire.

Unfortunately, Bigfoot apparently doesn't approve of Nugent's half-assed heroism. (Note that he assumed he just stopped a rape, but did nothing to ensure the victim was actually okay) For in the morning they discover that their boat--which contained supplies and back-up ammunition--has been untied and floated off. The footprints at the scene are unmistakable and they make a cast of one.

Alas, by the time they find Wanda (Melanie Graham) in her cabin, Bigfoot has already clawed the back of one of the students when he came upon two of them having sex. Wanda is no help as she seems catatonic, and Nugent realizes she was the woman they "rescued" from the cult earlier. Worse, when one of the students shows her the Bigfoot cast to try and get her to talk, she breaks out of her reverie and smashes it.

Deciding to camp outside of Wanda's cabin proves a poor idea when one of the students wanders to far from camp and Bigfoot bashes his head against a tree and carries his body off. Nugent decides the best way to get answers is to hypnotize Wanda. He's right, in that they learn that her father cast her out of the house when she was 17 after he saw her being romantic with another young man. However, he chose a poor night to do so, as Bigfoot found her and--in a break from his pattern up until now--he decided to rape her instead of killing her.

"Look, sometimes you get tired of just being a relentless murder machine, okay?"

Her father did nothing but wail in anguish as he watched her be attacked, only shooting at the beast once it was finished. However, he did apparently try--and fail--to poison the baby out of Wanda before it was born, assuming it to be a demon spawn. However, the baby was born and when he beheld its poorly made visage he murdered it and buried it outside the cabin. Wanda also reveals that she actually burned her father alive in revenge for murdering her baby.

Nugent decides to dig up the grave and discovers what appears to be a deer skull (?!) in the coffin, which is apparently proof that the baby was half-Bigfoot. He decides this must mean that Bigfoot was desperate to further his species since he knew he was the last, and thus chose Wanda as his mate. Never mind that Bigfoot comes calling on the cabin now and, despite there being several women he could choose from to further his species, he opts to go for "murder everyone but Wanda."

I suppose the women might be grateful for that, if they weren't too busy dying horribly.

"I...forgot...the..safe...word!"

Naturally, Nugent somehow survives after Bigfoot smashes his face onto a hot stove. Did you know that having your face burned off causes you to sprout novelty vampire fangs? Well, now you do!

Back in the hospital, the cops decide that Nugent is simply criminally insane and that's that. I mean, why bother looking into such a clearly crazy story? The End.

I bet the Girl Scouts were just thrilled to see their logo used in this movie.

There's really no way of arguing that Night of the Demon is a good movie. Technically competent, sure, and definitely entertaining--but that doesn't automatically make it good.

For one thing, the acting is uniformly awful. I really can't think of any performance that rises above "minimally competent," but most are simply bad. For another, while the film manages to somehow balance flashbacks within flashbacks, its story is still rather nonsensical. Note that it sets up some kind of a Bigfoot cult, implied to be an offshoot of Wanda's father's religious group, and they appear in precisely that one scene with no further role in the story.

Yet, for all its many, many faults, this is a damn fun little movie. It moves along at a great clip and, silly as the frequent flashbacks are, they keep the film from being boring even during the long set-up. It also must be said that, for the most part, its Bigfoot suit is really good. We get a lot of good looks at it and it only looks painfully fake in a few of its shots.

The gore is also far from Tom Savini in quality, but damned if it doesn't give us lots of it.

Really, this is the sort of monster movie that is perfect for watching with a group of friends or at a high school sleepover. It's fun, violent, and sleazy in all the best ways--note that unlike most films of its era, the rape scene is actually not played for titillation--and it really is a hoot.

Shame that the version streaming on Amazon Prime is of such poor quality. True, this is the sort of film that was destined to always be presented in VHS quality, but it would be a treat and a half to see it get an HD release one day.

I mean, you can never have enough scenes of Bigfoot ripping a guy's ding-dong off in HD.

Welcome to Day Fourteen of Hubri5Ween 2017, the fifth year of this nonsense! Click the banner above to see what everyone else did for N!