My favorite bad movies are always the ones that tend to combine a “WHAT IN GOD’S NAME IS HAPPENING???” factor with a certain level of competence. It can’t just be a confusing mess made by cynics or overconfident nincompoops because that’s not fun. No, the fun part for me is when the filmmakers love what they’re doing and know what they’re trying to do, but still find it difficult to relay that to the rest of us.
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Around the time that I started having BAD MOVIE MONDAY three years ago, my wife invented the term “Gratuititties” in order to describe the often gratuitous but always welcome presence of uncovered female breasts in a trashy movie. I’ve used it in as many reviews as I can, mostly because I think it’s a funny word. However, never has it been more appropriate to use than in this movie’s review. It only takes a little over one minute and thirty seconds before we see the first “gratuititties” in the film. Don’t worry though because they’ll be back again and again, and I felt like that boy at the end of ANIMAL HOUSE when a pretty girl crashes through his bedroom window onto his lap and he goes “THANK YOU GOD!” except I was thanking all the women in this movie pretty much throughout the entire movie.
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Do you like movies that look and feel like they were written during a weekend bender that might have included the sort of drugs that Rick James often used? Do you like movies that star actors whose fortunes have fallen so low that they’d have to rise up a few notches on the cinematic food chain in order to merely be considered “washed up”? Do you like movies made by people that seem to have seen a lot of movies but don’t seem to know how to make one themselves? Well, you’re in luck! Because today I’m reviewing THE CHILLING and it’s a Grade A quality turd.
The film I’m reviewing today is the granddaddy of low budget trash. There had been low budget movies before, of course, and many were pretty trashy. However, none of them had been quite as shameless in their crass exploitation of sex and violence as this one. I can only imagine what the crew cut and beehive hair crowd of 1963 must have thought watching this for the first time.
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Today’s BAD MOVIE MONDAY column is about a film called NEW YEAR’S EVIL. It was released in 1980 and was directed by Emmett Alston. It stars Roz Kelly, Kip Niven, Grant Cramer and Chris Wallace. The film is a pretty good horror movie, but… is it a slasher? I’ve always said that from 1979 to about 1983 every horror movie was trying to force itself into the slasher subgenre, often with poor results, and NEW YEAR’S EVIL is the perfect example of a movie that feels like it was hastily rewritten to fit the trend. So you know what? Instead of a review, I’m going to answer the question of whether or not NEW YEAR’S EVIL is a Slasher Movie, and my answer will be definitive.
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Since Christmas was yesterday, Happy Holidays to all of you out there in internet land by the way, I’ve chosen the immortal classic Silent Night Deadly Night 2 for BAD MOVIE MONDAY. Kind of as my gift to everyone who bothers to read this silly little column. It’s my way of both thanking you for listening to the insane ramblings of my diseased brain and of introducing you to the Silent Night, Deadly Night series of films. A series that I feel is rather unique by the fact that every entry goes more and more off the rails as it progresses. Parts 3, 4 and 5 get REALLY wild, but that’s for another time Continue reading
Want to hear something funny? As I was sitting here, getting ready to write this review, I only just this very second realized that “Black Christmas” is a play on words. Specifically, it twists around the cheerful upbeat title of the 1954 movie White Christmas starring Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye. In my usual clueless chimpanzee-like way I had never made this connection even though I must have seen the original Black Christmas thirty times in the last thirty-five years. Anyway, that’s my way of introducing today’s movie. Which is not the original, but instead the 2006 remake starring Katie Cassidy, Michelle Trachtenberg, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Oliver Hudson, Lacey Chabert, Kristen Cloke, and Andrea Martin. It was directed by Glen Morgan, who was a brilliant writer on The X-Files and a not so brilliant writer on the most recent incarnation of The Twilight Zone.