The 2nd MoFo Hall of Infamy : Son of Infamy
 

Welcome to the 2nd MoFo Hall of Infamy - otherwise knows as :

THE HALL OF INFAMY II : SON OF INFAMY

What is Son of Infamy all about? It's about nominating a film for us all to watch so that our hatred and disgust for it means you win! Instead of nominating a film that's likely going to be voted the best, you're nominating a film that we are certainly not going to like. So nominate a film you despise - whether it be a film well known to be one of the worst of all time, lowest rated on the IMDb, something you personally can't stand, or even a film that has been generally well recieved that you think deserves our derision. The choice is up to you. Then it's up to you to watch all the films that have been nominated, and write a review for each one. The size of review is up to you. At the end we all vote for the films in order of least liked/most hated on down to most tolerable.

Please note : nasty or argumentative behaviour won't be tolerated, and persistent offending will result with your expulsion from the Hall of Infamy

So, what are the rules? What conditions? Any restrictions? Just a few :

1 - Make sure your nomination doesn't exceed 150 minutes in length. None of us want to watch a 310 minute bad movie, even for a fun exercise such as this. It's also a good idea to check and see how available the movie you're nominating is. It's not good to nominate something like American Flatulators 2 if it's not available online and the only copy is going for $400 on eBay.

2 - You can't nominate any previous Hall of Fame or Hall of Infamy winner - as for the latter, this only includes our inaugural winner : Going Overboard (1989) which is now infamous.

3 - All of the usual Hall of Fame rules apply :


Please note : I'm operating under Australian Western Standard Time, which will feel a little unusual compared to other hosts. If you ever want to quickly check how it compares, then :

If you're on the West Coast of the U.S.A. add 15 hours
If you're on the East Coast of the U.S.A. add 12 hours
If you're in the U.K. add 7 hours

Participants :

PHOENIX74 - 2 nominations received
TheUsualSuspect - 2 nominations received
Allaby - 2 nominations received
KeyserCorleone - 2 nominations received
Takoma11 - 2 nominations received
ueno_station54 - 2 nominations received
Siddon - 2 nominations

Re: The 2nd MoFo Hall of Infamy : Son of Infamy
 

I know I said I was taking a break from Halls, but since the last Hall of Infamy went well, I might join this one regardless. I'll have to think about it.

Re: The 2nd MoFo Hall of Infamy : Son of Infamy
 

This sounds like it will be delightfully terrible and terrifically awful. I'm in and I already know what piece of trash I will force everyone to watch.

Re: The 2nd MoFo Hall of Infamy : Son of Infamy
 

I don't like to join multiple Halls at once, but I only have 3 films left in the Personal Recs one, so at the rate I've been going, I might finish that before the end of this HoF's open door period anyway.

Re: The 2nd MoFo Hall of Infamy : Son of Infamy
 

Do I want to torture myself with these horrible movies again?

There's a terrible movie I had in mind, but it is only 55 minutes. So people might actually use that as a positive!!!! So I can't do that, right?!?!?!

The first one was fun to be a spectator. So you know I'm going to be tuning in again, as a spectator. Since I'm a seasoned ticket holder, my seat has moved to the 50 yd line.


I shall enjoy...

Re: The 2nd MoFo Hall of Infamy : Son of Infamy
 

Submitted a movie that I haven't seen in over 15 years. I hope it holds up as bad as I remember.

I have to say, an intriguing few movies so far - and I'm sure my rampant curiosity will be punished.

A few people regretted not joining the last one, but I'm leaving this one open for quite a while, so there's no hurry on making a commitment.

Re: The 2nd MoFo Hall of Infamy : Son of Infamy
 

I sure hope this is awesome bad stuff as opposed to just unwatchable stuff...I've got sooo many possible noms

I'm probably in. Will decide by the end of the week.

I will not participate, but will follow along, speaking up only to offer halfassed defenses of the movies I actually like.

Re: The 2nd MoFo Hall of Infamy : Son of Infamy
 

I won't join this one, but I'll definitely be following along and I hope for this thread to go as smoothly as the last one did. See you all in the 3rd Hall of Infamy.

To Rock & Speling: You ain't bumpin' me from those 50 yd seats!

I'll try using reverse psychology to get you to join.

"You know, I think John Dumbear is too much of a coward to join the Hall of Infamy. In fact, if he doesn't join, I'll bask in the knowledge that this is true. The only way I can be convinced otherwise is if he joins, but I don't think he has the guts to do that."

I'm sensing the Hall of Infamy is a Hall that heaps and heaps of people want to watch but not so many want to join.

Re: The 2nd MoFo Hall of Infamy : Son of Infamy
 

Come on, people! Join the fun! The first one was a blast and the second one will be even more epic!

Sorry, just realizing that I could technically make you all watch Krampus again.

There are several Krampus movies so we could all make each other watch different Krampus films.

That would have to be the spinoff, Son of Infamy vs. Krampus.

Btw I am so joining. Bring me your worst, and don't disappoint me.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoVVMs5iidk

Another kind of fascinating nomination comes in.

I think this is a really fun idea. I just need a break from Halls for the time being.

Don’t worry. I got us the best seats in the house.

Speaking for myself, I don’t really join the Halls due to the effort involved, but the kinds of films and genial atmosphere in the last one made it fun to follow along.

Re: The 2nd MoFo Hall of Infamy : Son of Infamy
 

I told PHOENIX74 about one of the worst films I have watched but sure in the heck not watching anyone else's. You want to nominate a film, anyone can have mine. 2.5 on Imdb. Never been rated on RT and I think Letterboxd is same rating on IMDB.

I will just ask, @TheUsualSuspect @Allaby @KeyserCorleone and @Takoma11 - how do you all feel about having the ability to nominate 2 films for this Hall of Fame? I'd be very kind with the deadline.

I would be cool with that.

You mean if there's a relatively low turnout for this round?

I'd prefer not to have to watch more than about 10 films for this Hall.

Yeah, if the turnout doesn't reach the magical '6' - but it wouldn't be a compulsory 'you have to nominate 2' rule. Just to beef the number of films from 5 to, say, 6, 7, 8 or 9.

Sounds like an interesting turn of events. In that case, I've already got a couple options.

Re: The 2nd MoFo Hall of Infamy : Son of Infamy
 

I already know what my 2nd pick would be..and it's awful.

Say no people. Wait for the unholy six to come together.

Boooo!

Just wait the evil will coalesce given time.

Okay - here's the drill for this Hall of Infamy. In another 48 hours I'll reveal the nominations so far.

People will have 7 days to join from that day forward.

If the number of people joining doesn't get to 6, then on the 6th day I'll throw open the doors for 2nd nominations.

I object!!! :mad::mad::mad:

No, not really...I'm cool with that. :cool:

Please Note : I'm now accepting second nominations, which will be revealed when the deadline for joining reaches us. If we meet our quota, then these second nominations won't be included.


.

I sent in my 2nd nomination, if it ends up being needed. It's as terrible as the first!

Re: The 2nd MoFo Hall of Infamy : Son of Infamy
 

I've only heard of one of these.

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Candy, 1968

Yes, yes, give me some more you blue-eyed b*tch!

Candy (Ewa Aulin) is a high school girl who is lusted after by every man over the age of 30 who lays eyes on her. After being assaulted by the family gardener (Ringo), Candy's father (John Astin) takes her to New York to start over. But at every turn Candy finds herself in the sights of a different man.

It's hard to rate a movie like this, where what works on purpose and what is just a fascinating trainwreck starts to blur together. At the very least I can say that I was never bored.

As I see it, this film has two things going for it. The first is a weirdness that seems to actually work at times. At one point a radical man with a hunchback climbs the walls to escape the clutches of the police. At another point, a doctor (James Coburn) performs surgery on Candy's father, producing grindhouse levels of blood splatter.

The other thing that I appreciated about the film was that part of the humor came from how ridiculous the men were and how pathetic it was that they were using their power to sexually abuse and coerce Candy. Whether it's Richard Burton as a poet who always inexplicably has hair and clothing fluttering in the wind forcing himself on Candy in his car, an aspiring filmmaker cornering Candy in a bathroom, Walter Matthau as an army general who expects Candy's sexual service in exchange for saving her father's life, or Marlon Brando as a "guru" who exploits Candy in the name of enlightenment, the way that all of these men are drawn to Candy's innocence and inexperience seems like a decent commentary on the inherent insecurity that underlies a lot of the virgin girl fantasy. One of my favorite moments actually doesn't involve Candy at all---it's the source of the quote at the top of this review. Two police officers go into a gay club and begin beating up several men who are either transgender or in drag. One of them kisses one of the officers, and the officer responds with anger, hitting the person with his baton. "You want more?" he asks, and his victim preens on the stairs, delivering the line at the top. It's a moment where the violent use of authority is turned back on its perpetrator, and the film could have used more of it. There's an almost subtle joke about the fact that Candy herself is always blamed for her sexual encounters that's a bit too real for the ultimate direction that the film takes.

The problems with this film are two fold. The first is that it contains a lot of racist, homophobic, sexist sentiments without the distinction of whether or not the characters have those view or the film does. Ringo playing a Mexican gardener--who shouts "Viva Zapata!" as he assaults Candy--is just the tip of the iceberg.

But the real problem with the film is Candy herself. I have nothing bad to say about Aulin's performance. She brings a guileless delivery and aura to Candy that actually becomes a bit funnier as the film goes on. (Around the third time she acts surprised by a man wanting to have sex with her it feels like a joke, something that isn't true the first time). Candy is actually quite likable in her own way. She just wants people to be happy, and sees no reason why she shouldn't offer them her body or sex if that's what they need.

But this means that Candy doesn't grow as a character at all. Her sweetness is very flat and one-note, something that is a problem with the writing, not the performance. Candy reacts with the same degree of passion whether someone's buying her a Coke or operating on her father's brain. It also blurs the lines of consent in the film in a way that is uncomfortable to watch. Candy is constantly cornered or coerced, and then her reaction is kind of a shrug. Obviously this movie wouldn't be fun if she were distressed by these various assaults, but at the same time she doesn't seem to derive much pleasure from her encounters. By not developing her character, the movie ends up objectifying her just as much as the pathetic middle-aged men who lust after her. There's an unpleasant sense that a bunch of A-listers just signed on to grope an actual teenager (Aulin would have been 16 or 17 at the time of filming). A rumor that Brando actually tried to have sex with Aulin adds a nauseating dynamic to this.

So visually interesting, but conceptually very problematic in a lot of ways.

Re: The 2nd MoFo Hall of Infamy : Son of Infamy
 

Just gonna get my nom out of the way.


Titanic: The Legend Goes On

OK, there are two versions of this movie. One is a 90 minute version I can only find online as a riff (some YT channel that specifically riffs bad musicals). The other is a 75 minute edit. I know what you're thinking: go for the 75 minute version to get the pain out of the way more quickly, right?


EEEEEEEH nerp. Truth is, I recommend the 90 minute version, because the movie is so packed with horrific DIsney-knockoff subplots that it's not even funny unless you riff it, and the horror of the 75 minute version is that the edit does NOTHING to relive the movie of subplots, which means it's more quickly paced and confusing, and the worst part? It's not actually a 75 minute edit! It's an hour-long edit with 14 minutes of credits! And the editing is so much worse!


The 75-minute edit is the worst movie I've ever seen. However, I still find the original 90 minute version absolutely unwatchable without the riff. We still have countless characters ripping off DIsney movies with only slight variations, sometimes more than one per character! And I'll also admit that the songs on the 90-minute version are worse than the replacements on the 75 minute version (although I'm in the minority when I say the rap song on the original is slightly better than "Party Time." And let us not forget that the animation sucks, the jokes are shit, half the cast is pretty ugly and the story is hardly a story. You can choose which version you want to watch as far as I'm considered. Both are a 0 of ten. The only reason I'm not counting the edit as the version I'm counting as my OFFICIAL review is because I have a rule concerning my list of every movie I've seen ranked from best to worst: always put the best version of the movie on the list to be fair. This means I'm also giving the other movies a chance to post something worst. I decided not to nom the second worst movie I've ever seen, anyway, because I was thinking more in terms of what others would hate instead of what I would hate.


0/10.

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Airplane Mode, 2019

You're a basic b*tch, now get out of my liquor.

Logan (Logan Paul) wants to have sex with his internet girlfriend who lives in Australia, and so seizes on the opportunity to attend a convention in Australia, despite being afraid of flying. But when the pilots are accidentally electrocuted, Logan and a charming woman he met on the plane, Jenna (Chloe Bridges), must safely land the plane.

Okay.

Okay.

I think that this movie perfectly encapsulates the philosophical difficulty I have with figuring out my own personal definition of infamy. For me, there's something about the gap between expectation (even if those expectations are relatively low) and reality that makes a film truly upsetting/repulsive/infamous.

Is this movie unbearable? Yes. Did I expect it to be unbearable? Also yes.

Look, this is an extended skit full of half-hearted edgelord humor. At the center of it all is the smirking Logan Paul, a man whose real-life repulsiveness only adds to the difficulty of sticking with the film. Then you throw in below basic jokes about a man breast-feeding a baby, a man being racially profiled by the TSA, or a character always waking up with an erection.

There were three minor blessings in this film. The first is that it's only 80 minutes long. The second and third, respectively, are Chloe Bridges and Stephen Guarino (playing Bruce the flight attendant), who are actual actors who can deliver a line. It's easy to spot the various YouTube personalities who populate this mess, because they only know one way to deliver a joke, and that's screaming at the top of their lungs. Bridges and Guarino, however, at least have some charisma and timing. (Though he is saddled with truly terrible dialogue, I may have carried over some affection for Guarino from his role on Happy Endings as Derrick.)

There's really not much to say about this film. It's shrill and deeply unfunny. At the same time, it doesn't seem like it aspired to be anything other than that. It's awful. But infamously so? I'm still working on that part.

Re: The 2nd MoFo Hall of Infamy : Son of Infamy
 

There's a Logan Paul movie? Yikes, good luck with that one everyone.

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Titanic: The Legend Goes On, 2000

Quit kvetchin', Gretchen!

Angelica (Lisa Russo) boards the Titanic with her awful stepmother (aunt?), dreaming of one day finding her long-lost mother. She meets the charming William (Mark Thompson-Ashworth) and the two begin a tentative romance amidst a variety of dramas and intrigues involving the people and animals aboard.

My students in my classroom will often be charged with drawing something . . . and then head straight to their iPads to trace an image from the internet.

This film looks like every single character design was lifted from a Disney film, like to the point that I'm surprised there weren't legal ramifications. There are literally two Dalmatians, a dog that IS Lady from Lady and the Tramp, almost exact copies of the mice from Cinderella and numerous other profiles that are shockingly familiar.

And outside of the copying, the animation is just clunky. Maybe my favorite weird animation moment is when William bumps into Angelica, leading her to drop the basket of laundry she's carrying. William picks up one of the dresses that she's dropped, remarking something like "I bet you look lovely in this." Only the dress he's holding up has been drawn to look like it's the size of a ship's sail. (Okay, yes, it's meant to belong to one of Angelica's less svelte step-sisters (cousins?), but it's still a bizarre, formless image).

There are numerous---way too numerous!--subplots involving the ship's chef, a family of thieves, Angelica's story, William's story, a lusty French waiter, and so on. About a third of the way into the movie I honestly lost track of it all.

For all these complaints, though, this film veers into that can't-look-away trainwreck territory. I actually laughed out loud when the dog started rapping. It's bad, but kind of compellingly so. The overt plagiarism alone makes it kind of interesting viewing. The only thing that the animators really seemed to care about were a handful of times they were called on to render some impressive breasts for characters in low-cut dresses (and Angelica in her wedding dress, LOL!).

So I watched Titanic: The Legend Goes On... (2000). This is an animated comedy with talking animals set aboard the titanic because the sinking of the titanic is of course a cute, lighthearted event... This was bad, but not unwatchable. The characters are obvious rip offs of characters from Disney movies. The rapping dog was ridiculous, but made me laugh. The animation isn't very good and the voice acting is pretty flat I did sort of like that song though. Thankfully, this is pretty short.

I'm paying $1 to watch A Talking Cat?!.

Just putting that out there. Would I like to pay $2 to watch it in HD? NO THANK YOU, AMAZON!

I just finished suffering through the awful "movie", Airplane Mode (2019). I think this is our early frontrunner to "win" this hall. Logan Paul is annoying and unlikable and his "performance" here is terrible. The screenplay is stupid, juvenile, and derivative. I will admit I chuckled a couple times. The best performance in this is from the baby.

Re: The 2nd MoFo Hall of Infamy : Son of Infamy
 

Bane

Watched this out of eagerness. See, Takoma's last pic was some of the best dogshit on Earth, so I was hoping her next nom would live up.

I... kinda liked this, though. It's obvious that the sets and actors were B-movie level, but the story kept me intrigued. Yes, it was a generic rehash, but it kept its mystery vibes powerful throughout, and the villain was really easy to hate. Some of it was kinda scary, too. I mean, I still prefer Saw whenj it comes to this kinds of movies, but I want a remake of this. And I wasn;t too disappointed in the end, either. It kinda felt real in a way.

I'm watching another James Eaves movie now, The Witches Hammer. This is way worse, laughably so.

6/10.

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A Talking Cat?!, 2013

Ya, so you're a chef?

Phil (Johnny Whitaker) is a retired coder living with his son, Chris (Justin Cone). Chris has a crush on Frannie (Alison Sieke), a classmate he tutors. Nearby, Susan (Kristine DeBell) is trying to find investors for her catering business, getting help from her kids Tina (Janis Valdez) and Trent (Daniel Dannas). Both families are visited by Duffy (Squeaky, voiced by Eric Roberts), a talking cat who gives them valuable life advice.

I'd suggest that it could be a fun drinking game to take a shot every time a character in this film says "Ya" or "Weird", but the deaths by alcohol poisoning would weigh heavily on my conscience.

Like the Titanic animated movie, this one was bad in a way that got quite a few chuckles out of me, definitely veering into so-bad-it's-enjoyable territory. Everything about it is so haphazard that it seems designed to be riffed mercilessly.

The dynamic of the film is such that the writing is terrible and the acting just sinks right down to that level. It's hard to single anyone out, as it's varying shades of stilted, but Whitaker comes off particularly rough. I have to say, though, that the film gives the impression that everyone got exactly one take and, you know, whatever happened happened. But the hair, the goatee, the ill-fitting clothing----they all take Whitaker's Phil over the line into uncomfortable absurdity. Like could no one tell the man in that one scene that he had a huge wedgie? No? Just gonna let him walk away from the camera? That's cold man. That's really cold.

The writing, as mentioned, is so bad. It's a movie where every character, regardless of age or gender or emotion, speaks with the same limited vocabulary. "Ya" seems to start every sentence. Everyone and everything at some point or another is classified as "weird". The characters are also incredibly one-dimensional. A sequence where Susan badgers her daughter into cooking pans and pans of cheese puffs for her investors is just bizarre. Shouldn't Susan, the person who own the catering business, be the one doing the cooking?

This leads into the topic of, like, general incompetence. In one of my favorite LOL sequences, Phil comes over to flirt with Susan. Susan takes a hot pan of cheese puffs out of the oven with her bare hands, and then hands them to Phil. Phil, shocked by the sight of Duffy at their home and not the scalding hot pan of baked goods, drops the pan on the floor. And yet the camera refuses to pan down to show us the ruined cheese puffs. Probably because someone cooked exactly one batch and they were being saved to pay certain cast and crew members. Then there's the scene where Duffy is hit by a car. Normally an injured pet would get me going, even in such a dumb film, but then we see Duffy, clearly happy or high on catnip with a single stretch bandage wrapped around his head, and I just laughed. The "special effects" used to make the cat appear to talk (but only in certain scenes?!) has to be seen to be believed.

So on the topic of Duffy: adorable! Roberts' voice over sounds like it was recorded in a tin can, but while the dialogue is painful it never crosses the threshold into annoying. The cat is very cute and I enjoyed watching it lounge around the various locations.

Very silly. This is a very silly film.

Yeah, I went kind of easy on ya'll this round (both this one and my second nom). I'll talk more about why I disliked this film so much when I review it.

I've seen this and it's only watchable with Rifftrax. I also met Eric Roberts last year and asked him about it and he said his kids loved it.

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Bane, 2008

*This review will contain out-in-the-open spoilers, including the end of the film*

Four women---Katherine (Sophia Dawnay), Jane (Lisa Devlin), Natasha (Tina Barnes), and Elaine (Sylvia Robson)--have been abducted into a strange underground facility. Their memories erased, they suffer relentless interrogation and torture at the hands of a doctor named Murdoch (Daniel Jordan) and a mysterious man (Jonathan Sidgwick). At night, they are terrorized by a masked surgeon (Sam Smith, no not that Sam Smith).

For maybe the first 20 or so minutes, I thought, "Man, maybe I was too hard on this film." I haven't seen this movie in about 10 years, and I tend to be pretty generous when scoring films that are obviously low-budget affairs. It is rare for me to score independent films--especially those that seem to be trying--less than a 5. But as the film went on, it became pretty clear to me why this one ended up on my crud list.

Going back to what I wrote about Candy and Airplane Mode, infamy to my mind has something to do with a gap that exists between what a movie could have been or wants to be and what it actually is. That space between expectation and reality is, for me, what makes something frustrating.

So Bane.

This is a film that raises some interesting questions, only for the answers to be either completely obvious and stupid or incredibly frustrating and nonsensical. Anyone who has ever seen a single dang film in their lives would easily guess that one of the women is somehow involved in what is happening. The film even weirdly tries to lampshade this by having Natasha be oddly instantly suspicious that Jane is part of it all.

The longer the film goes on, the more the torture and torment feels random, and the twist at the end that it was basically all random just to generate fear is the kind of "answer" that makes me incredibly annoyed as a viewer. It's the kind of plot element that allows a writing team to just sit around coming up with random stuff. I'm not saying that some of the situations aren't kind of creepy. Natasha waking up and finding that her kidney is gone is icky, and a scene where Jane either remembers or dreams being confined in a tiny cage while surrounded by hostile men is adequately claustrophobic and awful. But something about the pace of the movie never gets the tension and fear to build in the right way. It's all stop and go, with little or no new understanding to keep you engaged.

One thing I can compliment the film on is the lack of sexual exploitation in the film. It's pretty rare to find a film where a woman hostage isn't a victim of rape or attempted rape, and I appreciate that this film doesn't go there. On one hand, given what we ultimately learn about the objectives of their torturers, this actually seems like something that would have happened. But on the other hand I think that including such content would have veered the film into unwatchable territory for me.

What really irked me, ultimately, about this film is the combination of where we end up and just how long it takes to get there. I paused the film at one point when I was getting antsy, only to discover there was still an hour of runtime left. How? Why?! Why is this film so long. When I think back to what happens in it, I can't account for the 100 minutes. And the final scenes? Just really not a fan. Everything feels clunky, from the fact that a character has a literal exposition video to show a character to the declaration at the end that love was what saved everyone. I'm sorry, but maybe you are not watching the same movie I'm watching. That wasn't love, sweetheart, it was guilt. Not quite the same thing. It's the kind of finale that raises a lot of questions, many of which make you reflect more negatively on the content that came before. (My main question: can anyone explain how the surgeon was able to stab such neat numbers into their bodies? Was this guy a pointilist painter in a former life?)

There are some not-terrible ideas here, but there are way too many of them and they are explored in a way that is a huge let-down. The nerve of this film being two hours long.

Re: The 2nd MoFo Hall of Infamy : Son of Infamy
 

oh damn i love A Talking Cat!?! it better lose

Do you love it with the fire of a thousand dropped cheese puffs?

Or merely with the teenage exuberance of a college senior who doesn't know how to swim?

I haven’t seen A Talking Cat, but David DeCoteau seems like a good dude. There’s a decent Important Cinema Club episode on him (and I think one of them even interviewed him). I haven’t delved super deep into his work, but I had fun with Nightmare Sisters and Dr. Alien.

Clearly I need to see A Talking Cat

I have to say, friend, if you're already mis-punctuating the title, I'm not sure you're in the spirit of the thing.

And hear I was feeling good and rad that I had spelt everything right

Don't feel bad. If A Talking Cat?! taught me anything, it's cheese-puffs toupee reading lamp play stupid so he likes you glowing orb.

Re: The 2nd MoFo Hall of Infamy : Son of Infamy
 

A Talking Cat!

Boy, this is my first one to watch, and it's in the running for the top spot. Talk about a poorly produced crap fest. Bad flat lighting in every scene, shot on what I can only assume was someone's JVC camcorder from the 90s. Writing that makes me want to cut my ears off and throw them miles away. Acting that is...my God....some of the most wooden delivery I've seen in a long time.

Let's not forget the laughable talking CGI bits with the cat. Something someone probably did with a phone app. If someone paid money to watch this, they need to have their bank account taken away from them, maybe put into conservatorship. This is a movie where a group of random people decided...hey, let's just do whatever. No attempt to be good, no attempt at entertaining or...anything really.

Damn, this one sucked.

Okay, so here we are and I'm going to go out on a limb here and say even if someone new joins, those second nominations are looking set to be revealed to join the current nominations. I currently have 4. The 2nd Reveal and Deadline for joining comes in 3 days time.

Re: The 2nd MoFo Hall of Infamy : Son of Infamy
 

oh didn't realize there was still time to join. guess i'll jump in then :)

And just like that! We have a new nomination :



.

Re: The 2nd MoFo Hall of Infamy : Son of Infamy
 

i noticed we didn't have any christian propaganda yet so i had to remedy that

Sorry I missed this, am I to nominate a second film?

Re: The 2nd MoFo Hall of Infamy : Son of Infamy
 

since i already let the cat out of the bag in regards to my feelings towards this film i guess i'll start here:

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A Talking Cat!?! (David Decoteau, 2013)

So I quite enjoyed this when I'd first seen it years ago, probably not too long after it came out, mostly as a lolcow but i thought it had a hint of genuine charm as well. Obviously the very low budget, lack of locations, excessive stock music, nearly non-existent stakes, probably shot on a DSLR, drunk Eric Roberts recording his lines into a tin can and of course the talking cat effect make it a prime candidate for mockery and to have some fun in the process. This time around things were a bit different though. This time I enjoyed the film in a far more sincere way. Its such a nice, sunny film, the vibes are just immaculate. the music, despite obviously being royalty free, really pressed the nostalgia button in my brain as it reminds me of like late 90's-early 2000's PC games. A lot of it sounds like you could find it in a Barbie or Nancy Drew game and it hit me with a remarkable amount of warmth and comfort. I had such a genuine smile on my face the whole way through. There's some real magic to this film and it really turned around the kind of blah mood I was in today. You could do a wonderful triple feature with two other films that deal with a magical stranger waltzing into a family's life and changing things for the better, Teorema and Visitor Q :p. I never expected to enjoy this so genuinely but my heart has been warmed and my day brightened.

I watched A Talking Cat!?! today. This wasn't that bad. The acting was pretty poor for the most part. I thought it was a cute and interesting story. Some of the dialogue and scenes were a little cheesy, but I have seen worse. Squeaky the cat who played Duffy the cat was clearly the best actor in the film. Eric Roberts was fine as the voice of the cat. I chuckled a couple times. I've only seen one other film by this director, which was Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama (1988). I enjoyed that one and it was a better film than A Talking Cat. But this one was tolerable and mildly amusing. Meow!

Re: The 2nd MoFo Hall of Infamy : Son of Infamy
 

Well, couldn't let myself go to bed happy so I decided to watch this instead:

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Airplane Mode (David Dinetz & Dylan Trussell, 2019)

Okay so the first scene, someone did a wrestling move (big plus) followed almost immediately by an especially lame transphobic joke (big minus) and boy it sure would've been nice if one of those was a reoccurring thing instead of the other and even though I'd just prefer their not also be racist jokes at all, you'd think racist TSA joke technology would have evolved at some point in the last 20 years. Despite this, the film was at least moving along briskly enough... for a bit at least. Once the actual premise starts the film loses any momentum it had and I can't believe that was only 80 minutes. I could say it felt like an eternity but realistically it probably felt about 20 minutes longer than it was, which is still absurdly bad. I felt my brain going numb by the end. It's maybe still not as bad as I expected but that's because it couldn't have possibly been worse than I expected. Its just rapid fire jokes from the most annoying people imaginable which, since there is so many jokes a couple of them are bound to work. I don't remember any of them but it probably happened. Yeah this was quite bad, good chance of winning.

You've already forgotten the instantly iconic moment where the love interest threw pudding at another passenger?

the best bit in the movie is clearly just Logan Paul awkwardly scooting away on a hoverboard after the kid breaks his femurs, but that's probably just because the movie ended immediately after.

Only if you want to.

I threw the idea out there, that if we didn't get many joining I'd open the doors for second nominations - but I made it a non-compulsory aspect of the Hall. Since ueno joined I reached my minimum number of participants, and we reached 6 nominations, and 5 second nominations - but I'll ask everyone one last time (this is especially for @Takoma11 who didn't want to review any more than 10 films) does anyone have a problem with adding the 5 extra second nominations to this Hall of Infamy?

@Allaby @KeyserCorleone @ueno_station54

I'm fine with adding the extra noms, if everyone else is okay with it. If anyone has an issue with it, I'm also okay with not adding the second noms.

Re: The 2nd MoFo Hall of Infamy : Son of Infamy
 

i'm cool with it either way. i'm gonna end up sitting through my second pick either way lol.

It's fine with me to add the second nominations. I already watched everything except Leap. I appreciate that most nominations this time around were pretty short. (Yes, my own film was an exception. I think I'd repressed the fact that it was two hours long).

Re: The 2nd MoFo Hall of Infamy : Son of Infamy
 

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Leap: Rise of the Beast (Chris Tempel, 2011)

Okay a bit of preamble. I kind of cheated a bit with this nomination (as well as my second pick if we do those). I had recently found a great list on Letterboxd that just had a ton of just unhinged shit (not all bad but mostly bad) on it and threw a ton of it on my watchlist. Once I saw I could still join this hall I had to pick something from that list, it would have been a waste not to. The reason I say I cheated a bit is that I picked films that, though by all accounts are terrible, were things that had a chance for me to actually enjoy which might be kind of not in the spirit of this thing.

Fortunately, this wasn't good or fun in the slightest and I don't have to feel guilty about the pick :)

This really sounded like it was going to be a good time. Christian parkour action movie about the entire Vatican (as in the country) being the antichrist?? What a pitch. That sounds so bonkers in concept but sadly it did not bonk and a only serves as a reminder that parkour is actually really boring unless its at the absolute highest tier. Its got all the bad movie stuff we expect. Bad acting, badly shot, no oomph to the action, a bit of terrible green screen here and there. Tragically none of it ends up being fun even by accident. Its just kind of boring. Completely unremarkable. I think the funniest aspect of the film is just that everyone in the film is the most christian looking person you've ever seen. Also there's a cliffhanger ending and no follow up ever happened, that's kind of funny too. There's a fight scene that's at least choreographed I guess? It's not good but they planned something at least? idk I'm grasping at straws here but its at least not bad enough to like, affect my mood or anything it just came and went.

If anyone has a link for Wild 90!(1968) I join this Hall....I can't find it and the person running the hall can't either.

It wasn't easy, but I found it (it's also on the Criterion channel).

And with that, there were 7 :


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@Siddon - you have the option to nominate 2 films in this Hall of Fame if you wish

I'm watching Wild 90 right now, before it's taken down by the powers that be!

Re: The 2nd MoFo Hall of Infamy : Son of Infamy
 

ayyy something i actually want to watch lets goooo

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Wild 90 (1967)

Often times I wonder to myself what makes a film terrible and three things come to mind. First is the film is boring....and Wild 90 tells the story of three guys held up in a single run down apartment after robbing a grocery store. We never leave the location...people come in and out of the apartment for little to no reason and the film ends with Norman Mailer saying it was all about the CIA. The second part is the film poorly made...and this is a film that is so bad you have to wonder just how many of the people working on the film were sober. 50-70% of the dialogue is incomprehensible. Mailer shouts and screams and puts on a WC Fields or racist accent who knows it's just terrible. The film isn't in focus at times. And the third part is the film just stupid...and listening to Norman Mailor drunkenly rant, bark at dogs and try and get laid on camera...is really dumb.

Fun Fact: one of the many non-actors to show up in the film is future honorary Oscar and cinema verite trailblazer DA Pennebaker who plays I think a cop....can't really tell. I hope you all enjoy listening to a babbling drunk moron for 80 minutes and think Criterion wanted this film to be seen.

It helps to know straight off the bat what Wild 90 is about and what it was meant to be to gain some understanding of what happened and why it's what it is. It started as an acting exercise - three friends pretending to be gangsters. Buzz Farbar, Mickey Knox and Norman Mailer had so much fun, and so much funny banter came out that it was decided on the spot to make a film of the three of them doing just this. By the time these three were at their location - a bare, sparsely furnished room with D.A. Pennebaker set to record them on camera, they were drunk and must have been in a completely different headspace with the pressure on. What we get is 82 minutes of improv that stinks - and just to rub salt in, the sound recording is atrocious. A lot of the time, these guys are just interrupting each other or all talking at once - but even when they do get some clean air, you can hardly make out what they're trying to say. As the film continues, Mailer becomes far too drunk to be understood in any case.

There's no story so the banter just goes nowhere. Mailer spends much of the time grunting and trying desperately to project some kind of primal masculinity. He breaks things and bangs things. He's playing "The Prince" and is the hardest to understand clearly. Nothing he says is clever, and most of what he thinks up is painfully inane. But he's not alone in that department. Buzz Farbar is playing "Cameo" and spends an inordinate amount of his time playing around with a switchblade knife. He seems to be the lowest in the pecking order, and so most of the insults are aimed at him. Mickey Knox plays "Twenty Years", which is possibly the worst or best (I can't tell) name for a character I've ever heard. I can't remember much about him, because my most vivid memory of sitting through this embarrassing improv is Mailer's barking and grunting. Throughout the film these three get various visitors, but these people can't end the pain, and just get sucked into the flailing act which never really gets going.

Yes - embarrassment. It's palpable throughout the entire "performance", and it makes one wonder just why this wasn't scrapped. Perhaps Norman Mailer's ego wouldn't permit an admission of failure, so this had to play out to it's inevitable end. Pennebaker was the one who tried to persuade him to just forget it - the sound glitch was reason enough to not release it, but Mailer insisted. The film received overwhelmingly negative reviews - the only positive notice coming from Mailer himself in Esquire. To sit through and watch it makes for a very painful 82 minutes - the last 10 of which had me counting down on the 'time remaining' counter so I could blissfully be released. If I was forced to say something positive about it, I'd say that it accurately reflects what being sequestered in a room of testosterone-fueled and drunk gangsters for 21 days would be like. We get a very ugly reflection of their world, with the constant need they have to assert their manliness and physical superiority over each other. It's not long before we hate all three characters and wish to be as far away from them as we can possibly be.

The way the three (and others) are filmed, by Pennebaker, isn't overly awful, and serves it's purpose. He stayed very mobile, and was able to adapt to his actors' unpredictable movements and actions. We get sawn-off shotguns, machine guns and pistols as props, along with a cornocopia of various booze bottles - most of which have been emptied. It's bare minimum kind of stuff, but it's there. The only thing that isn't is the ability of our three main performers to think up anything that's worth hearing. Everything they say feels forced - and nobody has even one small moment of inspiration. Buzz Farbar would later recount the fact that the three of them had been very ingenious and funny when doing their gangster thing at a restaurant in New York, but that in the film this wasn't the case. I'm willing to let this film have a little more leeway, for I've seen some arthouse films in my day that can frustrate and cause pain - most notably from Yoko Ono. It was a failed experiment, but experiment is what it is, and the end result was full of obscenity and posturing. This would probably be what three real gangsters are actually like - especially inebriated. They'd be just as stupid and incoherent. It's just that watching Norman Mailer and two of his friends be stupid and incoherent is no fun.

I thought I already sent my second nom.

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LEAP: Rise of the Beast, 2011

They're letting gays and women preach!

Shane (Alexander J. Bonds) is part of a crew of rebellious underground Christians fighting against a Vatican-controlled society in which everyone is microchipped and forced to attend alternate religious masses. A Vatican enforcement squad works to track down Shane's crew to keep them from distributing their street preaching videos on the internet.

It was hard to find a still for this film that doesn't make it look much more exciting than it is. As it was, with a not-awful run time of 75 minutes, I thought that this was pretty funny as a raw look inside the hyperbolic prosecuted Christian complex.

Just to be very clear, I know and love many people who are practicing Christians. And most of them are completely not threatened by the existence of other religions, women, or they gays. But we all know that there exists a subgroup of Christians who genuinely seem to believe that Christians are the most persecuted people in the world. This film was like a demented peek inside what they imagine as the end game of Christians not dominating political and social power.

Probably the best-worst element of this film is the "action". And believe me when I say that those quotes cannot possibly convey the sarcasm I intend. The best shot may simply have been a shot from behind of the four teens (are they teens? early 20-somethings?) running away across a lawn, inspiring absolutely zero faith that they can actually climb walls. The film uses the old bend your knees and say "Oof!" to imply having jumped down off of a building. There is a wonderful awful training montage, including advanced moves about on par with what my fifth grade students do on the playground.

But there also has to be a special note about the acting, which is flatter than a pancake. The bad guys repeatedly refer to the crew as a cult, and frankly their line deliveries make that accusation sound more real. Take the blonde actress's delivery of the line "Anything is possible with God," using a tone more appropriate to observing "It's cloudy outside." Or the strange lack of emotion as Shane relates the story of a child asking about the truth only to be forced underwater by a priest.

Finally, the settings. For a world power, I'm surprised that the Vatican's control room consists of five dudes sitting in front of a corrugated metal wall. And please someone explain why toward the end Shane and the ex-girlfriend were sitting in the most poorly CGI rendered room!

Wait, not finally! Ueno, you sick puppy, this film

Wowza. I can't say I liked anything about this movie, but it did get several laughs out of me.

Re: The 2nd MoFo Hall of Infamy : Son of Infamy
 

I am so glad I am not in on this..:laugh::laugh::laugh:

Honestly, this time around most of them are falling into "enjoyably bad" territory for me.

Thank goodness! That has got to be a relief.

Did they at least use gold spray paint on the wall? That would enhance the believability by a lot haha.

LOL, if only.

It looks like they filmed their "operations center" inside of a pre-fab shed or something. But it's really the scene in the CGI "prison cell" that has to be seen to be believed. At first I thought the idea was that they'd put the hero into some sort of virtual reality to extort information from him. Nope.

This scene can be seen at 58:35 below.

https://youtu.be/jZd-J7Ucn-c?t=3514

Wow, they didn't even try to get the lighting on the actors to fit with the background, or even do some minimal colour correction to make it appear less jarring. I hope they were just being lazy, and didn't genuinely think that looked fine.

It's the clearly drawn door that seals the deal for me. When they "walked out" of that door I was like "BWAAAAAA?!?!?!?".

This morning some missionaries dropped by my house. I should have asked them for a parkour training montage.

The what?!? I didn't watch the whole scene, but now I have to. :lol:

The door was indeed very fake and incredibly flat looking, but honestly, I was kind of expecting something like what we got in The Amazing Bulk:

So I watched Leap : Rise of the Beast (2011). This was terrible. The acting is really bad, completely wooden and the lines are delivered in the most stilted and flat way possible. You don't get to know or care about any of the characters. The film is pretty boring for the most part. Score, editing, cinematography, and direction are poor too. I did laugh a few times though. They obviously had a low budget and their intentions were good, but this is terrible.

For sure they didn't spend any of it on a sports bra for that one actress. Every time she was booking it down the street I was like, wow, I can almost hear the chest wall trauma happening right now.

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Wild 90, 1968

You don't even know a good tuna sandwich on rye.

A trio of gangster types (Norman Mailer, Buzz Farber, Mickey Knox) are holed up in an apartment where they have apparently been laying low for a while. They have meandering conversations and take a series of visitors including a boxer named Kid Cha-Cha (Jose Torres), two police detectives, and a trio of women.

Can we take a moment to just appreciate that for all of the mocking of Millenials posting Instagram pictures of their breakfast or whatever, this film proves that over 50 years ago, someone still thought that a rambling, incoherent exercise in improvisation would be worthy of viewing?

Part of the fun in this Hall is the different kinds of bad that you get. Some films are just purely incompetent. Others are abrasive. Some are uninteresting failures.

This film is kind of its own breed. Don't get me wrong, it is incompetent, abrasive, and uninteresting. But it's kind of---in theory---interesting as a warning about the perils of ego. The nerve, the absolute nerve, that it takes to ramble through a mostly-unstructured improvisation is pretty staggering. And because it's so poorly executed, even the motivation stays obscured. Is this meant to be funny? Like, a parody of tough guys? Is this meant to be actually interesting and dramatic?

I will say that the level of ineptitude on display here does keep it from being actually offensive. In fact, weirdly it almost serves as a useful exhibit for why they find a certain kind of person/artist intolerable.

I did get a few laughs out of this one. The accidental glances into the camera. That one part where they close a door and a stack of cardboard slowly falls down one piece at a time. And the trainwreck element that the people in this movie even for a minute thought that what they were doing was entertaining enough to put in front of an audience.

Re: The 2nd MoFo Hall of Infamy : Son of Infamy
 

Wild 90 is a great movie for those who can't stand Norman Mailer, but also can't help watching him continually embarrass himself.



Dreariness and self-importance have never been more closely entwined in one human being. The worst thing that ever happened to Norman Mailer is that someone told him he was a great intellectual. And he never forgot it, applying it to every god awful stupid and unfunny thing that ever came out of his mouth.


The end of his Maidstone though is still one of the great moments in cinema history, a moment that nearly completely erases the line between documentary and fiction. And that is bloodily satisfying and horrifying in equal measure.

There's a certain subset of people---some of them talented, some of them not---who have come to believe that everything they say is worth sharing out loud. And this film is a cautionary tale for those people.

Mailer's Naked and Dead and The Executioner's Song are both brilliant books.



If only he had learned to never speak in public. I recently watched the Penebaker documentary about him debating women's rights with Germaine Greer, and I don't think there is one thing he says that can be considered better than what some all-caps second rate internet troll might blurt out.



And he just seems so smugly satisfied when he unleashes one of his zingers, which leave his mouth like so many garbled turds. And almost never make a lick of sense. He's an unbearable twat. And, yes, sadly also very talented. Just not at movies.

Lets get this out right at the start - Airplane Mode is stuffed full of comedic material that is pathetic in it's preening need to elicit laughs from people who love racist and sexist comedy. People from different races and sexual orientations aren't in on the jokes - they're squarely aimed at, and broadside shots are taken in the hope that the sheer deluge of horror and bawdy slime will disguise the fact that they're there. The people that write the material don't do it on purpose. They're under the impression that they're so inclusive that they have license to blast away, while in all actuality they probably have a limited experience beyond their own culture and orientation. Offensive jokes that were never going to be funny anyway, because they just fall flat, kill a person's mood for comedy, and irritate the person watching to the extent that they're at odds with something they need to be in tune with. At least that's the way I see it.

Judging this film, apart from the offensive aspects, feels like watching a collection of Logan Paul YouTube videos one after the other at a fast pace. Once every so often, there's something a little funny - it's unrefined, and hasn't been worked on, but it's funny in the same way your friend's offhand quips might be. Of course, if that friend told you 5 or 6 offensive, disgusting and unfunny things in between every quip, you'd probably keep your distance and they wouldn't be your friend anymore. It might seem amazing, but I've actually seen many comedies that I consider worse than Airplane Mode just by the fact that they fail so consistently at making me laugh. At least here, once in a while, I admired when the film let loose and decided to really trash the culture that made it what it is to begin with. How meta. At times the film is really wild and silly. Of course, not far around the corner there's some awful humour that just ruins the whole mood and reminds us that the people making this don't know what they're doing.

Logan Paul (playing himself) has an Australian girlfriend, and has to conquer his fear of flying if he's to meet her in person and be physically intimate with her. When all of his friends decide to attend a "Hashtagacon" in Australia, Paul and a large group of influencers find themselves on a Koalair flight with serial prankster Vitaly Zdorovetskiy (playing himself). Unfortunately for the pilots, when they ask all of the passengers to switch their mobile phones to "airplane mode" they all refuse to do so and actually go crazy using them to blog, take selfies and post picture of themselves. This fries the cockpit, kills the both pilots and leaves the plane in the hands of Zdorovetskiy, who relishes the chance to rid himself of the various internet personalities he hates. Logan Paul has to conquer his fears and try to land the plane himself, all the while fighting the prankster and winning the admiration of the girl he ended up being seated next to in first class, Jenna (Chloe Bridges). Meanwhile, his "foreign exchange brother" Juanpa (Juanpa Zurita) frantically tries to lose his virginity before the plane crashes and they all die.

Airplane Mode is what would have happened if you had contacted a guy of around 13 years of age in high school, and had given him a budget, crew and ability to make any film he wanted. It immediately goes for masturbation - and I was kind of amused at the film for not including much of a preamble or setting. Crude. From there on out it juggles pot shots, gross-out humour, call-outs, racist jokes, sexist jokes and quite a few references to Airplane! I was interested in how well qualified the people who made this film from a technical standpoint were. Cinematographer Colt Seman was green, and had worked mostly in television. Editor Mitch Rosin had been second, third or fourth fiddle on many big films like Bridesmaids and Get Him to the Greek, but Airplane Mode was a rare venture as actual editor. Composers Simon Heeger and Christian Vorlander (known as 2WEI) had limited film experience. Special Effects Coordinator Josh Hakian had done good work on big films, such as Coverfield, Logan Lucky and The Last Stand. Production Designer Martina Buckley had been working in the industry since 1996, but only on second-tier type films.

This film had "been in the can" quite a few years before it was eventually released - so what delayed that release? Logan Paul's antics. Before Planeless Pictures could begin to recoup some of what they'd invested in him and this odd film, Paul released a video on his YouTube channel which featured him in Aokigahara (Japan's famed "Suicide Forest") and which also depicted him reacting to an actual suicide victim. Being a step too far, the reaction was negative and did considerable damage to Logan Paul's image. Releasing the film right at that moment was considered pointless, but Paul's image never really improved enough to matter - and Planeless Pictures sued the YouTuber for $3 million, claiming that he'd done it on purpose to try and permanently shelf the movie (which seems to suggest the film's producers admitting that their movie was pretty bad.) Watching it felt like a strange experience. I had the feeling that I was watching a comedy inspired by Airplane! where amateurs were in charge and professionals were doing the work. There didn't seem to have been enough oversight and thought put into Airplane Mode, and it plays about as well as you'd expect.

Oh, and the Australian accents? Perhaps they were as mangled and exaggerated as they were for "comical effect" - but only the voiceover during the credits sounded anything like an Australian.

Here they are - the other half of what we have ahead of us. The deadline is December 31st - good luck everyone!


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I coincidentally watched this two days ago and my prayers are with all of you.