The 2nd MoFo Hall of Infamy : Son of Infamy

oh right, i have to start watching these movies again...


The Legend of the Titanic (Kim J. Ok & Orlando Corradi, 1999)

While not a good movie by any means this has some low-budget charms that work for me and some fun ideas here and there. I don't know what to call whatever that zoom in the opening shot is but I was stoked for more cheapo effects like that, and there is some, but I wanted more dammit! Obviously I loved all the 3D animated shots, also wanted more of that lol. The terrible audio recording is also a plus for me, love all the hiss and feedback to it especially during eyepatch villain's lines. This stuff is pretty fun but there's also some wild story ideas like the moonlight bouncing off a woman's tears gives her the ability to talk to animals, but also the dolphins used there magic to also make that happen?? The Titanic actually sank because a giant octopus was tricked into throwing an iceberg at it?? a lot of dumb stuff in this film that I'm here for but like, the bulk of it is still pretty boring. The whaling rights scheme, the love triangle, whatever other plotlines were going on, none of its good and takes up most of the runtime which even as short as it is still feels a little long.

We're in an oxygenated cave below the surface of the ocean. Two women bicker. "You just listen to me, Miss Innocent. There's nothing friendly between two females. There never was. There never will be," says Dale (Phyllis Coates) - always described in this film as a "lady reporter" instead of just "reporter". It seems that being a female reporter is so bizarre and incongruous that the film needs to add to the description to concede that, as incredible as it is, the film realises it and is aware of the fact. Yes, this is the kind of movie when a female character will be reduced to hysterics and have the need to have it slapped out of her. She's talking to Lauri (Sheila Noonan) in this scene, as the two sit in a cave, useless to everybody just by the very fact they're women, as the men go and explore. When Lauri tells her that she's sorry she feels that way, Dale feels the need to add, "You don't need help - neither do I. Not as long as we have two men around us." Coates played Lois Lane in the Adventures of Superman television series, along with the feature, Superman and the Mole-Men - strangely enough as a "lady reporter".

This is Jerry Warren's The Incredible Petrified World, a film that was barely released after spending years gathering dust on a shelf. Anyone familiar with Warren will know what to expect. He was never much of a storyteller, instead having a more blunt way of looking at cinema. Just get as much stock footage, scenes from foreign films, and original material as you can, dub it to at least try and explain what's going on, edit it together, and release it. Sewn together in much the same way Frankenstein's monster was, his science-fiction and horror films have had something of a revival in recent times. The zero cost of public domain films means they proliferate like garden pests. As far as his movie-making philosophy goes, Warren was in 'auteur' mode for this, his second directorial effort. His later efforts would be lazier and more incompetent - preferring to swipe footage from Superman and the Mole-Men (somewhat coincidentally, although he did have a personal relationship with Coates) in an ill-fitting attempt to pad one feature out.

The Incredible Petrified World's big selling point was star John Carradine, and to be fair to Warren he actually features here, with footage shot for this film. Carradine would appear in other Jerry Warren films, which is perhaps the most bizarre fact we'll come across related to all of this. 'The Voice' was certainly prolific, and I could well imagine most of the film's budget making it's way into Carradine's pocket for one or two days worth of shooting. It's simple economics - someone of that stature placates nervous movie-going people. The fact that Carradine is in the film must mean it at least offers something, right? A star's name is worth all the sets, camera-hire, make-up and sound put together. It speaks volumes however, that in spite of all this Warren couldn't see fit to actually release this film after everything was finally done. Instead Petrified World snuck in with Warren's Teenage Zombies on a double-bill years later. You'd be hard pressed to find any contemporary reviews - it nearly doesn't exist at all.

The plot is full of potential. An expedition exploring the ocean deep in a diving bell - further and deeper than any before it - encounters calamity when the cable lowering it suddenly breaks. Considered 'lost at sea', the four members of this exploratory dive must survive long enough in hope of eventual rescue. I could imagine the lights getting lower, oxygen getting scarcer and frightening dents and bangs as the pressure outside starts to crush the elaborate diving bell they were lowered down in. Instead of this, the plot of The Incredible Petrified World goes in a very strange direction. After the break in the cable, the diving bell hits what our explorers think is an uncharted sea shelf - one where the pressure outside is perfectly fine for diving, and light still plentiful. As the two men explore outside, they discover an elaborate series of caves that provide fresh water, abundant sea-food and excellent oxygen. It's these caves that provide the bulk of the film's setting - Colossal Cave in Arizona providing an excellently cheap location for filming what we thought was going to be a deep-sea epic. Petrified World is an addition to the ever-expanding genre we know as the "Unexpected Cave Movie".

Fans of Warren's specific style of filmmaking can see the genesis of his later work. Petrified World's scant 67 minute running time is padded out with around 10 minutes of stock footage - 6 of which include the credits over a heaving sea and what many people think of as the best part of the whole movie : a battle between shark and octopus as a narrator informs us that for all we know, the ocean deep might actually be teeming with squid. It's a mystery. Anything might be down there. A honey-comb, oxygen-rich series of caves even. When our four explorers have walked around Colossal Cave for a length of time that really tests our patience, they're confronted with, of all things, a lizard. Mismatching stock footage of some bored lizard at a zoo tells us that this is what has caused the characters to stop and point. It bothers them, but doesn't really make much of an impression. It's moments like this that actually make The Incredible Petrified World enjoyable for a moment. But those moments are brief and buried under an ocean of exposition and scenes of people walking around in caves. Despite all of it's flaws, the film goes out of it's way to try and explain away plot-holes and inconsistencies. The reason there's light (very bright light) is due to the phosphorous glow of the rocks. The reason they're lost is due to the iron messing with their compass. The reason there is air is due to volcanic vents. But Warren overestimated just how much we'd care - and these discussions are dull interludes on the way to nowhere.

If the aforementioned lizard is one of the monsters we're promised in this film, then the next monster is our character's true nemesis. This 'main monster' is distinctly human - and provides the film with a 'the-real-monsters-are-us' theme which I'm fairly sure was unintended. He is described as 'Ingol - the Old Man in the Cave'. Ingol (sporting a fake beard - fake beards being something all of our technology and advancement is yet to get right, and to this day they're easily spotted) is another lost person. He's been wandering around these caves for over a decade, has a home replete with sea-shell hanging decorations and has also, disturbingly, killed his companion some time ago for no really good reason. Ingol has sex on his mind when our intrepid explorers stumble across him (who wouldn't?), and decides Dale is pretty much as good as he's going to get. When he suggests to Dale that they just kill the others and get it on, Dale is somewhat reluctant to go down that path, but she has to wait for the men, and a fortunate volcanic eruption, to come and help her out - even though Ingol tries to sweet-talk her by telling her he might just have to kill her and take the second-best lady if she's going to be so disagreeable.

At times the scenes inside the caves are grossly over-lit or under-lit, not that this was going to make or break the entire film. The scenes involving John Carradine, as Professor Millard Wyman, are the most competent, and involve at least a scant sense of drama. It's Millard that pretty much gives them all up for dead when the cable breaks - but despite this he's willing to fly around the world getting another expedition on the way - especially after being informed that there are things swimming around down there. This is all as confusing to them as it is for us. Considering that our explorers are in water shallow enough to allow excellent daylight vision, you'd kind of wonder why they don't just swim upwards instead of messing around with caves. You can't really nitpick The Incredible Petrified World though - you just go with it. There is no sense of time or location. It feels like our four intrepid expllorers are down there for hours, but it must be many days, if not weeks. They can't swim up, because they can't, and that's all.

Rounding off a look at a motion picture like this is the bevy of rumours that are most likely not to be true - the favourite of which seems to involve Phyllis Coates being an ex-girlfriend of Jerry Warren - who never ended up getting paid for her work. It's said that she agreed to star in it only on the condition the film not be shown in California. The film was indeed shown in California, and Coates was reportedly shown the door at Columbia for having the nerve to appear in such a shoddy movie. I'm not convinced though. It seems to me that Petrified World had such a small release as to pass by unnoticed - but it's just inside the realms of possibility that the suits at Columbia took note of every movie released in every drive-in and who was involved in them. Another rumour involves the film's cinematographer being a regular 'big picture' director of photography who hid his involvement. Victor Fisher does have other credits - so take that with a pinch of salt. Finally, there is the story of a monster costume so shoddy that even Warren refused to use it for the film.

Jerry Warren would go on to make the "lawsuit headache" film The Wild World of Batwoman in 1966, definitely the film he will be most fondly remembered for. Batwoman is so strange and indecipherable you'd have to seriously consider the fact that there was something fundamentally wrong with Jerry to begin with. The Incredible Petrified World makes more sense, in a relative way, but is a film that can't seriously be recommended to anyone other than the incurably curious.

__________________

Titanic: The Legend Goes On (Camillo Teti, 2000)

So we have one of those cases of a film that has multiple cuts here, an uncut 82 minute version and a heavily edited 58 minute cut that has 12 minutes of credits to hit an acceptable runtime. Now, it likely would have been much more fair to the film to go with the original cut but I obviously went with the edited version because a) much shorter and b) the changes sounded insane. An altered plot, scenes out of order, different songs, reused shots, sounded like it could have been a complete mess in the fun way. Its not, but the potential was there. The only kind of fun things are the scenes they stretch the length of by adding frames, the "what happened to" type ending for all these characters we're barely, if at all introduced to and just the general incoherence of it. Also, this one has 3D animated exterior boat shots too which I appreciate but are less fun than the one's in the previous film and boy that rapping dog scene certainly happened. Unfortunately, much like the other Titanic movie these fun little aspects are far, far outweighed by just like, a lot of nothing but even moreso this time around.

Heartbreak High

What we have here is a high school sports movie aimlessly wandering about the personal and sexual lives of two football teams before the final game of the season. This movie explores several one-sided characters, including an aggressive but skillful coach who has a longstanding relationship with a pair of underpants, his rival who likes to make football puns during sex, a girl who wants to abstain herself from sexual relations and a bunch of high school football jocks messing around with a bunch of high school girls who suggest strip poker to pass the time.

Does this movie really add anything to the sports movie catalog? Nerp. It was a sorry and messy excuse of a movie that only made me chuckle once. Every freakin' character was a cardboard cutout of characters either from other sports movies or from children's cartoons. The character Pigger, who only speaks in pig grunts, is one of the stupidest things I've ever seen in an adult film, and that sorry excuse of an idea belongs in some crap like the 2016 Ben 10. And these sex jokes and plot lines are so derivative that parts of me almost aches just watching it. I found myself drifting onto hanging out on my phone constantly during the third act when the actual football game took place. The football action was so poorly filmed and dull compared to actual football games, and I'm a little bit of a football fan.

This is officially one of the worst sports movies I've ever seen. The only other one that's worse that I can think of right now is BR Futebol from Brazil, and that was a crappy CGI one. Everything about this movie is unjustifiable, save the potential charm a high school jock may get from going back to the gridiron glory days, much like high school films like Fast Times at Ridgemont High or Dazed and Confused except they did it so well that they probably deserve their cult status despite being a little overrated.

I'm tempted to check a couple of these out.

__________________
IMDb
Letterboxd

Do it!

I'll probably wait for the results and then watch whichever movie wins this Hall. Well, it wouldn't really be a win, but you know what I mean

Kinky Coaches and the Pom Pom Pussycats (Mark Warren, 1981)

aka Heartbreak High, aka Crunch, this movie didn't get even one title that felt appropriate for it. Ignoring the awful title(s), the letterboxd description sounded appealing enough and the film starts pretty well too. The opening bit with the Hick Cup isn't like a good joke or anything but it sets the film up well enough then we get a pretty decent football montage with some fun little football stunts into a nice opening credits song. And then the film was never enjoyable again. A shame because this concept could be done so well (it probably has been at some point idk) but the writing is just consistently embarrassing. Jokes range from just not funny to outright cringe and just never manages to generate any charm. Pretty much spent the whole runtime just waiting for the football game (since the opening montage was basically the only good scene up to that point) and then that was fun for like 10 seconds and ran out of steam. Football isn't really the most exciting sport second-to-second and the film tries to pretend that it is by just showing play after play and ignoring all of the appealing aspects of the game. Like I get its just a dumb comedy but you could still build actual stakes for this game and lean into the tension and suspense that comes naturally to football. I could ignore this easily if the attempts at slapstick were even decent but nah, they couldn't do that either. Definitely a not good film all around but its mostly just kind of boring more than anything else.

So, as usual I guess I should start by saying that 99.99% of Christians are fine no matter how devoted they are to their religion, and there's only a very small minority who become not only fanatical, but needlessly twisted and contorted into awful people. Cherry-picking from the Bible, they stick their noses into people's private lives and try to control what everyone does to their satisfaction. Worse are the paranoid among them, who see people who aren't Christian as discriminating or conspiring against them. Despite the plight of Jews or Muslims, they see Christians as a group that's being persecuted - and the most mentally unbalanced believe in far-fetched tales of Satanic worshippers and conspiracies.

The first Leap film was kind of cute - it was such an amateurish attempt at movie-making that you couldn't really take it seriously, and it indeed looked like writer/director Chris Tempel wasn't too unaware of that. It's focus on parkour was interesting, although the parkour on display was anything but impressive, with kids swinging on railings and crawling on ledges. I'd do that as a kid, and it didn't look all that hard. In it, a couple of parkour nuts run into a bunch of hyper-Christians who become interested in learning the art of PK - and in doing so the male parkour trainer falls in love with religion (although it was quite apparent that he was already there - "Do you believe that Jesus rose from the dead?" - "Of course! Everybody knows that." - dude, you were always a Christian) - making enemies with his then girlfriend, who kidnaps him and another Christian, holding them at gunpoint asking them if they believe in God. Those pesky atheists. Bigger things are afoot though, because an interest in the Book of Revelations reveals that the End of Times is near - the mark of the beast seemingly being a microchip that's to be implanted in people.

The usual peculiarities were on display. Atheists are portrayed as unhinged maniacs full of hatred and violence who really have it in for Christians. Tempel's view of an atheist's life is one full of horrifying violence, corruption, rape and greed. Without God, there's no need at all to hold back on anything - so all the atheists really have is a seething, obsessive loathing for Christians, and an intent to see them undone. On the other side of the coin, someone who has accepted our Lord Jesus Christ as their savior has a life that is good - everything finally makes sense. All of these factors come into play in the first Leap film, but in the second Tempel brings a sense of the bizarre and craziness that plays into an obvious bugbear of his - Catholicism. Even worst than atheists it seems, and in the end times the Pope and Vatican end up becoming the beast itself. It's with this that the Leap films lose their sense of fun, and become dour q-anon-like conspiracy rubbish.

I couldn't count all the times one of the girls in Leap : Rise of the Beast says "That makes sense!" just when the main PK guy has mumbled a bunch of incoherent rubbish. It usually goes something like this :

Tiresome PK kid : "So in Revelation it says that the beast's right hand will reap the ghosts of the past - and what's the acronym of right hand? RH. What is that also an acronym of? Rhubarb Holding. What do old ghosts do? They haunt and rue the fact they're no longer living. Rue - Haunt? RHUbarb HOlding? Right Hand? Holy Ghost? Vatican? Pope? The beast!"

Girl listening intently : "That makes sense!"

No, it never makes sense. It's always some convoluted interpretation that has been twisted and contorted to fit some preconceived notion. What's more tragic is that all the parkour and fun is nowhere to be seen. Mostly what we get in this second film is a bunch of people crammed into a room discussing conspiracy theories, while elsewhere the villains - some kind of new world government that is never very clearly defined, plot their capture. The kids start posting videos online and that means they're target number one, for people are watching their (somewhat convoluted) messages online and presumable learning "THE TRUTH" - no matter that the internet is crammed full of such conspiracy-minded videos. The whole narrative plays like some childish daydream. Chris Tempel has some growing up to do - there's more to life than this.

The powers that be hunt for the PK kids - and there's never a sense that any of it's important. This is really what the Book of Revelation was talking about? God's plan? A bunch of parkour kids and snotty agents chasing them? I thought it would have been something grander. This is where we get people thinking that vaccines are the mark of the beast, or that the government is just trying to control us. The Bible. Conspiracies. Q-Anon. Catholicism and the Vatican. Satanic worshippers and paedophiles. Democrats and Republicans. Parkour. Jesus. God. Every day these people let go of old theories and wholeheartedly embrace new ones with no sense of the irony. Can't they count the hundreds of conspiracies that amounted to nothing? How many failed theories until you realise that the world is more complex than a few acronyms, numbers and whispered secrets? How long before you realise that even if there is meaning to the Book of Revelations, your interpretation is guaranteed to be wrong? Conspiracy nuts - just go live your lives. You're not figuring anything out from your lounge chair - you're just doing mental doodles.

Leap : The Rise of the Beast is the most pathetic interpretation of the End Times I've ever witnessed. All of the painters who envisioned fire and fury would have been very dispirited to see that it all amounted to some power bars, a swing on a railing and some agent chasing some kids around some alleyways. Filmmaking-wise, this was better than the first Leap - but narratively it was so much poorer, and much less fun. Also, who needs green screens for brick walls and empty rooms? You guys couldn't find a real brick wall or empty room to film in? This movie is bizarre. It's so dull even the nutty extreme Christians couldn't find much good to say about it, and the sillier of those praised the first Leap film. There's hardly any parkour in it. At some point Tempel became more enamored with conspiracies, and less with the good old PK that was at least lively and pleasing. When the nuts start walking out of the theatre, you know that you should be getting back to Jesus and crawling on ledges.

I forgot to mention the acting in my review, even though during my notetaking I went out of my way to remind myself that it was the "worst acting I've ever seen in my life" before writing "Bad Acting" in large letters and starting to doodle large exclamation marks after that to emphasise what had become something about the film to make a large impression on me. "Flatter than a pancake" describes it perfectly. Catatonic. Stolidly comatose. Vacantly deadpan. Numb in it's lack of expression. I never knew acting could get that bad.

The original Leap is still worse in every way, not that this one was a good movie either.

All of the big stars in Candy believed it to be the worst film they'd appeared in. In Marlon Brando's autobiography, 'Songs My Mother Taught Me', he said that "I was ridiculous in that picture, and everyone else in it was diminished by it." It was meant to be meaningful, side-swiped at being a sex farce, and achieved none of it's aims. Instead of being deep and consequential it was empty, facile and dumb. It played at being weighty and material by throwing images of galaxies and art at us while satirizing poets and artists - but there was nothing at all behind all of that aside from a kind of cynical "it's all about sex" fixation which repeats endlessly, driving the viewer into terminal boredom and despair. It was probably the most boring 124 minutes of film I've watched this year. Even Benny Hill would have probably found it a bit on the nose.

The film follows Candy (Ewa Aulin), who is inexplicably Swedish in the film, despite having American parents (Terry Southern's novel is about an "All American Girl" which makes the choice of actress for the main part all the more puzzling.) She's forced to leave her home and head to New York after being caught in bed with the gardener, Emmanuel (Ringo Starr) after bringing home famous poet MacPhisto (Richard Burton). On the way there, her father (played by John Astin) is injured, and Candy is forced to give sexual favours to Brigadier General Smight (Walter Matthau) in return for his help. Candy's Dad is later operated on by famous surgeon Dr. Abraham Krankheit (James Coburn) who also takes advantage of his patient's daughter. In fact, the film simply sorts through a conga-line of men who desperately want to have sex with Candy and coerce, fool or seduce her to see their aims to fruition. There's a hunchback played by Charles Aznavour, who takes her to a mansion after meeting her in Central Park, and there's a guru, Grindl, played by Marlon Brando.

Director Christian Marquand plays all of the seductions in Candy for their comic potential, but the humour is misplaced, and moments that are meant to be farcical and funny fail to meet their aims. From the very beginning, it's tiresome and more than a little awkward in it's foundering misfire-prone non-fulfillment. James Coburn once noted that "Unfortunately, the director's timing was off a European nature. The jokes were always a beat behind. They were often a beat off. When you do comedy, you've got to be fast." Or else he simply didn't have a good sense of what's funny. I find some filmmakers to be surprisingly immature and stunted - finding sex itself funny as perhaps an 11-year-old child might. Horny poets and gurus aren't by themselves funny at all, especially when they're trying to take advantage of teenage girls (Candy in this has just graduated high school.) Also, commenting on the fact that these people use their stature and esteem to try and get girls into bed isn't exactly going to blow people's minds. But what else is there to Candy?

Candy's psychedelic nature feels forced and insincere. The music from Dave Grusin (who would go on to win an Oscar for the music in The Milagro Beanfield War and be nominated another 7 times) tries to have a certain kind of edge to it - and he was certainly young enough to be part of the generation this film wanted to attract. He'd have been better off working on a different film. Candy also makes use of music from The Byrds and Steppenwolf, notably "Magic Carpet Ride" - all of which is too good for this. The director of photography was the notable Giuseppe Rotunno (once Oscar-nominated for All That Jazz) - he was still basically an Italian cinematographer at the time, taking charge because Candy was shot nearly entirely in Italy. All of it has the feel of people making an intellectual, psychedelic film without themselves really being into that kind of thing. Throw far-out, stoner pictures and music in there with everything else and try to fool everyone into thinking the film is working on a cosmic level.

A lot of the crew were young though, including Art Director Dean Tavoularis (a future Production Design Oscar winner for The Godfather Part II) and Set Decorator George R. Nelson (who would also win an Oscar for his work on The Godfather Part II.) The crew was sizeable, and very professional - all quality people. It's just the the project failed at the very top. There are stories of how Marlon Brando changed his part of the screenplay because he thought his scenes could be so much more funny (obviously that turned out to be a disaster) but overall, everything that happens tries too hard to be funny, and fails ever-so-miserably to be funny. I was surprised by how grotty and porno-like the action was - stopping short of full-on nudity, but only just. Stars would shuffle into the plot, letch onto Candy, seduce her in some uncomfortable manner, have sex with her and shuffle off. All the while, joke after joke fell flat.

Christian Marquand would only ever direct two films in his life - French film Les Grands Chemins in 1963 and this in 1968. It was a project that picked up momentum and more stars after Brando had signed on, and actually got a few favourable reviews at the time. It does have some status as a cult movie - but those who appeared in it loathed it, and I loathe it too. It's not interesting, aesthetically pleasing or mysterious. It's not funny, and even the considerable talent it has at it's disposal can't do anything but waste their time and ours. The best it can do is surprise people that it even exists. I mean - what a cast. Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, James Coburn, Walter Matthau...and cameos from the likes of Anita Pallenberg and Julian Beck? I wanted to like this even a little bit - for that might have eased the boredom. But no. It's simply an amazing collection of talent behind and in front of the screen being directed by some jerk who goes on to let it all go to waste.

The Incredible Petrified World

I was hoping for an MST3K episode on this (I'm never distracted by joking through movies, as I do the same), but none existed. First, lemme just point out that this movie is guilty of every single "lost world" trope in the book. Before this move, the worst movie of this genre I had ever seen was Women of the Prehistoric Planet. But even that movie had a few little OK moments scattered around. This doesn't.

First: randomly discovering this world on an expedition, and where? Undah da See! Second: Bring a single smart woman aboard to fall in love with, and another female to confli8ct with her. Third: a bunch of scientists randomly theorizing as to why this world exists, although this is typically both a con and a pro since this generic trope also provides some decent dialogue and some things to think about. Such was the heart and soul of the novel Journey to the Center of the Earth. Fourth: Big rocky tunnels to get lost in and eventually stumble across number 5: a big lizard. Unfortunately, this lizard does not have the blessing of being oversized and/or animated through stop-motion.

Other problems include drawing out boring scenes such as swimming to the surface with no regard for making the water look beautiful or captivating, and in the end this mistake makes the water foggy. And there's also the lengthy intro giving us basic information on fish that LITERALLY EVERYBODY KNOWS! So is this a lost world adventure or an IMAX documentary for toddlers? And of course, where are ANY real monsters? There are none.

Our so-called "villain," a man who's been living in this unremarkable petrified world has no real threatening traits, and anything that he does as a villain was pretty much predicted upon seeing him. That is our level of originality.

This is one of the most boring movies I've ever seen, and an insult to the lost world genre that only has a few instances of OK dialogue. This should be avoided like the plague, and it's beyond me how this movie never made it to MST3K. I'm sorry, but as a big fan of the lost world genre, I would rather watch Loqueesha five times in a row than ever see this again.

Forgot to mention, I sent my ballot.

Congratulations, you made it!

The Kinky Coaches and the Pom Pom Pussycats is a kind of mix of teenage sex romp and sports movie - of the kind that proliferated in the 1980s. Sexploitation had found numerous outlets by the beginning of the decade, and the previous one was a high water mark for pornography, with the likes of Debbie Does Dallas and Behind the Green Door giving that genre the kind of respectability it hadn't seen before (and would never, seemingly, see again.) High school graduation or college sexual antics were boosted by Animal House in 1978 and Porkies in 1981 along with other films, which were usually misogynistic - and this film came out the same year Porkies did. Some of them are okay - crazy and goofy, but Pom Pom Pussycats gives us it's clearest view of how it sees the world when one of the guys in it says, "There are two things I take very seriously, football and women." It's a bad sound - if he'd even said "sex" it would have been better - the opposite sex not some kind of 'thing' on par with sports and cars. Sexism runs rampant in this.

Mixing football and sex was obviously inspired by Debbie Does Dallas, but it's very tame compared to some 1980s romps. Also, the comedy comes across as fairly vague and ineffectual. Some comedies lay it on thick, and you get to see jokes rise and fall - but in Pussycats you can barely tell what parts are meant to be funny. The fat and nerdy Weasel Wexler (Paul Backewich - one of the IMDb's one-credit wonders) is obviously meant to be comedic, but nothing that he says nor anything that happens to him is funny, and the way he behaves is neither outrageous nor constrained enough to make an impression. "Acting a little funny" in one of these films isn't enough, so when Wexler whines a little or is somewhat bullied it barely registers in an audiences mind. Neither the screenwriters (Bruce Calnan - his sole writing credit, Douglas Ditonto - his sole credit and Richard Sauer - his sole credit) nor the actors know what to do, and as a result the run-time of this 'comedy' just trundles by with the occasional weak attempt at something funny. Norman Fell looks positively pained by what he has to say - unable to squeeze in anything except his below-par banter.

Belushi's Blutarsky in Animal House very obviously inspired "Pigger" Peterson (Terry Swiednicki - another one-credit wonder) - but this version just annoyed me with his disgusting grunting, and shameless copy-cat antics. This is the kind of movie that uses the word "jugs" - something that never made me laugh before, but now does because it's both quaint and inappropriate. It's also another film where the kids are meant to be graduating high school but all look around 30-years-old. It's probably a bit of an embarrassment for Robert Forster, who is the "kinky coach" the film's title alludes to - he excitedly (and I mean excitedly) mixes sex and football when he does it with what I thought was his wife, but might be another teacher or someone else. It wasn't quite clear to me, and this female character only makes an appearance in his sex scene (under the covers - Forster wasn't getting nude for this.) How they got Forster, John Vernon and Norman Fell for this film I'll never know - it's not up to the standards of a film featuring well-known actors.

And then there's the football game. It starts a full 30 minutes before the film's end. That's right. This game goes on for almost as long as a proper game of football does. I ended up writing "They mistook how much we'd want to see the football game" in my notes. But to tell you the truth, it was probably the best part of the film - at least something was happening. Late in the film, when there's a disputed field goal, Weasel Wexler's video tape of the game is replayed. Do we see a video tape of the game played back? No, we see an edited close up of the ball, wide shot and different angles all put together like a movie. It's incredibly stupid - we're meant to think a filmed and edited playback is some kid's video tape. It wasn't done in jest - it was just lazy. Fell plays a journalist, and has maybe one half-decent line. Vernon plays the opposition coach - who becomes obsessed with his lucky underpants to the point where he shoehorns their disappearance into his inspirational speech. Nobody comes out of this unscathed.

So, if most of the actors had never had a role before, and never worked again, plus the fact that all three screenwriters have this as their sole, life-long credit - what of the others who made this film? Director Mark Warren had a career in Canadian television from 1977 to 1992 (with a six-year hiatus near the end.) He only ever directed one other feature film, which also came out in 1981 - Tulips, featuring Bernadette Peters and Henry Gibson. It was produced by the Canadian Film Development Corporation and was co-directed with two others. Musically speaking, Pom Pom Pussycats is one of only two films Richard Cooper was ever involved with. Cinematographer François Protat has 70 credits to his name, including Tulips and also the more well-known (at least to me) Johnny Mnemonic (a 90s Keanu Reeves film) and the very overrated Weekend at Bernies. He won awards for Joshua Then and Now (1985) and Kabloonak (1994) - two of his better films. Meatballs editor Debra Karen put the film together.

We're obviously let down by the writers and actors here, but the editing was also very bad in places (though I can't rule out the possibility it was censored) and overall this was a very sub-par film. Most of the funny stuff fails - but there isn't even enough funny stuff to fill out a 90-odd minute film, even if every joke had of been hilarious. When 100 or so drunk and rowdy men charge two defenseless, practically naked girls I didn't laugh - I was scared for them. This film isn't even an interesting failure. Take 1983 video arcade-related sex comedy Joysticks. It's terrible - but it's so bad that it's kind of fun, and interesting to pull apart. The Kinky Coaches and the Pom Pom Pussycats is a bland, dispiriting failure - it doesn't do much. Even it's sexist attitudes and misplaced humour is mediocre and not worth discussing. If there had of only been one copy of it, and it had of been accidentally erased, the world wouldn't have lost anything at all. Most of the actors and all of the writers must have found that show business wasn't for them, and went on to other careers. Perhaps once a year, Weasel Wexler actor Paul Backewich puts it on to amuse his grandkids with. Grandpa was once in a movie. A bad movie. A really bad movie.

Leap Rise of the Beast (2011)

I for one never heard of this Jesus guy so thinking for myself and reading this book really helped me. i kid i kid...But yeah this is a bad film but I was laughing the entire time. I love when these low budget films can only cast people that are the same age. Everything about this film is cheap student level, the dialogue was littered with cliches to the point that I was frankly impressed that god allowed them to do it. I also appreciated how you had a group of nonsense characters constantly showing up and leaving all of which trying to be the cool hip young preacher sort. This one was so over the top I couldn't even hate it I just was laughing the whole time.

Getting towards the deadline, and 3 participants are yet to finish - two of them a fair way off.

@ueno_station54 - 3 films to go
@Siddon - 9 films to go
@TheUsualSuspect - 10 films to go

I really get that going through these cinematic horrors is a pretty tough job. I'm willing to extend the deadline to a significant extent if people need more time. I'm especially hoping Siddon and TheUsualSuspect hang in there, because two of their nominations are so worthy of winning this.

I'm off work until the 9th of January. I will have these done before then. Life just got busy and these types of movies became... not high on my to do list unfortunately.

That number will be cut in half today I need two links for Kinky Coaches and A Talking Cat