The Return of Torgo and Wooley's September Excite-o-rama!

At age 12, I unironically considered Krokus' Screaming in the Night video to be the height of artistic achievement.

__________________
Captain's Log
My Collection

When I was 13 I unironically thought Uriah Heeps Traveller in Time was the most badass song on the planet. I may or may not have changed my mind.

I really like Europa Report, largely because of the overall philosophy it seems to have regarding science and discovery. It nicely walks the line between things that are unknown and things that are monstrous.

I found the ultimate conclusion of the film pretty moving.

I am apparently the one person who really enjoys She. When I watched it, it didn't have the intro indicating that it was the future after an apocalypse (I didn't catch it) and hadn't much in the ways of plot summaries, so when the movie got to the market scene and they were selling a box of Cheerios and dishwashing gloves, my attention got piqued and I never got off board with it.


It does lessen with rewatches though, but I still found it wonkily entertaining.

She is a lot of fun. That and Hundra are a tidy little double bill.


I'm struggling to think of a time where economic realities have had a real impact on me liking a film and I'm not coming up with anything so far. If it's a matter of ideas or ambition not being fully realized that is the problem, I'm simply happy to have the ideas and the ambition even if the film can't afford them. Let's not pretend ideas and ambition are a common commodity

Someone else needs to check out The Purple Ball during one of these things so I don't remain the only person whose ever seen it

Is it great? No. Are there great things in it? I'm, I guess

I like it for the same reasons you do. This might be a nitpick, but I wish the ending

Suddenly I want to finish She.

I think it's more a matter of scale. Like I was saying about Krull, a whole lot of stuff actually works and comes across really well (honestly, the Slayers, with their giant-slug brains that rush out of their bodies when they die, are pretty awesome compared to Stormtroopers who couldn't hit the broad-side of a barn with laser-guided missiles) but when your ambition is "We're basically the new Star Wars" and suddenly everything on the screen but the two main actors is like the worst blue-screen anyone's seen since BEFORE 2001, and the villain himself is a guy in a rubber suit only slightly better looking than It! (The Terror From Beyond Space) fully 25 years earlier, that's where I run into the issues.
Trancers is easily the best overall movie I've seen yet for this thread (and my postings are four movies behind) and it had a lower budget than Legend, Krull, and Conan The Destroyer. But that's a movie that spent its money well and kept its scale to what it could afford to pull off. I mean, you take a movie like Halloween, made for $80,000 where they literally gathered up and re-used their dried leaves but it plays like they had all the money they needed and compare it to something like The Being, made for $4.5M, that plays like $4.48M of that money was laundered. Lemora, Messiah, even Malatesta, all are movies that punched way above their weight while Krull ultimately seemed like it fought above its weight and got its ass handed to it and She, let's be honest, at times looks like they were filming in a high-school gymnasium or something because they didn't understand their scale and how to capture it. It's really an artistic failure not an economic one to not understand why The Strangeness, filmed on weekends in the director's grandparents' garage, works for what they had to work with while your movie looks cheap and shitty by comparison.

Yes, but for me the "tipping point" comes when

I know what your saying, in that not all cheap is created equal and (out of the ones I've seen) those are better 'economical' movies than She. Like, obviously.


But I'm totally fine with something looking like it was filmed in a highschool gymnasium. And (from what I remember, it's been a long time, and maybe I'm mixing it up with Hundra), there is a lot of weird random things happening on camera. It kept my attention where the rest of the world completely bores me. And while, yes, it all looks like shit, but my point is I don't care as long as the movie keep giving me something.



For me, I'll take the garbage that is She, over many many movies that have the money to techincally pull off what they want to do, but ultimately end up using that money to dilute the heart or fun or complete impossible stupidity of what is on camera.



I'm aware it's a controversial opinion of mine, but it is nearly irrelevant to me if a film 'pulls off' what it is aiming for. I just want some evidence that something is happening somewhere. And the older I get, the more it turns out that it is total trash that lets me see something I haven't already become completely jaded by.



Maybe I just think failure is beautiful, and therefore success is failure compromised.

Well, you'll get no argument there, I'd definitely rather watch Krull than The Rise Of Skywalker.
I mean, actually, I'll watch Krull again in this lifetime, for sure, but I will never watch The Rise Of Skywalker again, not if someone paid me to.
And I'll watch She before I watch any of the recent Marvel or most DC films too, for that matter.

I've never seen Krull.



Like, not even a second of it.


Which is amazing, because it surrounded my childhood. Vaguely. Out in the shadows.

Fury Road, as low as Thunderdome? I don't think so...

I didn't say this had to be your ranking. This is mine.
For one thing "as low as Thunderdome" doesn't mean anything to me because there's no way Fury Road is on the level of Max for me and since it's practically a remake of The Road Warrior, it cannot actually be quite as high as that film. So FR and Thunderdome could be no higher than 3rd.
I thought Fury Road was up to the Mad Max Standard but I absolutely did not feel that it was the new standard. I really didn't care for Hardy as Max for starters, Immortan Joe looked cool but had even less to say or do than The Lord Humungus, and I thought the pacing was rushed a bit (by George Miller standards) and the movie almost felt a little overstuffed. Theron was fantastic though.
Meanwhile, having recently revisited Thunderdome I felt that any notion that it was an inferior Max movie was nonsense and that it's actually, arguably, the most imaginative of any of the films (certainly more so than FR). So there is no "as low as Thunderdome" because I think Thunderdome is a good film. I don't have either film ranked "low", in my opinion, they just can't be as high as the two great films in the series.
So I stand by my ranking, firmly, for me.

All the Mad Max movies are great. Probably the best franchise in film history. Does it even matter which one's rank highest? All answers are correct in this case. I think the notion that there are wide chasms of quality between Road Warrior and Fury Road and the other two completely nonsensical.


Admittedly, I say this as someone who initially thought the first one was 'boring'. But I've also been known to be incredibly stupid from time to time.

I agree.

I thought I had Europa Report on my watchlist, cause I've been reading/hearing about it for a while, but I didn't. Just added it. Seems like the kind of thing I might enjoy.

__________________

Star Slammer

This is a very low-budget (even by the standards of my viewing this month) Women In Prison type movie but also trying to be very campy and also in Space.
I did not know this when I decided to watch it.
When I bailed out of She I decided to reach for another low-budget female-led Sci-Fier but I just saw the thumbnail and went with it since there aren't that many I haven't seen at one point or another. This was not what I was expecting.


The movie is unbelievably silly and the acting is so atrocious that it makes one wonder, how can there be so many people out there supposedly trying to get into the movies when all the people in this movie did? It appears the lead actress' credentials were that she would take her top off and everybody else was just someone off the street who’s never tried acting in their life but thought it sounded fun. For the most part, if teenagers in a school play delivered their lines like this, their own parents would walk out.
Like most of these movies, very little actually happens and this makes Ice Pirates look like Star Wars.
I wanted to watch something really low-budget, like lower than Trancers or Metalstorm or Spacehunter. So I did.
There’s really nothing much to say about this. Here is either a woman starring in Star Slammer or a woman watching Star Slammer.

I see that’s directed by Fred Olen Ray. I haven’t derived delved super deep into his filmography, but I enjoyed Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers and Evil Toons.