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2008-02-17 -Short Attention Span Theater-

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Posted by Frank G 2008-02-17 06:50|| || Front Page|| [11131 views ] Top

#1 Oh, come on. Nothing could ever be worse than Manos.

Posted by Eric Jablow">Eric Jablow 2008-02-17 09:39|| 2008-02-17 09:39|| Front Page Top

#2 Yeah, but at least Manos had the excuse of being made by a San Antonio fertlizer salesman.

This movie was ostensibly made by Hollywood "professionals".

Posted by charger 2008-02-17 12:13|| 2008-02-17 12:13|| Front Page Top

#3 My top 10 list of amazingly bad movies. An asterisk
(*) denotes those worth seeing for twisted enjoyment.
An exclamation (!) indicates intentionally bad or comedy. There is no way to order this list from worst to worster.

1) Gymkata(*). Olympic gymnast Kurt Thomas fighting insane people in Kookistan for the US, with gymnastics, not martial arts, the winning nation being allowed to bribe the dictator for a military base in his nasty central Asian ex-Soviet backwater.

2) Starcrash(*). The amazingly beautiful Caroline Munro, co-starring Christopher Plummer and a young David Hasselhoff, with the most horrific abuse of science in a film, ever. A robot with a southern drawl. People swimming through space like water. "At night, the temperature drops thousands of degrees every hour!"

3) The Bed Sitting Room(*)(!). The largest collection of pre-Monty python British comedic talent ever assembled, in post-nuclear war England, with surreal humor so inaccessible as to be unwatchable except while chemically impaired.

4) Casino Royale (1967)(*)(!). The absolutely worst example of 1960s cinematic excess, with an all star cast, insanely beautiful women, four directors, zero continuity, and a brilliant soundtrack.

5) The Creeping Terror (1964)(*). A con artist persuaded a town to give him money to make the film with locals as actors. He made the movie then disappeared, never to be seen again, so the movie was never seen until the mid-1970s, on TV. The monster is a bunch of teenagers covered with a big piece of carpet, that slowly gobbles other teenagers incapable of deliberately walking away from it. You root for the monster.

6) The Magic Christian (*)(!). Peter Sellers and Ringo Star in contention with Casino Royale (1967) for the title of 1960s cinematic excess. All star cast, high anarchy quotient. A good explanation for why England is so messed up these days.

7) Greaser's Palace (*)(!). Directed by Robert Downey, Sr. Jesus in a zoot suit comes to Earth via guided parachute and lands in an old West mining camp run by the constipated, dictatorial Greaser.
Hypnotically bad on the first viewing, but utterly unforgettable. Gets better with age and inebriation.

8) Lisztomania (*)(!). Ken Russell's bizarre homage to the even more bizarre life of the first rock star, Franz Liszt, who put our modern "extreme lifestyle"
scandal-prone celebrities to shame with his outrageous life. Unless you know the biography of Liszt, the movie seems cartoonish and silly.

9) The Story of Ricky (*). "That which kills you makes you stronger." It's a prison movie. And a martial arts movie. And an ultraviolence movie. And a monster movie. And a hilarious, bizarre mess. Best when listening to the bad English version, with bad English subtitles that do not match what the actors say on the screen. Oscar nomination to the warden's fat b*stard sniveling sadist kid. It is gape jawed funny.

10) The rest (*). Plan 9 From Outer Space. Robot Monster. The Terror of Tiny Town. Blackula. Cat Women of the Moon. Satan's Sadists. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. Pippi Longstocking. Mommie Dearest. Radio Ranch. Frankenstein meets the Space
Monster (aka Mars Invades Puerto Rico). It Conquered
the World. Hercules II (1985).

Posted by Anonymoose 2008-02-17 13:46|| 2008-02-17 13:46|| Front Page Top

#4 Moose, I feel good that I haven't seen any of those you listed (and I see a LOT of movies) - I would nominate Battlefield Earth with John Travolta. Scientology crap in a sci-fi setting. My then-young sons were enthused by the TV ads, but halfway through asked if we could go home - that's never happened before or since. The movie was unintelligible crap

Posted by Frank G">Frank G 2008-02-17 13:56|| 2008-02-17 13:56|| Front Page Top

#5 Lost in Translation. Un-bearable.

Posted by jds 2008-02-17 14:43|| 2008-02-17 14:43|| Front Page Top

#6 Manos: The Hands of Fate is still my measuring stick for a bad movie. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians is second on my list. If Hottie/Nottie is anywhere close to those two, it has to be bad.

Posted by Steve White">Steve White 2008-02-17 15:24|| 2008-02-17 15:24|| Front Page Top

#7 I tAkE cARe Of ThE bLoG cOmMeNtS wHiLe FrEd Us AwAy.

Posted by Torgo (aka Eric Jablow)">Torgo (aka Eric Jablow) 2008-02-17 15:42|| 2008-02-17 15:42|| Front Page Top

#8 Yee, gods...The Creeping Terror...I thought I was the only one who'd ever seen that wretched piece of drivel - it's so utterly bad I find myself sitting down to watch it every time it comes on (with suitable alcoholic beverages close at hand).

I recentl saw another very, very bad film whose name I can't recall. Had to do with a group of pre-WW2 German kids who were piloting gliders. One of them murders a rival for a girl's affections and then they all go off to fight for the Nazi's. Years later, the survivors meet at a pre-arrnaged time and location. Loe and behold, here comes the glider with the murdered rival in it...

Bad, very, very bad...

Posted by FOTSGreg">FOTSGreg 2008-02-17 16:09|| 2008-02-17 16:09|| Front Page Top

#9 Of the ones I've seen:

Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone
Xanadu
Ishtar
The Fisher King
Bill Cosby in Ghost Dad
The Black Hole
Saturday Night Fever
Grease

That excludes cheap monster/horror movies like Godzilla and Gamera and pretty much everything that Channel 33 showed on "Shock Theater" in the 1970s, which were bad but in a goofy fun kind of way that made them entertaining to watch. (I highly recommend Destroy All Monsters, the ultimate giant rubber monster smackdown.)

Posted by Mike 2008-02-17 17:13|| 2008-02-17 17:13|| Front Page Top

#10 Godzilla vs The Thing

I was the only one at the showing at UC Berkeley that was not high on weed. Everyone else thought that it was profound.

Posted by Alaska Paul">Alaska Paul 2008-02-17 17:19|| 2008-02-17 17:19|| Front Page Top

#11 Sweety Sweetbacks Badasss Song was fairly painful and I enjoy Blacksploitation flicks.

I aslo thought Paris Hilton's "National Lampoons Pledge This!" was pretty foul.

Posted by rjschwarz 2008-02-17 17:42|| 2008-02-17 17:42|| Front Page Top

#12 Bride of the Gorilla
The Wasp Woman
Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women
The Wild Women of Wongo
She Gods of Shark Reef
Teenagers From Outer Space
Surf Nazis Must Die
White Pongo.
Very bad movies.

Posted by Deacon Blues">Deacon Blues 2008-02-17 17:54|| 2008-02-17 17:54|| Front Page Top

#13 The Lost Glider was an episode of the TV show ONE STEP BEYOND. It only seemed like a full length movie.
If forced to watch Battlefield:Earth try introducing dialogue from Hogan's Heroes, it really does help.

Posted by bruce 2008-02-17 18:18|| 2008-02-17 18:18|| Front Page Top

#14 > Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone

I liked that one!

The new version of Planet of the Apes was major suckage.

Posted by Bright Pebbles 2008-02-17 19:20|| 2008-02-17 19:20|| Front Page Top

#15 Most under-rated Sci-fi movie.

Demolition Man.

Posted by Bright Pebbles 2008-02-17 19:22|| 2008-02-17 19:22|| Front Page Top

#16 The recent House of Wax was pretty bad too. The best part was seeing Paris Hilton with a steel pipe rammed up her..... head.

/sorry couldn't resist....

Posted by CrazyFool 2008-02-17 19:57|| 2008-02-17 19:57|| Front Page Top

#17 I would like to add, for many hours of mindless nonsense, the movie Radio Ranch (aka Men With Steel Faces) was the highlights from a serial called "The Phantom Empire". Here's a plot synopsis:

Gene Autry is the owner of a ranch with a radio station, for which he performs his music. Villains discover radium on his ranch, so plan to mine and steal it, ala the Hardy Boys. To carry out their insidious plot, they have an Ali Baba cave, and menacingly ride horses around while wearing Emperor Ming's guards helmets and capes.

Well, Gene Autry's young male and female sidekick, who fly a single engine plane, poorly, discover the villains' cave while crashing, without injury. However, at some point, the villains bust through to a secret underground city.

The queen of the underground city has her own troops that she plans to invade the surface world with, or something, helped by large robots also used in Flash Gordon, I think.

But her scheme is thwarted by Gene Autry, who thwarts just about everybody's plots at some point, between running back to his radio station for its next one song broadcast.

Thwart and sing. Sing and thwart. Eventually, I think the underground city is destroyed somehow and the queen dies heroically fending off her own schemers, the villains are arrested, the radio station and the ranch are saved, the sidekicks are sold off to Gypsies as slaves, and Gene's horse does stunts.

In other words, a typical day on Radio Ranch.

Posted by Anonymoose 2008-02-17 20:09|| 2008-02-17 20:09|| Front Page Top

#18 hmmmmm good thing I missed that, Moose

Posted by Frank G">Frank G 2008-02-17 20:14|| 2008-02-17 20:14|| Front Page Top

#19 How come no one's mentioned 'Gigli'?

Posted by Pappy 2008-02-17 20:54|| 2008-02-17 20:54|| Front Page Top

#20 never saw it, but I DO know "gobble gobble" was the most requoted scriptline.....

Posted by Frank G">Frank G 2008-02-17 21:23|| 2008-02-17 21:23|| Front Page Top

#21 I nominate Gigli.

It cost $50M+ to make. It grossed about $3M in the first weekend but only about $6M total (2003).

I actually saw part of it once late at night. J Lo is very cute but the dialogue makes both her and Ben Affleck seem absolutely atrocious.

Posted by mhw">mhw 2008-02-17 22:15|| http://hypocrisy-incorporated.blogspot.com/]">[http://hypocrisy-incorporated.blogspot.com/] 2008-02-17 22:15|| Front Page Top

#22 I liked Lost in Translation, but then I liked being an Ang Moh/Gwei Lo/Farang in Asia.

Posted by phil_b 2008-02-17 22:24|| 2008-02-17 22:24|| Front Page Top

#23 Battlefield Earth cries out for the MST3K treatment.

Posted by OldSpook 2008-02-17 22:34|| 2008-02-17 22:34|| Front Page Top

23:27 gorb
23:25 gorb
23:16 Lone Ranger
23:16 SteveS
23:00 OldSpook
22:53 Assistant Sock Puppet of Doom
22:51 ed
22:34 OldSpook
22:26 g(r)omgoru
22:24 phil_b
22:17 Grailing and Tenille1838
22:15 mhw
22:14 FOTSGreg
22:12 Grailing and Tenille1838
22:09 OldSpook
22:09 Grailing and Tenille1838
22:04 Grailing and Tenille1838
22:02 Grailing and Tenille1838
21:56 OldSpook
21:23 Barbara Skolaut
21:23 Frank G
21:18 Barbara Skolaut
21:14 JosephMendiola
20:58 bigjim-ky