#83 – Things

Movie Night Survivors,

This week we watched… THINGS… a 1989 no budget Z-grade Canadian horror film made by trailer park residents in between walks to the Zippy mart for packs of smokes. It brought us to our collective knees and made some question the 0 ratings they gave to ‘A Talking Cat?!’ and ‘Manborg’. Was it enough to kill movie night forever?

For a long while I had no idea what was going on in this move. Then for even longer stretches I couldn’t tell if anything WAS actually going on. I think it was about a doctor artificially inseminating a woman, then she gives birth to some kind of snake thing and it kills everyone in the house. But the movie spends so much screen time having them open cabinet doors and get beers for Dave that you lose all will to live. 

At this point Chris J tried to lead a mutiny at what we thought was near the end, but it turned out to be only half way. The slow pace and needless shots were killing him. But we all forged ahead. The creature shots were actually pretty decent for these guys having no budget, but the camera work made up for any positives that could possibly come from this movie.

I was going to try to write a recap of the second half of this movie, but Bill’s description says it all. I’ll quote it here for completeness.

FROM BILL E
Everything was out of focus and out of frame. All the voices were dubbed.  it couldn’t have sound effects, music, or talking at the same time. So it was only one type of sound at a time.  Since they couldn’t have sound effects while dubbing, the literally had the voice actors make “vroom” noises for machinery and electronics. The acting was terrible, in fact I don’t even know if they knew what the script was, they just dubbed whatever they wanted later. And this is just the technical problems with the “film.” The decision made by the director were also unfathomable. They had a real pornstar acting in the movie, who read from a card off screen and *NEVER* got even the least bit naked. They lost track of their own plot and forget why the actors were doing things. They literally lost track of a character for about an hour of the movie, the characters say “where did he go. Dunno maybe he got sucked into the 3rd, 4th, and 5th dimension”, and then he suddenly reappeared when the movie was almost over with an electronic hedge trimmer trailing an extension cord and fighting the “things” with no explanation. One one point, we were watching the actors watching TV… for 10 minutes! Also, there were dream sequences inside dream sequences and flash forwards and flashbacks… I think there was a flash sideways at one point. Also, all of the characters are assholes, who are assholes to each other for no reason. I mean, I make it sound “so bad, its good,” but it was “so bad… it’s just tooooo bad.” The only part that was “so bad, its good” was near the end, where on of the voice actors finally realized how stupid this was and start laughing while reading his lines. These lines were not supposed to be funny, but he was having trouble saying “Oh no you got my eye.. bring back my eye” while his character was being eaten alive. It was so bad, it forced me to literally moved the vertical axis on our scale of bad scores by giving this movie a negative value

We should also rethink our ratings of Manborg… Think it deserves better. 

Mark

MOVIE FACTS:

• Terrible
• Budget of between $35000 and $40000
• Amber Lynn – real porn star in this movie. still making movies (google that on your own)
• they had someone else get naked in the movie… not the porn star. (probably couldn’t afford her}

Looking through the screenshots I have to say that it might have been better if I wasn’t watching it though a piece of wax paper. BUT ONLY MARGINALLY. All my computers were crapping out on Rabbit last night, so some of the screenshots are from the new Rabbit Android app, which imposes the text over the screen, but that makes it seem like an artistic statement. 

This movie is like a insane hot wing eating contest, you hate it while it’s happening, but later you can give an amusing anecdote about it. As time passes you think maybe you can handle it again. YOU CAN’T, MOVE ON! 

Favorite Scene:

• Getting the guy a beer from the kitchen
• Them making sandwiches
• cauterizing the guys cut off hand with a rolled up newspaper. 
• ‘Bloody Skull’ saying. i’m not dead yet, save me. 
• any time the actors do squishy noises because they don’t have audio. 

Thanks Goins!
Next week has to be better right?

-Mark