Cult Movie Challenge 2019 Wrap-Up!

YEAR TWO OF CULT IS DEAD, LONG LIVE CULT.

Myself, Jackie, and John have watched weird, obsessively detailed Something Weird catalog videos disguised as a documentary on old pornos.  We've learned why you don't muck about with Black Magic Fuckery.  We've entered and questioned the strange world of Andy Sidaris, he of the Bullets, Bombs, and Boobs.  We've pondered the philosophical question of "why isn't Elijah Wood punting any of these zombie kids"?  We've been 20,000 leagues under the sea, to a strange, happenin' New York version of Oz, and whatever the hell you call the ending of Big Man Japan.  But through it all, which films were great, and which were not?  That's what we're here to look at today!  Hope y'all enjoy this way-too-high-effort end of year Content!

IF SOMEONE GAVE YOU THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE

A Pistol For Ringo
(Spaghetti Western Week)

10: More in the spirit of the classic American westerns with the indulgences spaghetti westerns allowed pumping through its veins than something truly in the style of a Leone or Corbucci, A Pistol For Ringo nevertheless delivers an excellent time at the movies thanks to its balled-up contradiction of its main character, the savagery of its villains, and how cleverly the two flit in and out've advantages and disadvantages between them.  It's the kind of tense battle of wills where bodies can still drop with great frequency, and both parties need to bullshit some quickie explanation for why it happened and why it's justified before there's a bullet 'tween their eyes.  Plus, as I mention in the linked review, it has a weaponized Christmas tree in the finale, so it outranks Die Hard for best non-conventional Christmas movie.

Tremors
(USA Up All Night Week)

9: I say again, the most American monster movie to ever grace the silver screen.  Tremors fully commits to the classic "buncha stock characters trapped by weird monsters in a hostile setting" set-up of 50s monster movies, and runs hog wild with the possibilities offered by that setting being a run-down middle-of-nowhere desert town with plenty buildings to destroy and its own resident survivalist loaded on guns galore.  The monsters act intelligently enough to create an active push-pull dynamic that keeps the movie from resting for too long, the characters all acquit themselves nicely, and it features a contender for my favorite scene of the challenge when Burt and Heather empty an entire wall of firearms into a single Graboid.  Yee-haw, y'all! 

The Killer
(John Woo Week)

8: Without seeing Hard Boiled, I can't declare The Killer the definitive John Woo package - I CAN, however, declare it promises his brand of kinetic gunplay at a peak, relationship/rivalry between Chow Yun-Fat and Danny Lee that can't be beat (those parts where they spend an entire scene with guns to one another's temples while pretending to be on good terms for Sally Yeh's sake are great), the kind of effortless, butter-smooth pacing you think one only dreams about, and a genuinely tragic, gut-wrenching ending to cap it all.  Really glad our decision to go with more unconventional John Woo films for this theme didn't pan out.  I'm sure Red Cliff is great in its uncut two-film form, but then we wouldn't've time for this action classic.

Porco Rosso
(Anime Week)

7: The first Miyazaki film I've seen to dip below a perfect 5 star rating, and still considerably better than the vast majority of films we watched this year.  Where Porco Rosso doesn't quite touch the highs of Castle in the Sky or My Neighbor Totoro, it still soars on the strengths of its beautiful flying animation, memorable character designs and personalities (big, big shout-out to the Mama Aiuto Gang), and contemplations on mortality and forgiveness.  Porco's vision of fighter pilot heaven ranks up there with the most arresting images Miyazaki ever committed to film, and the extended fisticuffs brawl against a rival pilot towards the end has some real weight behind its comedic rhythms.

An American Werewolf in London

(Werewolf Week)

6: John Landis sure did get some innocent people killed with his recklessness, but damn if he wasn't a great filmmaker in his prime.  Even knowing its place as a horror-comedy, I found An American Werewolf in London an unexpectedly uproarious time, a black as hell's pits joke about life slamming David Naughton's face straight into a brick wall over and over again, and him being too oblivious about anything to pick up on the hint until he's lost half his blood and all his teeth.  The werewolf and Griffin Dunne's decaying ghost corpse still look great nearly forty years on, and the film's rocking a strong sense of place whether we're on the wild wet moors of Northern England or playing out a fifty car pile-up in Piccadilly Circus.  Romance is a bit weak, but that conversation about suicide with a bunch've recent werewolf victims in a porno theater is killer.

Eight Diagram Pole Fighter
(Shaw Brothers Week)

5: Gordon Liu's thickheaded, eager-to-fight Fifth Brother is my favorite character from any of the films this challenge.  His skullbrained attempts to achieve enlightenment through peaceful meditation by threatening to beat and break everyone and everything around him would make Eight Diagram Pole Fighter a top-ranked film on their own, and yet the movie also offers gorgeous sets, ridiculous plot convolutions, and easily the best hand-to-hand action I saw all year.  That fucking rotating coffin pile, man.  The monks using their poles to rip out full sets of teeth from the enemy mooks' mouths?  The whole opening massacre scene?  The splinter-bomb bamboo staffs?  Or...

Head
(Psychotronic Encyclopedia Week)

4: "Hey hey, we are the Monkees, you know we love to please/A manufactured image with no philosophies."  Need I say anything more than my original opening line describing Head as the perfect cinematic equivalent to a suicide note written in magazine clippings?  The Monkees, Bob Rafelson, and Jack Nicholson went right the hell off in this attempt to detonate not only the band's popular public image, but any possible alternate interpretation, leaving naught but ash behind.  They chose to do this in a wildly inventive, literally acid-fueled charge across the entire pop culture landscape of their day, with some of the band's catchiest psychdelic tunes as backing, and highlights like the alternating black-to-white Ton Basil dance to a casual conversation about suicide amongst dozens of others.  It came for the head of everything Monkees related, and walked away with about twenty more representing the whole 60s counterculture movement on its belt.  And somehow, it's still a prime example thereof.

Danger: Diabolik
(Mario Bava Week)

3: I often claim films attempting appeal to spectacle, high-octane action, or simple hipness are often let down by a perceived need to still tell some kind of coherent story or impart a message, which often leads to the stuff you're supposed to find appealing getting lost beneath the greater volume of less expensive subpar character work, or else overwhelming interesting ideas in the event some arose in the screenwriting.  Danger: Diabolik needn't worry about this problem, because it is the Pure film I have chased after all these years.  It wants to be cool, it strives to be cool in every single scene, and it IS cool in every single scene, because Diabolik lives a life of fabulous, enviable crime, pulls off some incredible new stunt, heist, or escape every time we see him, and lives a life scored to Deep, Deep Down.  When we are not with Diabolik, we are still in a world shot and acted to revolve around the idea of his personality, and make his next action seem all the cooler whenever he next appears.  It's the kind of movie where a bad guy who operates at the peak of James Bond villainy by dropping people out've planes through a hidden trapdoor in his on-board office is no match for an anti-hero willing to pump him full of emerald bullets, and then retrieve them from his ashes in the crematorium, which plays even better than I describe it.  Forget Endgame or Joker, THIS is the best comic book movie I've seen all year.

Manos: The Hands of Fate
(Mystery Science Theater 300 Week)
(Bwang!)

2: It is all broken, and it is all glorious.  Manos: The Hands of Fate is the proverbial movie that's so bad it crashed straight through the floor and came out the ceiling again good.  Nothing works as intended, not the acting, not the screenplay, not the camerawork, not the music, not the sets, nor the props, nor the lightning, or the basic scenario.  It is still the single funniest thing I've seen in my entire life when Torgo, poor ol' John Reynolds in those malformed satyr legs, starts hobbling along to his discordant, repetitive theme tune, which stops abruptly for some shaky dialogue, only to strike up again after a sudden jump cut to Torgo struggling back inside.  The total lack of ability here loops round in circles until it crashes in on itself like a particle in the Large Hadron Collider, sparking an alchemical process whereby a movie of total ineptitude becomes one of the few I'll ever describe as So Bad It's Good.  Anyone who claims you absolutely NEED Joel and the Bots to make this one watchable is Wrong, for it is a cult classic all on its own merit.

Inferno

(Dario Argento Week)

1: MATER SUSPIRIORUM!  LACHRYMARUM!  TENEBRARUM!  DOMINAE, DOMINAE, DOMINARUM!

Beautifully horrifying, oblique to an extreme, rocking a Keith Emmerson synth-heavy soundtrack - this is the real deal.  Dario Argento tosses conventional narrative structure right out the window in favor of imparting the impression of a curse senselessly tearing through anyone and everyone you know with no possibility of understanding, only the raw horror of watching something you cannot explain strike again and again in weirder and weirder forms.  Each image more exquisite and haunting than the last, Inferno builds to a peak from which it can build no more, and then tops itself with the ultimate in indulgence: a spooky lady smashing through a mirror as she shouts "THE MORTALS CALL US DEATH!" and turns into a scary skeleton while the building burns down around her.  Of everything here, Inferno jams itself right into my list of favorite films ever made, no questions asked, except maybe "Can we stop acting like Suspiria and its family are meant to be understood like one of your shitty Star Wars lore books?"

Gahbahge Movies, Throw Them In the Trash, Please.

 

Ghost Shark
(SyFy Week)

10: Is it at all fair to hold Ghost Shark's quality against it, given its status as a low-effort film of the week from the SyFy Channel?  Yes, because I dedicated most of my review to proposing rewrite ideas, and in total they create a more enjoyable trashy movie than the wasteful film on offer.  I come to you expecting a movie to equal the slip-n-slide death everyone giffed on tumblr a few years back, and you give me this?  For shame.

Dune
(David Lynch Week)

9: You read the order correctly, I am putting Actual Theatrical Movie Dune From Highly Respected Director David Lynch a slot before Junk Bin Movie Of the Week Ghost Shark.  Even acknowledging Lynch was the wrong man for the job of adapting Frank Herbert's Dune (a job I'm still not sure anyone is suited to), and even knowing the film suffered heavy post-production meddling courtesy of Dino De Laurentiis, there's just no reason Dune should've come out bad as it is.  Initially a crushingly-dense attempt to communicate a small sliver of Herbert's complicated network of characters and interplanetary politics with an ill-fitting aesthetic and way too many hoarsely whispered voice-overs, the film manages the rare feat of reversing the polarity on its badness, and speeds through an entire half of the book inside half an hour with such ruthless efficiency it becomes impossible to tell what's going on if you've not read the book in the last ten years.

Sandworms looked cool, tho.

The Swarm
(70s Disaster Movie Week)

8: Hoof, The Swarm.  How does one succinctly describe The Swarm?  Well... picture a movie with far too many characters it invests way too much time into that still kills them off by the trainfull whenever it gets bored, asks you to take the sight of little black dots bip-boppin' across the screen as a legitimate threat, manages to make a bee swarm detonating a nuclear power plant and setting an entire city on fire seem boring, starts out incoherent and loses any ability to speak clearly as it goes along, and is two hours forty minutes in its uncut form on top've all that.  Should give you something to work with.

(Jackie never got me my gif of the children hiding in the garbage cans, and I am still miffed over never receiving meandthelads.gif.)

Microwave Massacre
(Bleeding Skull Week)

7: Jackie Vernon has nobody to play off in Microwave Massacre, and everyone else in the cast is convinced they can match his deadpan schtick, so the whole film is a toneless dead joke.  Focusing all the humor on "I hate my wife!" one-liners and gags about black prostitute meat doesn't help matters any.  It lacks even the conviction necessary to pay off the obvious "here's a little dog, here's a big microwave, dog, microwave, dog microwave" set-up it hammers on so much in the early goings, so it can't function as something legitimately disgusting either.  At the least, the disappointment of not getting anything enjoyably depraved convinced us to pop on The Boogens the next night, which introduced us to just... the most wonderful, beautiful boy I've ever laid eyes upon.

Superman IV: The Quest For Peace
(Bad Movie Week)

6: The reputation is deserved - Superman IV: The Quest For Peace hails from impossibly restricting origins, and falls below even the lofty standards of a piece abandoned by its original creators and picked up by Cannon with a last-second major budget slash and a cast who visibly want to leave.  Surprisingly, it shares some issues with Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice, in that if it chose to focus on one or two of its ideas, some of the misguided aesthetic and acting elements could be forgiven by mining some interesting territory, yet instead it plows ahead on every last notion, and makes them all worse for the overcrowding.  It's just BVS is swinging for the fences with big philosophical ideas, and Superman IV has Nuclear Man and a Superman double date.  Christopher Reeve deserved far, far better than this, but so does every Superman actor in the end.

Surf Nazis Must Die
(Troma Week)

5: Let's not besmirch Troma's good* name by associating them with this.  They only distributed Surf Nazis Must Die, and if Lloyd Kaufman had actually overseen production, it might've turned out a worthwhile artifact of trash cinema.  As is, there's precious little in the way of surfing or Nazism, and the Surf Nazis mostly stand around talking a big game without actually doing anything.  A promised revenge rampage from a black mother whose son gets killed about halfway through takes too long to get going, and by the time it finally starts up, the movie's pissed away whatever goodwill and engagement I was willing to offer.  There's nothing but an alluring title and poster here.

(*Good here meaning "slimy, grody, and proud of it.")

The Food of the Gods
(American International Pictures Week)

4: Meanwhile, LET'S besmirch Samuel Z Arkoff's good name by associating him with this.  Much as Arkoff made his fortune by selling on that empty promise of a title and poster and little else, he still found ways to deliver satisfactory product to ensure he wouldn't lose ticket sales TOO fast - I Was A Teenage Frankenstein is a drive-in classic, and nobody will convince me otherwise.  He went completely off the rails and became negligent in his duty when he permitted Bert I. Gordon to direct The Food of the Gods, which plays like Frogs without the joys of watching little amphibians command an army of swamp creatures.  It's a go-nowhere, do-nothing, show-off-the-worst-effects-of-Mister-BIG's-already-shaky-effects-driven-career film, and more than likely committed animal abuse to get some of its effects besides.  Only good thing to come from this was an imprompteau Village of the Giants rewatch, which convinced me Gordon wasn't ALWAYS the absolute worst.

Night Feeder
(Shot on Video Horror Week)

3: Y'see the killer baby on the poster?  It's not in Night Feeder until literally the very final minute, and it looks like it's made from burlap.  Meanwhile, there's an EXCELLENT brain dissection scene round the middle of the movie, which I cannot for the life of me believe was shot without a real cadaver.  Something this low-budget and low-effort could only boast so good a special effect if it were not a special effect at all, and just a fresh corpse someone's buddy dragged over from the morgue.  I got The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes flashbacks during that scene.

Anyways the movie's not good and I don't feel like saying anything else about this one.

Monster a-Go Go
(Bill Rebane Week)

2: I ask of you, which is the greater tragedy?  The way Monster a-Go Go, already a doomed venture from the start, languished on the shelf half-finished for years before HG Lewis took it up and slapped together a non-movie to fill out the runtime in a weekend?  Or the way I exerted so much effort in proposing a means of taking Monster a-Go Go of all things and making a satisfactory movie from its crumpled, broken body during my review?  I ask this as a legitimate question, for I truly do not know.

Attack of the 60 Foot Centerfold
(Fred Olen Ray Week bonus)

1: Because Wizards of the Demon Sword was not satisfactorily bad enough, apparently, I, in my infinite wisdom, decided we should also watch John's pick for the week that didn't make the final list, on the grounds of my having looked at clips of Attack of the 60 Foot Centerfold on YouTube when I was a teenager.  I apparently thought it would be funny for us to waste an afternoon watching a stupid softcore porno from Fred Olen Ray, a man with no talent and no interest in developing any.  It wasn't supposed to be here, it wasn't funny, I hold the film in active contempt, and wish to only repeat that its sole saving grace is making a giant lipstick joke instead of a giant vibrator joke at one point.  Just kinda fuck this movie.

As to what my watching companions thought this year?  Jackie says her favorites were Inferno and Porco Rosso, with her least favorites being Surf Nazis Must Die and Sgt Deadhead; while John says his favorites were The Killer and Pump Up the Volume, with The Swarm and Surf Nazis Must Die as his least.  Everyone hates Surf Nazis, that's the big takeaway this year.

CULT ROUND THREE.  CULT LIVES FOREVER.