Bad Art as a Mental Vaccine

 I was trying to explain to a friend why I wasn't too interested in watching Ender's Game.
I've read the book three or four times over the years and didn't really care for it, not to mention that the shock value of the ending, like all surprise endings, only works the once. I thought Ender's Shadow was a better book, but I probably wouldn't watch it in movie form either.
"Its a really good movie", he assured me "You shouldn't miss a movie this good."
I made some rebuttal along the lines of 'lacking time', but he wasn't going to accept that.
He felt that since I would make the time to watch really bad movies,  that I should place really good movies at an even higher priority. But I'm not too interested in a 'good' movie. There is lots of those, and I haven't even taken the time to watch Citizen Kane yet.
I watch bad movies the same reason I read bad books; to learn from them. So I was somewhat amused to discover the footsteps of an explorer ahead of me:

 "In one sense, at any rate, it is more valuable to read bad literature than good literature. Good literature may tell us the mind of one man; but bad literature may tell us the mind of many men. A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. It does much more than that, it tells us the truth about its readers; and, oddly enough, it tells us this all the more the more cynical and immoral be the motive of its manufacture. The more dishonest a book is as a book the more honest it is as a public document. A sincere novel exhibits the simplicity of one particular man; an insincere novel exhibits the simplicity of mankind. The pedantic decisions and definable readjustments of man may be found in scrolls and statute books and scriptures; but men's basic assumptions and everlasting energies are to be found in penny dreadfuls and halfpenny novelettes. Thus a man, like many men of real culture in our day, might learn from good literature nothing except the power to appreciate good literature. But from bad literature he might learn to govern empires and look over the map of mankind.”  -- G.K.Chesterton

There is more than that, of course: reading the bad sharpens the mind; it trains by the example of failure; it exposes the reader to a thousand tricks and cons.

Because the Reader is tested by the experience, his mental immune systems improve*. Show me someone impressed by Mein Kampf, and I'll show you someone that has never read more than a dozen books  in their life**. 

This too, is the danger of censorship. Weak paradigms fear books because they immunize. If you've waded though, say The Book of Mormon, The Silmarillian, The Prophet, and Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, you're going to have a hard time to take seriously anything said by Paul of Tarsus or John the Divine. This,I suppose, is the lasting value of actually reading the articles in Playboy.***

So this is why I will not take the time to watch Ender's Shadow or Schindler's List or The Shawshank Redemption , but I will watch The Terrornauts or The Hooded Mummy Versus the Other Alien, or anything that promises Godzilla.

Because I have more to learn from the quirk of his scaly lips than from a thousand serious films.

*For instance, I could have phrased this as 'hers' or even as 'their'. I learned about gender phrasing problems by reading. I also learned the meaning of 'cissexual', which someday I will work into a complex 'Narcissisexual' joke.

** I'd like to make a similar remark about The Wealth of Nations, but that book's failure is too subtle for a fair comparison.

***Although it was Penthouse that infected me with the phrase "...contrasting with her hearty English labia." Which to this day I cannot decide if it was the product of a porn movie reviewer slowly losing his mind, or a massively overqualified journalist.

"At first I thought we were in the hands of people that would understand..."

Frankenstein's Island(1981).

I am still not sure if this mesh of intriguing ideas filmed through the lens of insanity is supposed to be a comedy, or merely a director's personal fantasy about a island of girls wearing leopard print bikinis.
Who are supposed to be the barbarian survivors of a pre-historic, yet alien race.
Why do they do nothing but smoke  from modified human skulls, pray to the ghost of Doctor Frankenstein, and initiate each other by stretching themselves between trees?
Why is one of the alien women not a alien woman, but a human girl, daughter of the caged and raving blood-donor?
Why are they wearing leopardskin swimwear?
Why is Frankenstein's ghost raving about the power of the thread of gold?
 Why is the lab decked out with more high voltage equipment than any three mad scientist's labs -- but includes a ammo tin, spray painted pink , and whirling balanced on one corner?

This has the worst Frankenstein's Monster I have ever seen. Really. To the Stiff Servo Effect we can add the Fly Combat Combo. Or musical sound effects. Seriously, he's lurching so hard in some scenes that it looks like he's dancing to the Monster Mash.


I could go on like this for an hour.


In what world do Colonels of the American armed Forces wear baggy dark-brown jumpsuits?
 In this movie's world. In  this movie all cinematic normality is overturned. This film could b e a dadaist masterpiece, and may indeed be a hidden and unknown one.
The deliberate lack of action, followed by the epic brawl through the laboratory. The camera pausing part way through its exploration of writhing semi-naked female 'warriors' and their turtle-neck clad, sunglasses-wearing zombie enemy, (each of whom stand and walk as though their testicles ache unbearably), to watch the plucky terrier enter the battle, bark merrily and flee again.


"Those logs are tangible...rooted to the ground."

I'm willing to bet that the producers laid their hands on some footage of John Carradine...perhaps a minutes worth of film stock, something that was thrown out because Carradine looks like he'd died and was being animated by strings. They use the footage to put his name on the billing.
Its a transparent con, but still, the image of a hologram of John Carradine being worshipped by nearly naked dope bunnys on a far-away jungle island is strangely compelling.

The movie's refusal to be exciting, or to explain anything, is hypnotically tantalizing. Its like watching a strip tease where the dancer keeps shimmying and wiggling and discarding clothes only to reveal more layers of inexplicable raiment; the creeping madness kept in check by the banality of set and actions; the dialogue drifting in and out of sense like the rambling of a schizophrenic , or trying to read a newspaper in Cyrillic....

"Doctor Frankenstein, before he died, perfected a very startling theory which utilizes a intermediary - a human brain which is the connecting link for transnmission"
"the brain is kept alive by---low voltage?"
"its staying in  an expanded threshold - a super nourished state"

Thank you Madame Exposition, everything is clear, now. But why does the One Eyed Man laugh?

"We'll be alone,all alone in this wilderness...I can't stand it...!"

Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter(1966)

"We shall" Maria Frankenstein snaps, "Soon see which one of us is insane."

No one is, really. Except perhaps the lug that chose the title. This is a movie about Frankenstein's granddaughter.
When the movie opened with a sobbing Spaniard drinking from a wine bottle full of orange juice, I had high hopes: hopes that were dashed, watching a slow, and largely dull movie. A pair of murderers from Vienna are violating the human rights of local folk, deep in the Wild West, when Jesse James and his inexplicable beefcake (but fetchingly simple) sidekick cross their path.

The Igor is played weak-and-vacillating, but at the same time inexplicably murderous; the Inga is a fetching young village girl; Frankenstein herself would be a good depiction, if not for the mind control helmet.

There are only two details in this movie worth seeing:
The brightly striped anachronistic US army helmets rigged with neon-tube lightening bolts and short Jacob's Ladders that serve as re-animators and mind control helmets.
The other is the activation of the artificial brain: the addition of a vial of crystals, and it begins to pulse like a heart!

As a odd touch, the  beaker that the poison is stored in is a vacuum filtration flask with a side entry port! Considering they had the budget for a rack of glassware on the other side of the lab, this is a odd choice.
The lab itself was rather boringly furnished, and the sound mixing was bad. Maria Frankenstein's main monologue was almost drowned out by a really loud rotary switch.

This is a movie which had some promise. You can see that the filmmakers were trying to stay true to the Frankenstein Film Mythos: its just to bad that they mistook tedium for realism. No mugging at the camera, careful and consistent use of accents, no gratuitous nudity*. They even minimized the creature's Stiff Servo effect. They put them into castle by making it an old mission, but missed the 'profaning sacred ground' possibilities inherent in such a locale.

I'll forgive the excessive eye-widening for emphasis.

In RenegadeMime's tautology, 'If it hadn't been a poor movie, it would have been a good one.'


*Okay, the beefcake took his shirt off more than necessary, but he did have a nice physique.

"...I'm dying with sleep"

Count Dracula's Great Love(1973) "El gran amor del conde Drácula"

"And believe me, I can assure you..." ...That this movie would make more sense if watched backwards. It certainly could not make less.

Seeing as the copy I watched had been converted from 1.85 : 1 aspect ratio by clipping the sides, 'JANUS FILMS' became 'ANUS FILMS' which was the first warning sign that I had once again been slipped the red and blue pill at once, and madness was to be my evenings companion.*

Emory Exposition and his traveling companions (The Southern Belle, the Sexy Governess, Strawberry and Blueberry Shortcake**)
Suffer an vanishing stagecoach wheel while traveling through the Dread Gorgo Pass on route to the abandoned sanatorium built at Count Dracula's Lair.

I am prepared to award bonus points for the actress flexing her nostrils during the blood sucking vampire/lesbian interlude, but I'll have to take the points away again for the idiotic whipping scene, and the on-again-off-again approach to nudity that only makes sense when you realize they shot the film so that all the titty clips could be pulled out and the movie would still work.
Well, they failed. Censored or not censored, this was one of those movies where you sink into a dull lassitude while watching, vaguely irritated that you can't make sense of any part of what you are watching, nipples or no.

The movie might have been better if it had had a guidebook, explaining what the hell was actually the point.
"Because the power of the unknown goes beyond death..." I hate to think this is so, because that means I'm never going to get any kind of understanding of this movie.
 Its not like Troll  2 where the filmmakers had no idea what they are doing,its more like Javier Aguirre was possessed by Philip K Dick, and  set out to frustrate understanding at every turn.

Giving  the illusion of explication by overdubbing monologue at random points was clever, and actually left me more confused than if I'd just watched the movie with the sound turned off.
Typical echo-chamber pronouncement:  
"The blood of the girl that loved the prince of darkness, and the blood of the virgin that has been tortured will be mixed together, thereby creating a new physical body for his daughter..."

Why do the vampire trio rise with gaping mouths to greet the light? Are they hungry baby birds?
I like the idea of Dracula surrounding his castle with beartraps to snare fresh prey, but wouldn't the peasants clue in on this eventually?
Being  vampiric seems to mean walking around slowly with your mouth open and never blinking:
I was waiting for 'Wendell' or anyone, really, to say 'Blah'.
Why does Dracula/Wendell talk in the third person? Why does he talk all?

The madness extends to the Wikipedia entry!
The plot description includes this gem:

'...Then he seduces all of the girls but Karen. And he then turns them and then chains them in his dungeon. And he makes them die by making be in the sun. then he goes and seduces Karen and then he knows he has finally found love. He the tells Karen that he loves her and he can`t let her be what he is. So he stakes himself and before he dies he says "Karen".'

I'm sorry, Wikipedia contributor, that is actually too coherent to be accurate. I'm also intrigued by your phrase '...by making be in the sun.'

All in all, this one is a treasure of madness, and one I will watch again.



*With movies like these, who needs drugs?

** The characters,not the confections (And yes, I know there is no Blueberry Shortcake character, but there should be, the same way there should be a Castle Grayskull Polly Pocket Edition.)

"... the wickedness of my promise burst upon me; I shuddered to think that future ages might curse me as their pest"

“. . . the companions of our childhood always possess a certain power over our minds which hardly any later friend can obtain.”
  --Mary Shelley
 
Being slightly addicted to the Frankenstein mythos, I was pleasantly surprised to find a copy of Frankenstein(2004)* starring (to use the term loosely) William Hurt (disguised as a Old German Professor) and Donald Sutherland (pretty much as Donald Sutherland).
It was pretty close to the bottom of the barrel. They opted to ignore the cinematic Frankenstein, and adhere to the book,or at least those parts of the book you could glean from five minutes with Coles Notes.

Entirely missing the main plot of responsibility and Victor Frankenstein's general moral crappiness, they pasted in a lifeless romance and too much time significantly focusing on carvings of Christ.
Apparently they had learned nothing from watching Dracula 2000(2000)**

Also they killed two dogs on screen, a bad move when you consider how many dog lovers watch movies. Quick fact: Even Darth Vader killed no dogs onscreen.

The Creature was a tad emo, but the only person worth watching in the entire flick. Played by Luke Goss, who as played Prince Peeved from Hellboy 2.  He blew Robert de Niro's Frankenstein out of the water, who was my gold standard for 'realistic' Creatures: Karloff, of course tops the list of the 'unrealistic'.

I would like to see a 'realistic' version of Frankenstein done where they didn't crib sets and scenes from half-assed Jane Austen clones.
But they again. I'd like to see a version of Frankenstein as filmed by Alfred Hitchcock, maybe on that set with the huge roof beams.

Or better yet, a version of Frankenstein where Percy Blysshe Shelley played Victor Frankenstein, and Byron the Creature; and poor overshadowed Polidori as Clerval.***
It wouldn't be true to form, but it would be damned interesting.




* Not to be confused with the other Frankenstein(2004), Frankenstein(1994), Frankenstein(2007), Frankenstein(1992),  Frankenstein(1984), Frankenstein(1987), and of course, Frankenstein(1931).
EDIT: Also, Frankenstein(1910), which I managed to forget.

**Not to be confused with...oh, you get the picture.

***Under no circumstances would Mary be  Elizabeth. That would be way to obvious. Professor Krempe, perhaps.

"...I had the blood of Reptilicus on my hands..."

"...I had the blood of Reptilicus on my hands..."

Plot? The Copenhagen Tourist Board does a commercial for the city featuring Godzilla, King of the Tundra.
Complete with nightclub singer doing a nice little jingle about the wonders of the city.
Camera pans over stark wasteland to reveal drilling rig made of 1x3's and string that is drilling in the jungle. No wait, its the tundra, and they are drilling through permafrost. And blood. Not frozen blood, just blood.
Cut to Akvarium, and its not, I'm afraid, a pre-Hyborian kingdom.

Godzilla awakens hungry to crush the screaming hordes beneath his scaly feet - no wait, its not Godzilla, its Godzilla's Dragon-ish cousin Reptilicus , who must now trash Copenhagen because his front limbs are rigid and unmoving. Presumably his rear legs work, because he does seem capable of locomotion, what with traveling from aquarium to seashore  and  then to anywhere else they can bluescreen him.

They put some effort into making the monster visibly drool, but then never moved its front feet, which were held in a awkward position. Not as bad stop motion as the Giant Killer Robot of Feminine Death out of Starcrash, but really, what movie is going to live up to Scontri stellari oltre la terza dimensione ?
(I'm not going to go into why Starcrash is the greatest SF movie ever filmed, and possibly the finest that could ever be made, because I haven't seen Gravity yet.(And stop telling me that the physics in Gravity are riddled with errors: I am not six years old, I know its a movie, and hence, not real.)

Why do I get the impression that the frozen tail knocks the professor out and then opens the fridge door to defrost itself, using mental powers? 

Why is the 'full scientific powers of the United Nations' apparently the beautiful Miss Miller, who arrives before the advent of Reptilicus? And why is she from UNESCO?



Now if I had to regenerate myself from my tail tip because of pesky humans, and mature to my full strength in a locked aquarium next to invisible electric eels,* I'd be pretty cranky too, especially if the eels got out and were zapping me every time I moved. And if I had done all this during a thunderstorm**, and I had only been fed through a IV line since my last meal several million years ago, maybe I would eat the professor (unless he was just a professor med særlige opgaver). Its not like I'd be able to eat the slightly bizarre daughters without choking on their puffy skirts that really clashed with the stark laboratory setting.

And was the Danish Army involved in shooting that film, a la Transformers? (Watch the mighty Danes combat Reptilicus, and then pop down to your nearest recruiting station and sign up?)
And why was the main solider an American brigadier general? I mean, not why in plot sense, but why in writing sense? Why bother? Why not a Danish general? They must have generals of some sort, even back in the 1960's, they had generals.
Now the Danish army and navy fights Reptilicus so efficiently and thoroughly, that you'd almost think they had warplans drawn up and filed under R for Reptilicus.

'That area! Has it been sectored?" 

"Yes!"

So many questions, so little movie.

*I can't see them - is it just because the poor copy I watched, or is the glass aquarium the security guard/handyman/comic relief/village idiot soaks his hands in actually empty? And why am I reminded of Bender Rodriguez's electricity addiction while watching that scene?

**Which only made the eels madder.

Assignment (word starting in T)

Los Monstruos del Terror, AKA Dracula vs Frankenstein AKA Assignment Terror*
is a disappointment. Audacious premise, promising opening. A good laboratory** and a lunatic plot.
Its unfortunately spoiled by being:
~Third part of a trilogy, assuming you've seen them all, which I have not;
~Wooden Acting and dialog ...but not wooden enough to be any good;
~An obsession with strapping girls into the Chair of Torment, and then spending more time monologing than tormenting. The Chair of Torment was nowhere near as cool as the Wheel of Torment in Deathstalker IV, and fades in comparison to the finest example in cinema: the Machine from Princess Bride.

" Beautiful isn't it? It took me half a lifetime to invent it. I'm sure you've discovered my deep and abiding interest in pain. Presently I'm writing the definitive work on the subject, so I want you to be totally honest with me on how the machine makes you feel. This being our first try, I'll use the lowest setting...As you know, the concept of the suction pump is centuries old. Really that's all this is except that instead of sucking water, I'm sucking life... I've just sucked one year of your life away. I might one day go as high as five, but I really don't know what that would do to you. So, let's just start with what we have. What did this do to you? Tell me. And remember, this is for posterity so be honest. How do you feel?" -- Count Rugen

This film needed way more than thirty seconds of gogo dancers to rescue it, but I did like the idea of the Book of Monsters.

*Probably should have been called Assignment Terrible.

**European film makers usually get the set details right.