I've no doubt Bigfoot has cursed this film

Curse of Bigfoot (1978)
Starring: Bob Clymire, Augie Tribach, Bill Simsonson, Jan Swihart, Ruthann Manella, and Ken Koepfler
Director: Don Fields (aka Dave Flocker)
Rating: Zero of Ten Stars

After viewers are subjected to boring stock-footage, a cranky Bigfoot researcher (Clymire) relates the story of how he and a group of high school students inadvertently awakened a monster from ten thousand years (give or take a millennium) of magic-induced slumber.

"Curse of Bigfoot" is one of the most slip-shod movies I've ever had the misfortune of seeing. The fact that Bigfoot appears nowhere in the film is the least of the offenses committed by the filmmakers.

"Curse of Bigfoot" came about when director/producer Dave Flocker took a bad movie he'd made with his brother in 1958, chopped it up a bit, inserted what looks footage from a misbegotten educational film and a little bit of new film involving a high school teacher (Augie Tribach) preparing his class for a visit by his friend and Bigfoot expert Roger Mason. The goal was to bring "Teenagers Battle the Thing" up the minimum length needed for syndication to broadcast television and cash in on what I assume must have been a Bigfoot craze, because there seem to be quite a few films featuring the hairy beast from the late 1970s. The result is a film that stinks worse than a pile of Bigfoot droppings.

If you want to see an example of how not to do a day-for-night shot, this is worth checking out--you will see why you shouldn't shoot footage of the sun shining through the trees if it's supposed to be night.

If you want to see an example of how not to assemble a film from the carcasses of other motion pictures, then this is worth checking out--you'll see why you might want to reserve some time in a sound studio to loop some voice overs, so you don't have the situation where a character says in one scene that he is telling a tale that happened many years ago, but when the flashback starts, a narrator tells us the events happened last year.

If you want to see an example of how not to build suspense through padding your movie, then this is worth checking out--you'll see two yahoos wandering through a forest in a long, loong, looooooooong absolutely pointless sequence, and you'll get to see the world's most well-behaved teenaged boy and girl taking a moonlight stroll through a monster-haunted lemon grove in search of soda pop.

If you want to see a film that features examples of every kind of incompetent filmmaking you can think of, then this is worth checking out.

Somewhere in this fetid garbage pile, there are a couple of good ideas that hadn't quite been done to death in 1958 and which can form the basis for intriguing horror films even now--not to mention do form the basis for three out of five movies with the tagline "A Sci-Fi/Syfy Original Picture." The idea of ancient Native Americans subduing some monstrous creature and binding it in a cave through magical rituals is an intriguing one and the discovery and recovery of the creature is the only vaguely interesting part of the movie. A lot could have been done with this, in the hands of filmmakers who knew what they were doing, but it is unfortunately mostly squandered here.

My desire for the promise held in that ancient monster almost made me inclined to cut this movie some slack. Coupled with the fact that the one bit of serious thought that seems to have gone into the production resulted in the same actor playing the Bigfoot researcher both in the "present" and the "flashback" parts of the film. It's a nice bit of coherence that is otherwise lacking in the production, and it even lends a touch of realism as the actor, like the character he plays, has aged 20 years.

(Near as I can tell, the only film work that Bob Clymire was in this film and in the original "Curse of Bigfoot" production. I could find next to no information on him in the 10-15 minutes I bothered to spend on researching him, but I am curious what his connection is to this production and to the Field/Flocker Brothers. Perhaps this repackage was his idea?)

If you're looking for a teaching aid to demonstrate how not to apply a particular filmmaking technique or how to structure a film, or anything at all, then this is perfect. For everything else, you need to avoid it. And if you ever see it listed in a multi-DVD pack with viewer than ten other films, you need to rethink your purchase.

The undertaker should get pals to bury this one

The Undertaker and His Pals (1966)
Starring: Rad Fulton (aka James Westmoreland), Ray Dannis, Warrene Ott, Marty Friedman, and Sally Frei
Director: T.L.P. Swicegood
Rating: One of Ten Stars

A crooked undertaker (Dannis) and his psychopathic greasy-spoon-owning friends drum up business by invading the homes of beautiful young women and murdering them. The cooks take parts of bodies and serve them in the restaurant, while the undertaker overcharges the families for buring the remaining remains. It's a great scheme, until they target the secretary of private eye Jim Glass (Fulton) and twin sex-pots Thursday and Friday (Ott).

Writing that summary is about all the time I intend to spend on this movie. I almost feel apologetic that I made you read it. You've probably never heard of or seen this miserable failure at making a black comedy, and I encourage you to keep it that way.

To say this movie is crap is an insult to fertilizer. The One Star rating is very generous, and it's based solely on the fact that the film does have a couple of good gags... but they are the sort of gags that a 12 year old would think up scribbling in his notebook while bored in class.

'Blood Sucking Babes from Burbank'... sucks

Bloodsucking Babes from Burbank (2005)
Starring: Heidi Brucker, Danilo Mancinelli, Danny Kitz, Mira Rayson, Jacqueline Anzalone, Yasmine Vine, Danielle Kreinik, Christina Caporale, and Burke Morgan
Director: Kirk Bowman
Rating: Two of Ten Stars

Samantha (Brucker) and other archeology students conduct a search for a witch's cursed jewelry box that was reported to be lost in the Burbank Mountains two centuries ago. When her boyfriend, Gary (Kitz), takes the box to spite her because she won't "put out", he unleashes a curse that starts turning innocent women into cannibalistic monsters who hunger for man-meat, preferably the fleshy part on the neck and arms.

Given my questionable tastes in entertainment, a title like "Blood Sucking Babes from Burbank" attracts me like a bear to honey (or, perhaps more accurately, like flies to a cow paddy). Unfortunately, this film doesn't live up to the promise of the title.

It may have babes and they do engage in some blood-sucking, but a film like this needs to be either concentrated comedy or full of horror-driven violence and mayhem. There is precious little comedy here, the violence is nonsensical and very, very fake, and the mayhem is non-existent. The film is a letdown in just about every possible way.

The problems with the movie stem first and foremost from its weak script. It's full of too many characters and they're all badly motivated. There's also plenty of standard bad low-budget movie padding sequences of characters driving around, walking around, and having pointless conversations that repeat plot points that have already been explained.

The padding is particularly aggravating in this film, because if the scriptwriter (who is also the film's director and producer) had written a couple of scenes that gave more details about Angela's Cursed Jewel Box or more on the history that two of the film's more interesting characters--Zack and Felicity, a young couple who are trying to find the box and destroy it, played by Danilo Mancinelli and Mira Rayson--the overall film would have been stronger. (I'm sure I understand why the attack scenes--the ones where a sexy babe transforms into a monster cannibal with badly made fangs in her mouth and starts ripping the flesh from the body of the nearest male--are as static and uninteresting as they are: The film's amateur cast and crew were obviously not up for shooting fight scenes.

However, all it would have taken would have been some comment from Zack or Felicity about how men are paralyzed by the gaze of a woman under the curse to make the attacks seem a bit more believable; NO ONE would stand there and allow themselves to be killed the way the victims do in this movie, unless some force was acting upon them. The men being killed don't even utter a sound, aside from some mewling noises in most cases.

What it lacked in violence and logic, the film could still have made up for with humor, but it mostly fails to do that as well. The only funny bits in the film revolve around a pair of cannibalistic Valley Girls (Jacqueline Anzalone and Yasmine Vine) who sit around discussing Roman sex toys while munching on a gardener they killed after being cursed. Everything else is played absolutely straight... and played badly, because the film has a cast of mostly amateur actors who are working with tinny dialogue and a weak script.

And that's really too bad. A movie with a title like "Bloodsucking Babes from Burbank" should have been something I got a huge kick out of. As it is, the best thing I can say about it is that it did keep me watching to the end (even if the "twist ending" ended up knocking the film from a low 4 rating down to a low 3 rating, due to the fact that it was first completely unmotivated and ill-considered in the light of everything that had gone before it, and it features one final example of a strangely passive victim).

This has probably been used in torture sessions

Dungeon of Harrow (1962)
Starring: Russ Harvey, Helen Hogan, William McNulty, Maurice Harris, and Michele Buqour
Director: Pat Boyette
Rating: One of Ten Stars

A shipwrecked nobleman (Harvey) finds love and lepers in the castle of the insane, torture-obsessed Count DeSade (McNulty).

If anything, "Dungeon of Harrow" shows clearly that Pat Boyette made the right call when he stopped making movies in favor of a career as a painter and comic book artist; this goes double if it was Boyette who painted the artwork for the promotional poster for this film as it's the best thing about it. This film is Boyette's in every way--he helped write it, produce it, direct it, edit it, and even scored the music for it. The only thing that isn't terrible about it is the voice acting present in the narration, which was also done by Boyette, and which aleviates some of the pain of sitting through stretched-out scenes of actors wandering, sitting, or lounging around.

Every other actor in the film is as stiff and unnatural as the dialogue they deliver. Boyette was clearly going for an Edgar Allan Poe vibe with this movie, with the narrator looking back on horrible events, rampant madness, florid dialogue, and a storyline that will remind well-read viewers of "The Oblong Box", "Fall of the House Usher", and "The Raven" in equal measure.

Unfortunately, none of Boyette's actors have the chops to deliver the lines with the amped up melodrama present in the Corman Poe-inspired pictures from the same period and instead perform as though tye are under sedation for the entire film; I don't think there's ever been a movie about torture and madness with a more subdued set of performances ever released for viewing by the general public. Time and again, the lethargic actors turn what could and should have been frightening or dramatic into a test of patience so severe it would be out-and-out torture if forced upon a captive audience.

It's equally unfortunate that no-one seems to have taken the script further than a first draft, nor read it from beginning to end at any point during rehearsal, filming or editing. If someone had, they would have noticed characters behaving in contradictory and inconsistent fashions (not counting the batshit crazy DeSade), and several plotlines and characters appear and are dropped seemingly at random.

The film has two worthwhile and scary scenes--one where the Count believes he is being visited by a demon, and another where the main character is chained in the dungeon with an insane leper--but they are not worth sitting through the crap that surrounds them.

'UFO: Target Earth' is a misfire

UFO: Target Earth (1974)
Starring: Nick Plakias and Cynthia Cline
Director: Michael A. DeGaetano
Rating: Two of Ten Stars

Alan (Plakias) and his psychic sidekick (Cline) search for evidence that a UFO has crashed in a remote, backcountry lake, and of a possible government cover-up. Viewer boredom ensues.

While the advent of the DVD made many worthy films once again available to the general public, a lot of films that deserve to simply rot away have also been retrieved from the abyss of time. "UFO: Target Earth" is in that last category. Watch it, and all you'll find when the film's over is a deep wish you could reclaim the time wasted.

"UFO: Target Earth" starts out trying to present a documentary feel, but by the time our heroes head into the forest in search of the UFO, the filmmakers have given up on that conceit. Instead, they present a film that sounds like an 11th grader's research paper and a 9th grader's poetry served as its script, with a couple elements badly mimicked from "2001" and 1970s occult culture tossed in. And they present it in the most turgid and mind-numbingly dull fashion. I'm sure the filmmakers thought they were being artsy... but the null-zone of talent surrounding this movie resulted in something that's just dull.

I don't usually say things like "worst movie ever" or "worst actor ever", but I feel fairly confident in saying that Plakias is in the running for the Top Ten Worst Film Actors Ever award. The guy is so wooden that he might as well have been replaced by a department store mannequin in this film. His facial expression never changes, his inflections never move up or down... every line is delivered with the vacant tone of a heavily medicated mental patient.

Plakias is only the worst of a bad bunch. There isn't a good actor anywhere in this film, although those playing interview subjects early in the film come close to giving something resembling good performances. Of course, actors can only be as good as the material they are working with, and the material here is damn awful. The film only manages one bit of true suspense, giving the viewer hope that maybe something entertaining will start occurring--when the psychic starts hearing creepy voices over the walkie-talkie--but it soon becomes apparent that the filmmakers were just teasing us.

Some films need to be seen to be believed, but this is a film that shouldn't be seen by anyone.

'Witless Protection': A wit-free comedy

Witless Protection (2008)
Starring: Larry the Cable Guy (Daniel Lawrence Whitney), Ivana Milicevic, Yaphet Kotto, Ivana Milicevic, Eric Roberts, Joe Mantegna, and Jenny McCarthy
Director: Charles Robert Carner
Rating: One of Two Stars

A dimwitted small-town sheriff's deputy with dreams of some day being an FBI agent (Whitney) becomes the sole protector of a key witness in a Federal corruption trial (Milicevic) when he separates her from her security detail in the mistaken belief they are kidnappers. Can a cop dumber than a box of rocks get a witness safely to trial when hitmen and both legit and corrupt FBI agents are hunting both him and his charge?

"Witless Protection" is one of those comedies where the main character is so stupid that he succeeds because the bad guys constantly under-estimate the depth of idiocy. Basically, Larry the Deputy is what Inspector Clouseau would be like if he had been raised on a steady diet of lead paint chips and "Hee-Haw" re-runs. Every joke and situation in the film plays to the lowest common denominator, so this is one of those cases where it's imperative to leave your brain in neutral while watching, or you won't find any enjoyment here whatsoever. (A plus to the movie not challenging even the slowest of minds is that the solitary plot twist it features does come as a surprise; it anything but a movie as stupid as this, you'd see it coming a mile away, but here it's unexpected.)

It's a comedy that probably was funnier on paper, because it's main character COULD have worked and COULD have been funny if the actor playing the character had an air of likability, or perhaps just a tiny bit of grace or class. Unfortunately, as funny as Whitney can be when doing stand-up as "Larry the Cable Guy," the persona simply doesn't work in this movie. This character is so stupid and so crass that it's impossible to buy him as any sort of law enforcement figure; the aforementioned Clouseau can fake his way through an investigation, but the character here will fool no one, because he's a lethal combination of idiocy and completely lack of social grace.

While everyone in the movie is clearly game and trying their best to make it work, and Yaphet Kotto and Eric Roberts are amusing as the baffled antagonists trying to outwit a high-functioning retard, the center of the film simply isn't up for the task.

Fast Food Nation: Most Boring Film Ever?

Fast Food Nation (2006)
Starring: Greg Kinnear and Catalina Sandino Moreno
Director: Richard Linklater
Rating: Zero of Ten Stars

I've tried three times to sit through this movie. The longest I lasted was 43 minutes, and then I decided cleaning my bathroom would be a far better use of my time.

The story revolves around a fast food company executive (Kinnear) who gradually comes to realize he is working for an Evil Corrupting Influence in America and (near as I can tell, since I've never lasted long enough to see where the film ends up) eventually joins with the minimum wage workers in the company's restaurants and the exploited illegal aliens who work in the food processing plants in a "revolt" against the company.

I can imagine all kinds of biting, hard-hitting and extremely funny satire in the film's subject matter, even if I don't agree with some of the political messages co-writer/director Linklater is shoving down viewers' throats like foul-tasting Big Macs. But, sadly, Linklater seems more interested in preaching politics than actually entertaining... and as such he actually managed to make a political comedy less funny than "Silver City" and An American Carol. (I could at least sit through those travesties.)

I suppose I'm being a little unfair giving this movie a Zero Rating since I haven't watched the whole thing. Considering some of the crap I have been able to sit through that I awarded the lowest possible rating to, I think three failed attempts at getting through this ill-begotten sermon make it an appropriate and fair rating.

I'd love to hear a defense of the film, though. Does it better? Should I have used the "chapters" feature to skip the huge swaths of film that put me in mind of the cow dung that is supposedly in the fast food burgers that serve as the film's running thread?