the groundhog day project

We've been here before. day 612 - he'll save every one of us day 613 - this ming is a psycho day 614 - no one but the pure in heart Flash Gordon . Silly, stupid fun with a kickass soundtrack and score. With the unreal, murky red sky and Aquaman flying between Cyborg and the Batmobile, I wonder if someone working on Justice League didn't have some love for this film... Hell, given the likely ages of people working behind the scenes on a movie like Justice League , I wouldn't be surprised if they all had some love for Flash Gordon . But--not that I'm reviewing Justice League right now--they could have used a lot more of the sense of fun that Flash Gordon has. Seriously, even in its quietest, most serious moments, this movie can't help but be fun. From Ming's ridiculously labeled-in-English world-destroying computer to the "football" game to Aura kissing Flash while he's trying to communicate telepathically with Dale to that silly roc...

Hobgoblins is a good example for exploring why a bad movie is bad... Well, there can be many reasons, but this is a big one. Like the more (in)famous Troll 2 , Hobgoblins ' biggest mistake is not knowing what it wants to be... Or rather, failing entirely at being what it seems to want to be by not going far enough. Troll 2 , for example, leans toward serious sexual moments with Creedence but backs off before it goes too far. Instead, perhaps because it was made by Italians directing a bunch of Mormons, it aims at being quaint, being kid-friendly. Hobgoblins makes that same mistake. Phone sex worker magically shows up in person, but is there any sex? Nope. Amy secretly desires to be a stripper, apparently, but strips down to about the same amount of cloth you'd see in a Jane Fonda Workout take from this same decade. Sure, her lyrics are leaning toward explicit. Like that line about showing everyone she's not wearing any underwear, but then the hobgoblins turn everything t...

I'm watching a movie I've never seen before. It's called Hobgoblins . I wanted some ridiculous awfulness tonight. Starts simple enough. Old security guy at a film studio showing the ropes to a younger guy. Younger guy opens a vault he shouldn't hears some strange gurgling then... falls to his death? Off a stage? Inside the vault? What was gurgling? Did they not have the puppets that day of filming?           This thing cost only $15000, reportedly, and it shows. And, it is not apparent from the film so far what the plot is, or is going to be; this guy Kevin got hired to replace the dead guy, but then we left the studio lot to meet some of Kevin's friends--his girlfriend Amy (who seems more into Nick than Kevin), Nick who's in the military, Nick's girlfriend Daphne, and the (coded) gay friend Kyle. Kyle called a (G-rated) phone sex line for some reason, and now Nick is "teaching" Kevin how fight, and the music is all dramatic and now the van...

Really, it is simple to understand part of it. Just because you're a bankable actor, or a proven director (having graduated from music videos to feature films), doesn't mean that your life is guaranteed, that you will always have money. Sometimes, you have to make bad movies, or at least not so great movies, to stay alive, and for your career to stay alive. Michael Caine, for example, quite famously said of Jaws: The Revenge , "I have never seen it... but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific." Not every actor can make $20 million a film, and even if they can, you cannot live on that forever if you plan to stay in the limelight. You gotta keep making movies to be able to keep making movies. And, they can't all be the greatest film ever, they can't all be Oscar-caliber, they can't all be blockbusters. For example, it's hard to find the original source for this (it's quoted all over the Inte...

Seriously though, while there may be enough moments to suggest that Troll 2 is a giant metaphor for Joshua's burgeoning sexuality , really the metaphor is far more obvious--this is Rosella Drudi and Claudio Fragasso (writer and director, respectively (and also husband and wife), though there is one name--Drake Floyd--credited with both) warning us that the Cold War is not really over. The wall wasn't down yet--that would happen from mid 1990 into 1992--and production happened before the official opening of the wall, November 1989. But, the signs were there. The Cold War was coming to an end, the Soviet Union was collapsing, and all those zombie movies screaming at us about communism (and/or consumerism) were going to have no good metaphors anymore. (And, no, I won't be spending three days with every bad movie this month--I've gotten more than enough recommendations on Facebook to spread them out a bit more. But Troll 2 is one of those that needs more time. Plus, we...

I've got Troll 2 playing again, because I wanted to say something more about it. But, I also saw The Dark Tower today, and unfortunately, there are also things to be said about that film in this month of bad movies. Both films have a problem with audience. Troll 2 is ostensibly a family-friendly horror film, but then Holly and Elliott openly talk about sex--she even specifically mentions "group sex"--and Creedence is fairly sexualized as well. Additionally, just watch that scene with Arnold and the girl in the woods and tell me there isn't some serious sexual undertones going on there; girl with a torn shirt running screaming through the woods feels more like a serious R-rated horror film, or some exploitation film from the 70s. (In fact, there's room for an interpretation of this film not just as Joshua's hallucinations but his vicinity to puberty being the fuel even if Grandpa Seth's death was the trigger. Think about it: his grandpa dies and Joshu...

The question is, what do you want from a movie? Must it challenge your mind, make you contemplate your place in the universe? Must it simply entertain? For that matter, does it have to make sense? And have good acting and a script that sounds like someone actually read it at least once before filming? A bad movie can do all of these things. The problem, really, is when the bad movie makes you hate the people who made it, makes you hate the world for creating a place for it, makes you hate yourself for watching it. Well, a bad bad movie does that. A good bad movie can fail at so much that makes movies watchable--like Margo Prey not bothering to act at all as the mother in Troll 2 , just, you know, saying things, or Connie McFarland as the sister yelling like she forgot microphones exist--but still be so watchable in spite of the flaws. Some of what makes a movie like Troll 2 bad can easily be credited to the filmmaker; the director Claudio Fragasso (credited as Drake Floyd because ...