#77 The Garbage Pail Kids Movie (1997) (Colin)

The 80's was a simple time. If, like me, you grew up in this decade, then you know that we did not have PS Vitas, Nintendo 3DS's or iPhones to occupy ourselves in the playground. We had to, (and I know this is an alien concept today), communicate with each other face to face.  Interaction, speaking to and acknowledging each others existence was part of daily life and one example of how this was achieved is through sticker collecting.

We had short lived phases like yo-yos which Coca Cola gave away and bore the soft drink of your choice on the side or the Rubik's magic which we all managed to do in about 7 seconds. But sticker collecting carried on throughout school, mainly thanks to Panini's football sticker album which came out once a season.  The only album I ever managed to complete was Panini's Football '87 and I'm still proud of this today, (yes, I'm quite sad!).

The social element of all this was the swapping off any sticker doubles you had. Basically, every lunchtime, you would carry a wad of stickers you did not need and would try to find others who had stickers you wanted and who you could bargain and swap stickers with. Lunchtime then, would involve a group of kids in a circle, whilst one kid rifled through his stickers one by one, getting stopped by someone once a sticker they needed was on show. So the soundtrack to our school was:

'Got, got, got, oh need'

'Ok, what do you have? Got, got, got, oh need.'

Pride of place in the sticker collection were the foil stickers. These shiny ones usually had a football team's badge and were rarer than the normal stickers. So rare that this dialogue was not uncommon. 

'Got, got, got, oh need. What do you want for the Tottenham foil sticker?'

'20 stickers plus your Leeds United foil badge'

'Fuck off'

Then along came a new sticker collection, quite different from what we were used to. They came with a free chewing gum, which was rock hard and broke your teeth, (I believe the chewing gum is now used as an tougher alternative for diamond tipped drills), but above all they were a little rude and a bit naughty.

Based loosely on the look of the Cabbage Patch Kids, the Garbage Pail Kids were deformed and screwed up versions.  Each sticker had a drawing of a Garbage Pail Kid, usually vomiting, full of snot or farting, and underneath was their name. The name usually related to the drawing and was a pun or play on words. For example, my namesakes Croaky Colin or Semi Colin, (I have put these at the bottom of my blog, so you can see what I mean!).

Parents wanted them banned, some schools did ban them and the media was outraged that this filth was being peddled to kids. For this reason we loved them and they became hugely popular. Usually when we are about to review a movie, we get blank looks and shrugging of shoulders, however when I mentioned the GPKs nearly everyone my age had heard of them and remembered the stickers. Not many remembered that there was a movie, in fact neither did I.  

It turns out there's a reason for that......

#77 The Garbage Pail Kids Movie (1987)

Unfortunately when something in pop culture is at it's height of popularity, film studios start seeing dollar signs and aggressively seek to peddle any crap loosely associated with it. Fortunately, for those of us who enjoyed Transformers in the 80's, Michael Bay waited nearly 20 years before destroying it. Unfortunately GPK were not so lucky and whilst they remained very popular, a movie based on some of the characters from the stickers was released, or should I say rushed out.

The film focuses on Dodger, (Mackenzie Astin), a 14 year old weakly type, who helps out in an antique shopped owned by likable English eccentric Captain Manzini, (Anthony Newley).  Dodger fancies out of his league, cheerleader type, Tangerine, (Katie Barberi) and when Dodger attempts to chat her up, (rather badly), her boyfriend, Juice, (Ron Maclachlan) and some one-dimensional bullies take offence.  A tussle breaks out and they knock over a garbage can, (dustbin to us Limeys), which omits some nasty looking green slime. From this vile substance Piers Morgan is born. Also, the Garbage Pail Kids. 

Each GPK has a particular gross habit and are based on their pictures on the original stickers. There's Nat Nerd, incredibly spotty, wearing a superhero outfit and constantly weeing himself. Ali Gator, an alligator, (surprise!), who likes to eat eye balls and fingers. Valerie Vomit, who pukes, but thankfully only once, in the movie. Greaser Greg, who is the bastard son of John Prescott and The Fonz. Messy Tessie, who snots a lot. Foul Phil, who has incredibly bad breath and Windy Winston, who farts. A lot. As you can see from these characters, the humour is very high brow and subtle.

The GPKs, for some reason, make Dodger a jacket, which he wears when he goes to see Tangerine. Tangerine, who is a wannabe fashion designer, is impressed with the jacket and asks Dodger if he can get more which she hopes to sell at a fashion show. Dodger asks if the GPKs will do this and they agree. They then set about making the clothes whilst singing what has to be the most annoying tune known to man. The song is about working together or something and comes straight out of the Disney vomiting section of feel good songs with important moral messages.

Tangerine learns that the GPKs make these clothes and because they are ugly, feels just fine about exploiting them.  On the day of the fashion show, she locks them in the basement and Juice kidnaps them and takes them to a home for Ugly people. It's OK though, because Manzini and Dodger rescue them and they promptly go and ruin the fashion show, which seems to involve ripping clothes off models. This concludes with lots of models running around in bras and a lawsuit from Robin Askwith and Benny Hill. 

Having saved the day, Manzini explains how the GPKs need to go back into the garbage can as 'normies' will never accept them.  He attempts to magic them back in by singing a song backwards, but this fails. The GPKs sneak out and ride off promising us new adventures. Which they never do as the planned sequel and cartoon series was shelved based on the reception of the movie.

I was kind of dreading it, but unfortunately the movie was a bitter disappointment for fans of the original sticker series. The acting was OK, Manzini is a very likable English eccentric and Dodger also comes over as a character you can care about and you kinda hope things work out for him and Tangerine, but you can't help feeling we've seen it all before. 

Original is definitely not a word associated with this movie. Dodger really is the stereotypical 80's loser who's unlucky in love but has a good heart. Tangerine is the 'A' typical bitch who prefers jocks to kindness and judges purely on appearance and Juice is the 'A' typical jock boyfriend of said 80's bitch.  The bullies are cut and paste from any college movie of the 80's and lack anything new or remotely interesting. Overall the underlying message that you should not judge people on outward appearance is a good one, but unfortunately it is a message we have heard in numerous other movies in numerous better ways.

In my Ecks vs Sever blog, I speak about how game tie-ins are often just generic games which have already been written but which have a new skin put on to portray the characters in the movie.  This is what comes across to me in this movie, in that it really is a lazy film, with a plain script which could have been shoe horned into any popular franchise of the time.

The biggest issue with the GBKs is their look, it is truly awful.  The animatronics of the actual puppets are incredibly poor and they make Jaws from Jaws: The Revenge look like Avatar.  The GBKs look weird, but not weird good or weird funny as in the drawings on the original stickers, but just plain freaky. When each GBK speaks you can almost see and hear the steam pistons trying to operate the mouth, but failing miserably and with each sentence uttered the mouth moves only once, sometimes twice.

As I mentioned earlier, the drawings were loosely based on the look of Cabbage Patch Kids and if you scrunched your eyes you could clearly see some vague resemblance, albeit after a dog has chewed it.  The GBK puppets look like the dog has then subsequently shat the Cabbage Patch Kid out and then Satan has pushed some tortured souls into them.  They have all the appeal and charm of an maggot infested open wound.  Or Piers Morgan.

Overall, this is a very 80's movie which has not aged at all well.  The synthesiser sounds like a Casio keyboard in which someone has pressed the demo button and superglued it into position.  The synth, off course, was a staple soundtrack to most 80's movies, but unlike the catchy theme tune of Beverley Hills Cop, for example, the music in this movie is more Axel F- (must try harder).

The best thing to come out of this movie was the fact that I rediscovered Garbage Pail Kids the stickers.  They brought a lot of laughter to me in my youth and I will always look back on them with a smile.  The GPK movie did in some way evoke emotions I used to feel whilst collecting them.  Unfortunately it was how you would feel after opening your pack, finding out each sticker was one you already had and then dropping the rock hard chewing gum into the mud...... the feeling of disappointment.

'got, got' got, bollocks that was a complete waste of my time'.

#77 The Garbage Pail Kids Movie (Wes)

The Garbage Pail Kids Movie

Back in the late 80s, the world was awash with the trading card sensation that was The Garbage Pail Kids. Each card had a cartoon picture of a kid on it, with their own deformity or abnormality and a humourous name to match the picture. My personal favourites were Dead Ted (because of the awesome zombie art), Adam Bomb (a boy with a mushroom cloud coming from his head) and the brilliantly named Alice Island (wordplay on Ellis Island and The Statue of Liberty). If you find out out whether you share a name with one, then check out the full list here http://wgpkr.com/GPK/FindYourName/.These cards were reviled by adults (they were even banned in a lot of schools), and loved by kids. So much so that somebody decided that making a movie out of pun-based trading cards was a good idea.

Captain Manzini (Anthony Newley) is a magician who owns a antiques shop. Somehow he ended up with a garbage can (or rubbish bin for my British readers) in his shop, which he tells his young shop assistant, Dodger (Mackenzie Astin), not to ever touch. When Dodger tries to get the girl he fancies, Tangerine (Kate Barberi), to buy something, he gets chased around the shop by her boyfriend, Juice (Ron MacLachlan) and his gang of bullies. During the ensuing chaos, the garbage can gets knocked on the floor and a green slime leaks out, which soon turns into seven strange children (Ali Gator, Windy Winston, Messy Tessie, Foul Phil, Valerie Vomit, Greaser Greg and Nat Nerd). The Garbage Pail Kids rescue Dodger from the sewer, where the bullies have left him, and befriend him. They then proceed to help him try to get the girl, whilst Captain Manzini tries to find the right spell to put them back in the garbage can.

As said before the movie was based on the Garbage Pail Kids, which were supposed to be gross and mildly offensive, so I expected this movie might well be the same. Unfortunately I was wrong. The only thing gross and mildly offensive about this movie is that somebody felt fit to make it.

This is a movie with a message though. The Garbage Pail Kids are told to stay away from “normies”. This is the movies message to the viewers; don’t judge people on their appearances alone (a nice reaction to the vanity of the 80s), but to judge them on their actions instead. The beautiful people turn out to be the most horrible and self centred, where the Garbage Pail Kids help out the hero and show themselves to be nice people inside. It’s like Todd Browning’s Freaks, but for kids.

  

To hammer this message home further, there’s a part of the movie where the Kids help to make Tangerine some clothes for a fashion show (including what every kids film needs: A sewing montage!) and to stop them from spoiling it Juice and the rest of the bullies kidnap the Kids and take them to the State Home for the Ugly. This is where Captain Manzini was worried that all their other friends had been taken to, but he’d never had time to search for it. However when they do go to try to find it, they stumble across it immediately (well they a van driven by men who capture ugly people in a butterfly net and then follow that). Which strikes me as being incredibly lazy on Captain Manzini’s part, as it seems that he only ever had to open the yellow pages to actually find it.

The Garbage Pail Kids themselves are rubbery monstrosities and not in a good way. They look as rubbery as the shark in Jaws: The Revenge, and only have the fact that there were dwarves acting inside the costumes saving them from being amongst the worst puppets to ever grace the silver screen. The animatronics that control their facial expressions seem to be culled from Halloween props bought from a supermarket, but at least that gives them the full emotional range of Kristen Stewart.

They really missed a great opportunity with these “Kids”, although they do have their funny moments. The expected fart, snot and vomit gags are there (along with some bad breath, pants wetting and bizarrely, toe eating), but they all just fall flat. Nat Nerd wets himself at any opportunity he gets (because all nerds spent their time wetting themselves before they took over the planet, right?), whilst Valerie Vomit actually only lives up to her name once. I think there was only one time that one of the fart gags made me laugh (Windy Winston knocks out a barman in a bar fight with his Boston cheer), and that’s a rare thing for me (Mystery Men, Blazing Saddles and South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, amongst others, all had me in stitches with their fart gags).

The acting in this movie doesn’t fare much better. Ron MacLachlan and the rest of the bullies seem to have come straight out of Michael Caine’s acting school, and seem to think that shouting their lines is appropriate at all times, as do the actors voicing the Kids. The one actor whose performance I enjoyed was Anthony Newley. He does the best that he can with such a poor script and manages to come across quite likeable as an eccentric English shopkeeper.

So many great movies from the 80s had brilliant soundtracks, but there were also some that I hate with a fiery passion, Dirty Dancing being chief amongst these. So it was no surprise when I learned that these movies have somebody in common. Michael Lloyd wrote/produced songs for both (also for Ballistics Ecks vs Sever, so that’s the second time his work has appeared on this list).

Where a great score or soundtrack can really enhance a movie, watching something that has the sort of constant bad synth music that so many of the movies made in the 80s had can really distract you. Michael Lloyd seems to have been under the impression that he could do as good a job as Harold Faltermeyer. He was sorely mistaken in this and unfortunately made a soundtrack that’s more Revenge of the Nerds than Fletch. 

Oh but I’ve saved the worst ‘til last. There’s a song in the middle of the movie for no real reason. Sounding like it could fit into an episode of Barney the Dinosaur, The Garbage Pail Kids sing about how “we can anything by working with each other”, whilst they make the clothes to help out Dodger. Does anybody actually like these nauseatingly bad songs ever? It’s like there’s somebody in Hollywood that writes these songs about friendship and co-operation that seems to have a lot of dirt on everyone who makes a kids movie and forces one of them into as many films as they can. Randy Newman, I’m looking at you. It’s so bad that I’m surprised that Valerie Vomit didn’t spend the entire song puking over the rest of the Kids.

Like Mac and Me, I vaguely remember watching this as a kid and quite liking it. But I’ve now learnt that young Wes wasn’t that great a judge when it came to movies I went into this with trepidation. Was I wrong to do that? Well, yes and no. It wasn’t the worst movie I’ve ever seen, it was strangely entertaining in parts, but to say it’s anything other than complete rubbish would be lying. A curious movie that should have stayed in the 80s along with other curiosities, like shell suits and Madonna.

#78 Jaws: The Revenge (Wes)

Jaws: The Revenge.

Jaws is my second favourite movie ever. It was so beautifully shot, acted and scored that I never tire of watching it. The story is simple, but absolutely gripping. The fact that you hardly see the shark until the very end, shows Speilberg’s masterful understanding of storytelling. In fact there’s not a single thing I can think of that’s wrong with that movie, which is possibly why the sequels have never quite been able to muster the sheer genius of the original. Jaws 2 was good, Jaws 3D was passable, so does Jaws: The Revenge finally jump the shark?

The Brody children from the first movie are both grown men now. Sean (Mitchell Anderson) is still living with his mother Ellen (Lorraine Gary) and working as a police deputy. A few days before Christmas, Sean is sent to clear a log that’s got tangled on a buoy. As he attempts this, a shark bursts from the water and eats him. Ellen, convinced that the shark purposely killed Sean, goes to stay with her other son Michael (Lance Guest), who is now a marine biologist living in the Bahamas with his own family. It isn’t long until the shark has travelled to the Bahamas and is now stalking Michael’s boat. The Brody family must once again pull together to destroy this vindictive shark, which seems to share a strange psychic connection with Ellen.

Yes that’s right, for some reason Ellen just knows when the shark is attacking members of her family. Director Joseph Sargent actually made an adult decision that turning Ellen Brody into the Derek Acorah of the shark world was actually something worth committing to celluloid. She also now somehow has sepia tinged flashbacks to events that she wasn’t even there for (e.g. Chief Brody killing the original shark and Sean's death). This itself brings up something that I’ve said before... If your movie is shit, then don’t put clips of other peoples much better movies in it, as it only highlights exactly how inept your movie is.

As ridiculous as this may sound, that’s not the worst thing about this movie though. In fact there are many things wrong with this film, that singling out the worst part is actually quite difficult. Perhaps it’s the fact that the shark now roars like a lion (sharks don’t have any organs for producing sound) or maybe it’s the fact that the shark follows the family to the Bahamas (it’s extremely rare for great whites to venture into tropical waters, it’s even rarer for one to target a specific family and follow them around) to continue its personal vendetta.

  

Personally I think the worst thing about this movie is that it’s a shark movie that ONLY HAS TWO SHARK ATTACK DEATHS. If I watch a movie which I know is about sharks, then the one thing I expect is a decent body count. The only shark film that I’ve ever seen with a lower shark kill rate than this was Open Water, and that’s only because it only had two people stranded in the water (and one drowns).

Being a shark film fan, you really have to have quite low expectations much of the time. They’ve been some great shark films made, but for every Jaws, Shark Night or Deep Blue Sea, you get a Shark Attack 3: Megalodon, Shark in Venice or Jersey Shore Shark Attack. But no matter how poorly acted these films may be, no matter how awful the special effects may look, no matter how bad the stories are, at least they have sharks attacking people! Even Sharktopus, with its roaring shark/octopus hybrid (which was the silliest idea for a shark movie before Sharknado came along), is at least a fun movie THAT HAS SHARK ATTACKS.

The acting in this movie isn’t really actually that bad. Loraine Gary fights against some awful scripting and plays Ellen much the same as she had done previously. Lance Guest is ok as Michael, although he seems to be playing a watered down version of Matt Hooper from the first movie (brilliantly played by Richard Dreyfuss).

Micheal Caine shouts the role of Hoagie in the way that he often shouts his roles. Sometimes he’s an absolutely incredible actor, but unfortunately this is one of his more forgettable performances (apart from the shouting). Mario Van Peebles however has an accent that wanders more than an albatross and that spoils an otherwise acceptable turn as Jake (Micheal's research partner).

The most unconvincing actor in this movie by far is the shark itself. It literally chews the scenery! Unlike the original movies, you actually get to see the shark a little more often. It’s seen swimming past Michael’s mini-sub, or in one awful moment pursuing Michael through a shipwreck. If the shark looked good, then this wouldn’t be so much of a problem, but it looks more rubbery than Lee Evans.

Also for some reason this shark can now float on the top of the water as it devours its meal (victim number 2 if you’re wondering), or just comes up to pose for the camera like it’s on The Caribbean’s Next Top Model. I’ve never seen this behaviour on Shark Week and would have been left wondering why, if I wasn’t aware that sharks don’t float! (Unless they’ve become victims of Pennywise the Clown in a Jaws/It crossover movie, which if Asylum Pictures haven’t already started work on, then that’s my idea! Clown Sharks: Laughing in the Face of Death).

So, we have a roaring shark, that makes psychic links with people whose husbands once killed a shark, that can float and can swim over a thousand miles in three days following a plane. I can only imagine Joseph Sargent and the writer (Michael De Guzman) sitting on a boat, getting drunk and re-enacting the scar scene from Jaws. But instead of scars, they just sat there and tried to out do each other with ridiculous ideas (“I got that beat… It can shoot lasers from it’s eyes!”).

Just to round everything off, this film has one of the strangest endings to a film I can think of (actually it has two endings, as test audiences didn’t like the original one). To kill the shark they rig a device to electrocute it from inside. That all sounds fine, but then, for no reason I can possibly imagine, they stab the shark with the pole at the front of the boat and IT EXPLODES. Originally there was no explosion, you just see the shark, that looks like a sock puppet now, being stabbed with the pole and then sinking (it’s on YouTube if you want to see how bad it looks http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqiWWmAEfTA) 

  

There were a few bits I liked about the movie. There’s a nice homage to Jaws where Thea Brody (Judith Barsi) copies Micheal's actions whilst they are sitting at the table (just as Sean did with Chief Brody in the original). I also like the fact that this movie is a Christmas movie, which now means it’s joined my list of improbable Christmas movies (which also includes Die Hard, Chronos and Lethal Weapon amongst many others). I’m not sure however that it’s going to join the list of movies that I always watch over the Christmas period.

I have to admit that I had seen this movie before, but that was over ten years ago and my memory of it was rather hazy. I do remember that I absolutely hated it though, and I can now remember why. But things have changed slightly. I didn’t absolutely loathe the movie this time round. Sure it’s completely ridiculous, and the body count is lower than any random ten minutes of Game of Thrones, but it does have a certain charm. Perhaps it’s because even though it has the same look as the other Jaws films, it feels much more like a B-movie, and that’s never a bad thing.

My Name is Jo and I love Jaws 4.

OK so, it’s not a cinematic masterpiece, and yes, I know it’s full of continuity errors. In fact apparently, if you look close enough you can even see the stitches holding the shark together. I must say though that despite more viewings than I care to admit, I have never spotted this myself.  The thing is, Jaws 4 at its blood and rum soaked heart, is a B Movie. Further more, people who watch B movies and complain about continuity errors are like people who ask for cutlery at a fast food restaurant.

If you happen to be a massive Jaws geek like me, you will probably notice little references to the original the picture of the late Chief Brodie on the wall in the sheriffs office, or the clever, well as clever as this film gets, reproduction the of the scene with Brodie at the dinner table with his young son, reshot with a new generation. It’s a cute nod to the first film, and that really was a cinematic masterpiece, which if you’ve ever had to sit through even one film studies lecture, you will know.

Lorraine Gary revives her role as long suffering Ellen Brodie, a woman who has spent the best part of her life being harassed by a shark, and finally has enough. With fluctuating hysteria, only explained by either the menopause or a shark trying to eat her family. Despite suffering from PTSD so advanced that she is experiencing flashbacks of events she didn’t even witness, it is the widow Brodie who finally decides to put a stop to Bruce’s reign of terror. However inevitably she needs some help from a new boyfriend, cue Michael Caine

Caine’s portrayal of Hoagie, slick boozehound, possible drug smuggler and all round nice guy, that really makes this movie. Whether he is introducing Ellen Brodie to Bahama Mamas, or climbing out of the ocean in a shirt dryer than the Sahara, in a film that should really be all about the shark he steals the show. I am not sure if the reports that, despite missing collecting an Oscar to reshoot the ending, he has never watched the film are true, but I would go so far as to suggest it is the high point of his acting career.

It’s probably a fair point that the other characters are largely forgettable, being either obsessed with sex in welding sheds or under water snails. I wish the shark ate more of them.

Jaws 4 is a brilliant comfort movie, a film for watching curled up on the sofa with tub of ice cream or giant pizza after a bad day. If cheering up is what you need, it is worth watching for the banana boat scene alone. In fact the only true reason I can find to critique this film is the lack of well, shark attacks. For a film about…shark attacks, you can’t help feeling shortchanged by the number who actually fall prey to the animatronic beast.


You can find me tweeting about watching Jaws @JoMarieOReilly and probably blogging about watching Jaws at www.slapperverse.com

#78 Jaws: The Revenge (1987) (Colin)

Sequels are no strangers to our list so far.  We've had the completely confusing and nothing to do with the previous film, Highlander 2; the budget slashing end of a tired franchise, Superman IV; and the boring, non-action snoorefest, Speed 2.  One thing they all have in common is that they have been nowhere near the standard of the original movie.  Therefore it came as no surprise when yet another sequel appeared on our list, although this time the original movie is frequently regarded as an all time classic.

In 1975 Jaws was released to huge critical acclaim and financial success.  John Williams score sets up the suspense and drama beautifully, Ray Scheider gives a masterful performance as Chief Brody and even the shark itself looked darn good. It was a truly magnificent movie and quite rightly appears near to or at the top of many best film of all time lists.

2 more movies followed and although none recaptured the feel and success of the original, both are decent sequels.  Surely then we are on safe ground and the fourth Jaws movie will be an OK addition to the franchise?

I'm afraid not.....

#78 Jaws: The Revenge

Largely ignoring the events of Jaws 3, we start by learning that our hero from the original movie, Chief Brody, has died of a heart attack.  His son, Sean, (Mitchell Anderson), has now joined the Amity police and is called to remove a log from a buoy, (Ooer missus!).  When he puts his arm in the water to retrieve the log, Jaws promptly rips it off and then drags Sean under, killing him.

Sean's mum, Ellen Brody, (played again by Lorraine Gray), is convinced that the shark has singled out Sean and is seeking revenge against her family for the deaths of the other sharks in the previous movies.  Ellen's other son, Michael, (Lance Guest), suggests taking her back to his family home in the Bahamas.  Having spent a whole morning grieving for the horrific loss of her son, she decides to go.  They are flown to the islands by Hoagie, (Michael Caine), a chirpy chappie who seems to immediately fall for Ellen.  Ellen, who is still racked with loss, seems to take a shine to him too.  At this point no one seems to have buried Sean, but hey, a minor point.

Once in the Bahamas, Michael goes back to work as a marine biologist to Ellen's horror.  She wants none of the family to be anywhere near the water which is a bit rich as she continues to live in a coastal town and has just agreed to spend an indefinite amount of time at Michael's ocean view house.  On Michael's boat, the inevitable happens and Jaws attacks, everyone survives but the boat has a nice shark shaped teeth bite out of it.

Michael and his colleague Jake, (Mario Van Peebles), manage to attach a tracker unit to the shark when it returns a few days later.  So good is their device that Jaws manages to go unnoticed towards the coast and promptly chomps down on a banana boat, killing someone who was not a major part of the storyline.  Ellen Brody witnesses this attack and decides she's blooming well had enough and that she is going to put an end to all of this bother.

Stealing Michael's boat, she sets about trying to locate Jaws.  Michael, Jake and Hoagie discover this and Hoagie flies them to the boat, landing his plane in the water.  Jaws decides he only likes 'plane' food and starts to feast on Hoagie's plane, meanwhile Michael and Jake swim to the boat and give Ellen a jolly good ticking off.  Hoagie also manages to swim aboard and all 4 set about a plan to stop Jaws.

Michael and Jake somehow, (I kinda lost the plot at this point), send electrical impulses to the shark, (I'm guessing through that faulty device), which disorientates it and sends it towards them.  Jaws picks Jake up gently with his razor sharp teeth and drags him under.  Michael continues to send the electrical impulses, gets a nice bomb ready, Ellen spears Sharky with the boat and somehow everything comes together and we have a ton of fresh shark meat.  Yum.

Jake, presumed dead, comes back to the surface, everyone is OK and the waters are safe once again.  And so ends one of the most ludicrous, daft and disappointing sequels of all time!

So what is the problem with this movie?  Well, for once the cast is not the issue.  Gray successfully reprises her role as Ellen and plays the worried mother and grieving widow to great effect.  The notion of a shark singling her family out is off course stupid, but this is not Gray's fault and was something she had to work with.  Guest is also not bad and he gives a good performance in the lead role.  Caine was just there for the money, but still managed to portray a likeable, fun character in Hoagie.  I genuinely didn't want him to die when it looked like he had had his chips with his plane in the water and Jaws attacking.  I could easily volunteer any of the support cast to swap places with him!

There is an issue with the shark death count.  Bearing in mind that this is the fourth installment in the franchise and by now you would expect the deaths to get more elaborate, brutal and plentiful, 2 deaths for the movie is frankly, not enough.  I really felt cheated and like I did not get enough bang for my buck.  The best death by far is Deputy Brody's arm tearing off followed by the dragging under.  Although there is a major problem with this scene.  Brody, upon losing said arm, sits back on the deck of his boat screaming in agony, looking at the bloodied, torn jacket where an arm once was.  Unfortunately, we can see quite clearly that the actor has just hidden his arm under his jacket and it is as painful as supposedly getting your arm bitten off, that the arm is still there!

The other shark death was just stupid and seemed to involve Jaws floating on the surface and gently nibbling away at this women.  If you look closely, you can clearly see the actress putting her foot delicately into Jaw's mouth and the whole scene is badly staged and poorly done.

In fact poorly done sums up this movie quite well.  Everything is poorly done.  For example, explaining Michael's fiancee, Tiffany, out of the movie, (she's under sedation), in an off the cuff manner, (there could have been good scenes as both widows come to terms with their loss and how Tiffany could have reacted to Ellen's theory of the shark targeting the Brody's).  Or in Hoagie's airplane, the background is obviously bluescreen and not a good version of it either, but in one particular scene it is really bad.  The actors in the plane are all acting as if they are on a nice straight smooth flight.  Outside the window it clearly shows the background suggesting that they start off nice, straight and low, but then it ascends quickly, (as if taking off from a runway), and the horizon does a 45 degrees!  Meanwhile the characters are all still enjoying a nice smooth level ride!

The end is visually very poor as the cast are quite clearly in a water tank!  The sky is appears to be painted on fabric, (with heavy grey and black clouds, a bit odd for the Bahamas?).  This becomes obvious because the 'sky' has visible folds in it and ruffles!  This brings us nicely onto one of the biggest problems with the look of the movie, as a sky that is made of fabric I could forgive, but a shark?  Well no I can't forgive that!

In our last movie, Robot Monster, they spent about $16,000 on their effects, the makers of Jaws: The Revenge seem to have spent considerably less.  Jaws looks terrible and I think it is a major achievement for the effects team to make a shark look less realistic that the 1975 version 12 years earlier.

In nearly every scene you can see the rods which work Jaws, the rails under the water in which he 'swims' and in one scene, Jaws' fin is clearly wobbly and looks like a small sail in a strong breeze.  The scenes in which Jaws is hunting Michael in a shipwreck are the best examples of just how bad this shark looks.  Along with the visible rods is the very clearly visible stitching of the rubber skin!  The back of Jaws to the end of his tail looks more like a sofa cushion than a shark.  All in all, the animatronics are so bad in this movie that they might as well have cast Big Mouth Billy Bass as Jaws, (see if you can spot the difference below):

But for all of the bad effects and cheap feel of the movie, the one thing that stands out and the most obvious reason for why this film is so bad, is the plot.  A shark, hell bent on revenge, seeks out the family of the person he feels is responsible for the deaths of his sharky pals.  Really?  Did they not sit in the ideas meeting, read this out loud and think, 'actually we may have gone a bit too far here'.

Let's take Deputy Brody's death at the beginning of the movie.  Sean had to clear the log from the buoy because the coastguard was unavailable and the other officer was attending a cow tipping incident.  This is why Sean was where he was and according to the plot we are meant to believe this was not a chance meeting, but a calculated move by Jaws.  I mean really?  So Jaws rung up the coastguard and said, 'I think there may be a fishing boat in trouble 50 miles off the coast?' and then proceeded to a field to push over some bovine?  He then lets out an evil laugh, twists his moustache and goes and lies in wait next to the buoy.

This ridiculous theme is carried on throughout the movie and you could think to yourself, poor Ellen, (as it is her which keeps putting this theory forward), she must be grief-stricken after losing her husband, but the movie makers keep trying to make it plausible.  Especially when Jaws then 'follows' them to the Bahamas, (presumably at the back of Hoagie's plane with dark sunglasses and reading the New York Times, as I am not sure how else he covered the 2,000 miles as quick as the Brody's did).  I mean, if I had completely lost my senses that is the only conclusion I could come up with as it would be a huge coincidence that both shark and Brody's end up in the same location.  But I haven't, (although many more movies like this and I might), and this is just a laughable storyline.

There is also a suggestion that somehow Ellen and the shark share some sort of psychic connection and she 'senses' when Jaws attacks Michael and she feels drawn to go and confront the shark and knows where to find him.  Honestly, crap, crap, crap, and don't even get me started on this finale with Ellen and Jaws as there are 2 massively wrong things that really do consign this movie to the bargain bin and earn it's place, quite rightly on our list.

Firstly, there is Ellen's constant flashbacks to the original Jaws movie, particularly at the end when she is remembering Chief Brody, who has rifle in hand and is about to shoot the oxygen tank in Jaws' mouth causing it to explode and blow up original Jaws.  The thing is Ellen was not there, so how is she remembering this?  She then flashbacks to Sean's death, again, she was not there, so how the hell is she flashbacking to this?  And more to the point if she was there, why did she not bloody try to help?

Lastly though, (and this is talked about in all reviews so forgive me for repeating everyone else), is when Jaws who is about to strike the boat and kill Ellen, jumps out of the water and roars.  It fucking roars like a lion!  I mean, what the hell were they thinking?  a) sharks do not have vocal chords, b) they do not have lungs to push the air out to meet the non existent vocal chords to do the bloody roar this shark makes!  Was this supposed to make the shark more scary?  Was this supposed to make us jump with fear?  Because I will admit, I did piss myself, but that was due to laughter as I watched this pile of rubbish.

I have a feeling sequels will continue make an appearance on our list, but this one well and truly deserves it's place and could even be placed higher.  The idea to make Jaws some cold, calculating serial killer seeking revenge for previous shark deaths was ridiculous.  The further idea to make Jaws some kind of scary roaring monster, was just laughable.  Unfortunately the studio and writers did not realise that the ideas were now running thin and they resorted to extraordinary lengths to try to scrape together something for this movie.  It simply did not work and the ideas were so poor and far fetched, that in the end the shark truly jumped itself.

#79 Robot Monster (1953) (Colin)

A couple of weeks ago we had to endure a boring Genghis Khan movie which dragged on for nearly 2 hours.  This was swiftly followed by an agonisingly long, tooth pullingly painful film about the battle of Inchon, which came in at 2 hours 20 minutes.   I was all but ready to check myself into a nice padded room with a white jacket and straps.  Then I saw the next movie was only 66 minutes long and my spirits lifted.  When I then found out it was a 1950's Sci-Fi movie I was starting to get a bit excited.  When I then saw the alien was a gorilla with a divers helmet, well, I had to change my underpants.

Finally, another movie on our list that looks so bad, it's going to be good.  It instantly reminded me of another movie on our list, the wonderful Plan 9, which has become one of my most favourite movies of all time.  So after weeks of complete dross, did we have another 'B' movie piece of gold on our hands?

Yes we had.....

#79 Robot Monster (1953)

An alien which looks not unlike a fat bloke in a gorilla costume wearing a diver's helmet called Ro-Man, (played by George Barrows and voiced by John Brown), has landed on earth, killing all of it's occupants except for 8 survivors.  The alien's weapon of choice is the dreaded 'Calcinator Death Ray', which to me sounds a bit like a tablet you put in with your wash to prevent limescale build up.  Regardless, the 8 survivors have all taken a serum which blocks the effects of the ray.  I can only assume that the serum is tap water from my area as it seems to laugh in the face of Calcinator.

Among the survivors are a family which the film focuses on.  They are a scientist, (John Mylong) who doesn't seem to have a name in the movie but is known as The Professor in the titles and whose voice appears to be played by Bela Lugosi.  Unfortunately Mylong's acting is more Lugosi in his Ed Wood collaborations rather than his earlier Dracula era.

He is joined by his wife, (Selena Royle), which is a bit confusing as he had not even met her at the start of the movie.  Their son, Johnny, (Gregory Moffet), daughter Alice, (Claudia Barrett), who has thing for the professor's young assistant, Roy, (George Nader).  And finally their younger sister Carla, (Pamela Paulson).

There are 2 more survivors who are on board a rocket on the way to a space platform where some other Hu-Mans, (as Ro-Man calls us) are located.  These survivors are never on screen and are killed when their rocket is destroyed.  The space platform that they were trying to reach is also blown up mid movie.  As you can tell this is a real feel good film.

Realising that Ro-Man has forgotten to carry the 1 in his calculations, his boss, the Great Guidance politely informs him he has cocked up and orders him to kill the remaining humans.  As mentioned, the rocket men meet their maker first and then Carla also has her chips.  When he goes to kill Alice he realises for absolutely no logical reason that he loves her and can not do it.  The Professor seizes on this and offers Alice to Ro-Man in return for their lives.  This is where it's a bit tricky though,  as The Professor then performs a marriage ceremony for Alice and Roy.  This is a massive mistake by The Professor, as in hindsight, I think Alice will feel that she should have given the sweaty bloke in a gorilla suit a chance.

Anyway, Ro-Man finds out, throws Roy over a cliff and kidnaps Alice.  We all wish think Roy's dead but he turns up alive and well and warns the rest of the family that Ro-Man has taken Alice.  Then Roy dies.  Hurrah!

The Great Guidance, upon seeing Ro-Man bringing a rather alive looking Alice back to the cave in which Ro-Man resides, is a little bit miffed to say the least.  When it comes to killing humans, The Great Guidance realises that you don't send a tubby bloke in an unconvincing gorilla suit and fishbowl to do a more senior ranking tubby bloke in an unconvincing gorilla suit and fish bowl's job.  He kills Ro-Man and then unleashes some stop motion dinosaurs onto the earth and it looks like our plucky family is doomed.

*Cop Out Alert*  Johnny then wakes up and realises it was all a dream!  Although just to keep the audience wondering, as Johnny walks off, The Great Guidance emerges from the cave again.  Well actually 3 times for some reason.  The End!

Now I must say from the off, this movie was right up my street!  If any of you have read my Plan 9 review or other reviews in which I admit MST3K is one of my all time favourite shows, then this probably has come as no surprise.  However, this is probably a 'Marmite' movie.  If you love bad sci-fi, wobbly effects and absurd story lines you'll love this, if you don't, you won't.

Costing $16,000 to make, this was not a lot of money, even in the 50's.  Just to put that into context, the 1953 movie The Beast from 20,000 fathoms had a budget of around $210,000 and the 1956 film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers had a budget of around $417,000, (source IMDb).  So they really did pay peanuts to make this film and when you watch the movie, it does feel like it has been made on the cheap.

You can tell not a lot of money was spent on creating the aliens Ro-Man and The Great Guidance.  In fact, as you can guess from the title of the movie, they were originally supposed to be Robots, but they could not get a costume.  George Barrows then got the role as he had a gorilla suit and for some reason the film makers thought, 'oh well, that'll do'.

The rocket in which 2 unseen survivors go to the space platform is just stock footage of a rocket launching, followed by a bad model.  The actual space platform itself looks is an Airfix model of a jet fighter with a sparkler up it's arse and the hand holding this is clearly visible!  I was not expecting big budget CGI off course, but even by 'B' movie standards, the effects are poor.

The 'dinosaurs' in the movie are footage 'borrowed' from One Million BC and Lost Continent.  In fact there is a lot of stock footage, scenes from other movies and stills from other's artwork which pad this film out.  Not only do the effects look Tesco's blue stripe, but Phil Tucker, (the director of the movie) makes it even cheaper by pinching other's work!

The set is very cheap as there isn't one.  Nearly the whole movie was filmed on location in Bronson Canyon and consists of a cave and the remains of the family's home, which seems to be 3 walls and a small front yard.  You can see that Tucker saved every dime he could in the making of the movie, giving it a real '99p Store' feel.

The cast itself are average in their performances, but to be honest they don't have a lot to work with.  Trying to look scared as a bloke on his way to a fancy dress party attacks you, would test the most hardened thespian.  Claudia Barrett, (Alice), stands out for me as particularly bad as she tries to pull off an intelligent engineer who complains that she is not taken seriously, but ends up playing someone who can't be taken seriously.  One scene stands out for me when she is being kidnapped by Ro-Man.  Ro-Man lifts and carries her in his arms and Alice seems to perform some weird leg kicking thing as if she is trying to swim away from her captor.  On dry land this just looks a little silly.

Ro-Man himself permanently looks silly.  Barrows obviously could not see a thing out of the diver's helmet and fumbles and staggers his way around the movie.  In fact Ro-Man does a lot of staggering in the movie and seems to spend the first half of the movie just going in and out of his cave and the second half up and down a dirt track!  The family obviously never thought of running or even doing a fast mince as they could easily have left Ro-Man for dust.

Ro-Man's lack of athleticism is not helped in one scene when as he walks a tuba is playing.  This, off course, is the instrument of choice for a fat bloke walking in any cartoon!  It may come as a surprise that the music was actually done by Elmer Bernstein, who is probably more famous for his work on The Great Escape or Michael Jackson's 'Thriller'.  Bernstein obviously had a bad day at the office with this movie as even Steve McQueen would had suffered if on jumping the barbed wire, he had been accompanied by a slide whistle.

At the end of the day though, despite all of this bargain basement filming, this is a very enjoyable movie.  It is one of those movies where you like it but for the wrong reasons or at least differing reasons than Tucker intended.  I loved the shoddy effects and in particular the poor costume of Ro-Man.  The story is confused and ludicrous, I still can't work out why dinosaurs are used to mop up the remaining survivors when Ro-Man said they could re-calibrate the Calcinator Death Ray to counteract the serum that The Professor developed.  Maybe it was more fun or maybe there was a special prize for the most unnecessary way to kill the last Hu-Mans.  All in all it does not matter, because all of this daftness just makes me smile.

And that is why I love this movie, it just makes me smile.  All the plot holes, bad acting, bad costumes and effects are just endearing and add to my enjoyment.  I may be going over the top as the last 2 movies, The Conqueror and Inchon, were just long and painfully boring.  I dare say an episode of 'Last Of The Summer Wine', may have been welcomed at this point, but I think had this appeared further up the list, I still would have enjoyed it.

Therefore, if you like movies like Plan 9, then this is a film you will enjoy and which I highly recommend.  So dig out your gorilla suit, plop a fishbowl on your head, (remove goldfish and water first), search YouTube for Robot Monster and enjoy 66 minutes of 'B' movie heaven.

#79 Robot Monster (Wes)

Robot Monster

After the past few movies (The Conqueror and Inchon) being incredibly long and boring having to watch a B-movie that only lasts for just over and hour came as something of a relief. If it really is worse than those two, then at least it would be only a short torture. So was Robot Monster really that bad?

Robot Monster follows the story of the last eight humans left on earth after the alien being Ro-Man (played by George Barrows, voiced by John Brown) has destroyed everybody else with a death ray. These humans all survived due to the fact that they received an antibiotic serum from The Professor (John Mylong), which immunised them. They try to negotiate with Ro-Man, before he eventually blows up two of them who’re trying to reach an orbiting space platform. As Ro-Man kills the remaining humans off one by one, he decides he wants to date the eldest daughter of the professor, Alice (Claudia Barrett). Will this date work out? Will they have lots of little Ro-Babies? The questions are never-ending…

I think the biggest question I asked myself when watching this movie was: What the hell is going on? I’ve seen a lot of strange movies in my time, but in none of them did I ever expect to see a gorilla with a deep-sea divers helmet (or perhaps a fishbowl) on it’s head decide it wants to date somebody that it’s supposed to be killing. That is one seriously messed up situation there. I don’t think even Channel Four would have tried that one on The Undateables.

The date itself could really be a described as a typical Essex romance. A massive gorilla picks up a girl in his arms. Her legs kick helplessly as he carries her along. Then they reach the local Nando’s, only to find that Ro-Man himself had killed all the staff (and chickens) the year before. They laugh, and decide to go for a drink instead, but when they reach their local Wetherspoons, the same problem crops up. Alice eventually gets annoyed and stands there shouting abuse at Ro-Man in the street, until no police-men come to break up the fight, since Ro-Man killed them all.

 

Ok, so that was mostly a lie, but it’s no more ridiculous than the actual plot of this movie. I would love to say that this movie doesn’t get anymore ridiculous, but then I’d love to say a lot of things and never get the chance to. You see when Ro-Man decides he can’t complete his mission as he doesn’t want to kill Alice, The Great Guidance decides he has to finish the job for him. Of course the best
way to kill off humanity in the 20^th century, as any alien worth his salt knew, was to use man’s natural enemy – dinosaurs.

Yes, that’s right, dinosaurs. Where they came from, I honestly don’t know. Well, I do. They came from the One Million B.C. and Lost Continent. Like Ed Wood, director Phil Tucker seems to be a fan of putting random stock footage into a movie just to pad it out. It doesn’t matter that it really doesn’t make any sense, audiences like dinosaurs, so what better to destroy the earth with?

The strange thing is, for a film that gleefully puts in random dinosaurs and has a gorilla wearing a fishbowl that falls for one of he humans he’s supposed to be killing, this is actually quite a bleak film. Sure Ro-Man decides he doesn’t want to kill Alice, but he’s already killed 2,681,994,382 people by this point (according to census.gov) by this point, so you can hardly call him a humanitarian. The humans all live in fear for their lives so much, that at one point they bargain to give themselves up in return for a painless death.

They hardly dare to leave their shielded compound, which for convenience sake is located only a few hundred yards from Ro-Mans cave, instead of in say The Himalayas, or maybe Hawaii (if I was facing certain death from a gorilla wearing a fishbowl, I think that’s where I’d spend my last days). Except of course for young Johnny (Gregory Moffett), who has a reckless attitude towards Ro-Man and his own personal safety. He constantly hangs around Ro-Mans cave, possibly because Ro-Mans death dealing machinery also features a really cool bubble-blowing machine. I can only imagine that this was fitted to lure any stoned hippies to Ro-Mans cave that the dinosaurs may have missed.

 

Even though Ro-Man seems to have machinery that can track any life form on the planet (hence the need for the shield around the family compound), he constantly misses the fact that a young boy is hiding behind some rocks only a few feet away from him. I’m not sure who developed this magnificent machine, but they seem to have decided that the final calibration for detecting large life-forms could just be left up to whoever was passing by and had a bit of spare time on their hands. Even the scientist, Roy (George Nader) avoids detection whilst hiding behind the same rocks. Perhaps if Ro-Man occasionally looked around for these surviving humans, rather than skulking back into his cave after every intergalactic phone call, then he may have had more luck.

Perhaps most baffling thing of this “Directional Beam” is the fact that Ro-Man and The Great Guidance have missed the fact that there is supposedly an entire garrison of humans left on the orbiting space platform. If they wanted to kill off all of humanity, before they became a threat to the Ro-Men, then why would they leave an orbiting space platform full of people? According to Ro-Man, The Great Guidance spared it because it would have been a convenience for the Ro-Men when they arrived on Earth. I can only imagine he meant this in the literal sense, and that after travelling millions of light years, the Ro-Men would be REALLY busting for a pee before they landed. So they planned to use the space platform as an intergalactic motorway service station. Perhaps the remaining humans on there were to be used to man the disappointing shop, or the various fast food outlets that the Ro-Men require.

Have I convinced you that you need to see this film yet? Have you grasped at how poor the storytelling actually is? Are you desperate to see how laughable a gorilla wearing a fishbowl really is? Can you guess at how bad the special effects are? If the answer to any of these questions isn’t yes, then I think you may need to reread the whole review until you change your mind.

Yes this film is absolutely awful and it really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but it’s definitely in the so bad it’s good category. If you like Ed Wood movies for their sheer ineptness, if you love movies like The Horror of Party Beach because they have the most laughable monsters, if you love a good Elmer Bernstein soundtrack (shockingly true), then you’ll love this movie.

If you need anymore convincing, then the fact that Mystery Science Theatre 3000 had this as one of their movies is clearly recommendation enough. I strangely enjoyed this film, especially after the past few movies. I now also know what The Conqueror and Inchon were really missing. Random dinosaurs.