#49(a) Showgirls (1995) (Colin)

Once again we failed in our attempts to get our next movie on our list.  This film was another Turkish movie called Sut Mat (Yes Sir) (2007) which stars Mehmet Ali Erbil, who was also in our #55 movie Keloglan vs The Black Prince, (click here for the review).  If it's anywhere near as bad as Keloglan, then it's fair to say, we have had a lucky escape.

This meant 2 movies to replace this movie and the first offering is probably the best known movie we have reviewed so far.  It is the 1996 flop Showgirls, starring Saved By The Bell’s Elizabeth Berkley.

I do remember watching this as a 19 year old, lured in mainly by the prospect of seeing Berkley in her birthday suit led on by my up and down hormones, (today I’m lucky if I can get up and down the stairs).  I remember going into the cinema a bit red and flustered, embarrassed but excited and giving a knowing nod to the young men of a similar age.

What happened during the movie was totally unexpected by all of us that day.  Instead of a saucy arousing experience, we were treated to 2hrs of hilarity.  I have never heard an audience laugh so hard at a movie which was supposed to be a serious drama.  Heck, I had never heard an audience laugh so hard at a movie which was supposed to be a comedy!

So what made us guffaw with such gusto on that day?  Was it just 19 year old Colin and his peers  being childish?  It was time to find out……

The movie centres around Nomi Malone, (Berkley), who has come to Las Vegas to become a dancer.  She quickly realises this dream by becoming a dancer, albeit a topless one at seedy nightclub called Cheetah.  She also quickly befriends Molly Abrams, (Gina Ravera), a seamstress at Stardust Casino, who put on epic dancing shows which are essentially also topless dancing, but with a pretence of being artistic and less dollars stuffed into g-strings.

Nomi is introduced to diva dancer Cristal Connors, (Gina Gershon), who on discovering Nomi works in Cheetahs, suggests that she is a lady of the night and will do favours for food.  This does not seem to bother Cristal however, as she takes her boyfriend and entertainment director of Stardust, Zack Carey, (Kyle MacLachlan), to watch her ‘dance’ at Cheetahs.

Cristal pays Nomi to give Zack a lap-dance.  Zack seems to be enjoying it and would have stayed longer, but something comes up.

Cristal seems impressed and manages to get a part for Nomi in ‘Goddess’, a dance show which Cristal is currently performing in.  Nomi’s happiness is short lived when an appearance to promote the show at a boat show turns out to be doing favours for Yachtsmen, (polishing their masts or something).

Nomi gets her revenge by sleeping with Zack, (in a hilarious sex scene in a pool, but more on that later).  This gets the added bonus of Zack promoting her to Cristal’s understudy.

Cristal is a bit miffed and things come to a head when, after a heated argument during a performance, Nomi pushes Cristal down the stairs.  With Cristal’s hip broken, Nomi is promoted to star of the show.  (So remember kids, if you want to succeed in the world, act like a complete shit, just like Nomi).

Nomi’s world comes crashing down however, when Molly is raped and beaten by Andrew Carver, a musician who Molly had idolised and a celebrity client of Stardust.  Nomi wants Molly to go to the police, but Zack blackmails Nomi into keeping quiet after finding out that Nomi is really called Polly, a prostitute with drug offences on an assault charge, (yeah, because Nomi has so much to lose!).

Realising Nomi has to take matters into her own hands, she manages to seduce Carver, take him to a hotel room and then to beat him to a bloody pulp.  Nomi lets Molly know Carver has had his comeuppance, she makes amends with Cristal and then leaves Vegas.

Now this movie has its knockers and I am with them on this one.  (Sorry, I’ll try my breast to not make too many boob gags!).  This is truly a terrible movie with over the top clichéd characters, a clunky script and incredibly poor execution.  But the saving grace is that it is crammed full of unintentionally hilarious scenes, for example, that famous pool sex scene. 

For those that have not seen it, it essentially involves Berkley with legs wrapped around MacLachlan in a swimming pool, bending over backwards and throwing her back and head up and down as if she is convulsing and having a very serious epileptic fit.  It’s supposed to be sexy, arty and powerful, but it’s not, it’s weird, it’s exaggerated to the point of farce and it’s incredibly funny.

In fact Berkley spends the entire movie thrashing her head and hair around for anything and everything she does.  Lapdance, thrash her head around, sexy time, thrash her head around, eat a cheeseburger, thrash her head around.  Each door is thrown open, each tub of coke is smashed down onto the table and each question is asked with windmill like arms.  Berkley’s performance contains no subtlety whatsoever and is smashed into your face with a jet powered sledgehammer throughout.

I don’t find her dancing that good either and about as erotic as a slice of toast, (phowar!).  OK, I’ll be the first to admit I have 2 left feet and can’t keep a beat, but I perform a sexier dance than Berkley most Saturday nights when I am trying to take my shoes off after a heavy night on the shandys. 

It may seem like I am blaming Berkley entirely for this movie and it’s hard not to when she is the star and appears in every scene.  However, I must acknowledge the supporting cast who did not have a lot to work with, but who seemed to then do the bare minimum just to pick up the pay cheque.  Their lacklustre performance gives us the clichéd shady businessman, the clichéd ruthless manager and the clichéd super bitch.  If we had a man in a top hat, twiddling a thin moustache and tying Nomi to a rail track, we would have had the full set of clichés.

At the end of the day, if you were to have told me that a 2 hour movie with wall to wall boobs throughout would be dull as dishwater, I would not have believed you, but it’s true.  This movie is supposed to be a serious drama about how women are mistreated and exploited in the entertainment business, but it is so wide of the mark, that it accidentally knocked Mars out of its orbit.

I can see why 19 year old Colin laughed so hard with the rest of the audience.  It’s a mixed up, over the top, clichéd mess.  But by far the most shocking thing about this movie is that they have made a sequel, (this time without Berkley).  I was going to watch it and compare to the original in this blog, but as I was about to find it on YouTube, I had to answer the front door.  Good timing by the postman, Saved By The Bell! *gets coat*

#50 The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies (Wes)

The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies

I’ve heard of this movie, but never seen it. Seriously, what B-movie or bad movie fan hasn’t heard of this before? It’s not only famous for gracing most of the worst movie lists I’ve ever seen, but with a title that long, and that ridiculous it’s a hard film not to notice. But for me the title is what’s always put me off watching this until we came to it on our list, as it really just sounded like a movie that was trying too hard to appeal to hippies on its release, and like flares, or drinking the Electric Kool-Aid, that has no appeal to me whatsoever. So was I wrong to avoid it?

The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies features three friends, Jerry (Cash Flagg – a pseudonym for director Ray Dennis Steckler), Angela (Sharon Walsh) and Harold (Atlas King), who decide that going to the carnival would be an uneventful night (and boy were they right!). After watching some of the MANY dance numbers, Jerry becomes hypnotised by the fortune-teller Estrella (Brett O’Hara), who instead of the traditional “making someone act like a chicken”, decides that making him a homicidal maniac would be much more appealing to today’s jaded audience. Jerry goes on the rampage and kills the dancer Marge (Carolyn Brandt) and Bill, and attempts to kill Angela. It turns out that Jerry isn’t the only “zombie” that Estrella has made though, and these eventually escape and cause havoc in the carnival. Not that you’d notice, as I said before that whilst this is happening, there are MANY dance numbers in this movie. I really can’t over state that.

The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies (which from here on I shall just refer to as TISCWSLABMUZ. Which, by a strange coincidence is also the acronym for the zombies union – The Immensely Special Co-operative for beings that once Were Still Living And Breathing, but is now a Massive Union of Zombies), is an incredibly strange and confused film. That long description of its plot probably takes about as much time to read it as it does to watch it. The plot, it seems, was just something that director (also, actor and writer) Steckler thought was something that just gets in the way of a good song and dance act. If only Steckler knew what constituted a good song and dance act then this may not have been such a problem.

This movie is like the first audition shows of all the various talent shows. The ones you watch just to see the really terrible acts that have no chance of ever getting anywhere other than on these shows. Well most of them anyway. I can only imagine that whatever the equivalent of America’s Got Talent was in 1964 then that’s where Steckler found his carnival acts. It’s either that or he actually went to the cheapest burlesque shows in Hollywood and waited outside of auditions for all those dancers who failed to impress, as these dancers make Stavros Flatley look like Michael Jackson.

The lack of talent in the MANY dance numbers isn’t the only problem though. The “zombies” are incredibly confused. These are neither the flesh-eating ghouls that Romero would make popular four years later in Night of the Living Dead, nor the traditional Voodoo zombies of White Zombie or I Walked With a Zombie. They are closer to the voodoo zombies, but the “zombies” in this movie aren’t dead, just hypnotised and disfigured by acid. A better title for this movie would be The Poor People Who Went to a Carnival and Got Hypnotised, Then Hideously Disfigured by Acid and Locked in a Cage. 

I really don’t like to mock the physical appearance of actors in movies if I can avoid it as I think it’s often just a lazy way of trying to get cheap laughs. However there’s one thing that I just couldn’t get out of my mind whilst watching this movie, and that’s Jerry’s amazing resemblance to Nicolas Cage. But more like the contour cartoon of Nicolas Cage in the “You Don’t Say?” meme. Or probably more accurately as though somebody took the DNA from Nicolas Cage and Shergar and bred a Nicolas Cage/horse hybrid so the world would have a centaur that could foil a prison plane breakout attempt or train it’s daughter to be an extremely violent superhero (I’m assuming the planned attempt to mix the DNA of John Travolta and Red Rum was abandoned when it was shown that a centaur can’t reach it’s hooves up far enough to mimic having it’s face taken off for five minutes, so was deemed unnecessary to aid in Centaur Nicolas Cage’s career).

I’m really not sure it’s worth mentioning the quality of the acting in this movie, as there isn’t any. By which I mean both quality and acting. Much of the dialogue is mumbled (most notably by Don Russell as Ortega, who later would become a reoccurring character in Mystery Science Theatre 3000’s cut scenes (the character, not the actor)), and when it isn’t the sound quality is so bad that it may as well be. 

There is one strange thing that should be pointed out about this film, and that’s it had an absolutely amazing cinematography team who were all near the start of their careers. The director of photography, Jospeh V. Mascelli, wrote what is still considered to be one of the most important books on cinematography “The Five C's of Cinematography”. Camera Operator William (Vilmos) Zsigmond would go on to win the Oscar for Best Cinematography for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, amongst other achievements. Finally assistant camera Leslie (Laszlo) Kovacs ended up being the cinematographer for such movies as Easy Rider and Ghostbusters. 

Like I said earlier, I really think that this film needs a new name, the old one is too long and is just not relevant. I think we’d be better off with The Incredibly Bored Audience Who Lost the Will to Live and Walked Out of the Cinema Muttering That They Should Get Their Money Back After Sitting Through Such a Pointless Pile of Crap. Sure it’s just as long, but entirely more accurate.

#50 The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies (1964) (Colin)

The next movie on our list is the ludicrously titled ‘The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies’.  This movie is unique in that no-one ever saw it at the cinema as when you asked for ‘2 tickets for ‘The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, 2 choc ices and a coke please’, the Movie Theatre had actually closed.

Indeed, the movie title is probably going to be longer than my review.

Incredibly Strange is directed by and also stars Ray Dennis Steckler and he proves that he excels at 2 things: acting badly and producing crap movies.

The plotline can be summed up in a tweet, (and is thinner than a Toby Carvery slice of meat) and essentially involves a fairground, dancing, a fortune teller, dancing, hypnotising, dancing, dancing, a murder of a dancer and some more dancing.

Alice The Goon lookalike Jerry, (Steckler), takes his girlfriend Anglea, (Sharon Walsh) and her unfeasibly tall beehive hairdo to the local fair.  Best friend and mumbler, Harold, (Atlas King), tags along too and they are having a simply spiffing time until Jerry decides he would like to see stripper Carmelita, (Erina Enyo).

Angela refuses to go because she would have to pay for her and her beehive and Harold mumbles something incoherent and disappears.  This leaves Jerry all alone to watch Carmelita do her strip act which is about as erotic as cheese on toast.

After the strip tease, Jerry is invited to meet up with Carmelita and goes behind stage to find her.  Instead of Carmelita though, her sister and fortune-teller, Estrella, (Brett O’Hara), is waiting.  She hypnotises Jerry which turns him into a killer.  He promptly kills chief dancer Marge, (Carolyn Brandt), and the following day attempts to kill Angela.

Jerry is not the only person Estrella has turned into cold blooded killer and actually has a small army of people already ‘converted’.  At the end of the movie she lets them loose and they go on a mini killing spree within the carnival.  The police arrive and kill the hypnotised killers, but Jerry manages to escape.

His freedom is short-lived however and as he makes his way onto a pile of rocks in the sea, the police kill him.  The End.

The first thing you may have noticed is that despite the title of the movie, there are NO ZOMBIES!  This is a bit disappointing to say the least as to pad out this movie to 90+ minutes, you are subjected to 80+ minutes of poorly choreographed dancing and a comedian who is about as funny as Michael McIntyre.  The only thing that kept me going was the promise of flesh eating creatures who would surely devour the worst cabaret acts I have ever seen and bring about some partial satisfaction.  However, the ‘zombies’ are actually hypnotised very alive humans with ill-fitting rubber masks who are about as scary as a puppy sleeping on a warm sunny day.

In fact the whole movie is crammed with bad actors.  Steckler should have stayed behind the lens, (about 100 miles behind the lens would have sufficed).  Walsh’s whiney tones throughout the movie, have me cheering Jerry and hoping he puts an end to her, (and indeed our), misery.  And Atlas King, (whose best contribution to this movie is his name), has a thick East European accent and constantly sounds like he is gargling a chainsaw.  He may have the best lines in the whole movie, but I would not know as I could not make out a single word.

He is not helped by the sound quality of the movie which appears to have been recorded onto a wax cylinder which was then thrown into a wood chipper.  Fortunately the sound goes well with the picture, which is equally shonky and appears to have been filmed in glorious Techniduller.

And dull is the word I would use to sum up this movie, which is really disappointing because on paper I should absolutely love it.

Incredibly Strange is a movie in the same vein as Plan 9, Robot Monster or The Horror of Party Beach and is one those B movies that is so bad, it should become good.  But for me, it doesn’t and that is due to the large amount of dancing and singing throughout the movie which does nothing for the plot and frankly, is poor at best.

The dancers are a bunch of amateurs who appear to have tried their routines for the first time on the day of shooting.  If you watch them carefully you can see them tripping over each other and looking behind the camera for direction.  They are out of time and out of place in this movie and the scenes just seem to go on forever.  I found myself quickly losing interest and struggling to keep myself motivated to watch the entire movie.

I did want to like the movie, but in the end I really did not enjoy it.  There is one saving grace, however, the MST3K version is brilliant and makes this boring film watchable.  For you MSTies out there who have not seen it, it’s on YouTube and it’s very very funny.

For you non-MSTies, please save yourself the torture and don’t bother watching this.  The movie is not nearly as interesting as the title would suggest and in truth the movie should have been called ‘The Incredibly Boring Humans Who Were Hypnotised and Are In No Way, Shape or Form Zombies Interjected With Dance Routines So Boring, You’ll Want To Chew Your Hand Off’

But I guess that title was less catchy……