Three laughs: Hard Ticket to Hawaii

It is hard to rate some trashy films. Films can be really good entertainment in spite of the quality of the filmmaking. In fact, it might be even harder to create unique trash that keeps surprising you than most "quality" films with which you know what you are going to get. It certainly is an even better pleasure to watch them. My friend says that he knows a trash film is worth something if it gets three laughs out of me. I mean proper, good belly laughs when you just can't believe what the film is showing to you, scene after scene. That's as good a rating as any for these movies. Any film that has these three laughs has a special place in my heart.

Three laughs case #20:
Hard Ticket to Hawaii (USA, 1987)
Director: Andy Sidaris

There are plenty of 80's video store -stuffing cheapo films that exist by using the allure of female bodies and cartoonish violence to draw in the crowds. But few have refined the formula to work in their favour as well as Malibu Films auteur Andy Sidaris. If Godard only needed a boy, a girl and a gun to make a movie, then Sidaris needed a couple of D-cups and some beautiful hawaiian landscapes to create a better one!

Plenty of Sidaris' films use similar premises and girls with big guns, most also feature Dona Speir's agent character, Donna Hamilton. But Hard Ticket to Hawaii is notorious, because of a few scenes (that I will detail below) and the lead role played by Ronn Moss, a soap opera hunk beloved for his long-lasting role in The Bold and the Beautiful and for his musical career as a sort of blues rock balladier. It should goes to show as well that the film is funnier than Sidaris' usual forte, though not always because of the corny jokes meant to be laughed at. The film has a sort of good-natured and easygoing feeling. It's like everyone involved had a lot of fun, so it's a bit hard to get angry at the movie objecting women or having misogynistic underlying thoughts as the makers seem to be in on the joke. The women do have their own agendas, even if it mostly means them getting naked in a hot tub or seducing men for some piece of information.

According to a video greeting by Moss, the film is also a favorite of Quentin Tarantino (though he heard this compliment from his unnamed friend) and he has viewed the film numerous times. I can't argue with the sentiment, I like to watch the movie all the time, too.

"One man's dream is another man's lunch!"

Three laughs (SPOILERS):

1. The film's plot, as it is, is twofold. First, Hamilton and Moss's agent Rowdy Abiline are looking to bust a criminal league that's smuggling diamonds to a peaceful Hawaiian island in small remote-controlled helicopters. But the situation is also worsened by having a giant, chemically enhanced snake get loose and murder people. The snake is infused with cells from cancer-induced rats! Nevertheless, the model is totally cute and every time the rascal appears on screen, it gets a hearty chuckle from me. And of course the explosive finale of the snake saga has to be seen to be believed.

2. The film's action scenes are far between, as mostly the movie is more concerned with sex and soap opera -like scenes of the girls' daily lives. But when it delivers, it delivers hard! The favorite of YouTube is the entitrely bizarre scene that has a skater with a blow-up doll try to kill Abiline by skating by his car and pulling out an uzi. But Good ol' Rowdy just backs his buggy into the assailant, who flies in the air. Then Abiline pulls out his rocket launcher, and kills the creep, and then his blow-up doll. Take that for trying to be the next Tony Hawk!

3. Abiline is surprisingly violent towards goons for a guy that's most of the movie totally mellow and along for the ride with Donna's sexual hunger. Another brilliant scene sees him dispose of a guard on a beach. He sees he likes to throw a frisbee around with a bikini-clad lady every day, so flawlessly he steps in as her replacement. The thug has no big quarrels with this, and he carries on playing frisbee-throwing. But Abiline switches the frisbee to have razor blades on its side, which then is thrown straight to the goon's throat. You can't see shit like this in your Krulls.

Three laughs: Eega

It is hard to rate some trashy films. Films can be really good entertainment in spite of the quality of the filmmaking. In fact, it might be even harder to create unique trash that keeps surprising you than most "quality" films with which you know what you are going to get. It certainly is an even better pleasure to watch them. My friend says that he knows a trash film is worth something if it gets three laughs out of me. I mean proper, good belly laughs when you just can't believe what the film is showing to you, scene after scene. That's as good a rating as any for these movies. Any film that has these three laughs has a special place in my heart.

Three laughs case #19:
Eega / The Fly (India, 2012)
Director: S.S. Rajamouli

A lot of western people have stereotypes about films produced in India, even though it's a huge country with multiple huge film industries producing movies for different language regions. One of particular note is the Tamil area based in Tennai. Their action movies in particular tend to be more over the top and violent than ones under harsher Bollywood restrictions.

The film discussed today is an action movie that does have its share of triangle dramas and dance sequences. But in other ways it's one of the more out there cases I've seen. Since it's part of its elevator pitch, I have to spoil stuff a little. The film's protagonist is killed 30 minutes in and reborn as a common house fly.

What follows is a good case on why Tamil cinema is often more inventive than what you would get from Hollywood. Every scene tops the previous one and there are more ideas at play here than in a season of Dexter. Everything is based around the idea on how a small fly can revenge the death of his former incarnation and kill the man responsible. The film treats its ridiculous premise fairly seriously, but at the same time it keeps its tongue firmly in cheek and gives good physical gags in vein of some classic Looney Tunes vibes. It has the qualities of a Sam Raimi or Joe Dante flick, with some nice effect work and camera trickery also used.

Three laughs (SPOILERS):

1. As said, the first 30 minutes of the film are fairly conventional triangle drama material. It's surprisingly bleak to see Nani's main character strangled to death by the villainous Sudeep. But what emerges is a sort of scene like in superhero movies when the costume is first put on. "He's back!" chants the soundtrack. Yet he is a CGI fly. Learning the ropes of fly lifestyle, Eega has to run a gauntlet from getting stepped on to getting caught in a soap bubble and finally ending inside the villain's chai drink. Dark music notes play as he recognizes his nemesis.

2. The height of the film comes after Eega has revealed himself to his loved one Bindhu (Samantha). They begin to to plot on how to murder Sudeep. What follows is a training montage which has Eega lifting Q-tips, running on a C-cassette tape and practicing flying, while Sudeep has his goons deliver as many dead flies to him as they can. At the same time, the fly also almost kills him by disturbing a barber about to shave him, putting pesticide in his beer and lighting his bed on fire with a cigarette. Of course we also get to see the fly's dance moves during this sequence.

3. Probably the most bizarre scene in the film has the increasingly desperate Sudeep resort to black magic. The wizard bewitches two sparrows into becoming demonic hell-birds. The ensuing chase in particular utilizes the smaller scale and everyday objects in the house in a pretty inventive and interesting ways, while still keeping the pace going. And even this is topped by the film's explosive finale, which is something you should go out and see for yourself.

Three laughs: King Kong Escapes

 
It is hard to rate some trashy films. Films can be really good entertainment in spite of the quality of the filmmaking. In fact, it might be even harder to create unique trash that keeps surprising you than most "quality" films with which you know what you are going to get. It certainly is an even better pleasure to watch them. My friend says that he knows a trash film is worth something if it gets three laughs out of me. I mean proper, good belly laughs when you just can't believe what the film is showing to you, scene after scene. That's as good a rating as any for these movies. Any film that has these three laughs has a special place in my heart.

Three laughs case #18:
King Kong Escapes (Kingu Kongu no gyakushû, 1967)
Director: Ishiro Honda

About time to talk about giant monsters in this column. One of my favorites of the genre comes from the deal of the Toho company to have King Kong fight Godzilla. They did an independent sequel/spin-off after that which sees Kong take on a Mecha-Kong, 7 years before Godzilla met his own robotic doppelganger. I think the idea was to have Kong fight against a giant Frankenstein's monster. Ol' Frankie did later get his own two Japanese kaiju movies, but without Kong, whose rights reverted back to Universal.

Nevertheless, this one is fun precisely because, even though Kong is a King, he tends to be a very vunerable character in his fights, even more so than Godzilla, which creates some more excitement. But here much of the fun is due to the grotesque ape costume they have on the main character with its droopy eyelids and sharp brown teeth. And wobbly way of moving.

The villainous doctor and builder of the giant ape robot is named Dr. Who, in a probably another copyright-infringement I seem to love so much. The robot, which has Kong's famed abilities, is used to drop bombs in a crack in the Antarctic in order to obtain some radioactive material. But the radioactivity makes the robot malfunction, and thus Who must scheme a group of scientists heading to Skull Island to grab King Kong to do his dirty work for him. But Kong does not like to be held captive...

Three laughs (Spoilers):

1. On Skull Island, things are same as always. When a really grumpy-looking dinosaur growls a bit at a woman, we get the first glimpse of the film's hero. Glassed-over eyes slowly opening, staggering around and revealing its rotten teeth, this Kong is a thing to behold. After a tender moment with the blonde, he soon gets into a drunken brawl with T-rex, though. The japanese have some extra flourish in their monster mashes, though, like when the dying T-rex starts foaming at the mouth.

2. Later, helicopters arrive to dose Kong with sleeping gas, but it just makes it seem like ten beers and six vodka shots did the guy in as his eyes start drooping. And as with these kinds of cases, he has to be carried away from the bar, I mean, island. When he wakes up in a ship's hull he even seems appropriately hungover.

3. I takes a while, but we finally learn excatly what Dr. Who wants with Kong, and it's his world-famous digging skills, of course! One could have thought Kong wouyld be more famous climbing, though he gets to do that on the famed Tokyo Radio Tower late in the film, too. But long arms appear to be as useful as any machine when it comes to tunnel-digging. Swirling his arms away at the Earth's crust he still acts as mind-numbingly clumsy that he seems as drunk as ever. In-story, he's drifting in and out of sleep. A fun drinking game would be to take a drink every time the film shows a close-up of his golfball eyes. One would be as drunk as Kong in no time!

Three laughs: Uninvited

It is hard to rate some trashy films. Films can be really good entertainment in spite of the quality of the filmmaking. In fact, it might be even harder to create unique trash that keeps surprising you than most "quality" films with which you know what you are going to get. It certainly is an even better pleasure to watch them. My friend says that he knows a trash film is worth something if it gets three laughs out of me. I mean proper, good belly laughs when you just can't believe what the film is showing to you, scene after scene. That's as good a rating as any for these movies. Any film that has these three laughs has a special place in my heart.

Three laughs case #17:
Uninvited (1987)
Director: Creydon Clark

We've had killer rats, now let's try killer pussy. Pussy cat, that is. For this straight-to-video clunker features the ingenious high concept: what if some gangsters, some horny teenagers and a runaway mutant cat were stuck on a yacht together? It's probably much of a spoiler to tell that the cat starts to kill people. For from within its mouth emergers a smaller, more vicious cat or similar critter. The cat looks in parts like a plush toy, in parts like a wet rat. And also the cat's bite is poisonous.

It's probably safe to say that this film borrowed a lot from Alien, but as far as aliensploitations go, this has got to be among the most bizarre ones. Much of the film's budget went to the casting of some B-name actors such as Alex Cord, Clu Gulager and of course George Kennedy, who I have trouble seeing every time and not think of police chief Ed from the Naked Gun movies. Some more money could have been used here and there, the film's miniature boats are quite funny as they look like toys in a bath tub. Cash should have been shed also on gore scenes, since the film pussies out of them pretty fast. But even so, for a gorehound this is quite fun to watch.

Three laughs (SPOILERS):

1. Good monster movies take their time to reveal their monster. Here, it's shown in the very first scene in a laboratory setting, where a sinister corporation has created the mutant for some reason. Whenever it's seen walking around, it's just an ordinary orange cat, not unlike Garfield. But when it's cornered by some scientists in hazard suits, it opens its mouth where a smaller kitten emerges, and apparently kills everyone. Whenever it's shown a bit more it appears to be more like a cute muppet-like little monster, like they have in the Critters series. The cheesy synthetisizer music seems to belong more to a comedy, but in these scenes it at leat tries its hardest to create something resembling suspense. It fails, of course.

2. After the cat runs away from the scientists, he is being fed by a kindly stranger at a gas station. Who then gets immidiately mobbed. Luckily, the cat is familiar with the concept of revenge and attacks the attackers on their pickup truck. Which is then ran off the road into a river. In slow motion!

3. I did mention how George Kennedy makes me crack up. Most of the movie, his gangster character is a bit lackluster and uneasy while talking to his fellow mobsters about their ideas of taking spring break kids along for their cruise in order to distract authorities. But he gets slowly madder and madder and the scene where he finally boils over is a hoot. He comes out blasting, trying to kill the teen boys, but is stopped when the cat again protects his favorites and bites off his achilles heel. Too bad he doesn't get a proper death scene, here he's screaming his mouth off, but the cat's poisonous bite gets the best of him off-sceen and he's soon buried at sea.

I got to add, as far as it's-not-dead moments in horror movies go, this one has a really funny one.

Three laughs: Low Blow

It is hard to rate some trashy films. Films can be really good entertainment in spite of the quality of the filmmaking. In fact, it might be even harder to create unique trash that keeps surprising you than most "quality" films with which you know what you are going to get. It certainly is an even better pleasure to watch them. My friend says that he knows a trash film is worth something if it gets three laughs out of me. I mean proper, good belly laughs when you just can't believe what the film is showing to you, scene after scene. That's as good a rating as any for these movies. Any film that has these three laughs has a special place in my heart.

Three laughs case #16:
Low Blow (1986)
Director: Frank Harris

I had written a post about another film for today, but then I went and streamed this 1986 action movie and plans changed. It is by the renowned stunt actor Leo Fong who stars and wrote the script. Renowned mostly because of this movie, which really is something else. The 50-something Fong plays a former cop private eye Joe Wong, that is prone to shooting first and asking questions later. He always seems like he had just woken from a nap, moves as fastly, is as good a driver as Leslie Nielsen in Naked Gun movies and seems to live in a junkyard. There's some elements in the film that makes me suspect they had a tongue in cheek in certain things (like the running gag of the car not starting), but it's so bizarre and constatnly surprising that it doesn't really matter.

Playing the cultist main villain is Cameron Mitchell himself, who is remembered both from movies by Mario Bava, and taking a paycheck from some of the worst 80's direct-to-vhs actioners. Here he does the laziest and most hungover performance I've ever seen. He has a hood and sunglasses on in every scene (even his sex scene) and usually just sits in a chair, mumbling. His cultists mostly do the powerspeaks and lead the workers in their shady farm. The kidnapped daughter of a millionaire also drives Fong's hired detective to examine the farm, with hilarious results.

I've got to say, here almost every scene is stupider than the last and could be the most hilarious scene in another bad movie. The film has everything, dirtpit fighting, car chases with rusty old cars, cameos from other D-list action stars like Troy Donahue and Billy Blanks, hillbilly bar bands, even ninjas and pro wrestling women make an appearance. Thus, it's even harder to choose the three laughs for this case. I suggest you go and see the movie yourself, you won't believe it.

Three laughs (SPOILERS):

1. The first laugh of the film comes from the first scene, which shows Joe Wong leaving his office with a gun to stop a robbery of a local diner. It's never properly explained how he knew there was a robbery going on, but I suspect they had watched some Charles Bronson movies before writing this scene. Wong enters the diner asking if his ham sandwich is ready, brutally shoots the robbers dead and leaves quipping "Nevermind the sandwich".

2. Probably the most bizarre scene of the movie sees some redneck thughs appear on Wong's junkyard with shotguns and assault rifles to kill him. They've come to the Wong place, as the master of the domain has built his yard full of various traps and hiding places from which to attack his assailants. He keeps appearing out of racks of lumber, doing a quick punch and taking guns away. There's a shot of a thug waking up next to a pack of cute tiny widdle puppies, which goes unexplained. Once Wong has disarmed the gang, he goes on to take a plank and smash the windows and then a chainsaw with which to slowly tune their car a convertible, before the thugs go and run away.

3. In the climax assault on the cult compaund, Wong runs into one of the thugs from the junkyard scene, who laments the destruction of his car. Wong punches him out and on the floor the thug reaches to take his gun from his pants. But then Wong starts to make a punch and the camera cuts to hit feet where he stomps the thug's face as if it was made from birthday cake. This hilarious Riki-Oh -like overpowered violence scene has to be rewinded and watched again and again, which may be the reason why this movie is a bit pricey to be purchased today.

B is for Bava

A director whose films frequently feature festive lighting, blood, death and religious undertones is particularly suited for Easter viewing. As it happens, many of legendary horror director Mario Bava's greatest works not only follow that formula, but are also among his most influental works, and have an English title that begins with B. Previously we have taken a look at his viking pictures and one of his classic giallos, but there's plenty of more aspects to the Great Master. So, let's take a look at Mario Bava films that begin with B.


Black Sunday (La maschera del demonio, 1960)

Bava was there from the beginning of Italian horror movies, having worked as a cinematographer and 2nd unit director on films like I vampiri and Caltiki. But even if it wasn't the first, the impact his proper directorial debut is had to overestimate. Bleak and shocking, Bava certainly pushed the envelope from the very beginning, thus creating a mutitude of subgenres himself. For while Black Sunday may be indebted to British horror movies of the time, it is unquestionably of Bava's twisted mind.

A witch is executed in Medieval times, but before her death, she curses the offspring of her inquisitors. 200 years later, archeologists find the tomb and accidentally set the evil of the witch back to the world of the living. There's also romance attached to the modern descendant of the witch, which is somewhat reminiscent of the Universal Horror classic The Mummy.

Though Bava works in clichéd ancient tombs, cemetaries, gothic castle halls and fields in November, he has a sort of knack of making it all look spectacular and exciting, no matter how many movies you've seen the setting before. Bava certainly has a knack for gothicness, and I mostly prefer his historical horror to more modern endeavours. He also hads the means of using more violent visuals than his American and British counterparts dared, starting a sort of race with the bloody special effects in horror films.

The film's downside is than the actors are a bit stiff and some dialogue as spoken by them is simply atrocious, which takes away from the athmosphere of the movie. For a film as old as this, one can forgive this, but if this were in colore and on the style of later 60's movies, it would be a bigger fault. But otherwise it's a rich film that has visual delights on offer on almost every scene.

★★★★

Black Sabbath (I tre volti della paura, 1963)

In most other horror directors' work, doing an anthology horror would be a middling work, a small, cheap thing to do in between some more substantial movies. But Bava did things differently, and created parobably the best and most stylish anthology horror movie ever made. He might have also given the name for the first heavy metal band, but the truth on that is not within our grasp.

Bava goes for some Russian classics by adapting stories by Tolstoy, Chekhov and Gogol (albeit quite freely). The first is quite a risque giallo story of a woman being tormented by threatening phone calls, which has a strong lesbian subtext. The second is more gothic, which sees Boris Karloff (also the narrator of the film) as a fiend who returns undead after going out to slay a mythical monster. The last movie is the most colorful and the most obvious morality take, where greed over a dead woman's ring gets a woman haunted to madness.

The three films have each a particular athmosphere to them, each highlighting a particular strength in Bava's toolbox. While the film starts out very slow, almost tv episode-like, it gets going. And it gets scarier, too. The first film creates fears out of the unknown grudges of those closest to us, the second of natural powers beyond our grasp. And the final one has perhaos the most horrifying ghoul ever to put on film, as well as colorful lights and inventive angles used to the benefit of creating paranoia.

The film is classy enough horror in that the Karloff opening and ends with their Creepshow-like cackling feel a bit much and spoil the interest one might have for the classic litereture it is based on. And it doesn't hold particularly well as adaptation as these classics as well. But Bava does better characters and directing the actors than many other times in his career. he's truly firing on all cylinders here. Too bad he never got around of making the sequel, which would have seen an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror with Christopher Lee.

★★★★

Blood and Black Lace (Sei donne per l'assassino, 1964)

Pioneering works of Bava were often indebted to either Hitchcock or Hammer horror films. But in the end he managed to find a subgenre totally Italian, and started the giallos with this film. A giallo as I understand one is a horror/suspense movie with a mystery with a race against time as a secret killer going around murdering people one by one. Bava usually had the victims be well-off models so he could have an excuse to have plenty of beautiful women, but also lavish interiors and colorful costumes. At the height of the suspense scene he often would pull out his favorite coloured lights.

Bava's favorite actor Cameron Mitchell plays a fashion-house owner, whose models are being offed one by one. There's foul play afoot and a plot concerning the lives of everyone in the house with a secret diary being a key piece of evidence everyone is looking for. So far, so Twin Peaks. It is both clearly a picture made in the 60's and utterly timeless, as a sense of style as strong as Bava's never goes out of fashion. The film has a musical score of jazzy easy listening which makes me think this has also been a major influence on Pedro Almódovar. 

Later giallo directors had various perks over this, such as Dario Argento having a stronger sense of inventiveness, creating a horror athmosphere and the use of architecture, Lucio Fulci had more nightmarish and surreal visuals, and Sergio Martino had better female characters and reasonable psychology in his movies. All of them upped the gore a lot from this point, which leaves Bava's pioneer work seemingly quite innocent in comparison. But it is a film anyone with a strong sense of cinema can appreciate, not just horror movie fans. Like with many of Bava's films, I would wish the characters were more interesting and less campily acted as a lot of the movie is spent on just them talking. That's the main reason why, as good as it is, it feels like a bit of a chore to sit through this.

★★★ 1/2

Bay of Blood (Ecologia del delitto, 1971)

Being ahead of the curve, Bava also managed to create one of the first films that can be classified as slashers. The film involves teenagers going out to a remote cottage to get slaughtered. But the reason why is some soap opera scheming about inheriting an estate that's not that unlike the plots of his giallo movies.

Bava's violence is a downward spiral of brutality where the cycle of violence can't be stopped once began. The scenes of kids getting brutally killed in bed with very phallic instruments has since become a cliché of the genre, but more nasty for the modern viewer might be the scenes depicting the brutal murders of the elderly characters. Some killings have obviously influenced the later works of the likes of Argento and Fulci.

The film is not visually one of the most captivating of Bava's films, even though he worked also as a cinematographer. Nevertheless, the claustrophobia of small cabins and the silent threat of the nature within is captured well enough. It's not as captivating as some of his more sophisticated movies and at times a bit boring. Nevertheless, it's a film worthy of respect due to everything new it brings to the table of the developing horror movie DNA.

★★★

Baron Blood (Gli orrori del castello di Norimberga, 1972)

The time had long since passed gothic horror when Bava gave his last knack at the genre. Two dopes are investigating a witch's curse and thus think they have resurrected the notorious Bloody Baron when people around them start to die. Bava is at his best visual tricks here, the film features more exciting scenes of a torchlit castle at night and a city under fog than a season of DuckTales.

There's a bit of a retread of ideas first presented at Black Sunday, but also rewriting and re-conseptualizing them. Nevertheless, compared to the previous film this can't help but to pale a little by comparison.

For fans of more classic horror, the film also has some cleverly graphic deaths in an iron maiden, a cool finale of a witch sabbath, and the make up on the Baron's face that surely was a precursor to Freddy Krueger. On the downsides, the script doesn't really hold together, the music is cheap and the acting is way too campy. The Bargain-store Vincent Price main villain is particularly annoying.

★★★

Three laughs: Double Down

It is hard to rate some trashy films. Films can be really good entertainment in spite of the quality of the filmmaking. In fact, it might be even harder to create unique trash that keeps surprising you than most "quality" films with which you know what you are going to get. It certainly is an even better pleasure to watvh them. My friend says that he knows a trash film is worth something if it gets three laughs out of me. I mean proper, good belly laughs when you just can't believe what the film is showing to you, scene after scene. That's as good a rating as any for these movies. Any film that has these three laughs has a special place in my heart.


Three laughs case #15:
Double Down (2005)
Director: Neil Breen

It's about time to get to the filmography of one Neil Breen. Double Down may not be his best movie, but it is the first, so let's begin there. Breen began as an architect and a real-estate agent, but he had aspirations for a movie career. Nowadays he is a director, actor, writer, editor and a producer with a sizable internet following.

The reason for this is because his style is so unmistakable. Breen is both akin to Tommy Wiseau in his delusions of grandeur and acting style, and somehow totally unpredictable and weird, no matter how many movies he makes. He  likes thriller movies with little suspense and big stakes that are informed to the viewer mostly through dialogue or voice-over over some stock footage. Usually, Breen is out to save the world with his hidden knowledge, superior hacking skills and/or magic powers from evil and shady military, medical or financial institutions.

While all of Breen's films have been made on a pittance, here he basically doesn't even have money to any other actors save for a few cameos. A lot of the fun of Double Down is the ingenuity of getting past this fact. Breen is a former government agent and hacker, who has ran away from his former masters because they killed his fiancée for some reason. Hiding out, he threatens the world with hidden biological weapons he has hidden in several cities and that he will kill hundreds of thousands of people if not left alone. Somehow, the film twists this premise so that he's the hero?

Logic is not big in these films, even though Breen likes to repeat lines and themes over and over again.

Three laughs (SPOILERS):

1. Breen's unenthusiastic line-reading is a thing to behold, it's like a parody of Steven Seagal done by Bob Odenkirk in a weird wig. Thus it's preposterous how he keeps finding even worse actors than himself. This film has plenty of flashbacks and so we are also treated to the scene where Breen's wife got killed in a pool. And boy, is she atrocious an actor. Even lines like YES! seem worse presented than in the cheapest porn you can find, no matter lines like "I can't wait to be your wife!" After this, she is shot by a sniper (though there's no wound on her back) and left to float on her face in the pool as Breen cries to some bloody orchids.

2. Between stock footage and Breen talking to powerful people with some dubious connections, every once in a while we have a scene with him either hacking on the laptops in his car, or killing an intruder. One of my favorites is when he announces, playground-style, that his desert base is protected by an invisible barrier. We then see a soldier walk awkwardly with an assault rifle. He suddenly falls down dead with blood in his ears.

3. There's a lengthy scene of Breen climbing a rock formation on the desert. The camera pans to show four AK-47's resting to a rock. Breen blurts out "Sorry to interrupt your lunch" and blasts away with his handgun with arcade machine sound effects and with blood sputtering to his face. It seems the scene means he managed to catch four mercenaries out to get him off-guard, yet without ever having one image of any of the would-be attackers. Avantgarde!

Three laughs: Roar

It is hard to rate some trashy films. Films can be really good entertainment in spite of the quality of the filmmaking. In fact, it might be even harder to create unique trash that keeps surprising you than most "quality" films with which you know what you are going to get. It certainly is an even better pleasure to watvh them. My friend says that he knows a trash film is worth something if it gets three laughs out of me. I mean proper, good belly laughs when you just can't believe what the film is showing to you, scene after scene. That's as good a rating as any for these movies. Any film that has these three laughs has a special place in my heart.

Three laughs case #14:
Roar (1981)
Director: Noel Marshall

Everyone is all about Tiger King these days. But the original morally dubious story of living with large cats is of course Noel Marshall's utterly bonkers Roar. It has the clean-cut outer image of a Disney-like adventure movie for the whole family, and a nice message is living in harmony with animals as well. But somehow, the movie had 48 crew members injured with over 70 injuries over the two-year (!) shooting period. And, boy, it shows!

Film stars Noel Marshall and Tippi Hedren used to have a wild cat sancturaty where they spent time with large lions. But there's a difference between having wild animals in safari parks and as housecats. In the film, Marshall himself plays a bit wacked-out hippyish dad in Africa, whose house is overrun by, not only lions, but also tigers and pumas (not native to Africa), leopards, and some rather nasty elephants.

It's one thing to risk one's own, or even your spouse's life in order to have them act in your crazy lion movie, but Marshall also cat his real-life sons and daughter Melanie Griffith to the film. Griffith needed facial reconstructive surgery due to her injuries on set. Photographer Jan DeBont lost his entire scalp. Marshall got the blunt of tooth and claws, and the film actually features footage where he gets wounded. It's a wonder a film like this got made, it's a wonder a film like this got lost in the streams of time, and it's a wonder a film like this can be watched and awed today. Nothing like this will never again get made.

Three laughs (SPOILERS):

1. The first laugh comes from the opening credits of the film "Since the choice was made to use untrained animals and since for the most part they chose to do as they wished, it's only fair they share the writing and directing credits". As far as film plots go, this one is so disjointged and hard to grasp, it's no wonder it was co-written and directed by Robbie, Gary and Togar the lion.

2. The lions don't seem too happy to be kept inside a smallish farm, and especially the males keep fighting in rather brutal-looking fashion. Marshall should get a medal from outstanding stuntwork for seeing fights break out between lions and tigers and running to break it up as a referee. I can't make out if he's actually as mad as his character, but he can't be far off.

3. Marshall talks to the lions as if they are children, insisting they are just playing. That's why the film also has plenty of scenes where he's broken off between talking and run to the ground by lions. Most other movies would cut these kind of materials off, but in here, they're the bread and butter of the entire thing.