Shock Treatment (1981)

I first heard about the Rocky Horror Picture Show in a movie magazine or book back in the mid to late 70s.  During my sophomore year of high school, some of my fellow members of the SC Chorale had seen the movie and loved it.  I assume they saw it at a midnight show in Huntington, because the film had not yet played Charleston.  At one point it was going to be brought in as part of the WV Cultural Center’s film festival, but somehow a bunch of politicians allowed themselves to be deceived by some local religious leaders into believing that the film was a porno.  The truth of the matter is that these moral guardians, who later decided to also protest Monty Python’s Life of Brian, didn’t have the slightest idea what they were talking about.  They were fresh out of the recent textbook burnings where schools were picketed and children pulled out over textbooks that these people found offensive, and they had heard the film had some g-a-y themes and a song called Sweet Transvestite.  The Cultural Center ended up caving in and pulled the film from its festival.

The same friends that had seen Rocky Horror also carried with them the cassette of the original soundtrack album, so long before I ever got to see the movie, I knew all the songs.  I eventually go to see the film on one of the last nights I was attending a workshop for student journalists in Athens, Ohio.  A little theater in the college town was playing the film and a group of us who had come to call ourselves The Unicorps got in line and had the time of our lives.  There was Pat Murphy, Steve Bates, Kurt Kleiner, Linda Inman, Gena Gallagher, and several others screaming along and singing with the movie.  It was an amazing night in 1980.

I don’t recall when or where I first heard about the sequel to Rocky Horror, but one week I found out that Park Place Cinema 7 was going to be playing Shock Treatment on their midnight movies.  I was ecstatic.  Then I saw the film.  It was nothing like Rocky Horror in many ways.  The plot and the setting and most of the characters were completely different.  It was brand new, so there wasn’t a loyal cult following and no one had any clever lines to shout at the screen.  I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t love it because it wasn’t what I expected and wanted.  I did pick up the soundtrack album once I found a copy, but the movie only stayed one more night before it disappeared.  It wasn’t until years later that Key Video finally released the film on VHS.  I bought a used copy and gave it a second viewing.  I liked it a little bit better.  Several years passed and I pulled it out again and watched the tape.  The film still wasn’t available on DVD, so that was my only option.  I watched it and liked it a lot more.  Knowing not to expect Rocky Horror Strikes Back, I was able to enjoy the film for just what it was; a fun film with a great soundtrack.

I think one of the other reasons I may have been more taken with Shock Treatment on these later viewing might have had something to do with the fact that Jessica Harper was one of the stars and had several musical numbers.  I was a fan of her work and songs in Phantom of the Paradise, so this was like a hybrid sequel for me.  It was part RHPS sequel and part extension of Phantom.  Either way, I was hooked.  Eventually 20th Century Fox decided to release the film to DVD.  They released it as a single disc and as part of a 3 disc Rocky Horror/Shock Treatment box set.  The box set was all I could initially find, so I snapped up a copy.  Later I found the single disc edition at Wal-Mart for $5 and I grabbed it as well. 

I had been thinking a lot about the songs in Shock Treatment, and so I decided to make it one of my last of the year DVDs.  I popped in the disc from the box set and settled in.  I know the film uses color saturation and video style footage, but it seemed a little off for some reason.  I think my television may be going bad or need adjusted. 

The plot concerns Brad and Janet (Cliff De Young and Jessica Harper) returning to their hometown of Denton after being married.  The town of Denton has now been turned into a big television studio where all the residents either appear in the shows DTV broadcasts, or they sit in the audience watching it live.  Richard O’Brien, Patrician Quinn, Nell Campbell, and Charles Gray all return in different roles.  Jeremy Newson returns as Ralph Hapschatt although with a different actress (Ruby Wax) as his now estranged wife Betty Hapschatt.  Imogen Claire who played a Transylvanian in Rocky Horror also has a small part as the wardrobe mistress.  In addition to Janet’s parents, two British celebrities, Barry Humphries and Rik Mayall, also join the cast as Bert Schnick and Ricky.  It’s a little odd getting used to the new characters at first, but they are all easily as eccentric as the characters in Rocky Horror.  Another important character is Farley Flavors, also played by De Young.

Farley engineers for Brad and Janet to be called down as contestants on the Marriage Maze.  Once on the show, Brad is taken to Dentonvale for psychiatric evaluation while Janet is groomed to become a star as the host of Farley’s new show Faith Factory.  Who is Farley Flavors?  Why does he want to destroy Brad Majors and take Janet away from him?  The answer is that he is Brad’s long-lost twin brother who took a different turn in life.

I have grown to love Shock Treatment over the years and like others have stated, I actually find I prefer the music in Shock Treatment over the music from Rocky Horror.  It is definitely one of my all time favorite soundtracks along with Phantom of the Paradise, Streets of Fire, Magnolia, and Bugsy Malone.  I don’t think there is a bum song in the entire movie.  Shock Treatment gets 3 1/2 stars and one of those stars is purely for the music.

Brad and Janet

Beavis And Butt-Head Do America

I used to watch a series on MTV called Liquid Television.  It featured some amazing animated bits including Aeon Flux and Stick Figure Theater.  It also featured a cartoon with real rough-looking animation about these two delinquents playing a game called frog baseball.  I love animals and even though this was only a cartoon, I thought it was a little cruel.  Apparently I was in the minority as the two went on to have their own MTV series called Beavis and Butt-Head.  I still might have checked out the show, but my wife pretty much hated the sound of their voices, so for the sake of the greater good, I never took the chance of getting hooked on Beavis and Butt-Head.

Jump ahead several years and Mike Judge releases 3 box sets of Beavis and Butt-Head on DVD.  No it wasn’t the entire series.  Musical rights would have been impossible for that to happen.  There were also apparently some cartoons that Mike Judge didn’t feel were as good as the others.  Anyway, I happened to buy this guy’s DVD collection and one of the items in it was Volume One of Beavis and Butt-Head.  Then Wal-Mart got the first two sets in one of their bargain price promotions, and I had to get Volume 2.  I eventually found Volume 3 at FYE for some ridiculously low price.  I snatched it up.  Set complete, except for the movie.  Yes, Beavis and Butt-Head made a movie called Beavis and Butt-Head Do America and it was issued in a package that complemented the packing of the box sets.  Unfortunately it was priced too high for my taste and I just decided to wait and hopefully find a copy at Wills. 

After several years, I never did find the DVD at Wills, or at least in any condition worth mentioning.  Then one day recently I was looking in Wal-Mart and found Beavis and Butt-Head Do America in the $5 DVDs.  Sure it didn’t have the white slipcover packaging that made it fit in with the box sets, but it was the movie for a price I could stand.  I picked up a copy and brought it home.  The years must have softened my wife, because she didn’t say anything when I decided to pop it in the DVD player and watch it.  She didn’t pull up a chair and join in mind you, but she didn’t run screaming from the room either.  She quietly went out on the front porch, popped on her iPod, and began crocheting.

So what did I think after 90 minutes of Beavis and Butthead?  It was actually quite funny.  Sophomoric at times, but funny.  The plot involves the duo having their television set stolen and travelling cross-country to get a replacement.  Along the way they meet up with a couple of crooks having some personal issues voiced by Bruce Willis and Demi Moore.  They also cause plenty of trouble and end up becoming targets of the ATF led by Robert Stack’s Agent Fleming.

In addition to the various jokes, there is one segment where Beavis eats a mushroom and has a hallucination.  The animation in this section was said to be inspired by Rob Zombie.  It’s obvious from watching this segment where Zombie got some of his inspiration.  The scene looks like bits of Ed Roth, Coop, Robert Crumb and Robert Williams all mixed together.  It’s an amazing little diversion in the film.

I give Beavis and Butt-Head Do America 3 stars.  I was more entertained than I had ever hoped to be.

Miss March

Having worked my way through a plethora of Universal monster movies, I was ready for a change of pace.  I found Miss March in the $5 DVDs at Wal-Mart in widescreen, unrated, and with the little “brown paper” slipcover.  I grabbed it up and decided to check it out.  When Miss March first came out, I wasn’t excited enough to rush to the theater to catch it.  I also wasn’t all that worked up when the DVD came out.  I figured I would eventually pick up a copy at one of the pawn shops I frequent.  Unfortunately most of the copies I have found at the pawn shops have usually been scratched and scuffed up pretty badly.  Also most of them were either used copies from Blockbuster in the crappy rental boxes, or they were missing the little slipcover that came wrapped around the DVD.  The piece of cardstock works similar to the slipcover used on The Girl Next Door.  It makes it appear that the girl on the DVD cover is naked beneath the brown paper covering.  It’s a trick of course.  The girl on Girl Next Door has on a strapless top and the girl on Miss March has on a blue bikini.  Never the less, the little strip of brown cardstock makes the cover much more interesting.

There’s one other thing that has changed since Miss March first came out to indifference on my part.  I became a fan of The Whitest Kids U’Know featuring the movie’s stars Zach Cregger and Trevor Moore.  I also gained more respect for the talents of Craig Robinson who plays rapper Horsedick.MPEG in the film.  Robinson has a recurring role in The Office and was also featured in Zach & Miri Make A Porno.  He also wrote and performed in a wonderful stand up bit where he is playing keyboards for a singer who is singing a song about finding out his girl is sleeping around on him.  The song is filthy, hilarious, and has a great pay off as well.

Robinson performs three songs in Miss March, albeit songs written by Cregger and Moore who also wrote the screenplay and directed the film.  Two of the songs are actually the same song, except one version is the radio friendly version of the original.  It’s a pretty funny scene where Cregger and Moore are listening to the song and Moore explains that fact to Cregger when he hears Horsedick.MPEG belting out “I wanna love a white girl” instead of the lyrics he had previously heard.

The plot of Miss March involves virginal couple Eugene Bell (Cregger) and Cindi Whitehall (Raquel Alessi) deciding to have sex after the prom.  After doing several shots with Tucker Cleigh (Moore), Bell falls down a flight of basement steps and ends up going into a coma instead of losing his virginity.  When he awakens in the hospital four years later, he finds out his former girlfriend has just posed for Playboy magazine.  He and his friend decide to journey cross-country to meet up with her at the Playboy mansion.

There are some very funny bits in this film, and there are quite a few misfires as well.  The funny bits are never up to the heights of the Whitest Kids U’Know television show, but they did still make me chuckle.  Unfortunately there are also several gags that just fell flat for me.  Did I really need to see Bell lose control of his bowels all over the hospital floor?  Am I really supposed to believe someone can fly out of a bus window just because the bus hit a section of rough road? 

Miss March was a pleasant diversion, but it could have been much better if Cregger and Moore had let some of their fellow Whitest Kids look over the script and offer some advice.  Maybe letting one of them direct would have been a better solution as well.  I give the film 2 1/2 stars for the laughs it did provide me, but I also have to say that for a film set in the Playboy mansion, there was a lot less nudity than I would have expected.  There are a few topless scenes with background characters at the mansion or on Horsedick.MPEG’s music video shoot, but the Kids seem to have chosen gross out humor over raunchy humor despite the film’s title and premise.

Pufnstuf

As a kid growing up in the late 60s and early 70s, the names Sid and Marty Krofft were legendary.  They were responsible for Land of the Lost, Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, Lidsville, and H.R. Pufnstuf just to name a few.  Pufnstuf was one of my favorite shows when I was little.  I had found the entire series on DVD and purchased it, but I also wanted the Pufnstuf movie.  I ran into it at Wal-Mart and added it to my collection.  After my trip back to childhood with The Creature from the Black Lagoon, I decided to pop in Pufnstuf the movie and check it out.

I was very disappointed in Pufnstuf.  I remember really enjoying the music in the television series, but the musical numbers in the movie never seemed to be as enjoyable.  I may have a different opinion once I rewatch the television show, but I can’t even recall a basic melody from any of the movie’s songs.

Pufnstuf concerns a young boy named Jimmy (Jack Wild) that finds a talking flute and gets kidnapped by a witch named Witchiepoo and taken to the Living Island where the mayor is a dragon named H.R. Pufnstuf.  Everything on Living Island is alive.  The trees are alive.  The clouds are alive.  And everything talks from owls and gophers to vultures and spiders.

The most entertaining part of the DVD for me, was watching the original trailer which was a real throwback as far as the style of marketing used to sell the film.  The movie itself only rates 2 stars, and 1/2 star is purely for nostalgic reasons.  I’d love to know what today’s kids would think about old Pufnstuf.

AVH: Alien Vs. Hunter

Despite two subpar films, I decided to go full speed ahead and finish out the Asylum DVD triple feature.  AVH: Alien Vs. Hunter is The Asylum’s take on Aliens Vs. Predator.  The alien here is a whacked out spider creature.  The hunter looks like a robot ninja with a metal coolie hat.  It’s CGI vs. a left over Power Rangers costume.

AVH features former Greatest American Hero, William Katt as Lee Cussler, a small town newspaper editor/publisher/writer who dreams of being an acclaimed novelist.  He and the sheriff go out to check on a disturbance and find a crashed alien spaceship.  The alien did not arrive alone, however.  Another being is hunting the alien, but willing to kill anything else that gets in its way as well.

AVH is just as silly as I Am Omega and Monster, and the logic seems to have escaped this film as well.  People seem to travel from place to place almost magically at times.  At other times it seems to take hours to make it across the backyard.  One character spends the whole movie worrying about his wife and wanting to get back to her, but then allows himself to get separated from the group and lost inside the alien ship.  The movie is truly baffling in its complete lack of logic and common sense.

I will say that AVH was probably the most fun of the three films, but I still couldn’t get over the stupidity of it.  The alien looks neat.  The hunter not so much.  The movie gets 1 3/4 stars from me.

Monster (2008)

There are several movies listed on the IMDB under the title of Monster.  There are actually two listed for 2008.  The other one was not made by The Asylum.  This one was and it concerns a couple of American girls in Japan making a movie about global warming when the town is hit by an earthquake.  Or was it an earthquake?  One of the girls swears she saw something out there.  Soon they are running about town, trying to figure out what is going on and how to get back home.

Monster was The Asylum’s answer to Cloverfield.  The entire film is shot as if we are watching the found footage shot by the girls.  The plot is simply them trying to get to the embassy and to document the monster attacks when they happen.  They argue about turning off the camera.  They argue about whether to stay put when they find a fairly safe spot.  They argue about everything.  They also don’t do a very good job of getting any footage of the monster.  We see a few wavy tentacle things a few times, but unless the monster was supposed to be a big sea anemone (Mega Anemone?) or a headless giant squid, we never do get a very good look at the critter. 

I didn’t care for Cloverfield.  I loved the creature, but I wanted more of a narrative and a plot and an ending.  Monster takes everything I hated about Cloverfield and gives me even less (less plot).  It also takes the things I did like about Cloverfield and gives me less (less monster).  To be fair it also took the money I paid to see Cloverfield and buy the DVD in the limited edition steelbook from FYE and charged me much less ($5 I think for all three movies).

Monster gets 1 1/2 stars as well, and the more I think about it and I Am Omega, the more I think I’m being way too kind.

I Am Omega

Back in the spring while I was in Illinois, I picked up a DVD with three of The Asylum’s “mockbusters” on it.  The set featured I Am Omega, Monster, and AVH: Alien Vs. Hunter.  I decided to try these out and started with the I Am Legend clone, I Am Omega.  Since another adaptation of the Richard Matheson story was titled The Omega Man, it’s fairly obvious how they chose the title.

In I Am Omega, Renchard (played by Iron Chef America “chairman” Mark Dacascos) is one of the last humans to survive a zombie outbreak.  He has a base set up and has been going out and planting bombs for his ultimate plan to destroy the city where most of the zombies are located.  Unfortunately he picks up a message from a girl who is trapped in the city.  He is content to let her die, but after a couple of guys blow up his house and convince him at gunpoint to join them in helping to rescue the girl, he finds himself charging into the heart of zombie town.

I was severely disappointed in I Am Omega.  I found the movie incredibly slow at first and there was very little in the way of human versus zombie interaction.  I think secretly I also wanted Dacascos to announce the secret ingredient was brains in typical chairman fashion.  Sadly that wonderful pop culture moment failed to materialize.  The only positive thing I can say about the movie is that the zombies looked nice.  The film contained some of the nicest looking zombies I have seen.  I’m sorry they had so little to do.

I Am Omega gets 1 1/2 stars.

Mega Piranha

When you see a DVD with a title like Mega Piranha, with a cover depicting a giant toothy fish biting a battleship in half, and with the Syfy channel and The Asylum’s names featured prominently on the back of the case, you have only two possible options.  You can shake your head and walk away, or you can plop down $5 plus tax and buy it at your neighborhood Wal-Mart.  Guess which path I chose?

Having been dazzled by Mega Shark Vs. Giant Octopus this spring, and catching the first few minutes of Sharktopus this summer, I had no choice but to check out Mega Piranha.  To be fair, I like piranhas.  I loved the Roger Corman and Joe Dante classic from 1978.  I have never been able to hear the classic line, “Look, up in the sky.  It’s Superman!” without thinking of Heather Menzies (well actually her body double) since seeing the film.  I liked the piranha that chewed off Aquaman’s hand back in the Peter David scripted comic of the 1990’s.  I even liked the piranha sequence in the grindhouse classic Make Them Die Slowly.  I even had a friend with a pet piranha.  He used to feed it guppies until one of the guppies got to be its buddy and the piranha refused to eat it.  Let’s face it.  That was a bad-ass guppy.

So I missed Piranha 3-D this summer.  I wasn’t going to miss out on the cheesyness of Mega Piranha.  I popped the disc in and sat back.  It didn’t take long for the fish to chow down on their first meal of horny swimming couple.  The couple get eaten and the story quickly forgets about them.  Then a boat gets taken out by the fish and the U.S. government represented by Greg Brady (Barry Williams as Bob Grady) sends James Bond wannabe Jason Fitch (Paul Logan) down to find out what exactly happened.  For a boat to go down so quickly had to be the work of terrorists, or actually, really hungry fish.

So Jason Fitch goes to this South American country where he meets up with uber-brainy fish scientist Sarah Monroe (played by ex-teen pop star Tiffany who has apparently decided to rejoin her battle against the other ex-teen pop star and star of Mega Shark Vs. Giant Octopus, Debbie Gibson.  This time, forget concerts in the mall.  She’s  trying to beat her at playing the brainy scientist in a movie with giant sea creatures).  Let me just add that this is one contest in which I can’t choose a side.  Tiffany posed in Playboy, but Debbie Gibson had that great Mojo Nixon song written about her.

Back to the piranha, these fish are no ordinary piranha.  These have been genetically altered to grow larger, but they won’t stop growing and they keep getting more aggressive.  First off, why were these scientists even trying to grow larger piranha?  They explain that they were experimenting on fish to help increase the food supply for struggling and hungry villages, but who eats piranha?  And secondly, once the piranha start to get too aggressive and start growing to the size of dinner plates, wouldn’t you think the smart move would be to exterminate all of them instead of letting them escape? 

By the time the movie is over, the piranha have grown larger than a Buick.  They are leaping out of the water and crashing into office buildings, eating beachgoers and doing all sort of CGI tricks.  The military has tried shooting them, bombing them, and are set to nuke them.  However, now that the fish are off the coast of Florida, no one really wants to drop a nuclear bomb on them.  The scientists quickly come up with another solution.  They will make the piranha fight each other.  If one of the big piranha can be made to bleed, it will start a feeding frenzy that will kill them all.  Anyone else have a problem swallowing that train of logic?  Oh well if I wanted a movie that made sense, I wouldn’t have chosen one titled Mega Piranha with a big fish eating a battleship on the front cover. 

Mega Piranha was about 90 minutes of cheesey fun if you can over look the huge logic holes.  I enjoyed myself even if I didn’t buy the ending for a second.  Mega Piranha gets 2 stars.

The Pebble And The Penguin

I used to anticipate new animated films from Don Bluth the same way I did new Disney animated films.  The animation was usually breathtaking and the story was usually intelligent enough to hold my attention as a young adult.  I started to get a little disillusioned around the time of A Troll In Central Park and then when The Pebble and the Penguin came out, I was ready to give up.  The animation had lost that look it had in Secret of Nihm and An American Tail.  The lead penguin in Pebble looked like another goofy cartoon penguin whose name escapes me.  The key however is the fact that the penguin looked goofy.  I’m not a fan of goofy looking penguins.  It goes without saying that I did not rush out to see The Pebble and the Penguin, although two years later Bluth redeemed himself with Anastasia which looked like classic Disney animation. 

My daughter loved Anastasia and I ended up taking her to Anastasia on Ice while my wife took my son to see Armageddon.  If memory serves there was some sort of toy they sold at the show that allowed  the kids to take part in the action.  It was like a wand or something and at one point the audience was all supposed to shake their wands to help Anastasia.  I barely remember it, but I think the silly thing was like another $15.  Needless to say I got my daughter one of them and she had it for years.  She probably still has it buried in a toy box somewhere if it didn’t get completely broken and trashed.

I am still trying to replace several of my VHS tapes with DVDs and one of the movies I needed to replace was Rock-A-Doodle.  One day prowling through Wal-Mart’s bargain DVDs, I found a double feature DVD of Rock-A-Doodle and The Pebble And The Penguin.  I decided to pick it up despite having the goofy penguin movie on it as well.  I decided to take a break from werewolves and wanted something short and light.  I wasn’t feeling particularly well that night either.  I thought I would put in Rock-A-Doodle.  It was short, and since I had seen it years ago, I knew it wouldn’t require a lot of brain power.  When I went to put the disc in the player, The Pebble and the Penguin was on side A.  I started to flip it and pop in Rock-A-Doodle, but this voice in the back of my head started goading me to watch something I hadn’t already seen.  I gave in and started up The Pebble and the Penguin. 

The Pebble and the Penguin is an animated musical love story with penguins.  Hubie, the goofy looking penguin voiced by Martin Short, wants to marry Marina (Annie Golden).  Penguin tradition is that suitors present their potential mate with a pebble, much like a human engagement ring.  Hubie finds a beautiful stone for Marina, but has to fight evil penguin Drake (voiced by Tim Curry) for it and ends up almost getting eaten by a seal.  He gets picked up by a boat that is gathering penguins for a zoo or something of the sort and has to break out and make it back to Marina before Drake can get her to accept his proposal instead.

It goes without saying that the film was written for kids, so the outcome is pretty obvious right from the start.  Short, Curry, Golden and Jim Belushi all do fine voice work for their penguins, and Barry Manilow provides a slightly better than average score.  There are no stand out numbers in this film like there are in the modern Disney animated classics, but at the same times the songs don’t truly fail either, although one song that is peppered with truly corny jokes from Hubie to Rocko was quickly wearing down my tolerance for saccharine covered crap.

All in all The Pebble and the Penguin wasn’t as bad as I feared it would be, but it is no where close to The Little Mermaid or Anastasia.  If I ever have grandkids, I’m sure they will enjoy it, and I guess that’s really who the film was made for in the first place.  I give it 2 1/4 stars.

Wet Hot American Summer

When I first heard about Wet Hot American Summer in Entertainment Weekly, I thought it sounded really funny and wanted to see it.  The film never made it around Charleston to my knowledge.  It did come out on DVD, but it was usually in the $20 range, which is more than I typically pay for a DVD.  It also played Comedy Central, albeit in an edited format, so that wasn’t something I got excited about.  The other day I ran into Wet Hot American Summer in the Wal-Mart $5 DVD section.  I couldn’t pass it up.

Wet Hot American Summer is a summer camp comedy with a cast composed of members of The State, SNL and Stella along with some up and coming actors (Paul Rudd and Bradley Cooper) and more recognizable names like Janeane Garofalo and David Hyde Pierce.  It is a little like a more adult and more alternative Meatballs.  It plays with the conventions of the summer camp comedy and sends many of the old clichés home on their heads.  The big misfit softball competition where the underdogs face an unbeaten rival team from their arch rival camp, the underdogs here decide just to forfeit so that they can do something else that they feel will be more fun.  The counselor love affairs also get similar treatment with the hot girl deciding to stay with the hunky guy that cheats on her instead of running off with the sensitive guy that has loved her all summer long. 

Throughout the movie I had several bouts of deja vu, and it took me quite a bit before I realized that I had apparently caught more of the film on Comedy Central while flipping channels than I first thought.  It didn’t spoil the film for me, but it was strange trying to figure out how I knew large chunks of a film I didn’t think I had ever seen.

I give Wet Hot American Summer 3 stars, but it does have an odd sense of humor that might throw some people off.