May 2014 Recap

I didn't watch very many bad movies this month and compared to the bad movies I normally see each month, the ones I listed below would be considered classics. I did watch a lot of awesome movies though. Here's my top 5 and bottom 5 for May, 2014:

My top 5 (in no particular order):
1. The Last Polka
2. Hawk Jones
3. The Psychopath
4. Neon Maniacs
5. Lurkers
Runner Up: Ghost Story & Rituals

The bottom 5 (in no particular order)
1. Nail Gun Massacre
2. The Amazing Spider-Man
3. The Undertaker
4. Wild Malibu Weekend
5. Galactic Gigolo
Runner Up: Son of Dracula

249. Taken 2 (2012)

May 31, 2014

While Taken 2 was nowhere near as good as the first Taken, it wasn't as bad as a lot of the reviews I heard said it was. It was a continuation of the story from the first film, in which the families of the bad guys Liam Neeson killed started seeking revenge for their lost loved ones (even though they were all dirtbags). When the bad guys families find out that Neeson and his family were in Istanbul, they took Neeson and his wife, Famke Janssen. Using his particular set of skills to remember every detail even while he had a bag over his head, Neeson was able to determine where he ended up, and was able to get a message to his daughter to try to save them. Then, once saved, Neeson swiftly delivered justice and got his family home safe again. I heard they are making Taken 3. While part 2 was implausible, a part 3 is really inconceivable. I don't think they have any pets, and if any of the family members get taken again it would just become a parody of itself.

248. Pitch Perfect (2012)

May 31, 2014

My friend Patrick pretty much had to force me to watch Pitch Perfect. It didn't sound like a movie I would just not like, it sounded like a movie I would absolutely hate. To my surprise, I laughed through almost the whole movie (laughed with, not at). It was about some college kids who performed in a cappella tournaments and the funny things that happened along the way to the championships. They hit all the right notes for me, with vomit humor, a girl who whispered hilariously horrible secrets, and a bunch of other surprises. Similar to Mean Girls, it was the kind of movie where I felt bad for having pre-judged it. I'll try not to make that mistake again.

247. Event Horizon (1997)

May 29, 2014

Set in the not too distant future, Event Horizon tells the story of a mission to try to rescue the crew of a spaceship that disappeared seven years prior. There were some cool effects and some not-so-cool effects, but all in all I'd call it a decent movie. Probably the best movie Paul W.S. Anderson has directed so far. It reminded me a little bit of the beginning of Lifeforce. In Event Horizon, things inevitably go wrong during the mission when they find the missing craft and discover that something sinister and inhuman is on board. It was pretty good - not great - but worth watching.

246. Sweet 16 (1983)

May 29, 2014

I'm not entirely sure why they called this movie 'Sweet 16'. There was a sweet sixteen birthday party near the end of the movie, and they sort of tied it to the plot, but really this movie was just a straight-forward slasher film where a few people get murdered and everyone else has to wonder who did it. Racial tension in a small bar lead some to believe it was a local Native American man. Despite the evidence, the Sheriff knows better, and he suspects the parents of a girl whose boyfriend was one of the people killed. During the aforementioned party, we're shown the true killer and fed a fairly bogus story as to why. Recommended for slasher completists but not really anyone else.

245. Galactic Gigolo (1987)

May 28, 2014

Galactic Gigolo was pretty awful. It started with a game show on some planet where everyone was a vegetable. The host, a giant carrot, was asking questions to a broccoli, who ended up winning a trip to somewhere in New Jersey where he was supposed to sleep with all the women in the town. He made it to the town and had no problems getting with the women, but he kept getting chased by some hunters who wanted to kill him, and some mobsters who wanted to hire him to help rob banks. It was a really stupid concept executed with unmitigated fatuousness and everyone involved in any shape or form (including myself for having watched it) is now dumber.

244. The Painting (2011)

May 25, 2014

The Painting was just a random Netflix selection that my wife and I decided to watch instead of being productive, and it turned out to be a decent little film. It was a French film that was mostly animated but had some live action sequences. It was set in a world within an unfinished painting where some people were finished, some where half-finished, and some were just sketches. They had formed a class system among themselves that was based solely on how finished they were, and for the most part, the finished people were snobs who looked down on everyone below them. One of the finished people was in love with a half-finished person, and the two had to keep their relationship a secret. They set out on a quest to go find the painter and have him finish the painting and they ended up going in and out of several paintings and seeing all sorts of different people and situations. We liked it, and it was soothing enough to wake up to on a Saturday morning, so I'd recommend it.

243. 976-EVIL (1988)

May 24, 2014

I don't know how many times I've seen 976-EVIL, but it is an awesome movie. Directed by Robert Englund and starring Stephen Geoffreys, it starts with a guy named Spike who finds an advertisement for an evil psychic hotline in a magazine and gives it a call. The calls start off pretty vague but end up turning evil as they go. Spike thinks it is a joke, but when his loner cousin, Hoax (Geoffreys), finds the number and starts calling it he gets supernatural powers that help him go after the people who've mistreated him and he ends up turning into some kind of a demon. I've always loved this movie. The sequel wasn't great, but the original was a lot of fun. My wife and I and some of our friends were lucky enough to go to dinner with Stephen Geoffreys once, and he was a really cool person!

242. Hatchet for the Honeymoon (1970)

May 24, 2014

Mario Bava's Hatchet for the Honeymoon was about as cool as movies come. It was about a guy who ran a bridal shop and killed some of the new brides after they tried on his wedding dresses. Each time he killed one of the brides-to-be, he grew closer in his own mind to figuring out who killed his mother. His last person to kill was his own wife, but she came back as a ghost and haunted him. There was a cop who was onto him from the start, but it was ultimately the ghost of his wife that was his undoing. I thought it was a great movie. Very suspenseful, with an interesting story.

241. Pompeii (2014)

May 24, 2014

Pompeii will probably compete with I, Frankenstein or 300: Rise of an Empire for my least favorite movie of 2014. I, Frankenstein still beats the others for being the worst, but Pompeii was pretty awful. It was essentially a Gladiator rip-off with a volcano about to erupt and kill everyone (but Gladiator was awesome and this was garbage). Pompeii starred Kit Harrington (John Snow from Game of Thrones), which is probably the only reason anyone anywhere saw it, and had some surprisingly bad cameos by good actors (Keifer Sutherland and Jared Harris). Since it was (loosely) based on real events, we all knew what had to happen at the end of the movie but they drew it out and made it weak. They had a good story to work with and they blew it.

240. Rituals (1977)

May 23, 2014

I thought Rituals was fantastic. Five doctor friends who take an annual vacation to a different part of the world get stuck in the remote wilderness when a psychopath starts stalking them. Not everyone survives, naturally, and most of the movie is spent with the surviving few trying to see how they can possibly get out of the mess they were in when they didn't even know who was hunting them. With superb performances by Hal Holbrook and Lawrence Dane, I strongly recommend this movie.

239. Evilspeak (1981)

May 22, 2014

In Evilspeak, Clint Howard stars as a military academy cadet who gets bullied by the other cadets as well as the faculty. He finds a secret room in the cellar of the church and starts communicating with a demon. He uses his computer (what was probably a pretty nice computer in 1981) to speak to the demon, and was eventually able to summon it and let it take possession of his body in what was one of the coolest endings of any horror movie. It moved a little slow in parts, but it is worth watching until the end to see Clint Howard floating around chopping heads off with a giant sword.

238. Wild Malibu Weekend! (1995)

May 22, 2014

Aside from being a vehicle to show a bunch of naked ladies doing silly things for money and attention, Wild Malibu Weekend! was a completely useless movie. The plot consisted of a handful of girls who were willing to take their clothes off on a cable game show while performing dumb tasks like putting condoms on cucumbers in order to make some quick cash. Since they didn't have much plot to work with, they spent a lot of time focusing on the game show's band The Ultramatics. There isn't much to say about this movie. Maybe as an actual TV show (and not a movie about people making a TV show) it would have garnered more attention and been kind of funny, but as a movie it just wasn't very good.

237. Ms. 45 (1981)

May 21, 2014

Zoe Lund, another talented young actress who tragically died far too young (she was only 37), starred as Thana in Abel Ferrara's classic Ms. 45, a mute young woman who gets brutally raped twice in one day and then goes on the warpath. She becomes a sort of vigilante even though her victims aren't necessarily bad people. She starts seeking out men to kill at random and dispatches them with her trusty .45, and she also had to dispose of the chopped up corpse of her second rapist before her nosy next door neighbor finds any body parts. Despite the fact that she carries out each arbitrary act of homicidal retribution with a frightening precision, I still felt for her character and didn't really care who she killed. I think at the point where she was raped twice in one day, she could have killed almost anyone and I would have been on her side.

236. Horror High (1974)

May 21, 2014

I primarily wanted to see Horror High because it had the cop from the original Assault on Precinct 13 (Austin Stoker), but became quickly intrigued by the lead actor, Pat Cardi. Cardi played a high school science geek who was constantly picked on by everyone. The jocks, the teachers, even the janitor had it out for him, so when he developed a formula to basically turn him into a human monster and he started killing all of his tormentors, it was up to a detective (Stoker) to try to solve the case. With solid acting by Cardi and Stoker, Horror High was a thoroughly enjoyable film.

235. Premium Rush (2012)

May 20, 2014

This was my second time watching Premium Rush. The first time I watched it I wasn't really interested in seeing it and then I was blown away by how much fun it was. This time I think I over-hyped it in my head and definitely didn't get the same enjoyment as before. I still loved Michael Shannon's over the top performance as the crooked cop with a gambling problem. The movie follows Joseph Gordon-Levitt, a bike messenger, as he tries to get a package from one side of the city to another while Shannon is constantly trying to take the package away from him to settle his gambling debts. It is entertaining, but I feel like maybe I just wasn't in the mood this time around.

234. 'Gator Bait II: Cajun Justice (1988)

May 18, 2014

Released 14 years after 'Gator Bait, 'Gator Bait II: Cajun Justice just couldn't quite muster the charm that the first one had. It was watchable, but a little disappointing in comparison. This one started with the brother from the first movie (the one who didn't have a tongue and couldn't speak) getting married to a city girl out in the swamps. Well, in this movie he spoke just fine, and there was no mention of the fact that he couldn't before. So we press on and forget about that. While on their honeymoon, one of the bad guys who died in the first movie came back to get the new bride and rape her with his new gang of idiots. They sort of tried to explain how he was still alive, but I wasn't buying it. So now we've got two glaring inconsistencies and I'm starting to wonder if the people who made both movies ever bothered to watch the first one to see what happened in it before making a sequel. But again, we press on. This is where the action heats up. The husband gets shot and left for the alligators to eat, and the wife gets kidnapped. When one of her captors shows the tiniest sign of having a conscience and helps her escape, she quickly learns the swamp skills necessary to survive not only in the wild but also while being pursued by a mob of merciless imbeciles. I'd call it worth watching once to say you've seen it, but only after you've seen the first movie.

233. 'Gator Bait (1974)

May 18, 2014

Starring the beautiful Claudia Jennings (Unholy Rollers) who tragically passed away at the far too young age of 29, 'Gator Bait was a lot of fun. It was the kind of movie that shouldn't have been good but was actually really entertaining. Jennings played a young woman living in the Louisiana swamps, where she hunted gators and snakes and took care of her little brother and sister. When one of the local deputies and his buddy went out to the swamp to try to rape her, she threw a bag of snakes at them and the deputy accidentally shot his buddy. Of course, he blamed it on Jennings, which started a swamp-wide manhunt with the Sheriff, his son the Deputy, and the father and two brothers of the guy who got shot. Outsmarted by Jennings at every turn, they eventually found her cabin and took the brother and sister hostage. Things went south, as they do, and the sister ended up getting murdered while they were trying to rape her. The brother got away (they weren't as worried about him since he didn't have a tongue and couldn't tell anyone anything), and when Jennings found out about what they did to her sister she didn't feel so bad about killing the rest of the rednecks that were chasing her. It was a pretty awesome movie.

232. Ghost Story (1981)

May 17, 2014

My friend Patrick was shocked that I had never seen Ghost Story, and I don't like to disappoint my friends, so I gave it a watch. He was right when he said it was a great movie. It featured four old men in a secret club where they told each other ghost stories. The problem for them was the scariest ghost story was the real life one they were about to be part of. When one of the old men's son died under bizarre circumstances, his other son came home to stay with him for a while. That son more or less forced his way into the club and learned of a long-kept secret that the old men had shared for many years, involving a young woman they accidentally killed and then disposed of. Turned out the young woman had become a vengeful spirit and was back for blood. With a guilty conscience and a will to survive, the old men and their newest club member set out to make right what they had done and try not to get killed in the process. It was a well told story with superb acting and creepy atmosphere.

231. Neon Maniacs (1986)

May 17, 2014

I don't really know what it was about Neon Maniacs, but I loved it so much. I can't stop thinking about how awesome it was. The plot was silly and the acting wasn't great, but something about it really made an impression on me. The Neon Maniacs were the homicidal Village People of the monster community. A group of 12 subhumanoid monster-types each with very individual characteristics - one was a doctor, another was a biker, another was a neanderthal, and so on. By night they terrorized and mutilated the teens of San Francisco and by day they hibernated inside the Golden Gate Bridge. It was up to a monster-obsessed girl who dreamed of making horror movies to find a way to stop the maniacs. She figured out the way and considering where the maniacs lived it was a really silly way (they were deathly allergic to water but they lived under a bridge). Anyway, despite any short-comings the plot may have had, I genuinely loved this movie more than I can put down in words.

230. Lurkers (1988)

May 17, 2014

In this creepy little film, ten year old Cathy is haunted by spirits that come out of the walls at night and reach out for her. Cathy's mother kills her father and tries to kill her but she escapes. Several years later Cathy has a new boyfriend and life seems to be going pretty well for her even though she still has some visions and a brother who blames her for the deaths of their parents. Her boyfriend invites her to a party at his new office which happens to be the same building that Cathy grew up in. She refuses to go inside and ends up witnessing a murder and getting chased around the block until she is forced to go back into the old building. When she gets to the party things go even further downhill, and she finds out that the building she grew up in is a gateway to hell. She also finds out that there are many gateways to hell around the world and that is where all the bad people are born. The party guests then turn into the lurkers who haunted her as a child and try to drag her down with them. I thought the film was excellent, and I would recommend it to anyone who likes watching obscure but classy horror films.

229. Godzilla (2014)

May 16, 2014

I liked the new Godzilla. We saw it at the drive-in, and there really isn't a better way to see a Godzilla movie. For CGI monsters, the effects were pretty good. It started with a mysterious explosion in Japan 15 years ago that devastated a small community and sent scientist Bryan Cranston into a frenzy to figure out what happened. Cut to the present and the signs were there that it was going to happen again. Cranston's son, Aaron Taylor-Johnson had to go to Japan to get Cranston out of jail for trespassing on government property and the two of them started working together to figure out what was going on. It was about this point when the movie became a monster movie and two giant monsters showed up. Then Godzilla showed up as well and the monsters started fighting and it was awesome. Ken Watanabe played an oddly intuitive scientist that for no explained reason seemed to know what the monsters were doing any why. I thought it was a lot of fun though. Much better than the 1998 Godzilla, which wasn't hard to beat.

228. The Undertaker (1988)

May 15, 2014

Sadly, The Undertaker was the last feature film to star the great Joe Spinell. It isn't a good movie. It was funny in a sort of unintentional way since the acting was so abysmal. The opening credits continually switched between a bunch of ladies working out and a purposefully pixelated rock concert. The concert had nothing to do with the plot, but the ladies did. Some of them got naked, and some of them didn't. One of them had an uncle (Joe Spinell) who was in the funeral business and business of late was not so good. So to drum up new business and to have fresh, young, female corpses to allegedly sleep with, he started killing young women. Not in the ultra creepy Maniac style, but in a more off-camera, boring style. Regardless, we push on because this is Joe Spinell's last feature film, right? Eventually the cops set their sites on Spinell and start investigating him. There really isn't a whole lot to talk about with this movie. The plot, acting, budget, and all other technical aspects are virtually non-existent, so we're left with only one reason to give this movie a second thought and I've already said it twice.

227. Son of Dracula (1974)

May 15, 2014

Son of Dracula was an over-ambitious and overly silly novelty film starring Ringo Starr as Merlin, and Harry Nilsson as the titular son of Dracula, Count Downe. Count Downe was supposed to be crowned the king of the netherworld or prince of darkness or something along those lines, but ended up vying with Baron Frankenstein for the title. The problem was the count never really wanted the title, he just wanted to play music and sleep with his human girlfriend, but Baron Frankenstein was so nefarious that the powers that be, namely Merlin, had to make sure the count was crowned. As convoluted as that whole story was, they decided to throw in to the mix all sorts of other creatures, from werewolves and wax people to mummies and other various ghouls. If they had been able to pick a direction and stick to it, I might have enjoyed the film more. As it was, the 90 minute run time felt like an eternity with no focus or clarity to keep me interested.

226. The Psychopath (1973)

May 14, 2014

The Psychopath was fantastic! It was a super creepy look into the life of a children's television host with a knack for finding children who had been abused, neglected, or molested, and a penchant for killing the parents who did it. As honorable as that may be, the killer was creepy enough in his own way too. He talked to his puppets and killed someone with a lawn mower and after killing one kid's parents he played piano and cried. It was a disturbing film and I absolutely loved it! I watched it on YouTube, but if I can track down a decent copy I will.

225. The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)

May 13, 2014

I didn't really care about seeing this movie, and now that I have, I don't really care about seeing any of the sequels. It felt so similar to the Sam Raimi Spider-Man that I just wasn't interested in what it had to offer. They say it was closer to the comics, but who really cares about that anymore? The object should be to take the subject matter and make a good movie, and this one was just OK. The back story was the same, Peter Parker's parents died and he went to live with his aunt and uncle, then he was bit by a radioactive spider in a laboratory which gave him super powers. When his uncle died he wanted revenge, so he started picking off bad guys while he was learning to harness his potential. The cops chased after him and called him a public nuisance. The scientist that created the radioactive spiders then accidentally turned himself into a lizard-man and became a super-villain, giving Spider-Man a purpose. Chaos ensued, Spider-Man won, the end. Nothing new here.

224. Winter's Tale (2014)

May 12, 2014

Based on its polished exterior, and the century spanning love story that may or may not have involved a flying horse and angels, Winter's Tale seemed, for all intents and purposes, to be a movie that I would never have enjoyed. However, I kinda liked it. It was a lot weirder than I would have imagined it to be from watching the trailers, and Russell Crowe's performance as a demon was pretty great. There was also a weird cameo from Will Smith as the devil, which was odd but entertaining. The whole movie felt like it should have been made with a smaller budget and lesser known talent and that may have made it a cult classic. It started with a burglar, Colin Ferrell, running from Crowe, finding the flying horse, and falling in love with a red haired girl who was dying. Ferrell thought it was supposed to be his miracle to save the girl, but it wasn't, and despite his efforts she still passed away. Then he sort of died and reappeared several decades later with no memory until a woman helped him figure out who he was and together they found out who he needed to save. I'm not doing it any justice describing it, so I'll just suggest you watch it and see what you think. It was pretty cheesy and definitely a date movie, but it was intriguing enough to finish.

223. Teaching Mrs. Tingle (1999)

May 11, 2014

I remember thinking this movie looked like a knock off of The Faculty when it came out, and I wasn't that interested in watching it. Seeing it now, I realize I was dead wrong, and besides having the same distinct late-90's look, feel, and smell, the two movies were nothing alike. In Teaching Mrs. Tingle, a straight-A student (Katie Holmes) desperate to become Valedictorian hits an uncompromising road block in the form of her history teacher, Mrs. Tingle (Helen Mirren), who seems to want nothing more than to make her students miserable. We all had teachers like that, so it's not too hard to relate, although Mrs. Tingle is a bit of an extremist. One of Katie Holmes' friends brings the answers to an upcoming exam to her and suggests they cheat, but they are inevitably caught by Mrs. Tingle who threatens to expel them. With their backs against the wall, the kids go to Mrs. Tingle's house to plead with her not to expel them. Then when she refuses they break into her house, almost kill her, and tie her to a bed for a few days. I'm not saying you shouldn't do that, but you probably shouldn't do that. The rest of the time is spent trying to figure out a way out of the terrible situation they ended up in while also trying to convince Mrs. Tingle to reconsider. Written and directed by Kevin Williamson (the guy who wrote Scream), Teaching Mrs. Tingle is one I would recommend for posterity sake, but keep it at arm's distance and don't expect to be blown away.

222. The Haunting of Helena (2012)

May 10, 2014

I thought The Haunting of Helena was pretty good. It was an interesting and somewhat refreshing new take on a ghost story, which can be difficult to find these days, as well as a creepy rendition of the tooth fairy story. Helena and her mother moved into an old apartment with a sordid past that involved a man ripping out his wife's teeth and killing her. When Helena lost a tooth, the ghost of the toothless woman gave her some old coins in exchange for the teeth, but also started making Helena do strange things. At the peak of the haunting, Helena's mother got them out of the house but the spirit followed them and they had to find the lady's teeth to hopefully put an end to the haunting. Sounds fairly straight-forward, but there were some interesting twists along the way as well as a surprising ending.

221. The Visitor (1979)

May 9, 2014

The Visitor was pretty awesome. It was another movie where I wasn't always sure what was happening, but I had a good time being confused. Supposedly it was about a battle between god and the devil over the soul of a little girl with telekinetic powers. That is a better explanation than I could've come up with on my own, since what I got out of it was while some creepy alien child-molester types were exchanging worried stares with one another, some other evil forces with privileged and supernatural information that us regular folks wouldn't understand (similar to Mrs. Baylock in The Omen) were seeing to the mental and physical well-being of a disturbed young girl with telekinetic powers. At least I got the telekinetic part right. Either way, it was pretty cool in a very bizarre 70's kind of way, so if you get a chance to check it out it is worth it.

220. Nail Gun Massacre (1985)

May 9, 2014

Nail Gun Massacre had one of the most annoying killers of all time. They shouldn't have spoken at all, yet in pretty much every scene they had some stupid line to get out. Maybe the problem was that without all the killer's dialogue they wouldn't have had enough to make a feature film. Regardless, I found them extremely annoying. The movie starts with a woman being raped by a construction crew. After that anyone who happens to work in construction is not safe from the garrulous, nail-gun wielding maniac. As the bodies piled up the killer found more and more ways to sneak in idiotic puns for nobody to hear but the audience (not sure if that was a conscious choice or if they even gave it any thought at all). The only way I could recommend this to anyone is if you've already seen all the other slasher movies and don't mind being bored for an hour and a half.

219. Doom Asylum (1987)

May 8, 2014

If you watch a movie like Doom Asylum and try to point out all the things wrong with it, you're doing it wrong. With a paper-thin plot that didn't matter at all, Doom Asylum was pretty great. From what I could tell, a guy got in a car wreck that killed his wife. He didn't die, but then, maybe he did? Some teenagers went out to an old mental asylum where a terrible band was practicing. The guy from the car woke up on a slab in the morgue of the asylum and started knocking off the teens with the mortician's tools. The teens and the band started fighting. Turns out one of the teens (Patty Mullen, Frankenhooker) was related to the couple from the crash. Terrible acting, cool effects, no coherent story line... what more could you ask for?

218. Super Xuxa Versus Satan (1988)

May 8, 2014

I don't remember how I heard about Super Xuxa Versus Satan, but I do remember that it was pretty messed up. I'm not sure if it is any less bizarre if you are from Brazil where the film was made, but round these parts movies like this don't make all that much sense. Xuxa is the host of a children's show, and she has magical powers that stem from her innate proclivity for goodness. When an evil creature (maybe the devil, maybe a demon, maybe an eccentric vagrant?) and his two evil subjects that live underground become aware of the pure good that is Xuxa, they take offense and try to coax her to the dark side. Xuxa can't be swayed by conventional means, so the evil thing resorts to drastic measures and steals her dog, sending Xuxa on an extraordinary adventure to get her little pal back. Along the way she obtains a magical crystal with powers of light and happiness or something like that and she uses it in her efforts to defeat the bad guys. It was pretty weird, and I guess I did like it, but I don't know who I would ever recommend it to.

217. Hawk Jones (1986)

May 7, 2014

HAWK JONES! Apparently Hawk Jones is the fourth most sought after VHS on the internet. Fortunately for us the Alamo Drafthouse had a copy and showed it as part of their ongoing Video Vortex series. Our hero, Hawk Jones, is a cop with an attitude. He has been around the block a few times and he doesn't take nothing from nobody. Saddled with a new partner he didn't want, Jones has to take down a notorious crime-ring led by the ruthless Antonio. First he teaches some dames what's what, then he works on cleaning up the streets until Antonio calls in The Destroyer, his preternatural henchman with superhuman strengths and abilities. Can Hawk Jones muster what it takes to defeat The Destroyer and put an end to Antonio for good? You'll have to find out for yourself, because this movie is so awesome that anyone who doesn't see it is truly missing out.

216. The Last Polka (1985)

May 3, 2014

Watching The Last Polka was a fantastic experience. Libby and I were visiting some friends near Nashville and they told us about someone's basement that had been transformed into a cool little theater where they showed rare and bizarre films. To make a long story short, the owner of the basement/theater had found a bootleg DVD of a VHS transfer of the made for TV movie The Last Polka, which was basically an extended version of the SCTV skit mockumentary about the Shmenge's brothers, Stan (Eugene Levy) and Yosh (John Candy). Stan and Yosh Shmenge grew up in Leutonia (a small country with a curious lack of trees), where they danced, sang, played music, did magic tricks, and served as all-round performers for their parents and fellow countrymen until they were discovered and became one of the world's most cherished polka acts of all time. Together with Linsk Minyk (Rick Moranis) and the Lemon Twins (Catherine O'Hara, Mary Margaret O'Hara, and Robin Duke), the Shmenge's delivered a galvanic performance the likes of which the polka world had never seen before nor since. It isn't on DVD yet, which is sad, but if you are lucky enough to track down a copy somewhere it is absolutely worth it.

Speaking of tracking down a copy, the full movie is available to watch on YouTube. Here ya go: