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.