Movie Scum

Like many of you in my age range, you probably have fond memories of roaming the aisles of the local video store and gazing at all the great VHS covers to try to pick that night's movie. Blood Diner  was definitely one of those films with eye-catching box art that has evaded me for years. I prefer it had stayed that way.

Photo: 20th Century Films It's finally happening! At least I presume someone is excited about this weekend's release of the long-delayed The New Mutants from Josh Boone , said to be the final hurrah of Fox's X-Men continuity. The film was shot in summer of 2017 with a targeted release date of early 2018. In case you don't have a calendar handy, that was over two years ago with the delays blamed on test screenings, reshoots, studios changing hands, and of course, a global pandemic.     So, in honor of this long-gestating piece of 2017 nostalgia, let's look at some other films that have fallen into the abyss of release date shuffles and burials.  

As Randy so eloquently put it in Scream 2 , sequels by their very definition are inferior works. Often times they are derivative and lack any imagination that made their predecessors so powerful. But most sequels aren’t bad per se, just worthless. These sequels though are bad enough to almost make you angry at the series for spawning such dreck.

This movie is terrible. Of course, this isn't a secret or a new revelation I've come to in deducing how mind-boggingly lazy this film is. In fact, it's so bad that I can safely classify it with The Happening which induces similar headaches and constant facepalms while maintaining its ability to make me want to suffer through it even though I know I'll hate myself afterward.

October may be over but sadly I still have a few more of these movies to suffer through. After watching Halloween: Resurrection , I began to yearn for the unoriginal simplicity of H20 or the complete and utter nonsense of Parts 5 and 6. Resurrection is the worst type of horror movie: it offers nothing of value to the franchise or the genre as a whole and it all around sucks complete ass. This movie (among others no doubt) is why horror films are seen as cheap, disposable, and worthless. In fact, there aren’t any better adjectives to describe this monstrosity.

Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star I’ve determined that Adam Sandler through his Happy Madison shingle is trying to make everyone hate him. I cannot fathom any other explanation for his recent output (see Jack & Jill below). I needn’t really say much because the crap speaks for itself. Even the trailer announcer sounds bored. Watch for it to hopefully tank this weekend, September 9. Abduction “Whatdya say we remake those Bourne movies with that kid from those, eh … Twilight movies? Yeah! No, not Robert Patterson (sic)! The other hunky one. Yeah. We just need to get a big director like Spike Lee! Oh, he’s not available. What about John Singleton? Yeah, that’s the stuff. And, uh, we’ll pack it with good actors like Alfred Molina and Sigourney Weaver! Big blockbusta on our hands!” – random movie exec. I’ll pass on this September 23. Real Steel Pop quiz, Hollywood hot shot! What do you get when you combine the Fighter/Rocky/any other boxing movie with Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots? U...

I typically see a lot of movies with my kids that I don't review here. That's not entirely out of laziness but more due to being uncomfortable critiquing something that was not necessarily designed for me. At some point for everyone though, you must step out of your comfort zone and do the right thing. For me, that point was taking my 4-year-old to see The Smurfs and hating it so badly that I must ward off any reasonable human being from seeing it. I'm not quite sure what irritates me the most: that I paid $15 for the two of us to see it, that it literally felt like the longest 90 minutes ever, or that I just indirectly contributed to the already announced sequel. Much like a good chunk of our readership (at least I assume), The Smurfs were one of those childhood staples that were always around, whether on TV, on the racks of the video store, or on the shelves at the local Toys'R'us. Truth be told though, I could've cared less about a Smurfs movie because it...

I will admit that I did not have entirely good expectations going into this one. Our own #pbf referred to this as garbage, and he has not seen THE third film in this series. I had seen a few positive reviews for THE Final Destinatio n though so I figured maybe it was an acquired taste, much like Mountain Dew: Live Wire. Oh, dear God was I wrong. So, so wrong … I knew in THE first ten minutes of this film that it would be given THE “honorable” crap category. THE other seventy minutes were merely confirmation that I can judge a stupid movie by its even stupider fucking cover.

Written by: PBF Strangers Online is excruciating. Watching it is like watching one of those Cinemax movies that come on at 2am, but actually trying to care for and follow the plot. Yes, this film should be nestled right between Sex Games: Vegas and The Bare Wench Project. Much like my relationship with this film, Hollis Parker (Noel Palomaria) is trying to forget the memory and stop the nightmares of when his wife was murdered 4 years ago. Currently, he hosts a web show called Strangers Online. Guests call via their web cams for sexual and relationship advice, to show their bodies, or sometimes just to be plain weird. Hollis’s show is quite popular, as is he. Hollis is in therapy, as he is guilt ridden over not being able to protect his wife from being murdered. This is what leads to his nightmares. He lives in seclusion with his girlfriend, Laura (Eva Frajko). A new intern, Karen (Tara Killian) has quite a crush on Hollis, which develops into an unhealthy obsession. Laura also ...

In an effort to shy away from the mainstays of Christmas movies for this marathon, I turned to Netflix to deliver a nice package of obscure holiday fun. What it delivered was quite possible the most painful movie I have ever experienced. Fuck you movie! Elf Bowling is apparently based on a computer video game of the same name that I have never heard of. In the game, Santa is pissed at his unionized, striking elves and apparently uses them as bowling pins. Seeing 82 minutes of that would have been far more entertaining. In a bastardized retcon of the origin of THE jolly old fat man in a red suit, Santa transforms from the captain of the Stinky Toe into ol’ Saint Nick that we know him as after his crew stages a mutiny and pushes Santa and his brother Dingle Kringle overboard into the freezing ocean waters. After thawing, Santa enters into a contractual agreement with the native elves on the North Pole to deliver the toys made by the elves as long as working conditions are happy. Dingle...

After it came and epically failed at the box office this summer, Jonah Hex was branded as a grade-A turkey, damning the goodwill Josh Brolin has earned over the past few years and further nailing the coffin of Megan Fox ’s movie career. I started watching expecting a bad movie but upon it’s conclusion I wonder, did I actually watch a movie? Clocking in at a thankful, yet still puzzling 81 minutes with credits, Jonah Hex probably would have been a worse movie had it not been so hurried to its conclusion. For that we can be thankful I suppose. From what I gather reading about the source comic series, the origin of Hex is similar but damn if we’d know it from the movie. Under the command of Quentin Turnbull ( John Malkovich ), Hex is a Confederate soldier who breaks rank after refusing to slaughter United States civilians and kills Turnbull’s son in the process. Hex is then forced to watch as his wife and son (I think?) are burned alive by Turnbull for revenge before being scarred...

As I scrolled through the Jesusflix offerings the other day, I came upon this gem and thought “A Michael Mann movie with Scott Glenn , Ian McKellen , and Jürgen Prochnow ? How have I never even heard of this before?” The short answer to that question is that The Keep is truly awful. Mann must have learned much in between this and Manhunter , such as how to construct a decent story. Taking place in a Romanian village in 1941, the Keep is a mysterious fortress of some sort that some German soldiers decide is a good place to hole up in. Even though they are specifically warned by the caretaker not to molest any of the silver crosses embedded in the walls, two soldiers unearth a passage to the walled-off inside of the structure only to have their faces blown off. Meanwhile, another group of German soldiers lead by Major Kaempffer ( Gabriel Byrne ), this time wearing the SS armbands which remind me I probably need to pay more attention to history, arrive after the death of many of the...

Written by: PBF Dave Parker, the writer/director of The Dead Hate the Living! said that he wanted to make the most un-Full Moon movie that he could. Full Moon Entertainment has brought us such delights as Puppet Master , Killjoy and was a distributor of Gingerbread Man 2: Passion of the Crust. What Parker meant was, he wanted to make a film without small creatures and make a film that felt as much like a real movie as he could make it. I assume he meant “real” literally, as he also said he purposely made the film referential of the low budget genre. Believe me, the film is full of references. We have a group of young filmmakers shooting a zombie picture. Through some forced exposition we learn that this is the director, David Poe’s first movie. His best friend Paul is the effects guy, and his two sisters are actresses (although Nina Poe’s part was secretly given to Shelly Poe, because everyone hates Nina). The film location is an abandoned hospital, which, again through an awkw...

Written by: PBF Nothing telegraphs an explosion better than the line, “Are those fuel tanks?” Meat Market 2 takes place some time after the events of the first film. We see Argenta kill Shahrokh after he turns into a zombie. She, one of the vampires, and a random one eyed Asian wander around foraging for food and supplies. They find another survivor and at her suggestion follow her. She tells them that she heard a radio broadcast about a place to go for food and shower, etc. and was on the way there herself. Naturally, they ignore all sense of skepticism and follow her only to be tricked. The survivor is really a Lieutenant for a military concentration camp or cult or some such nonsense, and surprise; the three of them are the newest addition to the camp. The camp is run by the Reconstruction Commerce Association of North America. Their goal is to rebuild society. They execute undesirables, perform experiments on some prisoners if acceptable for that sort of thing, and the healt...

Written by: PBF As bad as this movie was, I kept telling myself, “At least it’s better than Flesh Freaks .” That was until the lesbian, laser toting vampires showed up. Before raping my eyes, Meat Market sounded like a decent Zombie picture. There are bizarre attacks on humans that are thought to be animal attacks. Two former employees of a security agency figure out that they are not animal attacks, but zombies, and as it turns out, the company they used to work for is responsible. Not half bad, right? Well, I am angry at all who were involved with this. Now, in this movie’s defense, there were some positives. The zombie make up was actually pretty decent for a film this low budget. If you can watch it long enough, you can find some fairly nice shots and scene transitions. In what I thought was a very clever touch (and I must have misunderstood this), I thought that this was going to be a sort of “A Modest Proposal” scenario, which would have explained the title of the film. ...

When did parody movies become synonymous with sexist, juvenile, pieces of fucking shit movies? I blame Scary Movie . At its time, Scary Movie was a decent spoof of Scream , I Know What You Did Last Summer , and the other dozens of teen-based horror movies of the late nineties. While it has been several years since I have last seen it, Scary Movie had some legitimately funny sequences in their own right and also as a parody of the referenced movies. So, why is Scary Movie the devil? Because of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. In fact, we could go as far back as Spy Hard to blame the decline of the spoof but no one saw that movie anyways. Apparently after the relative success of Scary Movie , Friedberg and Seltzer decided to take any meager accomplishments they might have had being two of six writers of that film and create a legacy of cinema that represents the very reason that people who read books, plant gardens, or raise hamsters think that movies are crap. Why am I dedicat...

Written by: PBF Jesus, where do these movies come from? Apparently from a producer of The Devil’s Rejects . Thanks, movie poster! Razortooth , I assume is the eel’s name. No one ever called it that, but it has sharp teeth, so I jumped to that conclusion. We find ourselves in the Everglades, or a reasonable facsimile. There is Delmar, who is with Animal Control, and can make the ladies wet better than a 15 foot long giant eel can (as you might imagine, what with the name Delmar), and his ex wife Ruth, who is the Sheriff. Delmar is doing Animal Control type things while Ruth is looking for 2 escaped convicts. There are also some young scouts (as in boy and girl scouts, but some generic movie scouts) who are paddling around in canoes. Finally we have some college kids who are meeting Dr. Abramson to help him with his eel project. As you have probably deduced without even having to watch the movie, we find out that Dr. Abramson is responsible for the eel. It is a product of genetic e...

Written by: PBF I am going to warn you. This is possibly the worst movie you will ever see. I realize that I may have said that about a couple of other films. Forget about those. THIS IS POSSIBLY THE WORST MOVIE YOU WILL EVER SEE. So, college student goes to Belize for archeological dig that last through the summer. Dead body is discovered. Dead body comes to life. Kills everyone but the college student. College student comes back to college. Dead bodies come back to life and kill people at the college. Fairly simple. And yet so much damage to my soul was done. Where do I even begin with this? Well, the acting is just horrible. And not charming horrible like kids in an elementary school production about the first Thanksgiving. Horrible like genocide, or when a child is kidnapped. We here at Movie Scum, have better production values than this film. This is as low budget as it gets. The directing is ungodly. There were these really odd stretches of what looked like a show on Anim...

Written by: PBF Yeah, this is a lousy piece of crap. I stared at the screen trying to figure out why in the hell this movie was made. Watching this franchise is sort of like watching a dandelion on a very windy day; it starts out pretty enough, but eventually pieces of it keep flying off leaving an ugly thing in its place. Phantasm III (which does not have the subtitle Lord of the Dead either time the title is shown) starts off with the same flashback to the first movie that was at the beginning of the second one. Only this time it includes parts from the second film, carefully leaving out James LeGros, who played Mike in the second. That is because A. Michael Baldwin has returned for the role (so has everyone else that were in the other 2). After the flashback we pick right up at the end of part 2. We see the Tall Man who was “killed” come out of the doorway to the other dimension and take his own dead body back there. There is a boring “showdown” in the graveyard with Reggie a...

Oops. The F is right next to the D. So, I figured that since my last post was about a movie that is damn near perfection, I figured (partly inspired by it being on right now) that I would give you my offering for worst movie ever. Howard the Duck . This piece of garbage came out in 1986 and I have a small scar in both eyes ever since, from where I tried to scratch them out. Admittedly, I have seen it more than once. Not really sure why. I probably at one point wanted to bang Lea Thompson and her crimped hair (and Holly Robinson for that matter), or I had some bizarre compulsion to see duck titties again. Whatever the reason, I am ashamed. If you want to see why a terrible movie is terrible (and believe me, you don't), look no further. Piss poor acting, terrible directing and editing, absolutely insane and unfathomable plot; this has it all. I will give you the Reader's Digest version. Howard T. Duck (yeah, that's right) is pulled from his duck planet (which is just like ...