Bad Movie Night #3 - ROCK 'N' ROLL (AKA The John Fasano Tribute Night)

1. Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare

I've been wanting to have a John Fasano tribute for quite some time, since he tragically passed away the same day as our first Bad Movie Night, on July 19, 2014. So for our third Bad Movie Night, we watched three John Fasano films, starting with 'Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare' (aka 'The Edge of Hell'). Jon Mikl Thor starred in this hilariously bad rock 'n' roll themed movie that more or less turned into a religious film... But I'll come back to that in a bit. To begin with, at an old farmhouse a young boy watches his parents die when a skeleton/demon comes out of the oven and kills them. Then they must have strapped a camera to a cat and had it run wild around a living room for several minutes, followed by about 10 minutes of a van driving. The van arrives at the old farmhouse and Thor and his band 'The Tritonz' get out and talk about how they're there to record an album. They do the dishes a lot and sometimes they practice their songs (with strobe lights going because that makes practicing and recording way better). There are also several uncomfortable and uninteresting sex scenes that become really confusing if you think about them after the movie ends. Oh, and demons are roaming the house, killing the band members and turning them into more demons! After all that nonsense, we get to the final showdown (this is when things start to feel dangerously religious) where Thor's girlfriend turns into a huge demon and Thor declares he is an angel and he has been expecting the demon, and apparently nothing that had previously happened had actually happened (meaning there were lots of weird sex scenes that Thor had just imagined, or something). Thor thwarts the demon's starfish and sends the demon back to hell in what looked like about $10 worth of fireworks. This movie was worth watching for the creatures alone, but I'm going to recommend it to everyone anyway for no reason whatsoever.

2. Black Roses

In the quiet town of Mill Basin, 40 year old high school students eagerly await their favorite band, The Black Roses, who have announced a several day concert there. Their teacher consistently tries to teach them about Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson, but he can never seem to remember how long class is and the bell gets the better of him every time. The adults in the town don't like the idea of The Black Roses, and they have a town meeting and even show up to the first concert. Fortunately for the kids, the band is hip to what the parents are doing, so they start the show with a little rock ballad number that everyone can appreciate. The parents leave after the first song, believing the music is innocent enough, leaving The Black Roses to drop the act and rock everyone's faces off. The kids love it and keep coming back night after night, becoming steadily less interested in school and getting involved with all sorts of criminal activities. The teacher notices that the students don't care anymore and that their parents are all getting murdered, so he investigates and discovers the band is not what they seem to be and tries to stop them from brainwashing the town's youth. 'Black Roses' was the second night of our third Bad Movie Night, and I have to say there is nothing I don't love about this movie. It is delightfully bad with a great soundtrack and some fun effects and costumes.

3. The Jitters

Rounding out the John Fasano Tribute night, 'The Jitters' was the third and final movie of our third Bad Movie Night, and man is it a bad movie. It isn't the same kind of bad as 'Rock 'N' Roll Nightmare' or 'Black Roses', since both of those were at least somewhat exciting. This movie made me want to fall asleep several times, and a few people watching actually did. The film takes place in Chinatown, where some weirdly persistent bad guys keep terrorizing a store full of knick knacks for no apparent reason. Then a bunch of Chinese vampires that hop and growl start attacking everyone and they can only be stopped by sticking a piece of paper with some writing to their faces. It had James Hong, and he is always great, but other than that this movie was really lame.

Bad Movie Night #2 - NINJAS

1. Enter The Ninja

The Bad Movie Club's second bad movie night triple feature was another unmitigated success. It was a ninja-themed night, complete with samurai swords, good friends, good food, and bad movies. We kicked off the evening with Menahem Golan's campy cult classic, 'Enter the Ninja', an epic tale of a war veteran (Franco Nero) trained in the art of ninjutsu who goes to live with his friends in the Philippines only to find them and their village threatened by an evil businessman (Christopher George) who will stop at nothing to buy their land. Nero sleeps with his friend's wife (Susan George) to no ill consequences, and George eventually gets himself a ninja (Sho Kosugi), who just so happens to be Nero's arch-nemesis from his training days, and then it's on. A disproportionate amount of people die for this small piece of land, but I guess it's all worth it in the end when Nero and Kosugi meet for their monumental final battle. Sounds pretty awesome, right? It was a lot of fun, and totally worth watching just for Christopher George's ridiculous, over-the-top acting, as well as for the added bonus of seeing the grandpa from 'Silent Night Deadly Night' (Will Hare) as one of Nero's friends.

2. Samurai Cop

If you're a fan of bad movies, 'Samurai Cop' is the quintessential film you absolutely need to see, and it served as the second film of our second bad movie night. One of the finest examples of inept film-making, 'Samurai Cop' is so bad in almost every way, from the awful script to the silly soundtrack to the horrendous acting. To start with, Matt Hannon stars as Joe Marshall, and despite the fact that several people refer to him as the person who is called Samurai Cop, nobody actually ever calls him Samurai Cop and he is definitely not a samurai. The movie begins with a car chase, involving a helicopter that is clearly nowhere near any action and doesn't seem like it is even moving, yet the pilot can see all the action, and she is able to communicate all the details to Marshall without a radio. Once the chase is finished, Marshall and the helicopter pilot make love in their underwear. Robert Z'Dar and some other bad guys show up and ... Jesus, I've seen this movie three times now and I can't honestly tell you what happens. What I do know is this - Z'Dar and Hannon have one major fight in several locations, with Hannon's long, flowing wig occasionally coming detached, and there are a few more scenes of passionate romance including one where Z'Dar looks like he is trying to eat a girl's face. Almost everybody dies, but Hannon and his partner will be back for the long-awaited (24 years) sequel, 'Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance'. You can even be a part of the magic, if you want! Just head over to their Kickstarter page and donate all of your hard-earned cash!

There's also a toy lion's head mounted on the wall of a receptionist's office.

3. Undefeatable

The final film of the night was Godfrey Ho's 'Undefeatable'. As was to be expected, it was terrible, but wonderful. After Stingray, a lunatic with mommy issues, rapes his wife and she leaves him, he goes on a rampage, kidnapping and killing all women who look like his wife (turns out there were quite a few women in town who fit that bill). When a talented street fighter (Cynthia Rothrock) loses her sister to the deranged maniac, she makes it her mission to find him and bring him down. A cop who keeps bringing Rothrock in for fighting and disturbing the peace enlists her to fight her way to Stingray. That cop also knows martial arts. In fact, I'm pretty sure everyone in this film except for some high school jocks and the women who looked like Stingray's wife (wait, even one of them had some moves) were martial arts experts. That is a surprising amount of people in such a condensed area when you consider how many people you actually know who have mastered any martial arts (aside from getting a black belt in Karate in middle school). Doesn't matter. The script called for a town full of kung fu fighters, and that is what they got. It was the apposite ending to another fabulous bad movie night.

Bad Movie Night #1 - CATS

1. The Uninvited

'Uninvited' was the first of a triple feature this evening with the Bad Movie Club. For our first Bad Movie Club bad movie night, I decided to make it cat themed (mostly) and start the evening with Greydon Clark's horrendous tale about a cat that somehow has a demonic-looking smaller cat living inside of it that comes out and kills whoever it feels like (usually people who have wronged it or wronged someone who was nice to it). Meanwhile, some criminals with the potential to make loads of cash invite some young girls they've never met before to party on their boat, ostensibly to have a good time, but honestly just to give the authorities the impression that they're just fun-loving guys and girls having a party on a boat while they sail off to wherever it was they were planning on going. Those authorities aren't in the movie, so that is an unnecessary detail (like everything else in the movie). Anyway, the girls invite some other guys they have also never met before and one of those guys brings along the weird cat he just found and they all get on a boat heading nowhere in particular with strangers and an evil little cat creature. It was absolutely awful in such a good way. There were scenes that were clearly shot in someone's bathtub with black plastic trash bags lining the walls and a toy boat thrashing about in the water. Watching it with the Bad Movie Club was the only way to make a movie this terrible worth watching, and it was loads of fun. So I suggest getting a group of your friends together and forcing this film on them. If they still like you after it's over, you've got good friends.

2. The Carrier

The second film of the Bad Movie Club's inaugural bad movie night was the AID's scare analogy, 'The Carrier'. In it, a small town turns against each other after a furry bear-like creature scratched a man, infecting him with some sort of deadly virus that didn't effect him, but caused everything he touched to become infected as well. Anytime anyone touched anything that had been infected by the carrier, the thing melted the person's body parts and eventually the whole person. The town broke into two warring factions, half of them wearing white or light colored fabric over their heads and arms and the other half wearing all black. Someone discovered that cats were able to sniff out the infected objects, so cats became the most precious commodity of which both sides were willing to kill for. I didn't think 'The Carrier' was actually that bad of a movie (but bad enough, I suppose). Mostly it was just incredibly strange, and I liked it.

Oh yeah, and they had the creepiest Jesus statue ever.

3. The Intruder

The last film of the evening was the Indonesian film 'The Intruder', which was a blatant rip-off of the Rambo franchise. I'm not really sure what happened in this movie. People came and went with hardly any character development and I'm pretty sure some people who died came back later as different people. Most important though, is that the hero's name was John Rambu. Every time someone said the word Rambu we couldn't stop laughing. There was the part where Rambu's girlfriend gave him a red headband before he dove into the ocean, emerging to find his girlfriend killed by the bad guys who wanted Rambu dead and could have easily dispatched him then but chose to kill the girl instead for no good reason. Then there was a scene where Rambu organized a bunch of people in Mr. Bean cars to drive around shooting at other people. There was also a scene where a couple bad guys beat Rambu to a pulp and left him lying on the ground clearly defeated as they ran away exclaiming they were going to kill him. Oh, and he had a little ball that he threw at people and every time it bounced right back to him. Some trick! There were so many incomprehensibly stupid scenes that I really don't know what was going on. Rambu just showed up and killed a bunch of people who were supposedly criminals and I guess he saved the day from something. This film was spectacularly bad and deservedly fits in anyone's bad movie night.