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.