Hey, anyone interested in an okayish mild-horror time filler designed to get everyone involved paid and some time on the SyFy Channel filled? Well, do I have a very middle-of-the-road bit of inoffensive tepid entertainment for you! Because much like the real world of bulk movie production, not everything you haven’t heard of can be joyfully bad or outrageously crazy. A lot of it just does the job it’s supposed to.
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This had an enigmatic title, came from a noted Italian genre director, is being marketed under the normal quite crazy Shameless banner, and had a synopsis that sounded rather spicy. So as I was in the mood to try out something with a bit more European flavour than normal, and it didn’t look like yet another giallo slasher, it was worth a punt.
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Metamorphoses (Japanese: 星のオルフェウス, Hepburn: Hoshi no Orufeusu, “Orpheus of the Stars”) is a 1978 Japanese animated anthology film, produced by Sanrio. Directed by Takashi Masunaga and based on Ovid’s book of the same name, it took 3 years and 170 Hollywood animators to make. But that bombed, so 7 minutes were trimmed, a Peter Ustinov narration got added, and the whole thing got re-edited around a disco soundtrack. Did that pull its fat out of the fire? Well…
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As is the tradition, the final movie of 2022 put through the Trash or Treasure group watching was the Christmas-themed low-budget shonk-fest with the craziest premise that could be found. This time we were promised monster elves, Nazis, and some chap called Dan Haggerty. There was also the prospect of impressive hairdos, because it’s from the late 80s and that Ozone Layer wasn’t going to massacre itself.
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Apparently, the title of this film was chosen as people kept on mistaking the original 1997 film by writer/director Michael Cooney for the 1998 Michael Keaton film also called Jack Frost. That was a touching romantic comedy, the one we’re interested in is a nonsense story about a killer snowman. Then again, both of the snowmen on the covers look sinister and I haven’t seen either of them so maybe they are as interchangeable as Hallmark movies. Continue reading
When the credits start and you see the same name, in this case, Harry Bromley-Davenport, for the producer, director, writer, and composer roles it is traditional in psychotronic circles to brace yourself for impact. In the case of this sci-fi horror fever dream, it won’t do you any good, as its wanton disregard for explaining itself to the likes of its audience means you are just not going to be ready for this face-thumper.
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As a long-time reader of The Fortean Times, and having a general interest in the more esoteric bits of social history, I was keen to find out what this dramatization of the Cottingley Fairies story would be like. I could remember it making some noise when it first came out, but that was mostly because it was a British costume drama that had some bits of CGI in it rather than because it was a great film. So I was also curious if was going to be bogged down with The Great British Worthiness that meant we had tried to pretend we never had a genre cinema industry after the 70s. Continue reading
This film was picked based purely on having a nifty title, a 50/50 rating on Amazon Prime, and there being zombies in it. It was a gamble, and it absolutely did not pay off because this is one of the worst films I’ve seen in a long time. I often used to say “I can’t remember the worst movie I’ve ever seen, because it was so dull that I forgot it”; this is simply not the case, as the unending dullness of this has seared itself into my mind forever. It’s a bad zombie movie, a bad plague movie, and just outright unenjoyable.
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If some films have red flags you can see a mile off, this film has enough for a United Communist Countries parade. Firstly it was written, directed, filmed, scored, and edited by one person; Richard Winer. Secondly, it was mostly used as a promotional vehicle for, specifically a regional amusement park (Pirates World in Florida). Thirdly, about half of it is made up for repurposed footage from another project, bulking the two out to something that can hit the magical 90 minutes run time marker. Combined, and the results should be terrible. Well, they are. But underneath that, there is a layer of amazing that no one, including the makers, intended there to be.
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We finally reach the third and final part of the “Class of…” series of movies, with the Class of 2001. Well, the release title is ‘Class of 1999 II: The Substitute’, but that’s awful and the producers were cowards, so I’m just ignoring that. They also forgot to get Mark Lester involved, other than presumably the cashing of a nice cheque, but it’s still got enough markers of the original two to make this into a semi-coherent trilogy. Continue reading
Trash or Treasure 