I need to say a few words about the late Andy Sidaris (note the spelling–no relation to David Sedaris). Sidaris forged a successful career in television, including 25 years with ABC’s Wide World of Sports, before striking out on his own in his mid-50s to write, produce and direct a series of B-grade action movies which today are known collectively as the Triple-Bs (“Bullets, Bombs, and Babes”). All of his films followed a basic formula; Hard Ticket to Hawaii was the second of the series and probably the best of the lot.

Your typical Sidaris flick has a couple female heroines (usually former Playboy playmates), some over-the-top baddies with mullets, and a bunch of cool-if-unnecessary gadgets. Sidaris loves him some gadgets. This flick features a large, remote-controlled helicopter that is somehow integral to the plot. Why? Probably because Sidaris either owned it or knew someone who did. Lots of stuff in this movie (like the cross-dressing assassin) has the feel of “hey, I know a guy who can do x“). Oh, and it’s all set in Hawaii, probably because Hawaii’s a nice place to be when you’re indulging yourself.

The plot, such as it is, involves a smuggling ring operating in the Hawaiian islands and the efforts by agents of an unnamed government agency to thwart them. You don’t watch a for the plot but rather for the absurdities contained within. The fight scene below, whose entire conception is absurd yet delightful. The subplot involving a toxic snake, of which I dare not reveal more. The ludicrous subplot involving Sidaris playing a version of himself producing a football show. The random martial arts stuff, since it’s an '80s movie and they do that. The sublimely banal, badly-written dialogue. The cheerfully gratuitous nudity.

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I’ve referred to Dark Side of the Moon in several previous reviews, so it’s probably time it got its own. Let’s state the important things upfront: it’s a lesser rip-off of Alien, it’s 85 minutes but feels longer, and I’d pay real money to see the crowd reaction to it at B-Fest.

In a nutshell, in turns out that Satan has set up shop on the far side of the Moon, and is terrorizing ships which wander into an ill-defined corridor between the Earth and the Moon which corresponds to the Bermuda Triangle. There’s an involved, badly written, inappropriately scored scene involving the film’s hero and numerology which explains all this, to the mounting horror of cast and audience alike.

That out of the way, the film has a reasonable B-movie pedigree. Robert Sampson (Robot Jox, Re-Animator) plays the ship’s pilot. John Diehl (Stargate) is…some crewmember. Never doped out what he does. The great Joe Turkel (Blade Runner, The Shining) plays the computer operator/engineer.  The model work is better than expected. Possessed members of the crew have evil green eyes, which is overused but effective at times (especially Turkel). Even the ship’s “Mother” (Alien) rip-off, an android named Lesli, is an interesting take on the concept if underdeveloped.

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Following on from the screening of Creature, tonight’s selection provoked an argument five minutes in about who the hell selected it, and why. Liz having confessed to the deed, we moved on to speculating whether the entrails on-screen were real or especially good creature effects. Taking note of the quality of the entrails and the filming location (Spain) we decided they were real.

This is the first film by Deran Sarafian, who’s now chiefly known for his work on House, M.D. He’s come a long way. I learn from the credits that it was adapted from an original screenplay titled “Massacre at R.V. Park.” Aside from the lead characters (three American college students), everyone appears to be Spanish. Twenty minutes in as we watch a chicken meet its fate execution-style we suspect it was shot in Spain solely to get around American regulations. That or a tax dodge.

Anyway, what we’ve got here is a Spanish rip-off of The Andromeda Strain, but with an actual monster. On first glance this is a winning formula: enliven a portentous American film with additional action sequences and (one assumes) cheap exploitation. That’s what the Italians would have done. Instead the whole thing is weighed down by a badly-acted, badly-written subplot (main plot?) involving the three American students, including Lynn-Holly Johnson (as seen as James Bond’s spurned teenage love interest in For Your Eyes Only, another cringe-worthy performance). The other two are interchangeable brotards.

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It took two tries for Liz and me to watch this, according to Netflix. We don’t remember it; we definitely didn’t finish it. I don’t know why she wants to watch it; I’m just fascinated to see Klaus Kinski in a film not directed by Werner Herzog. The only other actor I recognize is Lyman Ward, one of those actors who just screams '80s (you saw him as Ferris Bueller’s dad). The director, William Malone, is new to me. This was his first feature; most of his later work is in television.

I’d like to welcome our readers to yet another Alien rip-off. I’ll give this one odds against Dark Side of the Moon; to cover the spread it needs something better than Satanic Joe Turkel. Doesn’t sound like much but it’s a standard. In this film the planet is Titan and the MacGuffin is some kind of cylinder that apparently has bad stuff in it. In a wrinkle, there are two greedy mining companies instead of one. There’s also a character who’s either an android or the ultimate frosty female security officer.

The opening effects work rips off 2001 and then doubles down by ripping off Blade Runner’s soundtrack. Some of the foley sound is ripped off from Star Wars. Why a freighter landing sounds like an X-wing is anyone’s guess. After a few shots in space we’re on Titan and into what I assume is a cinematographer’s nightmare: dark shadows, flashing lights, ground fog, and indistinct corners. For all I know this was a shot in the basement of Pardee Hall with the lights out (now there’s a plot). This is such a cheat and it drives me nuts. Aliens, which came out a year later, managed dark shooting while still showing stuff on screen. LV-426 was a brooding, menacing locale. This just looks cheap.

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The late Lord Blake, attacking the unenviable task of evaluating Benjamin Disraeli’s skill as a novelist, recalled the Oxford concept of the “alpha/gamma” grade. Long story short, a reviewer would award this grade when confronted with brilliance mixed with baffling incompetence.

That’s how I’m feeling about Millennium right now. The concept has similarities to the inferior Freejack (though it’s been years since I watched that): humans from the 30th century are retrieving people from airline crashes right before they die, leaving the flow of history uninterrupted. Our main characters are an NTSB investigator (Kris Kristofferson), an operative from the 30th century (Cheryl Ladd), and a physicist (Daniel J. Travanti, best known as Captain Furillo from Hill Street Blues).

Things are bad in the 30th century. The environment is severely degraded and all of humanity is barren. The people of the 30th century intend to use time travel to take people from the past who won’t be missed and then send them into a far future where the Earth is (presumably) more livable. That hangs together as far as that goes but I would think that a society which has mastered time travel could also master space travel and drop a colony somewhere. Pale blue dot and all that.

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This concludes a series of posts chronicling our difficult journey to the 2014 edition of B-Fest, the annual bad movie festival at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

We spent the whole day chasing a path to Chicago. All the improvisations between 10:20 AM and 4:35 PM were dedicated to catching the Capitol Limited, our best option. It eluded us. If we’d known that at 10:20, we’d have said the hell with it, canceled the outbound trip, booked Southwest out of Newark, and called it a day. Of course, you can’t know that. By the time we knew that the Northeast Regional (train 125) was delayed we were already in Metropark. This wasn’t avoidable. Also, we wouldn’t have been eligible for a full refund if we’d bailed out that early.

Next year it’s likely that we’ll fly out and take the train back. There’s more flexibility in flying out the day before; even if things go bad there are more options. Another possibility is the westbound Pennsylvanian. It departs New York around 10:40 AM and arrives in Pittsburgh at 8 PM. It has a guaranteed connection with the Capitol Limited, which arrives a minute before midnight. Four hours to kill in Pittsburgh isn’t awesome, but it’s time enough for a decent meal downtown.

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The B-movie credentials for Lifeforce are staggering. Director? Tobe Hooper (Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Poltergeist). Producers? Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus of the venerable Cannon Films, producers of countless first-run B-grade action flicks (a genre that doesn’t quite exist any more). “A Golan-Globus Production” always produces a lusty cheer at B-Fest. Dan O’Bannon (Alien) wrote the script. Henry Mancini does the score. It’s adapted from a book titled Space Vampires. Throw in Patrick Stewart, Peter Firth (Hunt for Red October), Michael Gothard (For Your Eyes Only) and you’ve got actors to work with.  Does it deliver?

In a word–yes. This is such an ’80s film: grand sets, bad hair, self-important people standing around pontificating, gratuitous (if tasteful) nudity, overuse of electrical effects. I liked it. The creature effects are excellent throughout. There’s a bunch of creepy weird stuff too. It’s not overwritten nor does it lag. It also gets credit for the proper use of “desiccated” in a feature film. Patrick Stewart has a limited role but he sells it as only he can.

It’s weird watching and realizing there was serious money involved. Reportedly Cannon put up $25 million–considerable for 1985–and got about half of it back at the box office. The money’s on the screen–the destruction of London in the third act is way more convincing than you’d expect–but the story is goofy. It’s something of a soul-collection plot, but on a totally different scale from Dark Side of the Moon or Ghost Ship, and definitely superior to the former.

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This is part of a series of posts chronicling our difficult journey to the 2014 edition of B-Fest, the annual bad movie festival at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

If you’re just joining I recommend reading the older posts first, so that you know how things got to this state. We’re now racing to BWI on a MARC commuter train, chasing the last Southwest flight to Chicago.

Jammed into a seat on a MARC bi-level surrounded by commuters isn’t the best way to purchase plane tickets, but sometimes life is shit. MARC delivered us to the BWI station a little before 6:00 PM, and we hopped the shuttle bus to the airport. Check-in and security went smoothly enough and after locating our gate we found a place to eat dinner while I booked a hotel in Chicago for the night. The flight would land at 9:25 and we’d be at the hotel before 11.

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This is part of a series of posts chronicling our difficult journey to the 2014 edition of B-Fest, the annual bad movie festival at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

In yesterday’s episode we were sitting in the cold at Metropark in Iselin, New Jersey, awaiting a late Northeast Regional (train 125), our connection to the Capitol Limited in Washington, D.C.

125 arrives at 1:40 PM, one hour and 35 minutes late. Its projected arrival in DC is 4:10, five minutes after the Capitol Limited departs. I’m not sanguine. Our chances hinge on 125 making up an unbelievable amount of time and/or Amtrak holding the Capitol Limited until we arrive.

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This is part of a series of posts chronicling our difficult journey to the 2014 edition of B-Fest, the annual bad movie festival at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

When you last left us, we had bailed out of a badly-delayed Trans-Bridge Lines bus at the Newark Airport with the intention of hopping a train down to Metropark to catch up our Amtrak Northeast Regional (train 125) coming down from New York.

This plan unraveled almost immediately. We arrived at the AirTrain station around 10:30 in a bit of a rush. Two New Jersey Transit trains were scheduled to reach Metropark ahead of 125. One departed at 11:00 AM, the other at 11:30. The second train would be cutting things a bit fine (~10 minutes). Newark advertises four-minute headways on the AirTrain, and it’s about a 10-minute trip from Terminal A to the train station.

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