Beach Blanket Zombie. Mark McLaughlin
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a potbelly, a bald spot, halitosis and a dead-end job? So doesn’t all that make Marla a bit of a monster, making male and female victims alike feel like crap, spreading a loathsome epidemic of low self-esteem?” If that ain’t a monster, I don’t know what is.
It is amusing, though, to see Marla strutting around in buckskin pants, shooting rifles and punching varmints. Sidewinder Sally’s more of a man than my weak-chinned, drunken Daddy ever was.
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No. 5 and Directed by a Hideous Moron:
Baby Schnookums of Arabia (1998)
I wasn’t sure what to make of this one... I’m not much of a history buff, but I’m vaguely aware of the existence of some soldier or diplomat or whatnot named Lawrence of Arabia, who used to have real-life intrigues somewhere in the Middle East. Arabia, I imagine. But why make a kid’s movie—a feature-length cartoon with an orchestral score and everything—about his baby brother? And by baby, we’re talking diaper, pacifier, the works. Baby Schnookums toddles off into the desert to have hee-haw-larious adventures with asps and mummies and guys with swords. He eventually joins up with a talking flying carpet named Ruggles and a baby camel named Humphrey. Momsy used to ride camels on her safaris. Elephants, too. Momsy was quite the hunter. I once went with her on one of her hunting trips and she bagged three lions and some kind of enormous pig. She’d hunted in that part of Africa before—the local guides call her ‘Insane Death Goddess.’
But back to the movie. All the symbols on the walls in the pyramid scenes were wrong. I know a bit about hieroglyphics, and the curse above the entrance of the tomb in the movie was supposed to say: HE WHO ENTERS THIS TOMB MUST PAY THE TERRIBLE PRICE. But actually it said: BEETLE BIRD BEETLE, GUY-POINTING-LEFT, BIRD BIRD, BEWARE OF CROCODILES, BEETLE BEETLE BIRD, PHARAOH STINKS.
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No. 4, Hideous and Slightly Splendid:
Don’t Look in the Crawlspace (1972)
Why do some houses even have crawlspaces? Like any normal kid, I grew up in a lovely big mansion, with occasional trips to the summer house, and neither of those places had any dark old smelly crawlspaces, as far as I know. People were meant to live in airy, palatial surroundings, not stuffy burrows. To my notion, a house without pillars just isn’t a house. It’s a shack. I have no idea why some people live in trailers. A house on wheels? That’s just wrong. I refuse to set foot in a house on wheels. It could roll off a cliff or something. The house in this movie doesn’t have wheels, but it does have cannibals living in its dark, wet hidey-holes. And they cook their victims in a cave below the house—they don’t just eat them raw. So they do have some class, though they don’t bother with a recipe. Ideally, human flesh should be served dotted with cloves, slow-roasted and generously brushed with either a ginger glaze or plum sauce. Or so I hear.
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No. 3, Equally Hideous and Splendid:
Living Dead in the Horror Museum of Wax (1988)
I found this Franco-Italian horror opus altogether intriguing. True, they set it in a fictional town—Hellwich, which sounds like a terrible sandwich—in Massachusetts, and it was painfully clear that the writers and director had never been to America, let alone New England. Nights in Massachusetts don’t echo with the chatter of monkeys and the snarls of lions. Men in bars don’t cry out, “More ale, serving wench!” But still, the movie makes up for those weensy flubs by being wonderfully energetic and creepy. The zombies prowl the town by night, then just before dawn, they go back into the museum, dip themselves in a vat of molten wax, and then stumble to their displays and harden into encased figures to be on show during the day. Then at the end of the day, they break out of their wax and the hunchbacked museum janitor cleans up all the broken wax and throws the chunks back into the vat.
One thing I don’t understand is this: molten wax is pretty hot, right? And the zombies immerse themselves in it. Wouldn’t the zombies be cooked by now? But then, maybe evil supernatural creatures are more heat-resistant. They’re built to endure the flames of Hell—so what’s a little molten wax?
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No. 2, Hideous With Lots of Prehistoric Splendor:
Dracula, 10,000 B.C. (1964)
A vampire caveman! It sounds like a stupid idea, but I loved it. Plus, the part of Drah-Ku-Lah is played by Tony Carpelli, a very handsome Italian actor with just a touch of a lazy eye, and I’ve always thought there was something really sexy about a lazy eye. Years and years ago, my sister Taffy had a boyfriend with a lazy eye. He was German, a foreign exchange student named Klaus, and he and I used to spend entire afternoons taking nature walks in the timber behind the summer house. Well, we told people they were nature walks. Last I heard, Klaus became a spy, but not a very good one, because he was caught and he’s in a Siberian prison now.
Cave-vampire Drah-Ku-Lah terrorizes a bunch of Neanderthals and it’s up to Von-Hel-Sing, the really smart caveman who’s a little higher on the evolutionary scale, to save the day. The dinosaurs look pretty fake, and I really don’t think dinosaurs and cavemen lived at the same time, but still, you really can’t have a caveman movie without a few dinosaurs. I mean, the prehistoric world without dinosaurs would be pretty boring. Just a bunch of cavemen fighting pigs and monkeys and big rats. Who wants to see that? My favorite part is when Drah-Ku-Lah bites the pterodactyl and then the pterodactyl turns into a vampire. A few minutes later, it flies into a big tree and a branch spears it through the heart, so it doesn’t have time to turn any of the other dinosaurs into vampires. I wonder how Klaus is doing in Siberia? I’d send him a sweater, but that would just make the other prisoners jealous.
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No. 1, Tremendously Hideous and Deliciously Splendid:
Horror in der Haus (2003)
This direct-to-video horror movie is a complete mish-mash. A sixtyish voodoo queen living in a ghetto befriends an extremely old German guy living by himself in a big spooky house surrounded by an electrified fence. In the house is a locked door with the metal letters K.K. nailed to it, and the doorknob always has an icicle hanging from it. That may seem like an especially odd detail, but trust me, it works into the plot eventually. The old guy turns out to be a mad Nazi scientist doing experiments in longevity, and he’s about a hundred and twenty years old. He has a lock of Hitler’s hair in a little jar, and he keeps trying to clone it into a full-grown Adolf, but the hair-guck that Hitler used had corrupted the DNA. So he tricks the voodoo queen into turning the hair into the person it used to be, telling her that it was a precious lock from his dear departed wife. The voodoo queen takes pity, whips out her big book of spells and works some magic on that evil snip of hair.
So, Adolf Hitler is born again, and not just as a baby—he’s all grown up, moustache and all, and speaking English with a thick German accent, so I guess the voodoo queen must have thrown in a linguistic spell. From this point on, the movie just gets more and more ridiculous. Eventually Hitler becomes a rapper, Big H, who sets his rants to a hip-hop beat. Did Hitler have any sort of musical talent? I guess the voodoo queen threw in a music spell, too. Big H makes everybody in the hood think he’s their friend, but needless to say, that’s all one big lie. He steals the voodoo queen’s book of spells and raises all his old Nazi buddies from Hell, and soon they’re goose-stepping through the streets, up to all their old nastiness again.
Then the director tries to play a tune on our heart-strings. By this time, the elderly Nazi has fallen in love with the voodoo queen. He sees the error of his ways, so he decides to become a good guy and stop reborn Hitler. In a movie this stupid, anything can happen, and while I don’t want to give away the ending, I will tell you that the K.K. on that door stands for Kris Kringle—yes, even jolly old Santa Claus gets caught up in the whole confusing, catastrophic brouhaha. This movie is like a massive ten-car accident: it’s not pretty, but you really do need to have a peek, just to see how sickening it was.
The world is full of great movies, good movies, mediocre movies and poorly made movies. But truly bad movies are like two-headed calves: rare, strange, loathsome and miraculous. So visit your local video store, rent some