Can you guess what movie or TV show we’re watching? We’ve turned on subtitles (when available) not to give you a clue, but to enhance that WTF effect! Leave your best guess in the comments to prove your true Flick Attackosity!
Sextette (1978)
Sextette is the cruelest motion picture I’ve seen, both to its leading lady and to its audience, neither of whom come away unscathed. In retrospect, the entire movie feels like a pre-cursor to Bobcat Goldthwait’s Windy City Heat, in which the victim is a poor, deluded old woman too feeble to understand how foolish she is being made to seem. It’s a massive assault on our collective dignity that could have been avoided if only one person at the time had the balls to speak the plain truth.
Based on a play she wrote decades earlier, the legendary Mae West portrays Marlo Manners, the world’s most celebrated movie star, who has famously married every man she slept with. Her latest hubby is a pre-007 Timothy Dalton, who has taken her to a very prestigious hotel to celebrate their honeymoon. Before they can consummate their marriage, the two are constantly interrupted by terrible musical numbers (including one with Alice Cooper!) and a legion of Marlo’s ex-husbands, all of whom are desperate to have her back.
Looking at least two decades older than her 84 years, neither West, her castmates nor the filmmakers ever acknowledge the absurdity of the film’s premise, which only makes it that much more pathetic and sad. It also doesn’t help that the thought of she and Dalton actually fucking is so repellent, the viewer cannot help but get anxious every time they embrace — making the film scarier and more tension-provoking than any horror movie ever made. —Allan Mott
Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010)
After being absent from the Resident Evil franchise director’s chair since the 2002 original, Paul W.S. Anderson returned for the fourth, Resident Evil: Afterlife, the first in 3-D. It’s a definite improvement over Apocalypse and Extinction, but still well below the sheer coolness factor of the first.
One problem is that Anderson has overestimated viewers’ previous knowledge of the franchise mythos. I’ve tried to wipe my mind of the awfulness that was Extinction, so while I was wowed at Afterlife‘s opening sequence of numerous Milla Jovoviches — Jovovi? — laying waste to the Umbrella Corporation’s underground Tokyo headquarters, I was lost as to why and how she had all these clones.
The film is more of the same, with Alice (Jovovich) defying gravity and kicking ass, saving friends from the occasional threat of zombies with mouths that open to reveal vagina dentata thingies. Here, she reunites with her Extinction pals, including lithe Ali Larter, hiding atop a big tower. Wentworth Miller is there in a cage, which is kinda funny considering he spent four years breaking out of them on TV’s Prison Break. (You’re right, it’s not funny.) There’s also Asian Guy, Sleazy Producer, Bald Tuffie, Hot Brunette, Not Scout Taylor-Compton and Evil Sunglasses Guy Who Shops at Big & Tall & Matrixy.
And don’t forget the zombie Dobermans! It’s weird how everyone in this movie responds to being shot at the same way: doing a backflip. It’s so predictable, that I’d just fake a straight shot and then aim high. Then the series would be over. I was excited that sexy Sienna Guillory was returning as Jill Valentine from Apocalypse, but she gets one scene, and it’s buried in the end credits. Oh, well, Resident Evil: Whatever 5 Will Be Called, perhaps. —Rod Lott
Sick Nurses (2007)
If you’re like me, you poor bastard, the title of this flick alone will land it in your Netflix queue. Then there’s the poster, depicting a pair of sexy, blood-spattered nurses. To hell with the queue — this one’s for instant streaming.
Sick Nurses is a horror film from Thailand and if the action took place in the real world, it would make very little sense. We’re in a hospital that seems to house no patients — just a half-dozen hot young nurses and one doctor who make a living harvesting and selling body parts. When one of the nurses who thinks the doctor is hers exclusively finds out that he is going to marry her pregnant sister, she cracks up and threatens to reveal their illegal operation. The other nurses kill her and, on the seventh day after her death, she returns to enact her revenge on everyone.
At this point, this goofy little film gets a bit more serious as directors Piraphan Laoyont and Thodsapol Siriwiwat go all surreal with the visuals. The hospital’s empty halls stop looking like ways to keep the budget down and start looking like corridors of the mind where bad things, and only bad things, ooze out of the walls or float along the ceiling.
But the quasi-artsy imagery never completely overcomes the over-the-top quality. What began as a camp comedy becomes a camp black comedy with lots of gore, long streaming hair and garter belts. —Doug Bentin
Can’t Stop the Music (1980)
For all of its cultural infamy, Allan Carr’s disco fiasco Can’t Stop the Music reminds us of one important thing: Valerie Perrine really hated to wear clothes. I say this because even though the film was rated PG and she spends most of her onscreen time surrounded by gay dudes, she still manages to somehow flash her moneymakers in front of the camera.
For many heterosexual male viewers, this probably amounts to the film’s lone highlight, but count me amongst the minority who are willing to defend Carr’s folly. For all of its faults (supreme tackiness, nonsensical scripting, Bruce Jenner in cut-offs and a half-shirt, the fact that none of the gay dudes are actually portrayed as being gay dudes, Steve Guttenberg), the film has a cheerful innocence and lack of cynicism that harks back to the old “Let’s put on a show in the barn!” musicals of the ’30s and ’40s.
A fictional look at the creation of The Village People, the film features Perrine as a retired supermodel who decides to use her industry connections to propel her composer roommate, Guttenberg, to the top of the charts. The two of them decide to throw together a group of colorful locals — a collection of “village people,” if you will — and happily discover that they combine to make sweet, if bland, danceable pop.
And somehow the future stepfather of those Kardashian babes gets involved. I’m still not sure why, but it probably has something to do with those cut-offs. —Allan Mott