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!
The Day Time Ended (1979)
I hope you like images of stars in space — because that’s the first three minutes of The Day Time Ended, an early Charles Band production in which a family living on a desert ranch in California finds strange things afoot after three supernovas explode and the light is absorbed by their abode’s solar paneling.
First off, the requisite annoying little girl finds a glowing green pyramid thing behind the barn and thinks nothing of it because she’s a selfish bitch whose one-track mind is dead-set on her new pony. This leads to bathroom lights and faucets turning themselves on and off, and soon the nighttime appearance of a 3-inch-high stop-motion alien who dances and flitters about the cabinets and bedding.
Then there’s a poorly matted spaceship that chases them through the house, and ultimately, as the title promises, time ends. Or rather, the family just gets warped into the future, on the outskirts of the city of tomorrow, and for some reason, this suits them just fine.
For us, however, it’s a whole other story — namely, one that can’t believe how director John “Bud” Cardos could follow up the greatness of Kingdom of the Spiders with dumb ol’ crap like this. —Rod Lott
Grease 2 (1982)
I’ve spent far too much time trying to come up with reasons why I enjoy Grease 2 so much more than its overrated originator. Sometimes I think it’s because I like Michelle Pfeiffer a lot more than Olivia Newton-John, but then I compare Adrian Zmed to John Travolta and that theory goes out the window.
Sometimes I think it’s because I prefer the music, but then I realize I can name so many more songs from the first film than I can from the second. Sometimes I think it’s because Maxwell Caulfield was so dreamy back then, but then I remember that I’m a totally macho heterosexual he-man who likes girls and boobs and stuff like that.
The film itself isn’t that much different than the first one, except in Grease 2, the innocent foreign exchange student is a dude (Caulfield) and the tough-but-sexy greaser is a chick (Pfeiffer). Like his cousin Sandy, Caulfield decides he has to slut it up to get the romantic attention he desires, so he buys a motorcycle and some tight leather clothes. Getting in his way is Zmed, Pfeiffer’s ex-boyfriend and current leader of the T-Birds.
Maybe it’s just because I’ve always been a fan of the underdog and resent how much Grease 2 has gotten picked on since it was first released. Sure, it kinda sucks, but it kinda sucks for all the same reasons Grease kinda sucks, and I’m pretty certain that Grease kinda sucks just that little bit more. —Allan Mott
42nd Street Forever Volume 5: Alamo Drafthouse Cinema (2009)
If you’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing a movie at Austin, Texas’ Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, then you know what to expect from the fifth entry in Synapse Films’ 42nd Street Forever compilation series: namely, some of weirdest and wildest trailers and other pre-show miscellany unknown to mankind. After Chuck Heston takes time out from his tennis game to explain the MPAA ratings system, the hour-and-a-half fun gets started, roughly organized into categories like martial arts, sex, sci-fi, action, movies with black people in them and super-shitty children’s films.
Highlights include Lucky Seven, full of kid ninjas with names like Little Fatty and Bumpkin; Birds Do It, Bees Do It, David L. Wolper’s animal-fucking doc with a kangaroo fetus crawling up its mama; Chatterbox, the infamous “talking vagina” comedy; Danish Love Acts, which shows just that; and Caged Virgins, which will make you wonder, “Hey, why is there a bat on her bush?”
Italian actioners and/or James Bond rip-offs abound, as do boobs, especially in Jack Hill’s Sorceress and Stacey!, which established Andy Sidaris’ trademark 60 JPH (jugs per hour) formula. Oddly, some of the strangest trailers are for the few comedies, such as The 3 Supermen in the West (man, I’d kill a hobo for a box set of this slapstick superhero series); a musical number for Putney Swope, Robert Downey Sr.’s race satire in the ad world; and Norman … Is That You?, in which Redd Foxx copes with the realization that his son is gay, and Wayland Flowers and Madame are in it, for some unexplained reason. Probably the gayness.
It’s hard to believe any youngster ever wanted to see The Magic Christmas Tree — “and to add to the fun,” says the narrator, “there’s a happy witch! The runaway lawn mower!” — or Pinocchio’s Birthday Party. But I can imagine they’d go apeshit for the Tarzan knock-off Karzan, Master of the Jungle, not to mention a crispy, piping-hot Flavos Shrimp Roll! Mmm-mmm! —Rod Lott
Dumplings (2004)
Wow. Just wow.
Set in contemporary Hong Kong, Dumplings is the story of Mrs. Li, a former TV star who is married to a man 15 years her senior. She’s 35 and he lost interest long ago in favor of his 20-something secretary/bimbo.
To regain her youth, Mrs. Li begins a regimen of eating dumplings — bite-sized, meat-filled, dough-covered — cooked by Aunt Mei, who appears to be in her early 30s. The dumplings are reputed to restore one’s youth, vigor and sexual attractiveness. Mrs. Li is at first repulsed by the lumps of dumps floating in broth, and we become so as well as hints begin to drop as to just what the meat in the concoction is. Aunt Mei — who, we discover, was 20 in 1960 — is a former nurse with a straight line to mainland China, where abortions are still performed in the thousands.
Written by Pik Wah Li (under the name Lillian Lee), who wrote the novel on which Farewell My Concubine was based, and directed by Fruit Chan, the film is — on the surface — about a power struggle between two women. Under the surface, it’s a biting revelation of how the rich, beautiful and powerful use the poor, pitiful and helpless. As Marie Antoinette said, “Let ‘em eat jiaozi.”
This one is as disturbing as any movie you’re likely to see unless you go so far underground even we won’t follow you. —Doug Bentin