The Ape Man (1943)

The Ape Man tries for straight horror, but yields more laughs, albeit all unintentional. Directed by the notorious William “One-Shot” Beaudine (Billy the Kid vs. Dracula), it stars Bela Lugosi as a renowned gland expert whose bizarre experiments have led him into hiding in his secret basement laboratory.

It seems he’s turned into a half-man/half-ape and sleeps in a cage with his trusty gorilla (one of the worst monkey suits the screen has seen). He doesn’t really look ape-like at all, resembling Grampa Teen Wolf more than anything else. Wishing to reverse his condition, Lugosi craves the fresh spinal fluid of the newly dead. He and his gorilla pal roam the streets at night so the ape can do the killing for him. A bunch of nosy reporters try to figure out who’s behind it all before more bodies are slain. Even at 64 minutes, it takes its damn sweet time getting there.

This is the kind of dreck that likely led Lugosi straight to Smack Central. But the worst (and yet best) thing about it is the end, when our hero reporter and his gal pal shutterbug look over at the creepy guy who’s been peering in windows the whole time (and looks like Conan O’Brien with a chromosome deficiency) and ask, “Hey, who are you?” The creepy guy turns to the camera and says, “Who, me? I’m the author of the story! Screwy idea, ain’t it?” and then rolls up his car window, on which is shoe-polished “THE END.”

You got that right: screwy, indeed! —Rod Lott

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National Lampoon’s Class Reunion (1982)

As I was painfully reliving the experience of watching National Lampoon’s Class Reunion, I felt a strange sense of déjà vu. Not because I remembered seeing it back when I was a wee child of the ’80s, but because it kept reminding me of another movie that really sucked.

“Hey,” I heard myself shout in my brain when the connection was finally made, “this is just like Slaughter High!”

A quick overview of the plots of the two films makes this clear as both are about a group of assholes whose class reunion at their closed-down high school is interrupted by a disgruntled former student whose life was ruined via a tasteless class prank. Space prevents me from listing the other ways the two films coincide, but at a certain point, I stopped keeping count.

The main difference between them is that Class Reunion was marketed as a straight comedy, which it constantly (and depressingly) attempts to be, while Slaughter High was marketed as a straight horror film, despite the fact that a combination of the filmmaker’s incompetence and contempt for the audience makes it play far more like an unsuccessful spoof than a typical slasher movie.

Made by what can charitably be described as the then-Lampoon’s B-company, the John Hughes-penned Class Reunion helps prove my two long-held beliefs that there is nothing worse than a bad slasher movie parody and that there is no such thing as a good slasher movie parody. Still, this is better than any National Lampoon movie that’s been made in the last decade. —Allan Mott

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Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010)

Disney had two high-profile, big-budget underperformers in the summer of 2010: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. Alfred Molina has supporting roles in both, making me think he and Disney have hatched some sort of punch-card deal. In Prince, he’s the swarthy sheik who serves as comic relief, with lines like “Did you know ostriches have suicidal tendencies?” and “Has anyone ever told you that you talk too much?”

The latter could be asked of the movie, which, like producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, tells very little story for a long feature. Based on a series of video games, Prince stars oft-shirtless and miscast Jake Gyllenhaal as Dastan, the titular royal himbo framed for the death of his father, the king — by poisoned robe, no less!

Dastan flees with Princess Tamina (Gemma Arterton) across the desert and encounter ostrich races, deadly snakes and guys with gloves that shoot spikes. He is quite the ace at hopping rooftops, performing rope tricks, and smiling and grunting. Whenever he effs up, he unleashes some magic sand in his magic dagger which reverses time for several seconds, resulting in a cool effect whose cost could keep Third World countries flush in white rice for years.

Between noisy action scenes of mild interest, boredom reigns and traipses a kajillion-dollar path of predictability. Likely under threat of death and/or contractual obligation, director Mike Newell utilizes Bruckheimer’s trademark golden hue, which always bugs me since I first saw it on Saturday-morning cereal ads. Those didn’t have Arterton, however, but even her stunning beauty isn’t worth weathering the sandstorm. —Rod Lott

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Surviving the Game (1994)

If you ever have a Fuck Whitey Film Festival, be sure to include Surviving the Game, a Most Dangerous Game update for the moviegoer who has both Men’s Journal and Soldier of Fortune sitting on his toilet tank.

Down on his luck following the death of his dog and an old coot he went Dumpster diving with, an overly dreadlocked homeless man (Ice-T) is hired by Rutger Hauer to be a hunting guide for him and his friends. The other hunters include Gary Busey, John C. McGinley and F. Murray Abraham, each tripping over the other in a rush to give the worst performance.

After an initial night of bonding in the cabin over a pork dinner — during which Busey repeatedly plays with a disembodied pig’s head, and you wonder if that was scripted — Ice-T gets a rude awakening (literally) as he learns he — not wild animals — is the intended prey. Despite the miles and miles of forest around them and not having hunting dogs, they always manage to know right where he is. After running for a while, Ice-T decides to turn the tables on them, and you can pretty much guess what happens from there. It involves little more than rock-throwing, rigging vehicles, jumping from trees and uttering bad quips.

Nutjob Busey has the film’s unintentionally greatest scene, giving a long speech about the time he wrestled a dog to the death, and he can’t get through a line of dialogue without throwing in an onomatopoeia. As Abraham’s son, William McNamara screams like a girl through the entire thing. The entire film is a hokey mess, with an utterly abbreviated ending (and unfortunately drawn-out beginning). —Rod Lott

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Last Woman on Earth (1960)

Just imagine the possibilities of a B-movie concerning two men vying for the affections of the last woman on earth. None of those possibilities are to be found in Roger Corman’s version, I’m sorry to say — not even if she were the Last Woman on Earth.

We first meet our trio during a Puerto Rican cockfight — with authentic mad-rooster footage! — the semi-lovely but wrinkly Betsy Jones-Moreland; shady hubby Anthony Carbone; and his lawyer, Robert Towne (yes, the Oscar-winning screenwriter, and he wrote this one, too). While the trio is scuba diving, everyone on land dies from a sudden lack of oxygen.

This leaves them lots of time to talk and eat and talk. The men start seeing each other as a threat, and Betsy as a prize. But all they do is talk and eat and talk.

There is one sequence I liked, when the Last Woman on Earth and her two dates roam the streets of Puerto Rico and see all the carnage. For a minute, it’s like they’re wandering through a George Romero film … only directed by Corman, y’know? You can skip it. —Rod Lott

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