Every Movie I have Watched This Year

As an exercise in futility here's every movie I watched in 2006. - Boy do I watch a load of shit.

January:

1. The Final Curtain
2. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
3. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
4. Underworld
5. Don Juan De Marco
   
6. Schweigende Stern, Der
7. Career Girls
8. Night of the Blood Beast (MST3000 version)
9. L'Appartement

February

1. Dark Star - One of THE best low budget SF films.
2. Hercules Against The Moon Men - Italian muscleman Sword and Sorcery epics. Just the sort of thing you need when you are too tired to think - and don't want to, even by accident
3. Markens grøde - Norwegian silent movie with live orchestral accompaniment. Lovely way to spend a wet Sunday afternoon in Fort William (and I get to pop the cherry of another movie on IMDb.com Wahaay!)
4. Thunderbirds are GO! - erm... Merriole bought it for me.
5. Rebecca - The perfect Sunday afternoon ... (moved to Wednesday night because the kids got in the way.)
6. The Pillow Book - Ewan McGregor is no better an actor naked than when he has his clothes on but I sat there entranced for 2 hours as people painted Japanese poems on each other and did other totaly arty Peter Greenaway stuff for no apparent reason.
7. Laserblast - Mystery Science Theatre 3000 went out with a goody with this one. Awful! Awful! Awful!
   

March

1. Abraxis, Guardian of the Universe - almost as bad as the title suggests. One IMDB review recommends it only to "the most disciplined bad movie watcher". That's me, folks.
2. Pieces of April - Nearly gave up on it after the first 10 minutes but persevered because I like Oliver Platt's acting. By the end I was in tears.
   

April

1. Red Zone Cuba - MST3K version
2. The Wild World of Batwoman - MST3K version ("END! END! END!")
3. Attack of the Giant Leeches - MST3K version
4. Manos Hands of Fate - MST3K
5. Missile to the Moon -
   
6. Earth Vs The Flying Saucers - Big budget crap 50s SF, so not as much fun as low/no budget crap SF movies of the period
7. Planet Outlaws - Which made even less sense the second time I watched it.
8. Boggy Creek 2- MST3K
9. Teenagers From Outer Space - MST3K (though, for my sins, I have seen it straight.)
10. Gunslinger - MST3K (and it's only the 9th of April today!)
11. Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders - Some people should have to apply for a licence to make movies. MST3K
12. Shoot or Be Shot - Lo No Budget movie starring Larry (Clash of the Titans) Hamlin and William Shatner. How could I resist?
    
13. Mitchell - A Jo Don Baker movie to be avoided at all costs (oxymoron! oxymoron!) MST3K

May

1. La Fille de D'Artangan - A great swashbuckling romp! My four stars may be overdoing it a bit as it's the first movie I have seen for ages that hasn't involved robots in some form or other but great fun all the same.
2. Eegah! - again! This time with the MST3K bots!
3. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians - That's it. No more trash. I have got to the bottom of the barrel and licked it clean. I'm cured. I'll finally get round to watching Rashomon, La Strada and The Seven Samuri next. Honest!

June

1. It Came From Outer Space 2 - I am ashamed. I have no will power. Just when I thought I had this thing beaten Channel 5 tempted me with this piece of shit. I'm an addict.
2. Adaptation- Did it! Pity the movie wasn't better. this has been on my TBW pile for so long and I've really been looking forward to it.

July

1. Jump Cut (Another fucking awful no-budget movie about no-budget movie making. Probably the worst of its kind - and that is saying something.)
2. Tony Takitani - (I got to see a grown-up movie in a cinema!)
3. Di Que Si - Unfunnily, unromantic (but Spanish) RomCom remarkable only for the lead actress' extraordinary tongue exercises in one scene.
4. Powers of Evil - which turned out to be two thirds of Histoires Extraordinaires, a 1968 portmanteau film based on Edgar Allan Poe stories and directed by Fellini Vadim and - well, the bits I got were directed by Fellini and Vadim, the third section, directed by Louise Malle, was edited out of this version. On the plus side it did have, an all too brief, shot of Jane Fonda in a bath being naughty with another woman, which, if truth be told, is the sort of thing I was hoping for when I bought it...
5. Bartlelby - strange, slow, creepy, funny beautiful film based on a Melville short story.
6. Star Wreck In The Pirkinning - The ultimate (so far) piece of fan fiction. A 90+ minute SF movie, downloadable from here, which pits the Star Trek universe against the Babylon 5. Given my fondness for the latter and loathing of nearly all things former, the sort of thing that should be just up my street. As it was, it was surprisingly watchable. The SFX were stunning for a lo/no budget film and there were some genuinely funny gags in it, but the story and script were, for the most part, atrocious. The first movie I have ever seen with left justified subtitles. Made in Finland.
7. The Sender - I must stop buying 97p DVDs from Tescos, I must stop buying 97p DVDs from Tesco's, I must stop buying 97p DVDs from Tesco's...
8. The Stranger - ...but paying £1 for them in Poundland is obviously worth it.

August

1. Return of the Killer Tomatoes - and yes, I am ashamed. (It was funny!)
2. The Silent Partner - Long forgotten, not bad, bank heist thriller with Elliot Gould and Christopher Plummer.
3. A Touch of Class - Glenda Jackson and George Segal. Not as good as I remembered it being 20 years ago, but still fun.
4. Love and Death - Woody Allen. Over the years I have slowly and sadly lost any enjoyment I ever found in Woody Allen's films. Were they ever really that funny or did people just pretend they were? The low point of this one for me was the joke about the old priest saying the best thing about life was 12 year old blonde girls - "prefererably two at a time". Oh dear.
5. Shadowchaser: The Gates of Time - Total "SF" shit
6. Interruptions - Zero budget unfunny home movie with pretensions.
7. Rollercoaster - Mad bomber on a roller-coaster. Beats Snakes on a Plane as a concept hands down - having said that I haven't seen Snakes on a Plane but my initial thought was. Snakes on the plane? Snakes are reptiles. Lower the cabin temperature and all the snakes will just go to sleep. End of movie. Goodnight.
8. Zelig - Another Woody Allen movie and I liked it! Never seen it before and I thought it was delightful. Aha! I think, maybe I was wrong about WA! (see Love and Death above) so I started to watch Stardust Memories which was on the same tape immediately afterwards - and turned it off after 15 minutes. What a load of self indulgent tosh! No. I can't stand the man. He can write; he can direct but there is something creepily narcissistic about him on screen. He was hardly in Zelig, and even then mostly in long shot and not speaking. I will look and see if he has written/directed but not appeared in anything else and test my theory.
9. The Owl and the Pussycat - I seem to have this 1970s George Segal groove going on in the movie watching at the moment. Whatever happened to George Segal?
10. The Changeling - Genuinely creepy Haunted House movie that starts out badly, gets better, and is just working up a good head of creepy steam when it looses the plot (by having to have one), then gets silly.
11. The Incredibles - Great Fun!
12. The Touch of Satan - The last unwatched MST3K Phoebe and Tyler bought over in the summer. What a bad film. Took me two nights to watch it as I kept falling asleep.
13. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country - Which kept my eyes (but not my brain) busy as I ate a litre of ice cream and deeply deepened my loathing of all things Trekky.

September

1. Spiders - 99p from Tesco's. Giant, semi-alien, homophageous spiders. Plucky Girl Reporter. Evil government agents. Total crap. (Except for the bit where the cute PGR fell into a convenient and unexplained vat of water with very few clothes on and got very wet, that was mildly interesting for a few moments.)
2. Solaris - The American version. Why, with so many almost good, or nearly good movies crying out to be remade and done properly, does Hollywood keep on remaking classic masterpieces that don't need fiddling with? (Note to self: Stop asking yourself that; it's the money dimwit, it's always about the money.) This wasn't as bad as I was expecting.
3. The League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse - I remembered Film 4 was now free! No Legs Akimbo in the movie; I am bereft!
4. Bellville Rendez-Vous - Great film. Came with a free newspaper! (which I didn't read).
5. I don't normally include part watched films but, because I'm sodding off on tour for a while, and because no one reads this anyway, I just wanted to put on record that I, in total brain-dead, trash-candy mode, gave up on Maniac Nurses Find Ecstasy after about 10 minutes. There is some hope for me.
6. The Road to Wellville - Not as funny as I remember it being.
7. Catwoman - Even worse than I had been lead to believe.

October

1. Uchûjin Tokyo ni arawaru (or Spacepeople Appear in Tokyo to give it its informal literal English title) - To make a change from the crap German SF I am reading at the moment I thought I would see what the other former WW2 Axis power could throw at me in the way of bad SF. Giant Klu-Klux-Klan starfish from Earth's twin counterworld warning us about a rogue planet "from another galaxy" on a collision course.
2. Berlin Express - a not very good Jacques Tourneur movie I bumped into on the FTA Movies4Men channel. I will watch anything Tourneur directed at least once. Anyone who made Cat People and The Comedy of Terrors and Night of the Demon has to be worth a look. (Too many links, Mr JunkMonkey) Groovy! Movies4Men is showing Hell Squad tomorrow. It isn't directed by Tourneur but looks awful:
   

   "In order to rescue the son of a diplomat who has been kidnapped by terrorists, a group of Las Vegas showgirls undergo commando training and organize a rescue operation. 1987."

   Looks awful! I must run a tape under it! (Later: Merriol cocked up taping it, so I'll have to wait till next time it's on. Bugger.)
3. King of Kong Island - If you're looking for a zero budget Italian movie about a mad scientist planning to take over the world with radio-controlled gorillas but who is foiled by a hunk who can't act (or dance) while the camera pans, and zooms in on stationary objects, almost at random. Then this is the movie for you. No King No Kong and set on the mainland. My brain hurts.
4. Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome - 1947 B feature with Boris Karlof. I love Karloff movies; he's such a ham. No matter how many movies he made, and he was still acting up until 1972, he's still basically doing the same silent movie acting he was in 1919). And no matter how evil, or what nationality his character is supposed to be, he still can't get rid of the underlying fact that he's an English gentleman at heart.
5. Blood Tide - Which, I suspect, was only made to prove the waiting world that Greece could make really bad international cast 'horror' movies too. Though the sight of James Earl Jones delivering lines from Othello while wearing a snorkel was a moment of genius. The only decent shot in the movie was nicked from the utterly weird Carnival of Souls.
6. From Russia With Love - It was on the telly. I was knackered.

November

1. Cast Away - The bits with Tom Hanks on the Island were OK but Dear God! the third act! what a tedious drawn out piece of shit!
2. Green For Danger - I just love Alistair Sim. I could watch him reading the phone book - to himself.
3. The Lavender Hill Mob - amazingly, the first time I have ever seen it.
4. School For Scoundrels - Alisair Sim wonderfully stealing an otherwise mediocre British 'comedy'.
5. Amateur - Dir. Hal Hartley. Never seen any of his films before this. I think I may turn into a fan very quickly.
6. The Jerk - sorry but it is funny.
7. Le Bossu - Swashbuckling nonsense with subtitles, dashing dukes, scheming villains, beautiful heiresses in mortal danger. Dumas with knobs on. Great fun.
8. M*A*S*H - R.I.P. Robert Altman. You were one of the greats.
9. Total Reality - mind-numbing SF trash (it cost me 12.5p in a car boot sale - I bought 4 movies for 50p - and I feel ripped off.)
10. The Last Patrol - A Dolf Lundgren, post-apocalyptic Mad Max influenced Israeli American B-movie which turned out to be almost quite good and not at all what I was expecting.
11. Undercover Brother - a sort of black Austin Powers - but funny.
12. Revelation - my first encounter with a new source of bad movie hysteria. The Right-Wing Christian Millennial SF/Horror movie...

December

1. The Astral Factor - Dear god! Masochistic Gold Stars all round for getting the end of this one.
2. Galaxy Invader - More MG stars! Jeeso! One of the joys of watching drek like this, is the undiscovered weirnesses lurking in the credits. This lo/no budget piece of shit, for instance, had opening title credits for a "Meteor Effect" that were on screen for longer than the meteor effect itself. It also had an end title credit that read "Hat by Don Zeifert". Hat singular. Now as the only person in the film who was wearing a hat was played by an actor called Don Zeifert, we possibly have here the only instance of someone getting a title credit for wearing his own hat in a movie. Movie history. I feel somewhat privileged to have seen it.
3. The Snow Creature - Nothing to recommend it apart from it's being only 71 minutes long and a stunning attempt at not actually appearing in the film from one of the leads.
4. Maybe Baby - This would have quickly become one of my movies "abandoned for various reasons, but mostly because they stink" but for the fact Merriol appeared to be enjoying it and I wanted sex.
5. Lost Jungle - watched only because it starred someone who appeared as a character in book I read recently.
6. Toto le héros - Like most films I really enjoy I have very little to say about it. I always find plenty to say about total crap but when the thing sweeps me off my feet I don't have time, or the inclination, to be analytical. I just want to savour the experience. Next time...
7. Project Shadowchaser III - trash Alien clone. The 100th review I have written for the IMDb. I think I now get let in on the secret handshake and a key to the executive wash room.
8. Def Con 4 - much better than I was expecting (especially after seeing New World's logo appear in the titles).
9. Moon 44 - Total shit.

Abandoned for various reasons, but mostly because they stink: Maniac Nurses Find Ecstasy, Team America, She's The One,

Running total 91

Linked titles, in bold, are pointers to my reviews/comments on IMDb.com. Unlinked, I didn't have anything worth adding to what was already there.