Sorry, but it is that time of year again:

So, every movie I have watched in the last three months: The usual mixed bag of crap, real crap, and utter crap with the odd staggering work of genius thrown in for good measure. 159 movies watched this year (one of them in a real cinema!) Did I keep my last year's New Year's Resolution to 'Watch less crap' this year? Did I? Did I fuck! I started the year watching Sgt. Kabukiman NYPD and it went down hill from there.

As an added bonus this time there is also a list of all those movies I abandoned for various reasons, but mostly because they totally stink: (Phoebe, it's okay, it will be over soon.)


October

1. Creature
   - Dire Alien clone with Klaus Kinski, who was obviously a bit short of the readies that week. The Something Unexpected But Inevitable (SUBI) event 15 minutes in: After a seemingly safe landing, the heroes' Space ship crashes through the moon's shallow crust and is buggered beyond repair.
2. Colussus and the Amazon Queen
   - Dear god! (15 minute SUBI: Our hero meets our heroine and discovers his companions have been taken captive by buxom Ponygirl Amazon Women with insane, first series Star Trek hair dos).
3. Danger!! Death Ray
   - (MST3K) One of the more weirdly punctuated titled bad movies I have watched recently. Pretty shit.
4. L'Effrontee (An Impudent Girl)
   - Delightful French awkward adolescence movie. Charlotte Gainsbourg was wonderful. She had to be - she was on screen for 95% of the time. The only wrong notes were the spelling mistakes in the subtitles.
5. The Giant Gila Monster - Public Domain rubbish, a dead cheap, dead crap, monster movie (get it here!) that I have been wanting to tick off my list for a while now. (That's not a real list, Phoebe, it's just an expression - I'm not that sad.)
6. La Belle Noiseuse: Divertimento
   - Well that's two hours of my life I want back. Two hours of watching rich French people telling each other life was unbearable in incomplete sentences. The subtitles for this movie had more ellipses that any other movie I have seen. I am so glad I didn't suffer the four hour version.
7. Little Miss Sunshine - not as good as was expecting given all the good reviews and word of mouth but an agreeable way to spend an hour and a half.
8. Silence of the Hams - I have been told I posses an almost inhuman tolerance for bad movies. This piece of garbage strained it beyond belief. Total and utter crap.
   
9. Repo Man - I love Repo Man.
10. Straight To Hell - Straight to eBay.
    
11. Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter
    -"Igor, go to your room!". What a piece of crap! I now want to see the other half of this 1966 drive in double bill - Billy the Kid versus Dracula.
12. The Amazing Colossal Man
    - (MST3K)
13. The Brothers Grimm
    - I tried so hard to like this movie. I mean really really hard - I failed.

November

1. Amazon Women on The Moon
   - if you ever find yourself in possession of this DVD skip the movie and watch a lovely little deleted scene called The Unknown Soldier.
2. The Wolf Man
   - The 1941 Universal version with Lon Chaney Jr.
3. The Vindicator
   - Canadian 80s SF shite. But even worse than that, DULL Canadian 80s SF shite.
4. Werewolf of London
   - Universal's first (1935) bash at a werewolf movie and not bad at that.
5. Battle of the Worlds
   - Delirious dreadful 1960s Italian SF (another one of those movies that made less sense the second time I saw it).
   
6. Asignment: Outer Space
   - Ditto
7. Hercules and the Tyrants of Babylon -
   
8. They Came From beyond Space -
   
9. Bedazzled
   - Peter Cooke and Dudley Moore's 1968 masterpiece
10. Bedazzled
    - The Brendan Fraser and Liz Hurley pointless remake.
11. The Lady From Shanghai
    - Never seen it before. Loved every frame.
12. Gold Diggers of 1933 - I am besotted with Joan Blondell, have been for years. The Forgotten Man number at the climax of this movie gives me the shivers.

December

1. Bride of Frankenstein
   - Universal Studio's greatest movie of the 30s.
2. The 39 Steps - (Hitchcock's version)
3. My Dear Secretary
   - dreadful Kirk Douglas screwball 'comedy'.
4. Strange Days
   - Overlong (thirty minutes of material stretched to two and half hours by throwing a shitload of money at it) this bombed when released. It deserved to.
5. The Quiet Earth
   - What a great little film!
6. 2 Days in Paris
   - which I enjoyed more than it deserved because it was the first time I had seen a real movie in a real movie theatre for about two years.
7. Tron
   - I love Tron. Well, I love it after our hero gets sucked into the computer and the fun really starts the first act - the live action, 'let's dump a lot of exposition and then put ourselves in peril' bit - is a stinker. Saw it for the first time (since seeing it when it first came out) in widescreen. Not squished up, panned and scanned, ropey old video.
   
8. George of the Jungle
   - It's Christmas...
9. Taxi
   - bof!
10. The Big Lebowski
    - I Laughed like a drain.
    

Abandoned for various reasons, but mostly because they REALLY stink:

1. Terror at Red Wolf Something-or-other
   - 1970's girls alone in big scary house crap.
2. The Phantom Creeps
   - 265 minute (12 episode) Bela Lugosi serial edited down to an incomprehensible mess of a 78 minute feature film.
3. Shadow of Chinatown
   - 300 minutes of garbage 1936 Bela Lugosi serial cut down to 65 minutes! Even more incoherently crappy than the last one.
4. Laser Mission
   - Brandon Lee action crap. I lasted 15 minutes after adding Brandon Lee to my 'Dying Young Was A Good Career Move'' list.
5. Equilibrium
   - Christian Bale, Emily Watson - and I turned off after 3 minutes. Some films you can just taste the shit coming from so far off. Set in a future where all emotions are illegal - ie no acting required for at least the first act - it was Fahrenheit 451, with added 1984, and tons of Matrix type ultra-violence slopped over - Balls to that.
6. Werewolf Woman
   - no one expects much from Italian horror movies but this plot free mix of soft-core tits 'n' ass and gory violence bored me stupid. Abandoned after 45 minutes, 7 murders and more on-screen pubic hair than was good for any movie that doesn't involve a hunk coming round to fix the blonde bimbo's washing machine.
   
7. Beast of the Yellow Night
   - Filipino horror movie took too long to go nowhere not very interestingly. I jumped ship after 15 minutes.
8. Piranha
   - I didn't get past the first real edit in the movie. Seriously. The first edit of the film was so inept I left. A record for me. Still didn't stop me being rude about it on the IMDb though.
9. Devil of the Desert Against the Son of Hercules
   - I fell asleep (halfway through the title).
10. Carnosaur
    - I gave up at the point where the traditional 'couple making out in the car about to be attacked by the monster on the loose' - were attacked by a glove puppet of a dinosaur. It looked like they were being savaged by an oven mitt.
    
    

Most bewilderedly trance state inducing movies of the year so far:
UFO: Target Earth, Dünyayi kurtaran adam, The Fury Of The Wolfman.


Tomorrow: Every book I have read for the past 3 months - don't go away now!