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Thursday, January 20, 2011

SAD

The other day when I was putting together the most recent episode of The Basement of Baron Morbid, it dawned on me.
I think movies suck now.
Let me explain and to do that I will be dragging Jess Franco, Jerry Warren and Al Adamson into the fray.
Quite a trio there, huh?
Let's start with Al. I have always liked Al's movies. They have that seat of your pants feeling to them. Low budget fun. He made this jewel heist flick called Psycho A Go Go. Psycho A Go Go didn't do great business. When it came time to make another flick, Blood Of Ghastly Horror, they decided to incorporate a lot of footage from Psycho A Go Go to make it on the cheap. Eventually footage from Psycho A Go Go was used in The Man With The Synthetic Brain and Echo Of Terror. All fun little films that took advantage of a lot of shared footage.
The one example of Jess Franco I would like to use here is Exorcism. I actually watched The Sadist Of Notre Dame first which uses a lot of the same footage, but it is a bizarrely different film. There is a third version, but it just has hardcore inserts so it doesn't really go with the point I'm trying to make here.
Then there is poor Jerry Warren.
That man would cobble together footage from things that didn't even match. He figured if the title was good enough people would watch. and he was right. Blood Of The Man Devil is a prime example. Two different features that ran out of money before completion. Normally people would throw in the towel. Not Jerry. He put them together and made a senseless motion picture that is still fun to watch.
What I'm trying to say here is that people don;t seem to have that spirit anymore. The rare exceptions would be Lloyd Kaufman who has used his car crash footage as many times as Roger Corman used his helicopter crash footage. There is Terry Gilliam who had a movie unfinished due to the death of Heath Ledger. This was a big budget flick that embraced the spirit of the old days and Gilliam finished the flick by changing how the storyline went and used three different actors to finish the flick.
But those are the exceptions.
Everything is so processed nowadays. And before you start on how Hollywood is just a big movie vomitorium, I'm not just talking Hollywood. From micro budget, to low budget to sexploitation it's all so homogeneous. Same old, same old.
I can remember seeing the same movie year after year at the drive in because they would just rename Invasion of The Bee Girls as Cemetery Tramps.
While I find some new flicks fun, The Green Hornet, for example, for the most part I can just pass on what is coming out nowadays.
Thankfully, there are tons of old flicks out there for me to watch and the exception to the rule that hits the screens once in a while.
I'm outta here. Gonna watch a Corman flick.  

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

no, TG did not changes the storyline at all. Rent the Blue ray and watch the extra's or watch a youtube vid with TG! All he did was have "Tony" be played by 3 different people. The storyline stayed the same.

Douglas A. Waltz said...

My bad. Not having ever seen the movie. Not a fan of Heath Ledger so I passed. I stand corrected. Thank you anonymous

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