B-Fest Wrap Up 3

Back to it.

STREET TRASH:

By this time, I'm getting my ass kicked. Savage Sisters caught me with a couple of jabs, but nothing I couldn't fight through. Then "Invasion of the Star Creatures" was a 750 lb. wrecking ball swing which caught me square in the head. I wasn't doing well.

Which brings us to Street Trash, a Troma movie without all that humor and basic goodwill. The premise: a bunch of hobos buy some toxic cheap booze which turns them into flourescent piles of goo in somewhat spectacular fashion. If it had been a cheap "who's going to melt next" movie, I could have bought the charm of what I saw. After the homeless gang rape followed by morbidly obese necrofelia, it kind of lost me.

Man, this movie was mean. I don't usually care if a movie has excessive amounts of swearing, sex or violence, but "Street Trash" just struck me as filthy, from the legitimately dirty people (not all of them, but the owner of the chop shop is a good example) to the bad taste in which every little moment was perpetuated. I left to sleep it off after about 2/3ds of the flick, and apparently I missed the best part where everyone explodes like the Fourth of July. If I watched it again, it might strike me differently, but I wished they would have stuck with the goo.

Final thought: If the point of "Street Trash" was to titilate, it failed with me. In fact, I'm pretty sure my primary and secondary sex characteristics retreated into my body after 20 minutes of this movie.

THE HYPNOTIC EYE:
A piece of advice: Don't fall asleep during a movie which involves an elaborate strobe light effect.

After sleeping off "Street Trash" in the lobby, I dove back into the theater for the first part of "The Hypnotic Eye," and ended up bunking on the floor about the first time THE EYE made an appearance. The strobe seriosuly freaked me out, and strangely, by the time I woke up for the finale, I didn't feel like I had missed anything. Then again, I wouldn't have been surprised if I had robbed a bank or committed a murder under the terrible influence of The Hypnotic Eye.

Final Thought: If I were the hypnotist in this movie, I would have instructed my minions to lie better. Every time someone under hypnosis was asked to lie their stories unraveled like a cheap sweater. I lied better on the floor under three seats using a bag or Doritos as a pillow.

KRULL:

I'm convinced that, in years to come, Krull will become the stuff of B-Fest legend. Let me set the stage.

For about an hour, we're dealt line upon line of mystic mumbo jumo as to why the barely bearded model-looking guy has to rescue the princess from the Society For Creative Enacronisms. At one point, we're presented "Thunder Horses" or "Fire Horses" or some sort of horse that runs fast and creates flames like the Delorian from "Back to the Future." They run in and carry our heros to the final battle with the badly rendered baddie. But just as the scene in the fortress begins to ramp up, the movie breaks and cuts back about half an hour.

See, the Thunder Horses and the quest to find them was about 20 minutes of the movie. Now, Krull would have functioned fine without the 20 minute exposition on these particular equine, and easily could have lost the subplot about the old guy winding through a giant spider web to find the old blind woman who could lead him to the Fire Horses only to die right before he summoned them, but no, Krull included it. So we had to back up.

It was a singular joy to see the reels mixed up like that, and it was the only significant aspect of this otherwise ho hum entry. There were a couple of good jokes, but man, fantasy films can be tedious. This one felt like it went on forever, but there was nothing terribly wrong with it.

Final Thought: My favorite part in the movie was when our hero reached into molten lava to get the mystic five-sidded boomerang. No one bothered to explain why the hero could put his hand in molten lava with no ill effects, but whatever, look at the cool toy.

TARANTULA:

Now THIS is a B-Fest entry. John Agar, giant spiders, long extended patches of nothing followed by the whole sale slaughter of livestock. Yeah, this is what we like.

Again, Agar spends at least a third of the movie courting a girl who happens to be living with a scientist who pumps animals full of a serum that makes them huge. You hoot when the spider shows up, you blanch when Agar finally gets some lip action, you power through the dull parts with quips and it ends abruptly with a burning spider in the background. I can't think of a better way to spend a Saturday morning.

Final Thought: Agar's method involves wearing women down, which is why we get to see so much of his dating technique. It takes five or six encounters for them to even slightly warm to the big lug, and we're privy to every step.

TEENAGE DOLL:
Ahh, our movie. The movie we were responsible for. The one we co-paid for. The one two fo us had never seen. The one that really had no point. The one that included an increasingly strange father-daughter relationship, the woman who bore a striking resemblance to Olive Oil, chase scenes in high heels, a sort of rumble and a resolution worthy of a Hallmark Greeting Card.

I'll be the first to admit this movie wasn't cinematic dynamite, but as Chad put it half way through, "It's a Coreman film, you expected something to happen?" Basically a good girl gets in a cat fight and kills a member of an all-female gang who guns for her. She seeks solace in the arms of another street thug who goes on and on about thug philosophy like he's in an Ayn Rand novel. Then it ends.

Say what you will about this mediocre entry (Hot Rods to Hell would have been more fun, so I'm told) but it was a fantastic kick to see our logo up there. I swelled with pride.

Gotta go. I'll finish this up later.