Thursday, June 16, 2011

Even Further adventures in bad Cinema. shoot me please.

I find it confounding how often I see the hyperbole 'wurst m0vie evar!' tossed about the internets in articles at various sites. The most recent stake that has been brought to my attention being a cracked post about the only martial arts movie ever made in Ireland, a flick titled Final Deviation. So he wanted to write a funny article about a poorly conceived and executed film. Unfortunately, I couldn't laugh along. Worst move ever? Not remotely. It doesn't even approach the title of worst Martial Arts movie ever(Man, have you seen Steven Seagal's recent work?).

Final Deviation, just in brief, is about an Irish martial artists(He resembles an angry primordial Alex Winter) who returns home from Asia to try and rebuild his life. Before he left home in the first place his father was murdered. It involves a powerful magnate and his thugs. A reasonably pretty girl with large breasts who is coveted by the Magnate's son/nephew/whatever. The town they live in features a martial arts tournament, for which the locals are die-hard fans. Don't get me going on the Monk. I don't know which order he was from, but he's clearly Irish Catholic. White beard, long brown robes and all. But he still becomes the Kung Fu Bill's mentor.

Basically, it's like the director took a script written in Hong Kong for a movie set in China, and then just nominally replaced everything with an Irish veneer and called it good. The acting is bad. The dialogue is extremely lame. The entire set up is absurd. Really, a Catholic sect of Kung Fu monks? The movie is pretty damned bad all around and is well worth a write-up on Cracked. I was actually rather pissed off that my source of self-inflicted pain, Netflix, didn't carry this monstrosity. Oh well, it is available for the moment on Youtube. In 9 parts. Look it up.

Now, Final Deviation is a sad sight to see. That people spent so much time on such a poor quality product is depressing. This being said, it doesn't remotely compare with the likes of say TNT Jackson. A 70s Blaxploitation-ChopSocky movie that seems to have been cast on the basis of 'she was a Playboy playmate! She has tits! She's gorgeous!' The rest of the details would take care of themselves.

Detail number 1: TNT, like every other Blaxploitation star of the era(with the exception of Foxy Brown who studied Bar Stool), knows Karate. According to the script. The luscious Jeannie Bell didn't know karate from kumquats. Did I mention that she was a Playboy Playmate and sported an awesome rack? This is important, they have a topless fight scene(in which between cuts her panties magically change color and cut several times). But that's OK, the light skinned dude that they got to be her stunt double had a decent grasp. In Final Deviation, the star was a capable physical performer, his poor acting aside. They didn't need to put a Chinese dude into Brogue Shoes and a Grandfather shirt to cover for him.

The rest of TNT Jackson is over the top and ridiculous, as one should expect from a low budget 70s Blaxploitation flick. It is thoroughly enjoyable for what it is and makes a good movie night feature if you have the right crowd in the proper mindset.

TNT Jackson, the failure pile in a sadness bowl that it is, still stands head, shoulders and balls over the movie that I rate the all time worst. Dark Havest 2: The Maize. I at one point got it into my head to watch the bottom 100 in the IMDB's worst movies list. Dark Harvest 2 was both the beginning and the end of that experiment. I was done, game over, to hell with this idea. I even watched two packs of the Mill Creek 50 movie box sets. You know, the ones where they slap 50 public domain movies onto 12 dvds and say 'here ya go, that'll be $15!' Yeah. I did THAT to myself. I'm like an EMO kid with my constant cutting, only the scars run far deeper. Dark Harvest 2 broke me of that habit. Mostly.

Watch the trailer.

Did you see that? That should have been the director's cut of the movie. At 2.5 minutes long they managed to use up all of the dialogue and action from the script, and they still had to pad the fucking thing out by another 97.5 minutes. 97.5 minutes of corn. And people running through corn. With a 10 minutes interlude dedicated to the protagonist digging in dirt, while the implied villain sneaks up on him. 10 minutes! Did they use every single frame of footage that they captured?

As of 6.16.2011, Dark Harvest 2 as 1928 votes on the good ole IMDB. 322 of of the people who voted gave the movie 10 stars. All I can think of is wow, that cast and crew has a lot of family members. Because nobody else, who has seen this movie, would honestly give it more than a 1. And the 1 rating only because negative numbers aren't possible. A handful of kind hearted folks rated it a 2. The rest of the people to voice their opinion must have been voting 'ironically'. Or just hitting random numbers. This is proof that Democracy doesn't work.

Or maybe they were responding to the trailer. The trailer is a solid 4. Perhaps even a 5.

Why did I pay money for that? It still pisses me off.c

1 comment:

  1. Addendum. I've not seen Dark Harvest 1. I've heard it was better than the sequel, though still inept. After my experience with DH2, I shan't be taking a look at the original. What blows my mind about Dark Harvest 2, the entire experience, is that they made a third movie in the series. WTF? Who keeps giving these people money? I want free money!

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