This past Saturday's Bad Movie Day had a modest turnout, mostly due to typical change-of-season illnesses, but the smaller audience did little to blunt the pain caused by our Halloween-themed Bad Movie lineup.
Attendees of Bad Movie Day rarely show up at the same time, so the first few films shown are always casually background affairs. We started things off light with a quick screening of Manos: The Hands of Fate, now apparently tying with Plan Nine From Outer Space for the title of Worst Film Ever Made. This eased us into the 1986 Trick or Treat starring Marc "Skippy from Family Ties" Price, a lovely little cautionary tale about a pre-Columbine social outcast who turns to heavy metal music to escape peer abuse, but then opts out of a crazed shooting spree and decides to fight a electric-powered rock star demon instead. Trick or Treat was apparently so good, the remade it (see: completely ripped it off) three years later as the guilty pleasure Shocker.
By five o'clock, the victims had assembled, and it was time to get dirty. First up was the warm-up film Bats, starring Lou "What the fuck happened to my career" Diamond Phillips as the redneck sherriff in charge of save his sleepy southern town from an army of government-project gentically-engineered super-intelligent killer bats. Just remember to keep telling yourself, "This film cost forty million dollars, this film cost forty million dollars..."
Then we all settled in for the main feature: Stuart Gordon's From Beyond, a hasty Lovecraft adaptation he rushed out to feed on the success of Re-Animator. Welcome to Benevolant St., which seems to be overly populated with slimy sado-masachistic shapeshifting evil geniuses, oversized phallic pinneal glands, giant tuning forks that melt the walls between dimensions and make everyone nearby incredibly horny, and a giant 'It' that will bite your head off... Like a Ginger Bread Man!!!
The final film of the night, some campy dessert to ease the digestion, was the 80's classic Chopping Mall, an almost textbook example of why those of us who grew up in the eighties are obsessed with bad movies. Here's a minute-ling trailer that does little to convey the true horror of the seventy-three minute feature itself. Those of you who attended Bad Movie Day will easily spot the three shots not even present in the film:
By this point even I was crying mercy, and so we called it a night. Stay tuned for the next Bad Movie Day. We hope to see you there!
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