(Not) A Guilty Pleasure: Raptor

You don't really care who made this, and to be honest, neither do I. So instead here's a snarky rebuttal to the above poster about stock footage never being extinct either.

No "Guilty Pleasure Quality" this time. I really hate this movie. Only in the category for consistency's sake.

I’m really not sure how to introduce Raptors, the 2001 spin-off film following the Carnosaur Trilogy. Other than that it’s low production values and mindless casting were even too much for me, as I’m knocking this film out of The Guilty Pleasures. That’s right. It was so bad I couldn’t even enjoy it as cheap and silly entertainment. The way it was shot, the way the actors walked, and the clues to major cop-outs later on down the film just turned me off from the very beginning. I would say that Roger Corman should have stay Executive Producer rather than moving to Producer for the film, but that would suggest the other Carnosaur films were any good. Raptors was just as bad but simply far less enjoyable.

I shouldn’t be criticized for not knowing how to introduce such a film, as even the filmmakers didn’t even seem to know how to introduce the movie. So rather than trying, they simply re-used footage from the first Carnosaur film to show a bunch of teens in a Jeep getting slaughtered by the dinosaur. In fact, much of the story is recycling a lot of elements from the first film simply so the filmmakers could reuse old footage when needed to cut down on production costs. The plot revolves around a mad scientist trying to clone dinosaurs back to life. Sound familiar? (I’m not even referring to Jurassic Park.)

The Guilty Pleasures Pile: Carnosaur

Science Fiction; U.S.; 1993; 83 minutes; written and directed by: Adam Simon; based on the novel by: Harry Adam Knight; produced by: Mike Elliot; Executive produced by: Roger Corman; New Horizon Home Video

Actual Quality

Guily Pleasure Quality

There are some movies that defy all thought and predictions. Films that go beyond the boundaries set for them by their contemporaries. Films that literally boldly go where no respectable person has gone before. (Mainly because respectable people know better.) These are films that are so bad they’re good. You laugh at they’re vain attempts to make you care, the silly ideas that are meant to scare you, and performances that no one, not even the actors and director, seemed to know what they were going for.These are the films that find themselves in our Guilty Pleasures Pile, and though many on this film blog have already thrown stuff into the pile, I’m going to make my first contribution in a while to the stash with a little mockbuster film Roger Corman executive produced en lure of Jurassic Park called Carnosaur. In fact, it’s fun to see how these two franchises kept butting into each other’s territory.

Corman was known in the olden days as the director who looked for one thing from his actors and one thing only: Stand on the tape mark, you turd. Actually, he was a wonderful guy to work with and lot of fun, but you had to hit your marks. He didn’t care what your line sounded like, he didn’t care how you did what you did… he just wanted you to stand on the tape mark and say your piece so he can say “cut”.

The Ghost Ship

 

Of the 11 remarkable low-budget horror films that Val Lewton produced for RKO in the 40s, an astonishing total of 4 come from 1943. This incorporates his final two with the most celebrated director to come out of the collaboration, Jacques Tourneur (I Walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man), and two with Mark Robson, including The Seventh Victim and this film, Ghost Ship. Despite the temporal closeness of their releases and what were surely short or parallel shooting schedules, The Ghost Ship feels like a transitional film. It still has plenty of Lewton’s distinctive touches, especially his incomparable ability for creating psychologically complex and morally ambiguous characters in a genre where either features are practically unheard of, but Robson’s direction seems lesser of a fit to Lewton’s brand of horror and terror than Tourneur’s.

Make-Out with Violence

In episode one of the anime series Elfen Lied, a dangerous mutant escapes from a facility where she was being held, washes up on a beach, and is found by a young man and his cousin. The entire series revolves around their attempt to protect her from the malicious forces pursuing here. Of course, though, it all comes back to their initial decision to take her in the first place. Now, call me crazy, but if I saw a naked, unconscious girl on a beach, my first thought wouldn’t be to take her home to take care of her, but to call the police or someone else. You may be wondering what this has to do with Make-Out with Violence, but for those who’ve seen the film, I think you catch my drift; if you find a zombie version of a girl that was missing your first instinct should NOT be to take her home as a pet.

From the Dustbins: Tetsuo – The Iron Man

 

SHE IS SO HOT

I had a hard time deciding whether or not this truly belonged under the Dustbin moniker, but after realizing that the only people who have probably heard of this film are either cult film aficionados or art film fanatics, I decided that it deserved this treatment.  I’m still not wholly convinced, however, seeing as how cult films are generally dusty old niche things that are remembered, and this certainly has been remembered like any other cult film has.  It’s certainly not something rotting away forgotten in a garbage bin someplace, particularly when one considers that it’s even received a third sequel just this past year.  But all the same, obscure films are obscure, and if I dare say so myself, this film is obscure enough. 

From the Dustbins: Roots Search

There is a reason Roots Search has been forgotten: it’s terrible.  It isn’t terrible because the character development is shoddy, inconsistent, and arbitrary.  It isn’t terrible because the plot is convoluted to the point of making obtuse art films seem lucid in comparison.  It isn’t even terrible because of its low-budget animation quality or awkward pacing.  With the right mixture of each of these, one could make a title that is “so bad it’s good”.  And yet, somehow, Roots Search manages to just barely miss even this mark.  It’s simply a case of being “so bad it’s still terrible”.

Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend

Pornography is usually pretty boring.  Maybe that sounds odd coming from a straight male, but let’s face it: it’s almost all the same.  If it’s professional-grade stuff, it’s littered with bad actors, fake orgasms, and a disproportionate amount of ugly people, and one rarely fares any better with amateur material.  But it’s a successful industry because it isn’t really designed to be interesting, just arousing.  Or, that’d be the case provided one isn’t discussing the somewhat notorious underground of Japanese cartoon porn.  

Splice

{Copperheart Entertainment; Gaumont; Dark Castle Entertainment; Warner Bros.; Steve Hoban; Guillermo del Toro; Vincenzo Natali; Canada; Sci-Fi, Horror}

2.5 Stars

When someone turns to you and asks “Wanna go see a movie?”, the last thought in your head is a movie about a raising an accelerated growing animal child trying to balance out the animalistic and human intricacies developed within her life.

Well, that’s the general premise of the movie Splice, with Guillermo del Toro producing the piece directed by Vincenzo Natali. Two young lover scientists named Clive Nicoli (Adrien Brody) and Elsa Kast (Sarah Polley) set out to create the ultimate multi-species tissue that can be used to cure diseases in every area. I’m no quite sure how it all works out, but it’s all sciencey stuff, so it’s slightly believable. The investors of this project are part of the higher ups at the company N.E.R.D. (Nucleic Exchange Research & Development) who want to profit big off of the findings.

After a successful cloning of two strange life forms, one male and another female, the excited scientists want to move into adding human DNA into the mix. The investors (David Hewlett and Simona Maicanescu) back off from further experiments in fear of the controversy human DNA would bring into the mix. N.E.R.D. (not the band) pulls funding, and the scientists go for it anyway in the secret, rebellious, and independent style.