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Ask FlickChick: Top Five Guilty Movie Pleasures!
Barbarella box art courtesy Paramount Home Video
Ask FlickChick: Top Five Guilty Movie Pleasures and More....
Question: I like challenging, thought-provoking movies as much as the next guy, but I also love pure, unadulterated cheese — real Mystery Science Theater 3000-quality junk. My biggest guilty pleasure is Ed Wood movies. Do you have any guilty pleasures, or are you strictly into quality movies? — Eli
FlickChick: Oh, I have a soft spot for junk. I also have a rant about guilty pleasures — indulge me, please — that goes something like this: The fact that you love Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) doesn't inherently make you stupid or invalidate your love for Citizen Kane (1941), so stand by your low-brow passions!
There. Now here are my top five really trashy movie faves, in ascending order.
5) Barbarella (1968)
What it is: a sexadelic adaptation of the erotic comic series about a beautiful space tart (Jane Fonda) — sorry, astronavigatrex — and her adventures across the universe.
What's so bad: Tacky, tacky, tacky in that oh-so 1960s cool way! Zero-gravity strip tease, sex with a blind angel alien, a sex machine, an army of marching dollies with fangs, Anita Pallenberg as an intergalactic dominatrix. No wonder Robert Rodriguez wanted to do a remake!
4) Fiend Without a Face (1958)
What it is: A B&W sci-fi/horror picture about a scientist whose efforts to harness telekinetic energy by siphoning off atomic energy from a nearby military base go terribly wrong. The result: Crawling brains with spinal cord tails and bobbly antennae that slither around killing people.
What's so bad: It's kind of dull and the killer brains are invisible until the very end — up until that point you just hear them making clanking chain noises (?) as they creep around. And there's a radiation surge in which the brains are suddenly flying through windows, crawling down chimneys and wrapping their spinal cord tails around people's necks while they suck out their brains. Awesome!
3) Requiem for a Dream (2000)
What it is: Darren Aronofsky's adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr.'s raw novel about drug addiction. It's got a great look and a good cast, but don't let that fool you — it's dazzling junk.
What's so bad: pretension! It's a vintage drugsploitation picture in flashy drag. At least Reefer Madness (1936) didn't pretend to be cutting-edge art. But that scene where the refrigerator comes after sweet old Ellen Burstyn, who's hooked on diet pills because she wanted to wear her old red dress on a TV game show, is priceless.
2) The Beastmaster (1982)
What it is: A low budget sword-and-sorcery picture starring hunky Marc Singer, his teeny-weenie leather bikini and his animal friends, including a pair of ferrets in a bag. When my roommate and I first got cable, it was on all the time. Seriously, it didn't matter when you turned on the TV, Beastmaster was playing. We were mesmerized, and I'm clearly still under its spell.
What's so bad: The earnest cheapness. Tanya Roberts as the bombshell slave girl. The little skull barrettes on wild-eyed baddie Rip Torn's long gray braids. The "death guards" in S&M leather getups and the scruffy, dyed-black panther. The monsters that reduce you to a skeleton in no time flat. Fun stuff.
1) The Apple (1980)
What it is: A tale of good and evil set in the far-off future of 1994, when the entire music industry has been co-opted by devilish Mr. Boogalow and his BIM — Boogalow International Music — empire. A couple of wholesome young folksingers from Moosejaw, Canada, wander into his clutches and are seduced by sex, drugs and spandex. Really.
What's so bad: Where to begin? The sequined jockstraps, the disco orgy number "Coming," soulless glitter-pop whores Dandi and Pandi and their song "Bim," the sulfurous machinations of "Mr. Boogalow" and his queenie sidekick Shake (who sports a very fashion-forward set of grills), the fanged BIM goons, the vision of Hell, the peaceful hippies fighting BIM's fascist regime with flower power, God's 11th-hour arrival in a gold car, the lyrics to "The Apple" ("Magic apple/Mystery apple/Take a little ride/Let me be your guide/Through the apple paradise")... I could go on. It's all what makes The Apple great.
Question: I love the movie Death Becomes Her, with Meryl Streep, Goldie Hawn and Bruce Wilson, especially the part when Streep goes to get the eternal-life potion from Isabella Rossellini. Rossellini tells Streep she'll have to disappear after 10 years or people will start getting suspicious, and goes on to say "... as one of my clients said, 'I want to be a ... '" Streep gasps and says, "She didn't!" and Rossellini shakes her head yes. Do you know what was she referring to? It's been driving me crazy. Thanks!
FlickChick: The client said "I want to be alone," the famous quote credited to early movie star Greta Garbo (which is in fact a misquote of the line, "I want to be let alone," from 1932's Grand Hotel). But it beame permanently associated with Garbo when, at the age of 35 and at the height of her stardom, she abruptly abandoned moviemaking.
Question: I recently saw a trailer for the movie Funny Games. I was intrigued so I looked it up, only to discover it was a remake of a foreign film and that the original director, Michael Haneke, was redoing his own film. I rented the original version and enjoyed it very much. It seemed pretty unusual to remake your own movie in a different language. Do you know of other instances in which directors have done this? I feel like there was a Japanese horror director who did this, but the name escapes me. — Jenny
FlickChick: Off the top of my head I can think of five: Takashi Shimizu's Ju-on: The Curse (2000), which he remade as The Grudge (2004); George Sluizer's Spoorloos (1988), which he remade as The Vanishing (1993); Ole Bornedal's Nattevagten (1994), which he remade as Nightwatch (1997); Francis Veber's Les Fugitifs (1986), which he remade as Three Fugitives (1989); and Jean-Marie Poiré's Les Visiteurs (1993), which he remade as Just Visiting (2001). Poiré even kept his main actors — Jean Reno and Christian Clavier — for both versions.
Question: Back in the mid-1990s, I saw a movie about two girls who had this really tight friendship and they kill a woman. Everybody I ask tells me I'm looking for Heavenly Creatures, but I know I'm thinking of a different movie. Can you help? – Alix
FlickChick: I think you're looking for Fun, which opened the same year as Heavenly Creatures — 1994 — but lacked the vivid visual imagination that made Peter Jackson's film a critical favorite. Fun starred Renee Humphrey and Alicia Witt (currently of TV's Law and Order: Criminal Intent) as the killer teens.
See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks on the Movie Talk vodcast.
Hear Maitland on the weekly podcast TV Guide Talk.
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Oct 24, 2007 6:15 PM
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Oh wow, I loooooooove The Apple! Absolutely craptastic, its songs are in rotation on my iPod - I especially love the calypso-tinged "I Know How To Be A Master." And how 'bout lyrics that rhyme natural, natural desire with actual, actual vampire!!! Good gawd, what bliss!
The whole movie's coked-up sci-fi queer disco trash. Love that it was filmed in Berlin, so minor characters inexplicably have German accents and the exteriors look NOTHING like New York (or anywhere else in America). And make what you will with lines like when one character (on a balcony) says, "I've never been so high in my life!" - an implicit apology from the screenwriter, no?
All the garish glitter, camel toes, and that BIM mark! I want one! This movie holds mad inspiration for Halloween costumes..
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Oct 24, 2007 6:44 PM
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Tanya Roberts in Beastmaster ushered me through the final passages of puberty. As was later confirmed in Sheena, she takes an outstanding al fresco bath.
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Oct 24, 2007 6:56 PM
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Showgirls. There. I said it. And I'm not ashamed. Much.
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Oct 25, 2007 2:08 AM
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Don't be mean to Requiem for a Dream! It's a very good movie, certainly not in the same class as the rest of the movies you mentioned. Ok, it's a little pretentious, but that don't make it necessarily bad. It's still one of those striking films that rocks one to the core, and I do think it is one of the best portrayals of the consequences of drug use.
As for awesome junk, there is not a single movie in the world who can beat GYMKATA! Gymnastics star Kurt Thomas gets transferred to the middle-eastern state of Parmistan to fight in a martial arts tournament, where he combines his gymnastics skills with karate to form a new way of fighting... GYMKATA!
Now, that's garbage! I mean, Parmistan? Seriously?
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Oct 25, 2007 3:18 AM
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Gee Oskar...I use Parmistan cheese on my pasta all the time.
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Oct 25, 2007 3:52 AM
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DaMess: Yes, but lets pretend you are writing a movie that is supposed to take place in a fictional middle-eastern country (as for why it needs to be fictional, I have no idea), and you are thinking of what to name it.
"Hmm", you think to yourself, "I like cheese. Why not use that?" You're on to something, no doubt! "Goudovia? Camonalia? Brie-ville? Roquefortran? No, none of those seem right." And suddenly, a flash of inspiration! "I've got it. Parmistan!"
Seriously, I would have liked to have been a fly in the room where that idea was pitched to the studio execs.
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Oct 25, 2007 6:15 AM
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My guilty pleasure flicks...
Rhinestone - AND I can sing all the songs along with Dolly Parton & Sylvester Stallone. LOL!
My Chauffeur - love the quirky and it has Sam Jones!
Smokey & The Bandit - The sheriff - how can you not love Jackie Gleason as the sheriff!
These three movies I can watch over and over and over again... *sigh* :D
I think I'm going to have to check out your guilty pleasure list myself! The only one I've seen is Beastmaster (love it!). The Apple sounds really intriguing. LOL
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Oct 25, 2007 8:38 AM
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Love Barbarella, it's so deliciously trampy! I vaguely recall Fiend Without a Face. I'll have to rent that along with your other favorites.
I have 2 of my own:
Attack of the Killer Tomatoes - it's such a hoot!
Death Race 2000 - just 'cause it is so bizarre. I saw this back in the '70's when I was a teen visiting my older cousin in college. We still make references to the movie (while driving, of course!).
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Oct 25, 2007 10:13 AM
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I love Steve McQueen's, "The Blob", John Travolta's "Perfect" and the super campy "Queen of Outer Space" with Zsa Zsa Gabor
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Oct 25, 2007 10:23 AM
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I looooooveee Requiem for Dream...great choice flickchick
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Oct 25, 2007 10:25 AM
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All hail Beastmaster.
And Krull. And Psychomania. And The Trip. And Jaws 3. And Bloodsport ("Kumite! Kumite!").
But most of all...
All hail The Clonus Horror!
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Oct 25, 2007 12:01 PM
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Yeah, I hate the whole "guilty pleasure" concept. It's okay to enjoy the things you enjoy, for all the various reasons you might like them. I like Road House and Bring It On, kung fu movies, Ed Wood movies, almost any movie about people learning to dance, really strident pro-feminist movies made between the late Sixties and early Eighties, and many, many more. I've never heard of The Apple, but it sounds AWESOME. I have to see it.
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Oct 25, 2007 12:15 PM
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Oh man... The Beastmaster would have to be on my list (although the sight of John Amos in a leather thong is so burned into my retinas, not enough Tanya Roberts can remove that image from my brain)!
Others:
Krull
Bloodsport
The Last Dragon
The Last Starfighter
Hmm, these all came from the 80s... I wonder if there's a pattern there?
The Apple, Barbarella, and Sheena are definitely going on my Blockbuster queue!
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Oct 25, 2007 1:27 PM
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Oh man... The Beastmaster would have to be on my list (although the sight of John Amos in a leather thong is so burned into my retinas, not enough Tanya Roberts can remove that image from my brain)!
Fair point.
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Oct 25, 2007 1:32 PM
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