Today's Movies

Brian Trenchard-Smith Movie Night

Sure Brian Trenchard-Smith is a favorite of Quentin Tarantino's.



But does it have to be the second paragraph of his Wikipedia entry? Should someone be defined by their fans? Charles Manson loved the Beatles and Stanley Kubrick loved White Men Can't Jump. Some conclusion could be reached with those facts. A conclusion that would go here.

Stunt Rock, believe it or not, is the second appearance by the rock band Sorcery at Bad Movie Night. They were in Rocktober Blood. In the invite I said:

Rocktober Blood features the band Sorcery, who you'll remember if you remember all bands. Apparently they did magic on stage. They're members of the Magic Castle in Los Angeles! Being in an L.A. heavy metal band in 1984 that does magic is a good combination of qualities if you're looking to be the most ridiculous person in the world.

This blog post is 72% original material!

The Man From Hong Kong has familiar faces as well. One is Yu Wang, who played Lurch in the Asian version of The Addams Family.



But really he's the star of Master of the Flying Guillotine.



God I love that movie. Here's the theme song to The Man From Hong Kong, which reached #3 on the US Billboard chart:



Which maybe you know more from Bone Thugs-N-Harmony's Flow Motion:



Here's what happened last week:

2004 CGI Movie Night

It seems we as a society had a good handle on CGI by 2004. Spiderman 2 fixed the wonky physics of the first one. We accepted everything but those wolves in The Day After Tomorrow. And CG was used to white-trashify Hilary Swank's family in Million Dollar Baby 1000% percent:



Whoa, Margo Martindale and Riki Lindhome were part of that laughably bad scene in an otherwise good movie? They're better than that!

The point is these movies were a little behind the curve. Like that kid in grade school who read embarrassingly slow when everybody was taking turns in class. But that's okay, maybe these movies would be good at business or communication studies.

Suburban Sasquatch is about a Bigfoot that keeps a perfectly nice home, has a good job and beautiful family but shocking secrets run just beneath the false facade of normalcy. Just kidding, that's every other movie about the suburbs. This one has 'squatch hitting stuff.

You may know Alien 3000 better as Unseen Evil 2. The first Unseen Evil may be most notable for having not one interesting thing to say about it. Fascinating. The best thing about UE2, as we all started referring to it, outside of the movie itself is this thread on IMDB of investors saying they never heard from the company again.

Here's what happened last week:

Monster Movie Night

Quick!, what's my favorite movie genre? Zombies? Christmas horror? Yeah, maybe. But it's probably monsters. You've got your radioactive monsters, in-a-strange-land monsters. Actually I'm going to stop there because that covers tonight.

Slithis is the radioactive kind. His bretheren include Godzilla, Them! and the 50-Foot Woman.



As you can see radiation seems to make things big. Except when you had those pelvic X-rays! Zing! Unless you're a woman, then your vagina is HUGE.

It's unclear if Slithis is huge. Maybe if he was originally a dust mite. No, wait. I remember what they say Slithis is. Hoo-boy is it dumb.

Beast Creatures, besides being just two names for an animal ("Look out, it's Human Guy!") are of the people-in-a-foreign-land-encounter-something-strange variety. Others include King Kong, The Thing and Native Americans.

As you can see these things typically exist on isolated islands, e.g. the platypus or Russell Crowe.

Here's what happened last week:

Today's Movies

Crank Movie Night

Movies are often described as having "non-stop action" and then you go and see them and there are scenes where no action is happening. What's up with that? Well, if any movie could claim to have non-stop action it is Crank and Crank: High Voltage.

In fact it's part of the plot. In both movies Jason Statham needs to keep his adrenaline going (in the first one) and continually electrocute himself or something (in the second one). You'll remember Statham from Cellular:



Sorry for that. You won't remember Amy Smart from anything (unless you live in the world) but I'm always thinking about showing Starship Troopers and The Butterfly Effect.



It's also the first appearance at BMN by Dwight Yoakam but I'm always thinking about showing Four Christmases.



I mean Red Rock West.

All those people return in High Voltage but get a load of this. The sequel has Bai Ling, Geri Halliwell, Corey Haim (in one of his last movies) and David Carradine. I would say it was one of Carradine's last movies since High Voltage came out the year he died. But given the Carradine family's work ethic he made around 15 more movies between dying and the indefinite future.

Here's what happened last week:

Game Show Night

Game shows are such a rich, bottomless resource of undeserved greatness that we could have a separate Bad Game Show Night that could run longer than Bad Movie Night. So I'm hereby announcing BMN's first spin-off: Game Show Night every Saturday at 8!

Not really. But the 80s School Educational Video Night is still in full effect on Sundays.

If you don't know the story of Michael Larsen I recommend the This American Life story about him. But really you just need to know he figured out there was a pattern to the game show Press Your Luck when it should have been random. We're also going to watch a Starcade.



And a Family Feud.



The Running Man is directed by Paul Michael Glaser, Starsky from Starsky and Hutch. He also made The Cutting Edge, The Air Up There and Kazaam. Consecutively! That's a good run. No pun intended.



Here's what happened last week: