(1982)
Dir - Larry Cohen
Overall: MEH
Yet another thoroughly oddball exercise by Larry Cohen, Q, ( also known as The Winged Serpent), is most likely one of the few movies to throw an Aztec deity dinosaur bird into Manhattan while simultaneously being about a mob schlub caught up in shenanigans with the cops. While Cohen's story is assuredly ambitious, it is a bizarre viewing experience in unforeseen ways. Michael Moriarty was one of the many excruciatingly awful things about Cohen's trainwreck The Stuff and he is regrettably the lead here as well. Though Moriarty is playing a very different character here, why anyone heaps any amount of praise towards his performances is utterly baffling. His every delivery and mannerism are so distractedly strange in a manner that is difficult to describe, so strange that he becomes nearly torturous to watch. David Carradine for his part seems to be phoning it in as much as he possible can and when he and Moriarty are on screen together, it is an amazingly bad combination of actors both taking it way too seriously and not at all. The stop motion animation is dated of course yet fine, though it' is really the story structure that is so unwelcoming. It comes off as two different movies sandwiched together with the entire, far more interesting "horror" sub-plot simply bulldozed off to the side and sporadically picked back up again at random times as if a large number of scenes in between are missing.
(1986)
Dir - Bret McCormick
Overall: WOOF
Good lord. The SOV, (shot on video), boom in the 1980s where camcorders were readily available for household/incompetent filmmaking to use wielded hundreds of laughably inept movies, most of them seemingly horror ones. To even call The Abomination a "movie" is insulting even to the worst movies out there as it hits all the marks of a clueless cast, crew, and director offering up something thoroughly unwatchable. The dialog is all dubbed in post production and is noticeably distracting, but the actual words that they are saying are all levels of embarrassing, ("Last night I coughed up a big tumor. Now I can't find it", "Instead of helping, the beer made my stomach churn"). There is a scene where a guy sits on a toilet and gets his asshole and then entire body eaten and another guy gets stabbed with a shovel and screams "Oowww! My stomach!". This is also the only film ever made that begins with its own trailer; a three minute montage of all the gore moments to follow with the same shot of the main character jolting out of bed while screaming shown at least four-hundred and eighty times. Now the problem is all of this sounds hilarious on paper and such moments isolated on their own are absolutely worthy of the "so bad they're funny" tag. Yet the movie itself is outrageously boring. You are seriously wondering if they even hired an editor or simply included all of the footage that they had as every scene just lingers on and on and on. It seriously makes Plan 9 from Outer Space look like Goodfellas.
(1989)
Dir - Dean Alioto
Overall: MEH
Both U.F.O. Abduction and a 1998 remake Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County made by the same team preceded the logically compared The Blair Witch Project in the "found footage" camp. The initial version was produced for only $6,500 and definitely shows, which is one of its undoings. The film quality itself is so incredibly poor that it is nearly impossible to make out what you are looking at and the very few things that would actually be exciting to see are all but indistinguishable. Though it is barely an hour long, it feels noticeably stretched to make it there. So little transpires in Abduction that the filmmakers were forced to have their cast behave irrationally to a fault, just to fill up time. When aliens are clearly spotted and then one of them even gets brought into their house, (one of several moronic things these people do), their logic is to just kill time acting normal while opening birthday presents, eating cake, and playing cards. Though this is presented as the only reasonable option, it becomes very boring since we are just waiting for something/anything else to happen. The family's dialog is staggeringly poor and several of the male characters spontaneously erupt into bossy, asshole behavior, screaming things at their family like "Shut up!" and "I'm in charge of this family!" when nothing of the sort is either here nor there. Clearly the cast was add-libbing as best they could and the overlapping dialog does appear more natural near the beginning of the movie. Yet once the children's Halloween costume level aliens, (another big strike), show up, all the aforementioned problems truly emerge.
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