(1982)
Dir - Jack Hill
Overall: MEH
After the success of John Milius' Conan the Barbarian, Roger Corman quickly and unsurprisingly put into production a cheapo bit of sword and sorcery silliness with Sorceress, doubling as the last film that Jack Hill would ever be behind the lens on. After Hill and up-and-coming B-movie peddler Jim Wynorski concocted a screenplay inspired by Alexandre Dumas' 1844 novella The Corsican Brothers, the production switched to Mexico at the last minute and was plagued by issues. Fires, weather, crew difficulties, criminal activity, and of course Corman skimping on the budget as much as was humanly possible, it all culminated in the actors allegedly being dubbed by random office workers and the like, which hilariously shows in the oddly flat ADRed performances. On paper though, there is plenty of wackiness here, like people in bad monkey suits, a horny satyr, Leigh and Lynette Harris playing naive and mostly naked barbarian babes with magical powers, zombies, evil wizards, hippy wizards, a viking who goes bare-ass, rape, sacrifices, and a lion creature doing battle with a monstrous head in the sky. Far from a masterpiece and jarring in its shoddy craftsmanship, but it is a goofy watch with some unintended chuckles to enjoy.
(1988)
Dir - John Henry Johnson
Overall: MEH
Despite its overwhelming ineptitude, John Henry Johnson's Z-grade Curse of the Blue Lights has some unintended and ridiculous charm. A regional crud rock that was shot in Colorado with a bunch of people that were likely never seen again on screen, (and for good reason), it is a little-movie-that-could production, with a shameless, cheap Halloween haunted house aesthetic and a moronic plot that is brimful of cliches. It is also so stupid as to be surreal. A network of ghouls in obvious yet elaborate make-up have some scheme to resurrect a guy in a laughably lousy rubber monster costume, all while teenagers who are pushing thirty can annoy a cop, haphazardly get separated, bounce back and forth between locations, and go find one of the most over-acting gypsies in cinema history. On that note, the performances are either scenery-chewing extravaganzas or of the clumsy and sterile variety where people lazily stumble their dialog; dialog that is consistently redundant with people saying a slight variation of the same sentence more often than not. Johnson's direction does not match his ambitions as he lets his camera linger on the actors until they are done embarrassing themselves, causing the film to feel eight hours long. Though it does everything incorrectly, its relentless tackiness and "eyes bigger than its stomach" trajectory still comes off as adorably amusing at times.
(1989)
Dir - Samuel Bradford
Overall: WOOF
Out of the many, many, many, MANY vampire comedies that emerged during the 1980s, Teen Vamp if not the lamest, (OK, it is the lamest), is easily the most awkward. The first of only two movies to be directed by Samuel Bradford and shot in Louisiana with local actors, (sans Clu Galager who embarrasses himself for a paycheck), it is the usual regional travesty that fails almost exclusively because of the inexperience of the person behind the lens. While the performers struggle with such cliche-ridden material and would have came off as such even with Martin Scorsese at the helm, Bradford stages everything in a clumsy manner that does nobody any favors. On paper, such 1950s throwback high school tropes mixed with undead ones sound like they would gel as well as any, but it is all in the execution and the execution here routinely falls down the stairs. Flat shots, characters prattling on, scenes that linger for too long; it all makes such lazy material that much more pathetically realized. For 1989, it seems particularly out of phase, not only by lacking the flair and gore that the kids like, but by not even taking advantage of boner comedy tropes that were running rampant at the time. So in addition to being moronic, badly acted, and unprofessionally directed, it is also about as hip as peanut brittle.
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