The Screengrab : all-night marathon

All-Night Mockbuster Marathon

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 12 May 2008 18:30:00 GMT

It’s time for another all-night marathon, so put on a pot of coffee, find the sweet spot on the couch and join me for a nocturnal journey into the shadowy world of the mockbuster. (If you’re not sure what a mockbuster is, here’s a handy primer.)

12 midnight. We begin with the latest mockbuster from the good people at the Asylum, Allan Quatermain and the Temple of Lost Skulls. I’ll bet you can guess which blockbuster-in-waiting occasioned the release of this one. Although the character of Allan Quatermain actually predates the creation of Indiana Jones by nearly a century, his reappearance now is a case of history repeating itself. Temple of Skulls is based on H. Rider Haggard’s 1885 novel King Solomon’s Mines, as was the 1985 film starring Richard Chamberlain, a mockbuster before they had a word for it. (Back then, we charitably called it a Raiders of the Lost Ark ripoff.) This doesn’t stop the producers from claiming that Allan Quatermain inspired Indiana Jones, which is partially true but certainly misleading in this context. In any case, there is no temple of skulls in the movie, so you can bet it was retitled once Lucasfilm announced the name of the latest Indiana Jones flick. Anyway, as Temple of Skulls begins, two rugged prospector types in South Africa find the map to King Solomon’s mines. Not trusting each other, they split it in half to ensure they’ll stick together. Shortly thereafter they are attacked by Zulus and the map pieces blow away. Some time later, rugged great white hunter Quatermain (Sean Michael) gets his hands on one half.

12:20 am. I’m trying to figure out when this movie is set. We’ve got coal-burning trains, ladies in frilly frocks, black dudes in hip-hop hats and Nazi references. So I guess…some time in the last 70 years or so? Anyway, Quatermain has teamed up with Sir Henry and Lady Anna, a wealthy couple with the other half of the map. They are being pursued by Quatermain’s arch-nemesis, a scenery chewer straight out of an old Hammer horror movie.

12:30 am. Here we have a five-mile-an-hour chase between a truck and a locomotive engine. It’s like someone stuck a Monty Python sketch in the middle of the movie.

12:45 am. Our heroes dodge CGI bugs, then encounter a (real) rhino. This scene is edited Survivor-style; we have no idea if the rhino is even in the same hemisphere as Quatermain and the gang.

1:00 am. In fine National Geographic tradition, Quatermain and company are captured by bare-breasted natives. There is a bizarre CGI Zulu head-removal ritual.

1:15 am. I was expecting pretty much constant action and zero plot from Temple of Skulls, but that’s not actually the case. For all I know, it’s a reasonably faithful adaptation. I must give the Asylum credit for scenery at least; the movie is purty to look at.

1:40 am. Let us move on to King of the Lost World, another literary adaptation posing as a recent blockbuster. It’s loosely based on A. Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, with the addition of “King” to the title and a picture of a big scary ape on the cover to fool drunk people at Blockbuster into renting it. The box also trumpets an appearance by Bruce Boxleitner – star of Scarecrow and Mrs. King! Well, that’ll bring the kids into the tent. Anyway, King opens with a plane crashing onto an island, announcing its intentions to rip off not only King Kong and Jurassic Park but also Lost. This is confirmed when we see a stewardess trapped up in a tree. Three minutes into the movie, a giant gorilla snatches her. We won’t be seeing him again for a while.

2:00 am. Giant bug attack!

2:10 am. There’s a glitch in the DVD and I have to jump ahead five minutes, at which point maggots are being used to heal a woman’s wound. So glad I didn’t miss that.

2:25 am. Our heroes find a fighter jet with an active nuke. The mysterious Bruce Boxleitner knows how to hot-wire it.

2:40 am. Things are happening now! One dude gets impaled by a giant scorpion. The others are taken hostage by skull-face painted natives. There are boobies! And lesbian natives!

2:50 am. A flurry of terrible CGI: we’ve got pterodactyls, plus the giant ape finally returns, though he looks blurry and pixilated. (Another reason CGI must die: think about how much progress in giant robot ape technology could have been made by now.) Boxleitner reveals he was sent to disarm the nuke, which really makes no sense, especially once he explains that the bomb has a limited range of 300 yards. Anyway, they blow up the ape real good. Okay, I’m lying. It’s not real good.

3:00 am. It’s time for The Da Vinci Treasure. Here’s how you know these folks at the Asylum aren’t completely shameless: the film concerns a forensic archeologist and his search for the Da Vinci codex. See – they could have called this The Da Vinci Codex! Maybe they didn’t quite have the grapes for that (though they did make The Transmorphers, unreviewed here – I’ve got my limits too, junior.)

3:15 am. Anyway, the main players here are a haggard C. Thomas Howell as our hero Michael Archer, an earring-sporting Lance Henriksen as the villainous Dr. John Coven, and Nicole Sherwin as your typically hot linguist/theologian. Throughout the movie, director Peter Mervis (Snakes on a Train) employs an annoying effect that kept making me think there was something wrong with my DVD player. It’s a sort of freeze-frame/flash/jumpcut deal – like someone mentions Jesus, and suddenly there’s a flash of light, a whoosh, quick shots of a crucifix and the Last Supper, and then back to the scene. I guess this pumps up the excitement level, as if looking for hidden clues on the Shroud of Turin weren’t exciting enough!

3:20 am. We have our first mention of the Knights Templar! Also, the Shroud of Turin is apparently kept in the basement of the Alamo.

3:30 am. And Da Vinci invented 3-D glasses, in case you were wondering.

3:45 am. In what must be the most expensive scene in any of these Asylum movies, there is a smash-em-up car chase through the streets of London (or San Diego, whatever) involving a tour bus. Fortunately they didn’t have to pay the guy playing the Casio on the soundtrack too much.

4:15 am. Apparently I nodded off during the big revelation scene in The Da Vinci Treasure. I’m sure it changed the face of Christianity forever, but there’s no time to go back! Let’s wrap this up with an old school mockbuster to cleanse the palate, shall we? Of course I’m talking about 1988’s timeless E.T. ripoff, Mac and Me. We begin on another planet, where a family of aliens is accidentally sucked into the vacuum hose of a rover from Earth. The aliens, I guess, are meant to be cute, but to me they look like giant sea monkeys or very confused burn victims.

4:30 am. After the alien family is brought to Earth, the smallest alien, or Mysterious Alien Creature, or MAC (you see?), hitches a ride with a single mother and her two sons moving to California. They don’t notice him, but he keeps getting into mischief, and the youngest, wheelchair-bound brother Eric keeps getting blamed for it.

4:45 am. Eric plummets off a cliff in his wheelchair and is rescued by Mac. When he tells the doctor what happened, the doc diagnoses him with “schizofreakia” and decides to dope him up. Ah, the 80s.

5:00 am. Breakdancing! At McDonald’s! With Ronald McDonald and football players and – don’t take my word for it, see for yourself:

5:15 am. By now everyone believes Mac exists, and they help reunite him with his family members, who are trapped in a mineshaft out by those windmills from Rain Man. The kids nurse the aliens back to life with nourishing sips of Coca-Cola. I tell ya, this movie is Morgan Spurlock’s worst nightmare.

5:30 am. Of course, government agents are in hot pursuit of Mac, and in their attempts to capture him they manage to blow up an entire mall and kill Eric in the process. Fortunately, Mac and his family are able to suck the death right out of him. Apparently the aliens don’t hold their ill treatment by the agents against their government, as the movie concludes with the whole family becoming U.S. citizens. A final ominous title card claims “We’ll Be Back.” We’re still waiting. And by “we,” I mean “not me.” Good night.

Previously: All-Night Bigfoot Movie Marathon

All-Night Bigfoot Movie Marathon

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 18:00:00 GMT

We’re all about the new and exciting features here at the Screengrab, so here’s another one for your dining and dancing pleasure. Those three of you who have succumbed to my repeated shameless plugs for my book Hick Flicks may recall the 24-hour hillbilly horror movie marathon I inflicted upon myself and my four-legged life partner Maury the Wonder Chibeagle in the interests of cinematic scholarship and medical science. I don’t think I have another 24-hour marathon in me, but I’m willing to pull the occasional all-nighter in the interests of furthering my research and edifying you in the process. Let’s kick it off with a subject near and dear my heart: Bigfoot movies.

As you three Hick Flicks readers may also recall from the book, the 1970s were the heyday of Sasquatch Cinema, but the last year or two has seen an unexpected revival of the genre. After spending the night with a handful of the latest Bigfoot movies, I think I’ve figured out why. Take, for example, Primal (not to be confused with the recent creature feature Primeval, which I initially did), a video cheapie that appears to have been shot entirely on location in director Steffen Schlachtenhaufen’s backyard. I’m going to speculate that Schlachtenhaufen won a Chewbacca costume in a sci-fi convention raffle, and this provided all the inspiration necessary – in fact, all the inspiration to be found, period.

12 midnight. The first rule of creature features: conceal your critter as much as possible, preferably not revealing more than the occasional fin or eyelash for the first hour or so. Schlachtenhaufen breaks this rule less than two minutes in, when we spot the guy in the wookie suit squatting under a tree. Two hikers have wandered off the trail, a development that doesn’t sit well with Bigfoot, who proceeds to eviscerate them. At least, I think that’s what happens. It’s a little hard to tell because Schlachtenhaufen piles every chintzy video effect imaginable onto the scene, from a ‘scratchy film’ overlay to a psychedelic light display straight out of a 60s LSD movie.

12:30 am. Some semblance of a plot has emerged involving a group of surveyors who are unwittingly (I think, although this is never clarified) scouting a wilderness area for a big oil company. At a nearby ranger station, a young woman and her schlubby boyfriend are visiting her estranged brother, the creepy ranger who likes to be left alone. Pathetically, the one-room ranger station with its hand-drawn sign is the most elaborate set in the movie.

1:15 am. Bigfoot makes what must be his sixth or seventh attack in Primal, and we’re still no closer to finding out why he’s so upset. Maybe he should move to a less populated area. In the end, the oil company sends another set of surveyors into the area, which is sure to make him cranky all over again. But it’s time to move on.

1:30 am. Our next feature is The Long Way Home: A Bigfoot Story, and so far it makes Primal look like a masterpiece of crisp storytelling, tight editing and lavish production values. The director is James “Bubba” Cromer, a South Carolina attorney turned independent filmmaker. After ten minutes I’m ready to throw myself on the mercy of the court. An old woman is screaming about how her chickens have all been killed. This goes on for quite some time.

2:00 am. It turns out that Cromer himself is playing a failed Miami Herald reporter who returns to his hometown to investigate reported Bigfoot sightings. But what he doesn’t know is that his friends have staged the sightings using a gorilla costume, in order to lure him home; they hope the Bigfoot story will revive his career. This is actually a somewhat promising plot, and it has the advantage of explaining why the creature looks so fake – a problem most Bigfoot movies never overcome.

3:20 am. The plot may have been promising, but the executive is dismal. The Long Way Home plays more like a collection of outtakes than a coherent narrative – it’s all long, single-shot scenes of poorly improvised dialogue delivered by non-actors, a few of whom happen to be interesting characters who aren’t well-served by the process. On the Myspace page for the movie, Cromer lists his influences as Ed Wood, John Waters, and Charles B. Pierce (director of The Legend of Boggy Creek), and his movie is an eerily accurate composite of all three sensibilities. Maybe that sounds too much like a recommendation.

4:10 am. Here’s a change of pace: The Sasquatch Gang (originally titled The Sasquatch Dumpling Gang – no, really), a family-friendly flick in the Napoleon Dynamite mold. A band of young SCA geeks find tracks and a mound of poop in the woods, leading them to believe Bigfoot is in their midst. Justin Long co-stars as their hockey-haired neighbor. (Curiously, this is Justin Long’s second Bigfoot movie in recent months, as he also appears in Strange Wilderness, which sadly was not available on DVD in time for this marathon.)

5:00 am. This really is a Napoleon Dynamite wannabe; not only is Jon “Uncle Rico” Gries in the cast, but Napoleon himself, Jon Heder, has a cameo, and director Tim Skousen was the first assistant director on Dynamite. Sasquatch Gang has a rewinding narrative structure and a couple of good gags, but it’s mostly a lame revenge-of-the-nerds story, and most importantly THERE IS NO BIGFOOT IN IT. There is Carl Weathers as a Bigfoot hunter, but that simply won’t do.

5:45 am. We’re wrapping things up with Sasquatch Mountain (although the onscreen title is actually Devil on the Mountain), which stars Lance Henriksen as a man whose beloved wife was run over by a car while videotaping Bigfoot. Years later, the tape ends up in the hands of a young woman who is taken hostage by a group of bank robbers in gorilla masks. (I’m just telling you what I saw, folks.)

6:30 am. Either Sasquatch Mountain is competent, or it takes on the sheen of competence when viewed at the end of a long night’s worth of Bigfoot’s Funniest Home Videos. Whatever the case, I am reminded yet again that, while I always think I like Bigfoot movies, that doesn’t often turn out to be the case. Somewhere in my head I have this notion of the perfect Bigfoot movie, but I’ve never seen it in real life. Sort of like the creature itself, I guess. It must be time for bed.