Ryan Watches 50 Movies

Disclaimer: The DVD I'm talking about today is not a horror movie, a drive-in movie, or a cult classic. It's pretty far out, though. Some time ago, I was digging through the $1 DVD bin at Walmart in Marble Falls, Texas, when I came across something amazing: A Milton Berle exercise video. The cover of Milton Berle’s Low Impact High Comedy Workout had a PhotoShopped picture of Uncle Mitlie in a tracksuit, smoking a cigar and holding a martini and... wearing a cowboy hat???, and I think you’ll understand when I say I knew immediately that I had to own that DVD, no matter the cost, which fortunately was only one dollar. How excited was I about this DVD? I was so excited that I took it home, put it on a shelf, and didn’t watch it for about four years. But on a recent Saturday, as my roommate Joe and I were looking for something to do, we realized the time had come to experience this workout once and for all. First of all, I love that this thing even exists. I have to wonder h...

Still jumping around in the Drive-in Classics 50-movie pack, I selected 1977's Prime Time as my next "classic." It's a sketch film, a subgenre of comedy that inevitably yields mixed results. Kentucky Fried Movie and Amazon Women on the Moon are both full of funny moments, and they take advantage of having a larger budget and more production time than a TV sketch show would have... but they also both have their share of stupid segments. Loose Shoes , on the other hand, doesn't have a single sketch that's amusing enough to justify its existence. I had never heard of Prime Time before I got this DVD set, but I was eager to see if the funny outweighed the stupid. And, well... I don't want to ruin the suspense, but I'll just go ahead and tell you that this movie sucked. THE MOVIE As Prime Time begins, a high-ranking military officer named Bill settles down to watch TV somewhere in Washington, D.C. He sees a commercial for "Trans Puerto Rico,...

And now for a chance of pace. A big, hairy, stinky change of pace. The Legend of Bigfoot was released in 1976, and according to the description on the DVD sleeve, it's a documentary. I was expecting it to be the kind of thing that you might see on the Discovery Channel... a look at the history of the Bigfoot legend, with some blurry photos and plaster casts but no new information. And, of course, it would contain the famous Patterson-Gimli Bigfoot film . Yeah, I definitely knew it would include the Patterson film, which we've all seen a million times. I was wrong. Wait, what? Could a public domain movie included in one of these 50-movie packs actually have something that I, a former child Bigfoot aficionado, had never seen before? Maybe! THE "STORY" The film was directed by Harry Stuart Winer, but the star of the show, the guy who wants us all to listen to him talk, is Ivan Marx. I looked him up - Ivan Marx was active in the Bigfoot believers community for a w...

Back to the "50 Drive-in Classics" DVD set! Once again I shun the order of the discs, and I jump directly to Creepers , a 1985 horror movie starring a very, very young Jennifer Connelly, before she won an Oscar, before she starred in Career Opportunities or Labyrinth , and before she became one of the most frequently screen-captured women on the internet. Creepers was directed by Dario Argento, an Italian filmmaker who is quite popular among horror aficionados. He's also the father of actress Asia Argento, who almost became a star after appearing in the craptacular Vin Diesel action movie XXX . An interesting fact I found in researching this movie online: Creepers is the title of the American cut of this movie, which has been edited to remove some of the gory stuff. The original version of the film is called Phenomena , which should not be confused with the movie Phenomenon starring John Travolta, even though Travolta, like Jennifer Connelly, has appeared in a movi...

Disclaimer: Although I'm titling this post with "Drive-in Classic 1 of 50," 1975's I Wonder Who's Killing Her Now? , directed by Steven Hilliard Stern, is not actually the first movie in the Mill Creek 50 Movie Pack: Drive-in Classics DVD set. It's just the one I decided to watch first, based mostly on the title. The title, of course, is a goof on the old song I Wonder Who's Kissing Her Now . My initial assumption was that this would be a really bad thriller with a high body count. But as soon as I pressed PLAY, that belief was challenged. An animated opening title sequence? A credit that reads "Starring Bill Dana?" Could this be... a... comedy ? ( Bill Dana , by the way, is a comedian best known for playing a Mexican character named José Jimenez, who ranks somewhere near the Frito Banditio in terms of political correctness.) And it is indeed a comedy, or at least it thinks it is. It starts out promisingly enough, but about halfway through the...

I did it! I watched 50 old public domain movies slapped together by a cheap home video label under the claim that all of them are "horror classics." So... now what? I'll get to that later, but first, how about a breakdown of all 50 horror classics by letter grade? Before you read on, try guessing which letter grade I gave out most frequently! A: 2 Night of the Living Dead, Metropolis B+: 3 The Little Shop of Horrors, The Phantom of the Opera, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde B: 9 House on Haunted Hill, The Bat, Monster from a Prehistoric Planet, Nosferatu, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Corpse Vanishes, Invisible Ghost, Creature From the Haunted Sea, Carnival of Souls B-: 9 The Amazing Mr. X, Bloodlust!, The Gorilla, Doomed to Die, The Killer Shrews, The Fatal Hour, The Giant Gila Monster, One Body Too Many, The Last Man on Earth C+: 5 A Shriek in the Night, Tormented, Bluebeard, The Vampire Bat, Nightmare Castle C: 8 Last Woman on Earth, Swamp Women, Indestructible Man, King of...