‘Merica!!
I have never learned my lesson.
Fifteen years as a video store manager and thousands (upon thousands and thousands) of movies later, and I still have never developed that thing the cinema buffs refer to as … taste.
You can have your “12 Years a Slave.” I want my “Rockabilly Vampire.”
Oh, it’s real. Don’t question me on that one.
Anyway, with that established, it should come as little surprise that I chose to spend the 4th of July seeing what questionable films I could come up with to watch for another round of my favorite life-waster — the Flat Butt Film Fest.
Only rules — I couldn’t have seen the films before and I couldn’t spend a penny.
So, no Netflix, no Amazon, no rentals.
Yes to library films and whatever I could scrape up from the floor of YouTube.
We open with “The Weird World of Blowfly,” a documentary about an ornery ol’ dude who had the ultimate bipolar career.
On the one side, he wrote love songs for ’60s R & B groups. On the other, he dressed as a superhero and spit out X-rated rhymes on stage as, arguably, the first rapper ever.
From there, we slide into the forgotten ’70s musical “Toomorrow” (yes, that’s how it’s spelled onscreen), starring a dewy-beyond-belief Olivia Newton-John in a tale of mod college singers being recruited by aliens.
Blowfly to Sandra Dee in 2.4 seconds. Whiplash, meet my neck.
I recover by bouncing through “Batman: Year One,” a quick, crisp animated plunge into the early days of the Dark Knight, then head back into the world of music with “Don’t Stop Believin’: Everyman’s Journey.”
Oh, you know, the you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up tale of a Filipino singer plucked off of YouTube to front a legendary ’70s rock band as they hit the road for a late-in-their-career revival.
Neck, whiplash … you’ve met before.
And it’s back to YouTube for “Sometimes Aunt Martha Does Dreadful Things,” which … words fail me.
Two crooks are on the lam and one, for no reason at all, chooses to dress up like a middle-aged housewife and lounge around the house all day drinking beer and doing some light house cleaning, except when he’s getting super jealous and all stabby.
Delightful. I think that’s the word we’re all looking for here.
Next up, Barbara Eden, Larry Hagman, Vera Miles and a young Tyne Daly in a really well-done ’70s TV movie, “A Howling in the Woods.”
Miss “I Dream of Jeannie” is a jet-setting fashion designer who returns to the town she grew up in, only to find that no one is happy to see her.
Her rich father is missing, her new step brother is a Vietnam vet with drug issues who lounges around the house playing the piano and smiling at all the wrong times and no one wants to talk about the little girl who was murdered and thrown in the lake.
Oh yes, and there’s a dog who won’t shut up, drifting through the woods, his howls haunting everyone. What DID the dog see?
Riding a nice buzz, I skip through “Page One,” a solid doc about the New York Times struggling to stay relevant, than get punched in the nads by “Abar: The First Black Superman.”
One of the few blaxploitation flicks of the ’70s I haven’t seen, it is, frankly, God-awful, and I feel my spirit waning in the wee hours.
My bed calls, and, unlike in my younger days, I see no loss of pride in giving in and calling it a day.
But first, I stumble on “Horrific,” a short film about a farmer going toe-to-toe with a sneaky, goat-eatin’, finger-stealin’ critter, and, in six-and-a-half-minutes of Looney Tunes meets Sam Raimi, it reminds me why I keep watching.
“Show yourself, you little peckerwood!! You took my finger and I can’t abide by that!!”
This rocks, and director Robert Boocheck, I bow to you … and then I stumble off to bed, a goofy smile on my lips.
To see “Horrific,” jump over to:
http://vimeo.com/78274444
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