Totally Random: Movies You Should See, and Avoid

SEE THESE

Dr. Strangelove: Or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb -

Considered by most to be Stanley Kubrick's best film, it is pure, unbridled political satire. If you can handle a more intelligent and disguised platform of jokes, you'll love this movie. See the 3 hilarious performances of Peter Sellers as a war room full of politicians try to avoid a nuclear holocaust from happening after a crazy General named Jack Ripper sends a fleet of B-52s to bomb the U.S.S.R. Also, you'll get to see the infamous sequence of a pilot (played by Slim Pickens) ride a nuke to the ground, waving his cowboy hat and "Yeehaww-ing" all the way down.

Bubba Ho-Tep -

This movie single-handedly takes the cake for the greatest plot-line ever presented in film history. A geriatric Elvis Presley and a black JFK fight for their nursing home when a mummy wearing cowboy duds starts to suck the souls from the other elderly patients, oh and Elvis has cancer on his penis. From second and third viewings I realized the movie isn't as strong as its plot-line, but nonetheless it's still a really fun movie. It features a very cool original soundtrack composed by Brian Tyler, who has scored other campy B-movies like Six-String Samurai. It contains a few of my favorite quotes, like when JFK reads graffiti on the bathroom wall that the mummy wrote in hieroglyphics- "Cleopatra does the nasty." Also I'd consider Bruce Campbell's performance in the movie to be quite underrated, I thought he was exceptional. See the movie, have fun, but don't expect too much from a "redemptive Elvis, mummy picture" as the actor Bruce Campbell puts it.

AVOID THESE

The Starfighters -

To put this movie's plot line into simplest terms, I guess I'd have to say that there is absolutely no plot line whatsoever. I currently hail this piece of crap as the worst movie I've ever had the displeasure of seeing. To try and pander to my blog's audience, I'll do my best to try and explain the content of the film. It's about a pilot in the airforce during a non-war time who only wants to fly planes. The trouble is his Father, a congressman, wants him to fly a different kind of plane than the kind he wants to. Confused? I know I was, but I could go more in depth for you. Basically, a bunch of planes refuel in the sky, on the ground they talk about how sharp the planes are, people talk in a restaraunt about corn, the pilots shoot targets from their planes, there's another refueling scene, a bunch of pilots float in a pool wearing floatation outfits known as "poopie suits", and then the movie ends with more plane-flying. Disgustingly Awful.

Glen Or Glenda -

The worst film of Edward D. Wood Jr. the man who is frequently called the worst director of all time. It is about a man who has to struggle through life as a transvestite, a fact that not even his fiancee is aware of. I will at least say there was some intelligent thought behind its production. Ed Wood was a transvestite himself and as you can imagine, in 1953 a man dressing in women's clothes was frowned upon. Wood used this film to try and make people understand the difficulty of hiding something because of fear that others will make you feel ashamed. With that said, what a horrendous film this is! Most of the movie is recycled stock footage of cars on highways, the army firing cannons, and stampeding buffalos, and I assure you Mr. Wood does not connect it with the point of the movie. There is also an odd character played by Bela Lugosi, the man famous for playing Dracula. Lugosi plays a scientist who appears at random points in the movie and yells stuff like, "Pull the string!" Finally, there is a dream sequence where the Devil ties a woman up on a couch- I found no symbolism in the scene, but I was slightly disturbed by the bizarre sexual images being presented. All in all, a failed attempt at trying to fix a social problem, and one of the worst movies I've ever seen (if you'd call it a movie.)

The Tenant - A film that shows how sometimes relationships with neighbors can be quite complicated

Roman Polanski's psychological thriller The Tenant may start off kinda slow, but by the second half it spirals out of control into one of the most terrifying things ever filmed.

It takes place in France where a man named Trelkovsky (Polanski) moves into the apartment of a girl named Simone Choule who had recently committed suicide. The longer he lives there the more sure he becomes that it was the other tenants of the apartment building that drove Simone to kill herself. Now Trelkovsky believes their most recent scheme is to drive him to a similar fate while at the same time turn him into the deceased Simone herself. You get to see his psychological decay as odd things continue to happen, such as teeth appearing in his walls, and people standing in windows staring at him for hours.

I first heard about this movie when the actor Bruce Campbell mentioned it in an interview as the scariest movie he has ever seen. Campbell has starred in many lower-class horror films such as The Evil Dead. He knows that the quality of his work in the slasher/exploitation genre differs with Polanski's thriller, and that is why I felt compelled to check it out. As much as I respect and love Bruce Campbell, it takes more than buckets of blood and spewing guts to get me scared. So, I get excited whenever I hear about a movie that could genuinely scare me.

Upon viewing The Tenant I could fully understand where Bruce Campbell was coming from. What makes the movie scary is the fact that you never know if the other tenants really do have an evil plot, or if Trelkovsky is crazy and it's all a part of his imagination. If you like being comfortably confused by things as you try to make sense of them in your head, then this movie is splendidly designed for your pleasure.

One good aspect to the film is Polanski's interesting camera techniques which mimic Trelkovsky's road to insanity as the film progresses. He'll film a slanted shot of a staircase as people are walking on it and you'll feel like you're looking through the confused eyes of Trelkovsky himself.

It is obvious that English was not the original language that all the characters in the movie spoke in. So, if you are easily offended by some bad overdubbing than you might be put off. It shouldn't be a problem though considering the dialogue is not at all the most important thing in the movie. However there is one monologue spoken by Trelkovsky that I liked quite a bit. He speaks of the levels of importance of his various body parts, he says, "If you were to cut off my head, what would I say... Me and my head, or me and my body? What right has my head to call itself me?"

In all his films Polanski seems to delve into a lot of dark material, and this movie is no exception. So, what kind of stuff should you expect to see? You'll see someone get hit by a car, you'll see child abuse, transvestitism, bouncing human heads, and of course the occasional suicide. Probably the thing that disturbed me the most was one horrifyingly awful scream given from a woman in a full-body cast. That cry of mortal despair brought more fear to me than any horror movie's scream ever could.

If you're interested in seeing something that could mess with your head a little and show you the darker, more twisted side of human nature then see Roman Polanski's The Tenant. You might just end up getting a little freaked out.

Here is a video of people explaining why they think it was so scary