Saturday, December 3, 2011

Ten Statements About....IT CAME FROM...SOMEWHERE ELSE CHAPTER III (1988)

A visual representation of how I felt watching this movie...
"Your arm is gone!"
"It happens on these country roads. Just proceed home, little minors."

1) You ever gone to a party at a friend's house, and your friend and his pals spend the whole night telling these jokes that make no sense to you, but those others find so hilarious they're rolling on the floor laughing?

That's this movie.

2) I...think I understand the rationale behind this black and white film switching to color during its laughable gore sequences. It's just that said switches don't have the impact I suspect the filmmakers intended it to have. The same goes for the redheaded woman stripping in the middle of the government office.

3) So you think you've earned the right to do a take-off on Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb, movie? I hope the ghost of Kubrick has been paying you nightly visits to disavow you of that belief.

Later in life, Joe Don Baker let himself go badly and became
convinced he was Asian...
4) You know, just dressing a character up to resemble Mr. Rogers or Gilligan and letting that be the joke (at least in the later; the former does have another 'gag' attached to him) isn't enough.

5) Look, I know this is an amateur production pretty much populated by friends and family of the filmmakers (one of the reasons why I'm not going to go into the acting much), but at least have the decency to have an actual story to tell with a beginning, a middle and an end. If you can't be bothered to do that, make this a sketch comedy film.

6) You can intentionally emulate a bad film and produce a good film...but you have to put thought into giving the audience something to make them look beyond the badness of the surface. These filmmakers seem to think the emulation is joke enough. And speaking of which...

7) If you're actually going to recreate a 50's science fiction film, you need to go all in and not include all the foul language. It just pulls the audience (I imagine there were three of them...and a dog) out of the sense that they're watching some lost B movie.

8) Maybe, but maybe, this film could have benefited from streamlining all the craziness, thus giving the 'story' more focus. Throwing in a spacecraft that never actually lands, spontaneous human combustion, nuclear waste, kung fu fighters, an improbably indestructible Mr. Rogers clone and so much more just muddies--and confuses--the waters.

This had nothing to do with this film, but it did come up
when I looked for film stills on Google and both the girl and
the horse headed goof is better looking than anyone in
the film, so...


9) Oh, and this movie is concrete proof that everything is not made better with ninjas. Sometimes, it remains crap, even with ninjas added.

10) At least it's only an hour and ten minutes...even if that hour and ten minutes feels like an ten hours and one minute.

Overall...a prime example of how a cult film can not be consciously created, this is a sad, sad little movie that shows no potential of being anything other than a bunch of kids trying to put on a show in a typically hamfisted way.

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