HINDSIGHT IS 2020: THE WRETCHED (2020) *

Boy, talk about truth in advertising!  Finally, here’s a movie that lives up to its name!   

The Wretched was one of the biggest box office hits of 2020, topping the charts for six straight weeks!  That of course was because there was a pandemic going on and barely any movies were being released, but that just gives you an idea of what a shitty year it was for Hollywood, and the movies in general.  Even during a pandemic, I can’t imagine anyone venturing out and risking their lives to see this in a theater.  Heck, I saw it in the safety of my own home, and it was still hazardous to my health. 

A witch hitches a ride inside a deer carcass (?) and crawls out to find a new home living inside a woman (Zarah Mahler) who is renting a summer house.  Meanwhile, next door, a teenager named Ben (John-Paul Howard) is spending the summer with his recently divorced dad.  When his neighbor’s son comes to him for help, stating he no longer trusts his mom, Ben does what he can to protect him.  When the brat disappears, the witch comes after Ben.  Naturally, he tries to convince everyone she’s a witch and of course, no one believes him. 

The Wretched is a slow and disjointed movie filled with confounding “rules” and even worse logic.  The idea of a witch using a human host as a husk is intriguing.  However, the filmmakers drop the ball at every conceivable juncture. 

The big problem is the structure.  The scenes with Ben are basically a rip-off of Fright Night, right down to the scenes of him spying on his neighbor.  Even using that sturdy template, the directors, Brett and Drew T. Pierce manage to botch things.  It just highlights how well that classic was constructed and how lousy this one is put together.  Things plunge deeper into the toilet in the third act when the witch starts hopping from body to body.  I guess they were trying for vibe close to The Hidden, but in terms of quality it hews much closer to The Hidden 2.

The stuff with the neighbor lady being overtaken by the witch could’ve worked, and yet the film spends so much time on Ben’s shady past, girlfriend woes, etc. that she (nor the witch) have a chance to become a real character.  Instead, she’s merely a plot device.  Imagine if we actually cared about what happened to her.  It might not have saved the movie, but it might’ve given it a little weight.

It also doesn’t help that Howard makes for a thoroughly unlikeable lead.  He grates on your nerves so much that you actually start rooting for the witch.  Mahler isn’t bad as the witchy neighbor, but again, we don’t see enough of her to make much of a difference.  Even with the changes I suggested, there probably was no saving this one.  It’s just as wretched as the title implies.

HINDSIGHT IS 2020: VHYES (2020) * ½

The idea is kind of irresistible.  A kid gets a camcorder for Christmas and uses it to tape a bunch of oddball TV shows.  These segments are basically parodies of the sort of stuff you’d see on late-night cable and/or public access in the ‘80s, making it sort of a spiritual successor in some ways to Amazon Women on the Moon.  It started out with some promise, and although I wasn’t expecting another Amazon Women on the Moon (and quite frankly, what could be?), I was at least hoping this would be as funny as the unfairly maligned Movie 43.  As it turns out, VHYes deserved to be erased.

The big problem isn’t exactly with the segments, although they aren’t particularly funny.  It has more to do with the structure.  Since the kid is basically channel surfing, it cuts from one show to the other at random.  In doing so, none of the segments ever get a chance to build up any real comedic momentum.  The way they try to tie everything together in the finale is pretty dumb too. 

There are a handful of good set-ups.  I liked the Antiques Roadshow-style show starring Mark (the What We Do in the Shadows TV show) Proksch.  The Home Shopping Network bits with Thomas Lennon had potential as well.  There’s also a true crime show that would’ve made a funny SNL sketch if it hadn’t hopped around so much. 

The film was directed by Jack Henry Robbins, son of Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon.  They both have cameos, although neither of them are really funny.  Even the usually great Kerri Kenney fails to generate laughs as a Bob Ross-inspired painter.

Robbins tries to recapture the ‘80s video aesthetic, with mixed results.  While it looks the part most of the time, some of the errors are so glaring that it completely takes you out of the sketch.  The biggest gaffe comes when Kenney paints a picture of herself in a compromising position with Dennis Rodman, who is depicted with green hair and wearing a Bulls jersey.  This would be okay ordinarily, but it’s supposed to take place in ’87 and Rodman didn’t go to the Bulls until the ‘90s.  Was the entire continuity department asleep at the wheel?  I don’t blame them.  With very few laughs spread about, you’ll probably fall asleep on this one too.

HINDSIGHT IS 2020: UNDERWATER (2020) *

Kristen Stewart stars in this underwater Alien rip-off, which I guess makes it… Deep Stew Six?

Anyway, there’s an accident in an underwater mining facility that floods the installation.  Stewart and the reminding survivors put on their deep-sea scuba suits and proceed to make it to a nearby outpost and call for help.  Along the way, they are picked off one by one by hungry squid-faced sea creatures who have an appetite for human flesh. 

Underwater not only rips off the Alien rip-offs of the ‘80s, there’s also a little bit of a Descent vibe in there as the last chunk of the film plays out like that movie.  Only instead of women in spelunking helmets evading slimy monsters in a cave, it’s women in bulky diving suits evading slimy monsters on the ocean floor.  Mostly though, it’s a big, soggy bore.

The first half is like a disaster movie, with K-Stew finding survivors in the rubble, assembling a team, and forming a game plan.  Halfway through, it switches gears and goes into full-on Alien rip-off territory.  I guess it wouldn’t have been so bad if you could see and hear what was going on.  Much of the underwater scenes are murky and thanks to the crappy cinematography, the creature attacks are pretty much a wash.  Couple that with the garbled dialogue and sleepy performances, and it only helps to make this one sink fast. 

After spending much of her post-Twilight years making indie movies, I guess Stewart was trying to appeal to a broader audience by starring in popcorn-friendly material like this and Charlie’s Angels.  She had the right idea, but the execution on this one is just plain shoddy.  (It’s definitely no Charlie’s Angels.)  Too bad they forgot to give her a character to play.  The rest of the cast run the gamut from dull (Vincent Cassel as the boring captain) to annoying (T.J. Miller as the unfunny comic relief).

Sure, the ‘80s underwater horror movie cycle were mostly bad, but at least we can look back on them with a bit of nostalgia.  I’m certain they spent more on the catering budget on this than the entire budgets of Deep Star Six and Lords of the Deep combined.  However, Underwater is just as bad, if not worse than those turkeys.  We do get one decent imploding human gag, although that’s not nearly enough to justify sitting through it.  Despite that one scene, Underwater deserves to be left at the bottom of the ocean. 

HINDSIGHT IS 2020: THE BEE GEES: HOW CAN YOU MEND A BROKEN HEART (2020) *** ½

From Frank Marshall, the director of Arachnophobia and Congo comes… uh… a documentary on The Bee Gees?  Wait, where’s Frank Marshall been lately?  (Pardon me a moment while I check IMDb.)  Holy shit!  It seems like the last movie he directed was fucking Eight Below fourteen years ago.  Man, this might be the comeback of the year!

I guess it makes sense he would make this documentary as The Bee Gees were no stranger to comebacks themselves.

The Bee Gees:  How Can You Mend a Broken Heart is one of the best documentaries of the year.  It’s the engaging and absorbing story of one of the hottest bands to ever grace the music scene.  It follows the brothers Gibb; Barry, Maurice, and Robin through their early career as a family band before finding success in England and America.  Tensions between the brothers cause them to break-up, but after some time apart, they reunite to conquer the world with their iconic contributions to the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. 

Not only do we share in their successes, but we are also right there with them when they are at their lowest.  Of course, I’m referring to the “Disco Sucks” backlash that whirled up to prematurely short circuit their careers.  Ever the survivors, they branch out and begin writing songs for other artists.

If there is a fault to the movie, it’s that it more or less chooses to end their story here with them back on top (for the most part).  However, I wish Marshall had spent more time on the band’s ‘80s stuff.  For all the talk about Saturday Night Fever, there’s no mention of the Sylvester Stallone-directed sequel, Stayin’ Alive.  I would’ve also liked to have seen them delve a bit more into their brother Andy’s death.  Then again, he probably deserves a documentary all his own. 

Those are but a few qualms.  Even if it stops short of being the definitive look at the band, The Bee Gees:  How Can You Mend a Broken Heart is nevertheless an enormously entertaining overview of their career.  If you ever imitated John Travolta while blaring “Stayin’ Alive” alone in your room (Lord knows I have), you will certainly enjoy it.

HINDSIGHT IS 2020: CORONA ZOMBIES (2020) **

 

A lot of people were up in arms when Full Moon’s Charles Band released this horror-comedy in the midst of the pandemic.  It was derided as being poorly timed and having even poorer taste.  I won’t argue those points.  I will say, that as far as cobbled-together cash-ins of global disasters go, you can do a lot worse.

Basically, what we have here is a modern-day equivalent of What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (or Kung Pow:  Enter the Fist for you younglings).  Instead of inserting a new, humorous dialogue track into a Bond rip-off or a cheap Kung Fu movie, we have a redubbed version of Bruno Mattei’s already pretty entertaining Night of the Zombies (AKA:  Hell of the Living Dead).  Not content to just steal from Night of the Zombies, we also get scenes from Zombies vs. Strippers that appears as part of a “Breaking News” bulletin.  Along with that is some cheap linking footage of two bimbos talking to each other on the phone about what to do during the pandemic.

Some of this is already dated, if you can believe it.  (Do people still advise you not to touch your face anymore?)  Much of it is tasteless.  Even more of it is just plain dumb.  Some of it, God help me, is actually kind of funny. 

The footage from Night of the Zombies is repurposed so that the viral outbreaks occurs at “Scramble’s Soup Factory” (or “Scamble’s” if you read the news ticker).  “The Corona Squad” is deployed to take out a warlord who’s hoarding toilet paper.  Eventually, they come face to face with the dreaded Corona Zombies.

Many of the gags are sophomoric.  A lot of them are sub-sophomoric.  (Is “freshmantic” even a word?)  I can honestly say that about half of the jokes are in poor taste, obvious, or downright crude.  There are jokes about social distancing, hand washing, and the Me Too movement.  No low-hanging fruit goes unpicked.  However, some of the non-virus-related throwaway lines are funny.

That said, the laughs kind of dry up by the end, and the new scenes with the two bimbos get stupider as they go along.  (What the hell is with the shower scene in which the bimbo is completely clothed?)  Thankfully, it’s only an hour long.  If only 2020 came and went just as fast.

One of the bimbos gets the best line of the movie after her friend tells her to turn on the news and she replies, “News?  Ewws!”

HINDSIGHT IS 2020: A LOOK BACK

Usually around this time, I start getting ready for the year-end Video Vacuum Awards show.  Even though the nominations don’t come out until the end of January, I start trying to watch as many Oscar-bait films as I can while playing catch-up on the movies I missed over the summer.  As I was compiling my Top Ten Films of the Year (So Far) list, I was astounded to learn that I only legitimately liked SEVEN of those films on that list.  I then started looking at my movie-watching list for the year and was shocked to discover I had only watched NINETEEN movies from 2020 all year.  (For comparison purposes, I watched forty-four 2019 releases during 2019.)  I was stunned when I learned I had only watched TWO movies in the theater all year (not counting the Fathom Events rerelease of King Kong).  You want to know the last time I only saw two theatrical movies in a calendar year?  1982!  When I was FOUR YEARS OLD!  You want to know what those two movies were?  E.T. and Rocky 3!  You want to know what the two movies I saw in the theater this year were?  Birds of fucking Prey and The Invisible fucking Man!  How can that even be possible?

Oh yeah.  Global pandemic.  That’s right.

Folks, I was almost ready to scrap the whole awards show.  Instead, I was going to do a mini-wrap-up of the 2019 movies I had seen in 2020 and call it a day. 

However, I decided that if I did that, I’d be letting the virus win.  I refuse to let a shitshow of a year ruin such a momentous occasion as The 14^th Annual Video Vacuum Awards.  Instead, I am going to plow forward and watch as many 2020 movies as I can until I beef up those movie-watching numbers, or at least have enough fodder to create actual award categories. 

Time will tell how many new releases I will watch, but one thing is for sure:  I will do my best to find films that showcase the best, brightest, and most talented performers, technicians, and filmmakers that are working in the business today; not only as a tribute to them, but to the artform to which they tireless sacrifice.  

And with that, I am proud to proclaim the first film I will be watching under the new Hindsight is 2020 column will be… uh…

UNTAMED MISTRESS (1955) **

Ron Ormond’s cut and paste jungle adventure, Untamed Mistress is sort of in the same vein as his Mesa of Lost Women.  That is to say, it’s pretty much a fucking mess.  Hey, at least there’s some nudity in the third act, which is more than I can say for Mesa. 

Two brothers on safari tend to their dying hunting guide.  He tells them a long story about how he used to be a big-time prince and traded it all in for the love of his life, a jungle girl who ran off to be one with the gorillas.  One of the brothers just so happens to be romancing a sexy jungle girl who may also succumb to the same fate.

The first act is full of flashbacks and footage from another movie.  The second act has a bunch of scenes of the heroes interacting with stock footage.  Things come to life in the third act though when the monkey business involving the guy in the gorilla suit comes into play, but until then, it’s rough going throughout most of the picture.

Some of Ormond’s attempts to blend the stock footage with the newly shot scenes works well enough.  The color palette matches more often than not, and the animal shots don’t look too grainy.  It’s when Ormond tries to mesh the actors in with the native dancing do things really become laughable.  (It’s obvious the dancers are part of some sort of exhibition as there are clearly hundreds of people watching from bleachers.) 

This stretch of the movie not only contains some completely gratuitous stock footage of native nudity, it also features some completely gratuitous new footage of native nudity, which I’m sure was the main attraction back in ‘55.  It’s a lot more T & A than many films from the era have, but it takes a long time to get there, and it’s not exactly worth the wait.  Still, I have a soft spot for movies in which guys in gorilla suits carry off gorgeous women into the jungle, so I can’t be too hard on it.

The lead actors are dull, but Jacqueline Fontaine periodically puts a little spark into the picture as Velda, the saucy jungle girl.  She gets one particularly good scene where she does an impromptu tribal dance.  In moments like this, you swear the film is about to come to life.  Most of the time though, it’s just a random assortment of scenes of guys looking at and talking about scenes from other movies.