RAPSITTIE STREET KIDS: BELIEVE IN SANTA (2002) NO STARS

I am proud to say that my daughter inherited my love of bad movies.  Throughout the pandemic, we have watched many episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 together, and it has been fun seeing her experience so many cheesy classics for the first time.  Little did I know, she has been looking for other grade Z flicks for us to enjoy.  When she brought Rapsittie Street Kids:  Believe in Santa to my attention, I was ashamed to say I had never even heard of it.  When we watched it together, we both agreed it was one of the worst pieces of cinematic crap we’ve ever seen.  

This is truly one of those proud parent moments. 

The student has surpassed the master.  

The legend surrounding this Christmas special is much more entertaining than the special itself.  It appeared only once on the old WB network before resurfacing on the internet in recent years, becoming something of a cult item.  It contains some of the worst CGI animation I have ever seen.  It was made in 2002, but the animation looks worse than the Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” music video that came out almost twenty years earlier.  I know computer animation wasn’t as sophisticated then as it is today, but there’s no excuse for it to look like a Nintendo 64 video game.

The legend goes that the director “didn’t know” the animation was that bad until he watched it at home on television like everybody else.  I don’t know if I buy that story, but it’s more believable than the actual plot.  That is also supposed to explain why the grandmother character speaks in complete gibberish as the audio file was severely corrupted and nobody bothered it fix it.  (The only intelligible word she says is “Christmas”, which in itself is something of a Christmas miracle.) 

The plot involves a bully who receives a ratty teddy bear as Christmas present from a kid who speaks solely in rap verses.  She is at first annoyed by the gift and throws it in the garbage.  When she learns it was a present from the kid’s dead mother (“before she went to the angels”), the bratty chick then embarks on a quest to retrieve the bear.

Fortunately, all this clocks in at forty minutes, but it feels like an eternity.  It’s an affront to the eyes, ears, and brain.  As someone who has suffered through plenty of bad movies in his time, I have to admit, this is one of the worst.  I couldn’t be prouder of my daughter.  

The most amazing thing about Rapsittie (Get it?  Like “Rhapsody”, except it is like “Rap City”, except they just fucked up the spelling?) Street Kids:  Believe in Santa is that it sports a solid cast of vocal talent.  We have Bart Simpson herself, Nancy Cartwright, The Ice Cream Man himself, Clint Howard, none other than The Little Mermaid, Jodi Benson, and MARK FUCKIN’ HAMILL!  Apparently, Hamill has no memory of recording his lines for this thing.  Again, I don’t know if I buy that part of the legend.  Instead, I’d like to think he used some sort of Jedi Mind Trick on himself to make him forget he was even in this thing.     

WITCHOUSE (1999) **

David DeCoteau directed this cheap Charles Band production.  It feels like a Full Moon riff on Night of the Demons, without the over-the-top gore, nudity, or fun.  Heck, with a few trims it could’ve easily been a PG-13 flick.

A group of friends are invited to party at a spooky mansion by their goth friend Elizabeth (Ashley McKinney Taylor).  Almost immediately, she has them join hands for a séance, which is never a good sign.  Little do the friends know, Elizabeth intends on resurrecting Lilith (Ariauna Albright), a powerful witch who was burned at the stake during the Salem witch hunt.  The friends also happen to be descendants of the men who burned Lilith at the stake, and it doesn’t take long for her to take her revenge.

DeCoteau really overdoes it on the lightning crashes and thunder sound effects as they are often way too loud and sometimes threaten to drown out the dialogue.  We get it, Dave.  It’s a dark and stormy night.  You don’t have to hammer it home.

I don’t know if I wound up watching an edited version (which is sadly, an all-too common experience on some streaming services) or what, but every time there is a sex scene it is awkwardly edited so you can’t see any nudity.  Even worse is the part where one of the sexy houseguests announces she’s going to take a shower and then they cut away to something else.  I’m not saying some gratuitous T & A could’ve salvaged this ho-hum affair, but it certainly couldn’t have hurt.  The kills are all relatively bloodless too, although we do get one pretty good head-ripping decapitation.  It also doesn’t help that all the characters are grating shrews and/or douchebag bros.  

On the plus side, it doesn’t waste any time getting to the point.  The seventy-two-minute running time also helps, and DeCoteau keeps the pace running at an acceptable clip.  That doesn’t make it recommended, but it does save Witchouse from being condemned.  

Two sequels followed.  

BODY FEVER (1969) **

Ray Dennis Steckler stars as a down on his luck private eye who’s hiding out from finance companies coming to collect on his many debts.  He gets a job from some shady customers to find a cat burglar (Steckler’s real-life wife and frequent leading lady, Carolyn Brandt) who ripped off a sweaty underworld boss (Bernard Fein).  Once Steckler finally tracks her down, she offers to cut him in for half of the stolen loot.  

Body Fever resembles a “real” movie, which is more than I can say for many other Steckler joints.  However, that ramshackle homemade quality is usually the most endearing aspect of his films.  As it is, it’s a relatively straightforward, albeit completely forgettable throwback to the detective genre of the ‘40s and ‘50s.

Steckler must’ve thought his performance was noteworthy because he is billed under his real name and not his usual “Cash Flagg” pseudonym.  He is sorely miscast as a hardboiled private detective, but his goofy aloofness at the very least makes the cliched detective sequences watchable.  Al Adamson regular Gary Kent also appears as a tough guy, as does Coleman Francis, who has a bit part.  (Legend has it, he was added to the cast after production wrapped when Steckler found Francis lying drunk and broke in the gutter.)  

If anything, Body Fever is proof that Steckler could produce a competently put-together movie.  It’s just that without a Z grade premise or title (as was the case with The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies), it’s all rather forgettable.  The occasional glimpse of nudity portends Steckler’s eventual career turn into porn.  It definitely needed more than a few quick snippets of skin to elevate it into something recommended, but as far as Steckler’s films go, you can do a whole lot worse.

AKA:  Super Cool.  AKA:  Deadlocked.  AKA:  The Last Original B Movie.

BLADE: THE IRON CROSS (2020) **

Blade:  The Iron Cross was made as part of Charles Band’s “Deadly 10”, a series of crowdsourced movies, most of which were sequels and/or spin-offs to films from Band’s Full Moon Features.  This one is a spin-off from Band’s durable Puppet Master franchise, focusing on Blade, the pint-sized, white-faced, hook-handed psycho puppet.  

During the final days of WWII, the Nazis begin experimenting with a serum that turns soldiers into zombies.  (The stuff in the syringe looks an awful lot like Herbert West’s green juice from Re-Animator.)  Meanwhile, a psychic reporter (Tania Fox), who can see a story before it happens, is on the trail of the dead bodies the Nazis leave in their wake.  Thanks to her psychic link to the killer puppet Blade, she just might be able to bring the Nazis down once and for all.

The stuff with the psychic reporter isn’t bad.  It just feels out of place in a Puppet Master movie.  I know they were probably trying to give this one a different flavor than the other films in the series, but it doesn’t quite click.  

Likewise, the stuff with the zombies feels like it came out of another movie entirely, and the subplot with our heroine having a psychic connection to Blade every time he kills is half-baked at best.  It often feels like a mishmash of ideas strung together to achieve a seventy-minute running time.  Some of these moments work better than others (the make-up on the zombies is decent), although nothing really gels.  Thanks to the everything but the kitchen sink approach, it leaves little time for Blade to do his thing, which will probably come as a disappointment to many Puppet Master fans.  

The German accents on the Nazis are awful and the acting is pretty poor for the most part.  Fox isn’t a bad leading lady for this sort of thing, but she has a lot more chemistry with a wooden puppet than with her flesh and blood co-stars.  She also gets a completely gratuitous topless scene, in which she bathes in front of Blade as well as a nude torture scene.  Overall, Blade:  The Iron Cross is a big comedown from Puppet Master:  The Littlest Reich, but it’s far from the worst Puppet Master flick, that’s for sure.    

THE MCPHERSON TAPE (1989) * ½

I give The McPherson Tape credit for being an early example of a Found Footage horror movie.  However, like most films of the genre, it’s a chore to watch.  In most of these things, it feels like you’re watching someone else’s home movies.  Well, this one starts exactly like someone else’s home movie with a guy filming his five-year-old niece’s birthday party.  Eventually, he and his brothers go stumbling around in the woods with his camcorder and run afoul of visitors from another planet.  

The opening crawl lets us know that the tape contains footage of an extraterrestrial encounter.  The filmmakers do their best to mimic what such an encounter would look like with the obvious low budget and low-tech materials on hand.  However, the fatal flaw remains:  If this really was the first solid evidence of beings from outer space, would you really sit through all the shit with the little kid opening her birthday presents, blowing out her candles, her uncle futzing around in the dark trying to fix the fuse box, and long scenes of people wandering around in the dark, or would you cut all that unnecessary shit out and just get right to the aliens?  I don’t know about you, but any movie that not only features a game of Go Fish in real time, but has a part where grandma has to EXPLAIN the rules of Go Fish is damn near insufferable.

I will say that the running time is scant (it’s only sixty-three minutes long), which helps The McPherson Tape go down a little smoother than some of the latter-day entries in the subgenre.  What isn’t smooth is the atrocious herky-jerky shaky-cam camerawork, which is among the worst I have seen in a Found Footage flick.  I mean if you’re gonna film man’s first contact with a UFO, you’d think you’d at least TRY to keep the camera still long enough to get a good look at them, but no.  Another problem inherent in the genre is that a lot of scenes revolve around the annoying characters yelling obscenities at one another for minutes on end.  These sequences get old fast and not even the occasional random alien cameo (Shyamalan must’ve watched this before making Signs) can do much to help rescue The McPherson Tape from the lower rungs of the genre.

AKA:  UFO Abduction. 

REDEEMER (2014) ****

Marko Zaror is a force to be reckoned with in this excellent DTV actioner.  In fact, the pre-title sequence kicks more ass in the first five minutes than most DTV flicks do in their entire running time.  Much to my complete delight, it only got better from there. 

Zaror plays a man with a mysterious past who likes to hang out in churches and answer the prayers of the poor and the desperate.  Lucky for the audience, the parishioners are usually praying for revenge and/or hoping their mortal enemies will be beaten to a pulp.  Zaror is only more than happy to act on their behalf as an avenging angel.  Eventually, he runs afoul of some nasty drug dealers and naturally, Zaror has got to beat the bejabbers out of some baddies.

Zaror was also the fight choreographer, which is a fancy way of saying he just told the director, “Start the camera.  I’m about to kick some serious ass.”  There’s a plethora of great fight sequences here, most of which feature Zaror handing somebody’s ass to them.  Notable weapons include a fishhook and an outboard motor.  

Zaror is a great leading man and all, but Noah Segan (who also produced) just about steals the movie as the villain.  He tosses off dozens of hilarious throwaway lines (probably ab-libbed) and has a unique energy that sets him apart from the typical bad guys found in these films.  His presence makes even the most seemingly cliché scenes feel refreshing.  My favorite bit comes when he sits on a couch surrounded by henchmen and wonders why all these badasses have cool nicknames.  He then tries to think of a cool nickname for himself instead of focusing on the matter at hand, which leads to hilarity.  

The whole movie is like that though.  It’s always a lot better than you expect.  Even though it’s essentially the same revenge plot we’ve seen before, it’s done in a much more energetic and fresh way that makes it a true gem of the genre.

Many action beats take cues from the John Wick films as they are full of long takes, violent confrontations, crisp camerawork, and concise editing.  It also contains one of the best henchman fights I have seen in some time (and I’m not even referring to the big brawl with the main henchman that occurs later in the film).  Sure, it may have a few too many obvious CGI blood squibs, but that in no way detracts from the mayhem.  

For action movie fans, Redeemer is a must see.

COSMIC SIN (2021) ½ *

This is another Bruce Willis DTV flick.  Unlike the usual down-to-earth actioners he’s been cranking out, it’s a sci-fi/horror hybrid.  It’s sort of a mix between Doom and Ghosts of Mars, and although the set-up had potential, much of it is just dreary and dull.  

In the future, man finally makes “First Contact” with alien life.  The aliens possess a couple of astronauts and turn them into space zombies who spit blood and infect others.  It’s then up to Frank Grillo and Bruce Willis to stop them.  

Cosmic Sin isn’t one of those Emmett/Furla productions Bruce has been starring in lately.  Even though it was made by a different company, he does even less here than he did in many of those cheap-ass movies.  He’s in it for a little bit in the beginning, but his character conveniently disappears for a good chunk of the running time once the action switches over to a forest planet.  Grillo gets the shorter end of the stick, if you can believe it, as he spends half the movie drifting alone in space.  But hey, anything to keep him from interacting with the other actors, right?

Some amusement can be had from spotting the clever editing used in the early scenes to make it look like Willis and Grillo are in the same scene together (they never appear on screen at the same time), but that can only carry this inept sci-fi slog but so far.  Willis does appear alongside his other co-stars, Corey Large (who also wrote and produced) and Brandon Thomas Lee (the son of Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson Lee!), if only fleetingly.

This has to rank as Bruce’s worst.  I mean stuff like Color of Night is bad, but at least it’s got style.  This looks chintzy and haphazardly put together.  It makes Asylum movies look like blockbusters in comparison.  While the initial standoff between the humans and aliens is OK, it quickly goes into the shitter and never looks back.  I was hoping that once Bruce and Frank hopped into their snazzy mech suits (they look like a cross between the suits in G.I. Joe:  The Rise of Cobra and Edge of Tomorrow), the show would finally get on the road, but once the dramatic focus shifts to the supporting non-stars in the cast, Cosmic Sin becomes a cosmic bore.