How to explain this movie? How to explain my fondness for this movie — well, really, two scenes. I like the part where they insert the leech into the brain of the “death guard” and it oozes green, and then he starts rampaging around, and I love it when the ferret takes Rip Torn out. John Amos in a leather diaper! Mark Singer in a leather diaper! I assume it was post-Conan and everyone was saying: Put me in one of those movies where I get to wear a leather (or fur) diaper. And, really, how would one be able to read one of those scripts and judge its potential. I’m sure “Conan” didn’t exactly sing on the page.
I think “The Beastmaster” was in constant rotation on late-night cable back in the days when I worked the night shift and I was always catching a minute or two just before sleep. At least Rip Torn got to redeem himself with “The Larry Sanders Show,” “Men in Black,” and “Songwriter.” (“If I wanted shit from you I’d squeeze your head.”)
Anyone else have some Friday cheese, an impossibly stupid movie that you can’t help loving?
THE REPLACEMENTS.
Really dumb movie. I watched 30 minutes of it AGAIN last night.
Filmed in Baltimore!
Plus, anything with Gene Hackman is going to have a good moment or two.
I keep coming in halfway through, AFTER the scene where two of his great big teammates stand up for him against… I forget who. Doesn’t matter–they stand up for him. I think a car gets damaged in the process.
Dusty, I think most of your picks transcend cheese — with the exception of Predator II. (Ruben Blades and all those skinned drug dealers.)
Reveal yourselves. Humiliate yourselves. I bet there’s a ROAD HOUSE fan lurking out there. Here, watch me: ABOUT LAST NIGHT, the utter travesty made of David Mamet’s SEXUAL PERVERSITY IN CHICAGO, just a terrible, terrible movie and I cannot stop watching it.
Plus, I think I’ve outed myself as a ST. ELMO’S FIRE fan elsewhere on this blog.
I’m not above a little humiliation: I love PRETTY WOMAN. There, I said it. It’s got the best shopping scene ever. Own all three DIE HARD movies. They pretty much sum up how I feel about Christmas (at least the first two do).
I admit I actually sat through all of DIRTY DANCING: HAVANA NIGHTS but I didn’t like it. Just bored.
Linda, I know someone who liked PRETTY WOMAN even more: My grandmother. She watched it EVERY day, at least once a day, for the last several years of her life. She was on her third copy when she died in 2001.
I bought her a copy of THE RUNAWAY BRIDE, hoping to convince her it was a sequel. She wasn’t fooled.
And, again, a plea: If anyone knows how I can get copies of the two LIFETIME movies about Betty Broderick, I’m game.
The Hitchered scared me to death!!
There are two cheesy movies that I love THE BURBS, featuring Tom Hanks, Carrie Fisher, Bruce Dern, and if that was not enough CORY FELDMAN.
I also love THE WARRIORS. I have seen it twice, and the absolute BADNESS of it amazes me. Both times I watched it, my mouth was hanging open and I was thinking “what the…” It’s about a street gange that gets framed for killing some guy and they have to fight their way back to Coney Island — through all the other gangs. I remember the Baseball gang and the Lizzies the most. Wretchedness at it’s FINEST!
Oh Betty Broderick – A woman scorned… with M.Baxter Birney at her craziest! I love it when she drives the car into the house.
All I remember thinking about in St Elmo’s Fire is how LARGE Judd Nelson’s nostrils were.
Oh, you want REALLY bad….I actually own the SECOND Conan movie, the one with Grace Jones and Wilt Chamberlain. How’s that?
Then there’s The Warriors, which retells the story of Xenophon’s March of the Ten Thousand using bizarre versions of New York street gangs (who could forget the Baseball Furies?)
Or the not one, but two movies about illegal coast to coast road racing, namely The Cannonball Run and The Gumball Rally. All classics, IMHO, although I haven’t seen them anywhere on DVD. But if I see them on TV, I’ll watch them gleefully.
Oh, and I thought Porky’s was hilarious.
Heh! Marika, you and I are kindred spirits. The Warriors rocks. Streets of Fire was pretty good rock and roll cheese, too.
I think so! Although I would never consider Cannonball Run cheese! That is a FINE, FINE, movie. I was too young to see Porky’s when it first came out, so my mother took me, and she owns both Porky’s and Porky’s Revenge. It is the secret shame of our family. That and she will sit through Mars Attacks! Just to see Tom Jones, who of course is the biggest piece of cheese ever! She loves that man! No wonder she lives in Vegas!
I have an even WORSE closeted Pretty Woman fan – my husband. YES. It’s true. He watches it every time it’s on. And he ridicules me for You’ve Got Mail…sheesh.
We love the Burbs too, that’s a great weekend, middle-of-the-day-nothing-else-on movie.
So cheesy they’re practically fondue: PLAY MISTY FOR ME with Clint Eastwood, because the really icky murder took place across the street from the house I did most of my growing up in, south of Carmel (even though they have poor Clint driving back and forth on highway one pretending he’s actually trying to go in a single direction), and THE PEOPLE, which was a movie-of-the-week thing in like 1972 about these really cool aliens who had disguised themselves as Amish or something but could defy gravity at will.
Also, there was this movie about Pilgrims coming back from the dead to kill Hope Lange, who was the reincarnation of the judge in Salem who had them all hung–or maybe she was like the Salem version of someone testifying against former friends in front of the HUAC or whatever, but STILL–my sister can to this day sneak up behind me and whisper “PIL… GRIMS…” and I’ll jump about three feet in the air.
And then there’s THE REINCARNATION OF PETER PROUD, speaking of bad ’70s reincarnation movies on TV, but I still totally dig it. Especially the car with the crankable headlights. A Cord?
Also THE CHRISTMAS TREE with William Holden, where his son and he are snorkeling and get exposed to some A-bomb test or some other radioactive shit, and then the poor little boy dies for the rest of the movie. But the thing that bugs me about this movie is that there’s this really beautiful Bach (I think) guitar piece that’s played, which sounds ALMOST like the Aranjuez thing but ISN’T, and I have not been able to figure out what it’s called for 20 years, even though I sometimes hear the Muzak version in this Chinese grocery store in Richmond.
Okay, and LOVE STORY. And THE WAY WE WERE. But don’t tell anyone.
Hey, Marika, MARS ATTACKS is a good movie! I loved it…that country music would kill aliens…that’s one of the funniest jokes ever!
I sobbed through LOVE STORY when it came out, and might watch it when alone, but would deny it if anyone ever asked.
Please don’t ever tell anyone, but I love RUNAWAY BRIDE and NOTTING HILL and own both of them and watch them a couple of times a year. Hey, I’m a sucker for Hollywood true love.
Many of you probably are young enough not to remember IMITATION OF LIFE of 1959. It stars Lana Turner, Juanita Moore, John Gavin, Sandra Dee, Robert Alda, Troy Donahue, and is maybe the best tear jerker ever made. Also, for those days, it did a fairly good job on race relations in the U.S. I can still cry at the ending…talk about dumb!
Ah, but IMITATION OF LIFE gets a pass because it’s part of Sirk’s body of work (and it’s much better than FAR FROM HEAVEN, which thought it was so clever.) Visually stunning.
I like PLAY MISTY, too and MARS ATTACKS. And the Hope Lange thing sounds hauntingly familiar.
My worst beloved weepy Sandra Dee flick: A SUMMER PLACE. I mean, even the song is weepy and awful. And I still love it.
Also filmed in Carmel, for the most part, although they keep pretending it’s Maine.
Okay, I’m going to go really low, after admitting the I absolutely love REPLACEMENTS, ABOUT LAST NIGHT, ST. ELMO’S FIRE and ROAD HOUSE.
And the first DIRTY DANCING. And no, I don’t tear up when she does the lift at the end. I DON’T!!!
I love the ROCKY movies. Rocky II is my favorite one. Not only do I watch them whenever they show up on TV, I also made a workout CD of music from all the movies.
Oh, the shame of it.
Um….I notice, Laura, that in your description of THE BEASTMASTER (a classic piece of cheese, I agree)you neglect to mention a prime (nay, perhaps even THE prime, to some of us in 1982) ingredient: Tanya Roberts…Charlie’s Angel, Sheena, Bond Girl.
Speaking of cheese, SHEENA is a mind-boggling example, my candidate for the silliest movie of all time. And it was co-written by David Newman, who wrote Bonnie and Clyde!!!!
And Don Coscarelli, who wrote/directed THE BEASTMASTER, didn’t stop there. His oeuvre is full of delectable fromages, from PHANTASM (with Angus Scrimm as “The Tall Man”) in 1979 all the way to 2002′s BUBBA HO-TEP, with the great Bruce Campbell as Elvis.
And then you can follow Bruce Campbell for some classic brie-fests as well….
(Six degrees of cheese.)
By the way, I think the Hope Lange movie was CROWHAVEN FARM, a terrific made-for-TV thriller from the 1970s. It scared the bejeebers out of me when I was a teenager, and I bet it would do the same today.
Billy Jack. [Think 'ROADHOUSE' with hippys.]
Valley Of The Dolls. [ Yeah, I read the book too.]
–john–
“CROWHAVEN FARM”
Joe–Thank God you remembered this title. I feel so much younger now.
‘Dr Cooks Garden’ anyone? [Bing Crosby t.v. movie, circa 1970, about euthanasia. I wonder if it was Kevorkians favorite cheese.]
Evil Dead 3 Armies of Darkness
“Give me some sugar baby”
How can you not love Bruce Campbell, king of the B-movies?
GREASE is the word…huge. huge fan. I also think I’m the only person in the world who likes HUDSON HAWK. Plus I’m a sucker for any cheesy teen movie, especially CANT HARDLY WAIT and that one with Freddie Prinz and the models.
I own BILLY JACK. Bought it for under ten dollars in Memphis this summer.
It’s even worse than I remember — which means it’s even better.
I also saw THE TRIAL OF BILLY JACK and the prequel, BORN LOSERS. In theaters.
And I know a certain HOMICIDE writer who doesn’t love Bruce Campbell, blaming his performance for undercutting a script. But I’m dying to see BUBBA HO-TEP because it was written by Joe Lansdale.
After watching my brother’s DVD of GUIDE TO A MARRIED MAN, I’m gonna nominate this for mind-boggling cheese. Let’s see, we have Robert Morse (whom I have had a HUGE crush on since childhood, thanks to too many viewings of HOW TO SUCCEED) advising Walter Matthau on how to cheat on his hot chick wife (Inger Stevens) with anecdote after anecdote…acted out by the likes of Art Carney, Joey Bishop, Carl Reiner, and pretty much every available 60s B-movie lech.
Otherwise it would have to be Patrick Dempsey movies from the 1980s.
I seem to be the only person on the Internet immune to BUBBA HO TEP’s wacky charms.
Robert Morse!?!? Jesus H. Christ on a rerun. A gap-toothed grin that makes me suspect that Letterman’s his illegitimate son. I’m too young for this. [51]
–john–
Another odd testimony to memory — I always associate Bruce Campbell with a near-death experience.
Summer 2001, on the highway between St. Louis and Kansas City. We were listening to a This American Life story about Campbell. About seven cars ahead, I saw a speeding car with a boat trailer attach begin to weave ominously. For a split second, it appeared that it would jack-knife or overturn, taking out all the vehicles around it. “Look out –” “I see –” and I began to slow down, evaluating how to avoid the worst of it. Then, somehow, the accident didn’t happen.
But whenever I hear “Bruce Campbell,” I think about that averted catastrophe.
Born Losers–Limburger on a Harley. A classic.
[But I don't remember if it had hippys or hippies or the word 'groovy.']
” My worst beloved weepy Sandra Dee flick: A SUMMER PLACE. I mean, even the song is weepy and awful. And I still love it.”
Wasn’t it Homer Simpson who sings a version of this?
“Theeeeeme….from a suuuuumer plaaaace…Theme from a suuuummer plaaaace, from a suuuuummer place, it’s the theeeeeeeme…”
“Um….I notice, Laura, that in your description of THE BEASTMASTER (a classic piece of cheese, I agree)you neglect to mention a prime (nay, perhaps even THE prime, to some of us in 1982) ingredient: Tanya Roberts…Charlie’s Angel, Sheena, Bond Girl.”
And lest we forget, Donna’s dingy mom on “That 70′s Show”.
And Bruce Campbell rules.
Oooh, ooh, new cheese: BEYOND THE SEA, with Kevin Spacey as Bobby Darin! A riveting jaw-dropper from start to finish. (And speaking of Sandra Dee….)
I think Tom Laughlin’s films–heck, Tom Laughlin’s life–define cheese. They’re magnificent.
Oh, I could talk about this stuff forever, and from the responses here, I’m clearly not the only one.
<i>I bet there’s a ROAD HOUSE fan lurking out there. </i>
Shh….
ROAD HOUSE… I learned what a bad line reading was.
The line was “You are such an asshole.”
It still annoys me. And I haven’t seen the movie since 1989.
LOL Joe I think Morse is older than Letterman. And speaking of Conan, I really like that movie about Robert E. Howard, The Whole Wide World. Vincent D’Onofrio was wonderful as Howard and Renee Zellwegger played Novalyne Price. Anne Wedgeworth played Howards suffering mother. The movie was based on Novalyne Prices book The Whole Wide World and if any of that is to be believed then Conan probably was good on the page. He certainly was a prolific writer even though most of it was kind of trashy. A quote from James Berardenelli: “During the course of his short and stormy life, depression era writer Robert E. Howard created more than two dozen pulp heroes, and wrote hundreds of short stories. His best known creation, Conan The Barbarian became so popular during the 1970s and 1980s that he spawned comic books and more than 50 original books that far out stripped Howards original out put. It’s said that the way to know an author is to read his writing and as Dan Ireland’s The Whole Wide World shows, Howard was a man who gave his all to his work.” So this guy Dan Ireland wrote the screenplay for Price’s story.
Sly
The BEASTMASTER…I haven’t thought of that movie in so long. My friend and I actually snuck into it after paying for another movie because we thought the guy in the leather diaper was HOT.
By the way I just saw MR. and MRS. SMITH on a flight. Talk about cheese….
Okay, so it is part of Sirk’s body of work, and it is truly the most wonderful tear jerker! You have to admit that, Laura.
Lots of smart people loved it. I expected to and tried to, but never connected to it.
The Dennis Quaid storyline made sense. There are ’50s movies where the subtext is clearly: “Honey, he’s gay.” (See Danny Kaye in WHITE CHRISTMAS. He runs away from Vera Ellen as if she were contagious and keeps reiterating that he wants Bing Crosby to get married so that the Danny Kaye character WILLL HAVE TIME TO GET A MASSAGE.) So dragging that front-and-center made sense to me.
But the race subtext was a little more belabored. After all, in the other Sirk movie, the one with Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson (I’m blanking here, but it would be wrong to Google at The Memory Project –MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION?) the gardener’s problem is class, not race. Race would have been an overt obstacle in a ’50s relationship; even the kids in WEST SIDE STORY are pretty articulate about it. (Although that’s technically a cultural divide, not a racial one, as Europeans and Puerto Ricans are caucasian.) Class-wise, the nurturing gardener in FAR FROM HEAVEN was pretty much on a par with Julianne Moore, probably would have been above her if it hadn’t been for the mores of the day.
Visually quite lovely, though.
Meanwhile, speaking of Julianne Moore . . . I’m a BOOGIE NIGHTS freak, have seen it at least five times. Watched it during a bout of insomnia the other night. I think you have to be a magnificent actress to act as badly as she does in the film-within-a-film and I could watch her deliver the line: “It’s a surprise, it’s a surprise, it’s a surprise” in the New Year Eve’s scene over and over again.
Plus, I can’t imagine a day when I won’t laugh out loud at the line: “I like butter in my ass and lollipops in my mouth.” It’s one film where I recommend the director’s commentary.
Yeah, I agree the race subtext was belabored. This was one of those films where I liked it better after I returned to it with the director’s commentary. There was some discussion of falseness as part of the genre, and it didn’t seem like an apology for shortcomings–it seemed like part of the guiding plan. I think I went back and watched it again after that–and then ordered PANTONE books from eBay to start pasting color chips into my director’s notes for my own projects.
No one seems to have mentioned ICE CASTLES, the dreadful movie with Robbie Benson and some girl who plays a blind ice skater but no one knows she’s blind until she falls over the roses on the ice at the end of her routine. It’s a horrible movie, but I can’t tear myself away. And what about THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN? Or FLASHDANCE? I also just saw ABOUT LAST NIGHT on Encore, stayed up too late watching it, too.
Oh – Bruce Campbell… I love him! I think The Adventures Of Brisco Country Jr is easily one of the best tv shows ever made.
Seriously.
Dirty Dancing is not cheesey! Is it??? I love that movie. Of course, I’m a nut for dance movies generally (except DD2 Havana Nights – boooooooring).
I know Bruce Campbell for his recurring role as Autolycus, King of Thieves (and frequent directing gigs) on Xena. Now just don’t tell me Xena is cheesey; I may never recover.
I love IMITATION OF LIFE. I think that’s why I found FAR FROM HEAVEN so disappointing. (Although I adore Patricia Clarkson in just about anything — even when she was ill-used as “the wife” in that serial legal show (MURDER ONE?) not to mention her bit as Mrs. Ness in THE UNTOUCHABLES.
Did I only love FAR FROM HEAVEN because I didn’t see IMITATION OF LIFE?
ICE CASTLES
An emetic more powerful than ipecac. [And one of my [ex]wife’s favorite movies.]