The Manipulator (1971)

The Manipulator is a cheerful little story starring Mickey Rooney. Mickey stars as B.J. Lang, a down on his luck movie makeup artist who befriends a rising starlet. Together in his old studio lot they film B.J.'s movie and through this gain a friendship that will last a lifetime.

Kind of...

The Manipulator is actually about B.J. Lang a makeup artist who kidnaps a rising young starlet and forces her to make his movie, mostly while she's tied to a wheelchair.

Imagine being in an abandoned warehouse full of movie props with Mickey Rooney... also you've both just dropped enough acid to kill Timothy Leary. That's The Manipulator.

This movie is incredibly odd. This is certainly Mickey Rooney as you've never seen him before. I picture Mickey as a jovial fun to be around kind of guy, always laughing... that is when I don't picture him as his role on The Simpsons.

Now I picture him as this:

Mrs. Goritry?

The Manipulator is full of moments where you'll wonder to yourself "What exactly did I just see?" One moment Mickey may be on some sort of crazy tirade about God knows what and the next he might be in the middle of some sort of orgy with Mickey Rooney and hippies.

Did you think I was kidding?

This movie makes very little sense... shocking, I know. There's talky bits mixed in with the nonsensical bits but they all really make very little sense. I watched the movie and I couldn't tell you why Mickey kidnaps this girl... or frankly what any of the movie is about beside the basic plot.

It's a bad movie that makes very little sense... but not everything is bad about it. Mickey Rooney actually gives a very good performance, and despite it being completely out of character you find it hard to believe that this was once Andy Hardy. And while he gives a very good performance it totally doesn't make up for this acid trip of a movie.

The ten minute mark really sums up what you're in for. For about five minutes you're treated to a scene of insanity. It involves an elderly naked man and woman, painted white, dancing around in front of a strobe light while Mickey Rooney moves in front of the camera making crazy faces. Occasionally the man and woman are standing in front of a bush that Mickey prunes and sometimes they just standing in cobwebs. Sometimes they're dressed, sometimes they are not.

And sometimes this happens.

Instead of watching this movie save yourself some time and just drop acid and watch It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.

5 Crazy Birthday Fish out of 5.

Lady Frankenstein (1971)

I hate it when I run into a movie like Lady Frankenstein. A movie that may not be great, but wasn't horrible. Sure, you probably didn't notice it sweeping the '71 Academy Awards, but it wasn't a bad movie.

Lady Frankenstein gives a somewhat new twist on the whole Frankenstein story. This movie follows Tania Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein's daughter. She's just returned home after completing medical school and would like to work on her fathers experiments... though she isn't aware that her father has progressed from experiments on animals to humans.

The first part of the movie is your typical Frankenstein movie, Victor Frankenstein is paying a grave robber and his band of merry body thieves to bring him fresh corpses to experiment on. Well, long story short "It's alive!" and that's when things start going downhill.

And not just because it's ugly.

You see, The Creature kills Victor Frankenstein. Woops. It also escapes the lab to wreak havoc on the countryside. Double woops.

Well Victor's lab partner wants to go to the police, but Tania doesn't want to tarnish her father's good reputation. So of course they remain silent and allow The Creature to go on a killing spree.

And kill he does! Usually people having sex. Seriously, I think he kills at least three people mid-coitus. I'm pretty sure this is the movies attempt to throw in a little bit of boobies. Either way, he goes on killing people while Tania comes up with an ingenious plan to stop The Creature.

I'll admit, the plot gets a little muddled here. You see, Tania comes up with a plan to create her own Creature to kill the other one. Gee, nothing could go wrong there. And all while planning this out she falls in love with the lab assistant, Dr. Marshall... and then we go further down the rabbit hole.

You see, Tania needs a body for her Creature... so she talks Dr. Marshall into killing the grave robber. It doesn't work out, because the Creature kills him before Dr. Marshall can. A lot of killing going on. You see, all those people who were killed are actually people responsible for bringing the creature to life. So let this be a lesson, if you're a grave robber or just a mad scientist you most likely are having a lot of sex.

Then something happened that confused me. Tania starts hitting on the retarded manservant. I mean that he's literally retarded, not just dumb. I assumed she was doing this because they needed a new body since Tom the grave robber was killed. The box implies that it's because Dr. Marshall is an old man and she wants his smart brain in the body of the hot, but retarded, manservant. I'm not sure which it is, and frankly I'm not sure the movie does either... but I'd like to think it's a mixture of both.

The more you kill people the more I love you

So they kill off poor Tommy and transplant Dr. Marshall's brain into his body. They can now battle the original creature! Or perhaps live happily ever after! Either way there's a battle royale between The Creature and Dr. Marshall in Tommy's body. For some reason having your brain put in another body gives you incredible strength.

Dr. Marshall/Tommy win of course, which gives Tania and Dr. Marshall/Tommy just enough time to make sweet, sweet love by the fire. You see the townsfolk and police have finally figured out what's going on at the old Frankenstein place and of the course the only thing to do is march up that hill torch in hand.

And that's really how the movie ends, the townsfolk burning down the castle and Dr. Marshall/Tommy and Tania doing it while the castle burns down around them. I'll admit, it was an odd ending but I guess if you got to go might as well be that way.

Overall not a great movie, but it's a watchable movie. It just gets weird and convoluted in places.

2 Birthday Fish out of 5.

Squid.

The War Between Mushroom and Peas

Usually I put the year up after the title as well as a picture of the DVD cover, but there's one problem... I can't find any information about this movie. None, zero. I looked it up on the IMDB as well as Googled it and couldn't find anything about it.

I wanted to go with something different today so I busted out one of the many, many dollar cartoon DVDs I have. I decided on The War Between Mushroom and Peas because... did you see it's name? Something tells me that's why I bought it in the first place. Also from now on I'm referring to it as TWBM&P because it's way to goddamn long to write out.

So I read the little blurb on the back and noticed it said:

This must have DVD features the following stories:
1) Little Red Riding Hood
2) Childrens Album
And Other Animated Classics

Color, English, Approx. 60 Minutes

Let me point some things out that are wrong about this.

1) This is not a must have DVD, seriously, no one is rushing out to add this to their collection.
2)Little Red Riding Hood is not on this DVD, in fact only two shows are: TWBM&P and something called Ilaya the Great. I assume those are under the category "Other Animated Classics".
3)60 Minutes... actually it's about 26 minutes. TWBM&P is about 17 and Ilya the Great is about 9 minutes.

We're off to great start!

So let's start off with TWBM&P. Imagine if Salvador Dali took a ton of acid and decided to write a fairy tale. That's pretty much what TWBM&P is.

Meet the King of the Peas

So the king of the Mushroom Kingdom... no, not Mario, decides he needs to husband up his daughter, Princess Whitey. That's right, Princess Whitey. She has many suitors but she's in love with... Browney. So if you're keeping score Princess Whitey is in love with Browney. Browney also spends his day doing manual labor in a field. Oddly enough that's where this story ends. I really figured we were in for some delightful racism... but nope, it really just ends with that.

So the suitors come from all across the land trying to woo the beautiful(?) Princess Whitey. You have the smartest man in all the land, the richest man in all the land and... well this is supposed to be the most beautiful man in all the land.

All man, baby...

Well apparently along with getting sweet, sweet Princess Whitey whoever marries her also gets a huge hunk of the Mushroom Kingdom. So of course the King of Peas wants in on this action... and by that I mean he declares war on the Mushroom Kingdom.

Well the King of the Mushroom Kingdom decided whoever can stop the King of Peas will be the right man for his daughter.

Yes, the King of the Mushrooms looks like a... you know

Well the most beautiful man, the richest man, and the smartest man all fail miserably. So it looks like the King of Peas has won... what's this? Browney swoops in and saves the day? Well who would have guessed.

So Browney saves the day and gets Princess Whitey in the end. It's uplifting. Really.

Then you have Ilaya the Great. It's about overcoming adversity.

Ilaya is born.
Ilaya gets sick.
Ilaya's town is attacked.
Ilaya is too sick to do anything.
3 wiseman call Ilaya a pussy.
Ilaya says "Nuh uh!"
Ilaya overcomes adversity.
So can you.

That's pretty much what I got from the 9 minutes of Ilaya the Great.

Cancer? Get out of bed you wuss.

4 Birthday Fish out of 5.


Squid.

Day of the Panther (1988)

What do you get when you mix martial arts, the land down under, bad acting and an awesomely bad script? Day of the Panther. That's right our movie takes us to everyone's favorite island of convicts and gives us the harrowing tale of an undercover cop hellbent on revenge for the killing of his partner.

What do you get if you mix Crocodile Dundee and Bruce Lee? The killing machine that is Jason Blade. That's right his name is Jason friggen' Blade. How awesome is that? If I continue calling him by his full name instead of him, he, or just Jason it's because he has the greatest name in cinematic history.

Our movie starts out with Jason Blade and his partner doing an undercover operation, and by that I mean they're sneaking around in the kitchen of a restaurant where a drug deal is going down. Apparently they have a much different definition of undercover in Australia. Either way the drug deal goes to hell, the buyer kills the sellers, our two undercover detectives get caught in the middle and have to fight their way out of the restaurant. Luckily it's a Chinese restaurant so everyone in the joint knows karate; that way Jason Blade can really showcase his talent.

Up next you have the most mind blowingly awesome scene in Australian cinema. Linda, Jason Blade's partner, is watching a drug deal go down. He tells her to wait, but that's not how Linda rolls. She's going to go down and check it out... and Linda knows how to make an entrance.

Little known fact: everything in Australia is made of balsa wood.

Remember how I said that this was a mind blowingly awesome scene? Want to know why? Because these are the three guys that Linda ends up fighting:



That's right, it's old man mask man! Cower in fear when he looks like an old man but is actually a really bad ninja!



Skull mask man with bat that has spikes in it! Okay, I can see where he's going with this. Skull masks are kind of scary, and a good way to intimidate others. The third guy must be really scary!



Pig... mask... man? What happened to Rocksteady there Bebop? He late? Seriously, I know that Pig Mask Man has a machete but really? Were there three masks and skull guy got the only good one? Was there just not a costume store on the way to the drug deal and you had to use what costumes you could scrape together from your mom's basement?

Also, if you've ever participated in the candy giving holiday of Halloween you've probably worn a latex mask. Let me ask you something, how was your peripheral vision out of one of those things? There's a reason kids get hit by cars on Halloween and it's not just because they're stupid. It's because you can't see worth a goddamn out of those masks. No wonder they get the crap kicked out of them by Linda. Also, want to see the greatest thing? During her fight with Skull Mask Man Linda pulls off his mask and...



He has a friggen' skull painted on his face! Why in God's name does he need the mask at all!?

So are you wondering why she's fighting three guys in masks? Get in line buddy because I'm pretty sure so is everyone else who viewed this movie.

Long story short Linda manages to dispatch the three guys in the goofy masks and is killed by their boss, the only one not stupid enough to put on a mask and parade around like it's Halloween. Though he does look a lot like George Michaels.



So on to the meat and potatoes of the movie. So now Jason Blade has learned that his partner has been killed. Thankfully he was already going undercover into the group that killed her, and actually undercover this time, not spying on them from fifteen feet away.

The great thing is, the moment he shows up at the airport two bumbling detectives are assigned to follow him because they think he's a gangster hitman. Despite the fact about 20 minutes later he tells their boss that he's actually undercover... yet they follow him throughout the movie. I guess the captain just likes wasting manpower. On the other hand I don't know if there's a Mayberry in Australia that these two could be policing instead.

Basically the rest of the movie is bad karate fights with plot kind of sprinkled around it.

You have Jason Blade working for the local gangster in Australia, and his right hand man is George Michael looking bastard, the guy who killed the drug dealers at the first and Linda... this guy really gets around.

You also have Jason Blade's Sensei, William Anderson, who happens to be Linda's father and his other daughter Gemma... is also Jason's love interest in the movie. I would think after you lost one daughter you wouldn't let your other hang around with a guy who tends to get into kicking fights with the gang that killed said daughter... but that's just me.

You also have the greatest 80's/karate movie plot cliche ever... you see the gangster boss holds a great big karate championship each year and he wants Jason to fight in it. Do these kinds of things actually happen? I mean I know there's karate tournaments, but are there huge underground tournaments held by stereotypical mob bosses where the worlds best get together and fight perhaps to the death? You see it constantly in movies, but you never hear about these kinds of things being broken up by the police in real life.

Either way you bet your ass that Jason Blade and George Michael end up in the ring fighting against each other. Sure it's not during the tournament, you see they find out Jason Blade is a undercover cop before then... but oh, ho, ho you bet they duel it out in the ring. You also probably guessed that Jason Blade is getting the crap kicked out of him but makes a miraculous recovery and wins. Frankly I'm surprised this fight didn't take place at dusk with the Sydney Opera House in the background.

So of course Jason Blade saves the day with a little help from Sensei Anderson and Gemma... But don't worry, Jason Blade will be back for Strike of the Panther. And you can bet your ass I'll be watching it as soon as I find a copy.

2 Birthday Fish out of 5

Squid.

Trauma (1978)

So here we go again. A foreign movie dubbed into English. This time it's an on the edge of your seat, thrill ride of a roller coaster called Trauma, or Enigma Rosso, or Red Ring of Fear, or Virgin Killer, and the list keeps going... Frankly I'd go with Virgin Killer, mostly because it shares the name with a Scorpion's album with a very inappropriate album cover.

Trauma wasn't as horrible as I thought it would be. Don't get me wrong it's still pretty bad, but I guess it could have been a lot worse. Mostly it's kind of an ordinary movie with weird subplots that seem to go nowhere. Like the main character is a detective, who happens to be dating a woman who's a kleptomaniac. Why is she a kleptomaniac? No real reason, she just likes to steal things... it adds absolutely nothing to the story. Though it doesn't really matter because about half way through the movie she leaves him for no real reason. He goes to leave and she says that when he gets back she wont be there, and that's that. What does that have to do with the story? Nothing at goddamn all. There's several little things like this throughout the movie... they don't do anything for the story, and in some places actually just seem to hurt it.

What does this picture have to do with anything? Absolutely nothing, but it's awesome.

That guy up there? That's our detective friend. He's investigating the murder of a sixteen year old girl. You know, when he's not having to deal with his shoplifting girlfriend. So while looking into this girls murder he discovers two things:

1) The girl goes to an all girl boarding school, along with her and her friends they have a secret little club called The Inseparables. All the sudden this movie got a lot more sexy.

2) The dead girl has a sister who's creepy. I'm not sure if she's meant to be, but I'll be damned if she doesn't seem that way.

Either way the dead girl's sister (who by the way doesn't seem all the broken up over the death of her sister, though neither does her mother) pops in occasionally throughout the movie with little hints and help for the detective. Because I hope that if a detective is looking into my murder he's doing so with the help of a ten year old... I hope it's a lot like Cop and a Half.

But don't worry, our detective doesn't rely solely on the help of a ten year old to solve crimes... oh no! You see, the detective is a loose cannon with unorthodox interrogation techniques! And by that I mean he takes one of the people he's trying to get information out of on a roller coaster ride. That's not a metaphor or anything, he literally takes him on a roller coaster ride. That's what gets the guy to talk. Seriously, I've seen Jack Bauer do things that are banned by the Geneva Convention... and this guy takes his suspects to the carnival. Maybe if he doesn't talk he takes them on the tilt a whirl.

Dammit, I get results!

Either way the story is kind of crappy. The plot is confusing with way too many subplots and unexplained things to make it even somewhat decent and the characters seem to do things that defy explanation. Maybe I got an edited version, or maybe it just didn't translate well to English. All I know is I got done with the movie and I know who killed the girl... I think... but I'm not sure how or why, and those things are kind of important in a murder mystery. It's like it started out well and then about halfway through the writers decided to get lunch. From about halfway through till the end just seemed like a convoluted mess.

Is it worth wasting 84 minutes of your life on? Probably not, but what else are you going to do?


3 Birthday Fish out of 5


Squid

Cindy and Donna (1970)

Needed something new so I switched over to the Drive-In Cult Classic DVD pack. Basically every movie in this pack is a bad sexploitation movie from the '70s. Every movie on it generally has to deal with someone wanting to have sex with a mother, a stepmother, a nanny, a sister, two sisters... you get the point. And Cindy and Donna is no different.

I learned two things from Cindy and Donna:

1) The '70s was an awesome time when you could use the word "groovy" in all seriousness.

2) Pot turn women into nymphomaniacs.

I can tell you that number two is false, if it were true my high school life would have been a hell of a lot more interesting.

The tagline for Cindy and Donna says it all: A story of two sisters. Cindy... so anxious to grow up. Donna... who grew up too fast! That's basically it, you have the sweet, innocent Cindy who wants to be like her big sister Donna, who's basically a pot smoking whore. I would strive to achieve that as well.


Also it has the greatest opening theme ever.

That's it. That's pretty much the whole movie. Seriously. The movie is just an excuse to get Cindy, Donna, Cindy's friend Karen, and Alice the stripper naked... all while leading up to one of the most hilarious endings I've ever seen. And frankly I'm okay with that.

Sure there are other "plots" in the movie but mostly they go nowhere. The father in the movie likes to have sex with a stripper... and that's pretty much all there is to that subplot. As far as I can tell it's only there to show the stripper naked. I'm starting to see a trend. Then there's the mother. She's an alcoholic. That's her subplot. She also has an accent that seems to randomly change throughout sentences.

The funny thing about this movie is that it's all about nudity and sex and drugs. It's sexploitation at its finest... and yet if you take all of that away you have almost a morality tale. This film is basically about the dangers of drugs and alcohol.

You have Donna who will do anything for weed. Sex in a car for a joint? Oh yeah. Have two creepy guys take naked pictures of you and then have sex with you? Oh she'll do it all for some sweet, sweet mary jane. Pot will do this to you. It's evil.

Then you have sweet, innocent Cindy. She wants to go farther with her boyfriend but just isn't sure that she's ready. But the second that joint touches her young, virginal lips? Well all the sudden her and Karen are going at it like lesbianism is going out of style.

But you have this odd message seemingly hidden under tons and tons of titties. So imagine an after school special about the dangers of drugs but where everyone is naked and having sex with random people.

2 Birthday Fish out of 5

Squid.

Spare Parts (1979)

Going in to Spare Parts I expected something horrible. We're talking about a '70s made for TV move that was shot in German and then dubbed into English. That's pretty much a recipe for disaster right there.

But Spare Parts surprised me... no, not because it was a great movie. Hell it wasn't even all that good of a movie, but it wasn't nearly as bad as I expected it to be. It had its ups and downs but overall came out fairly well.

Spare Parts is about a man and woman, Bill and Monica, who stay at the Honeymoon Motel for their... Honeymoon. First off let me say that I wish there were still motels that cost $7.50 a night... or maybe I don't, I'm not sure. Back to the movie though. Despite the fact that the desk clerk is the creepiest woman ever, the newlyweds decide to stick around and do newlywed kind of stuff (sex) and watch the sun set in a field.

This was their first mistake.

You see, as they're sitting in the field watching the sun set an ambulance drives up to them. Now most people would quizzically wonder what the hell an ambulance is doing in the middle of a field, and in fact that's exactly what Bill does. Monica on the other hand has the complete opposite reaction, she runs away screaming like a mad woman.

Bill should have listened to her.

Bill is kidnapped by the two men in the ambulance and carted away to god knows where, all the while Monica continues running away screaming. Though I can't blame her, the two men in the ambulance did have comically large guns. Either way she takes her screaming all the way to highway where she's promptly picked up by a friendly trucker. I can never decide if that's a good idea. On the one hand she's a hot twenty something blond wearing nothing but a white tank top and short shorts. On the other hand she's disheveled and crazy looking. Kind of a toss up about what's going to happen.

So this is what cataracts are like.

Luckily Trucker Mike is a nice guy who decided to help out our poor, crazy Monica. And I don't mean just a little bit of helping out, I mean going far beyond the call of duty on this one. He's devising plans on how to help her get her fiance back.

The whole movie involves Trucker Mike and Monica devising a plan that would allow them to find out who kidnapped Bill and how they can stop these people. So they pretend to be newlyweds and go back to the same motel that this started in in hopes of having the exact same thing happen again. And luckily for them it does! They manage to extract the information from the ambulance drivers and find out what they want with the people they're kidnapping. Spare parts of course! You see, there's a group that kidnaps people so they can harvest their organs. Seems like it would be easier to target say, homeless people as opposed to normal everyday people off the street who may have families that will miss them... but I guess that doesn't make as compelling of a movie.

The last half of the movie is where it starts to somewhat go downhill for me. It's not that the movie gets bad it's just that it's when it seems to start dragging on. The first half of the movie was generally pretty good, but the last half just seemed kind of odd and a almost like a different movie. The first part was a pretty good horror/thriller movie but the last half just turned out weird. It involved Trucker Mike and Monica going undercover in the group to find out who is behind the whole body harvesting scheme... and then get help from a very unlikely source to bring it down. The last half isn't bad, it just feels kind of off to me.

Like I said, it's not bad and it's not good. The story isn't bad but tends to drag on in places. The characters tend to do things that I don't think normal people would do, but that tends to happen in a lot in movies. The acting isn't bad when, again, you consider it was a made for TV movie from the '70s.

Spare Parts falls into a weird category for Bad Transfer Reviews, because while it's not bad I certainly wouldn't sing it's praises. It's just kind of there. It's better than a lot of the things I've had to watch, but I wouldn't really suggest that everyone rush out and see it.

2 Birthday Fish out of 5

Squid.

Dont Open Till Christmas (1984)

How good can a movie be when it forgets the apostrophe in the title card? The answer? Not very. Don't Open Till Christmas isn't exactly a bad movie, but it's certainly not a good movie. It's just there.

It's nearing Christmas and a lunatic is killing everyone in a Santa suit! Okay, I'll give you that there's going to be people who have to wear Santa suits for jobs and what not, but here's a simple way to not get killed: stop wearing it after your job is done, and don't walk down a dark alley while wearing one. Apparently no one in this movie is smart enough to realize this so you're treated to many badly dressed Santas being butchered over and over again.

Like this poor bastard

Have no fear there's a crack team of detectives from Scotland Yard on the case... and by crack team I mean they seem to kind of just be there in the background and instead the movie decides to focus on two people. Kate, her dad was the second person killed by the Santa Clause Killer and... Sherry? Cheryl? I didn't catch her name and in the credits I believe she's only credited as Experience Girl. She's a stripper* who is kidnapped by the Santa Clause Killer.

*I say stripper because I have no idea what to call her job. She sits behind glass and men pay to see her do things like get naked. I'm not really sure what that's called... but I doubt there's a job fair for that sort of thing

Neither of their stories are very compelling and are actually kind of jumbled and boring. I found Kate kind of annoying and her part seemed kind of forced and the story seemed to focus a lot on her boyfriend for no real apparent reason. While Experience Girl's part just seemed rather unneeded, it didn't really add anything to the movie. And when the detectives showed up in the movie they felt like they were just kind of there. They had a fairly big part in the movie, but most of it just felt kind of like filler.

There's nothing really wrong with this movie other than it's just kind of there. It's forgettable. I had no interest in it, and at the end of the day I don't have a lot of say about it because it was just kind of "meh".

Don't Open Till Christmas probably isn't worth your time. I went into it hoping for some kind of cheesy Christmas themed slasher that would fall into that "so bad it's good category" and would be a fun/funny movie to watch at Christmas time. Instead I got a really boring movie with a really average/boring plot. While I think that it could have been a decent slasher movie, in the end it falls flat and instead you get something that feels like it could have been better.

2 Birthday Fish out of 5