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.

Slave of the Cannibal God (1978)

Finally made it back to the Drive-In Movie Classics 50 Pack. Was in the mood for something bad and exploitative so I settled for Slave of the Cannibal God.

Slave of the Cannibal God stars Ursula Andress and Stacy Keach. First off, I didn't realize that it was Stacy Keach until about halfway through the movie. I think the first thing I remember seeing Stacy Keach in was Titus and that was in 2002, about 24 years after he made this movie. He had aged quite a bit. I also spent a good portion of the movie trying to decide if Ursula Andress was hot or not. On one hand she's pretty good looking, but on the other she's got kind of a weird facial structure and odd hairline. By the end of the movie I had settled on the fact that she was "odd hot", meaning even though she had some odd things about her look wise, she was still hot.

Odd hot or hot hot. I still can't decide.

Why have I brought this up? Well how good do you think a movie is when I spent a good portion of the time trying to decide if the leading actress was hot or not instead of, you know, paying attention. Give you a hint: not very.

If you were Italian and made a movie in the '70s with the word cannibal in the title there was a good chance it had two things in it: excessive amounts of boobies and real animal killings for shock value. Slave of the Cannibal God had both of these... kind of.

You see, the version of Slave of the Cannibal God that I had was the "heavily cut" version. The uncut version is 102 minutes long, where as the one I saw was 82 minutes. That means that they cut a fifth of the movie (here's hoping my horrible math skills are correct). Apparently this movie is chock full of nudity... unless you saw the version I did where you briefly see a little bit of boobies. When you cut out a fifth of a movie, I'm guessing here and there you end up cutting little bits of important information pertaining to the plot... and that's how Slave of the Cannibal God felt. Like you were watching a movie that was missing parts of its plot.

No explanation is needed for this. It's just terrifying.

I'm not saying that the movie made no sense, I was able to piece together the information easily enough. Occasionally though, you would get to part of the movie that felt like it wasn't explained very well... it could just be incredibly bad writing, but it also may be that the explanation had been cut out, it's hard to say.

Overall Slave of the Cannibal God was just kind of a boring movie. It didn't offer me anything that I hadn't already seen before in these kind of exploitative cannibal movies... and once you get rid of all the nudity the only thing you're left with is the animal killings which really does nothing for me. And Birthday Fish doesn't like seeing his animal brethren die just for the purpose of a crappy movie with no boobies.

Birthday Fish Gives this a 5 out of 5 on No Boobies to Animal Killing Ratio

The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1914)

I would guess some people don't realize that The Wizard of Oz is based off of a novel by L. Frank Baum, but I would guess that most people don't realize it wasn't the first movie based off of those books. Hell, L. Frank Baum had his own production company called The Oz Film Manufacturing Company which cranked out quite a few of them. Including the little gem I watched called The Patchwork Girl of Oz, which as far as I can tell is the first feature full length movie based of of the books, though I may be wrong. Either way this movie is strange. How strange you ask? Imagine dropping acid while watching a Terry Gilliam movie where all of the audio has been replaced with intertitles and organ music.

Strange.

You won't find Dorthy or Toto or The Wicked Witch of the West in this version. You will however find The Cowardly Lion, Tin Man, as well as the Scarecrow. Though instead of the fun lovable characters you know some of them have been replaced by something straight out of your nightmares.

Not Ray Bolger.

So is the movie good? Well, kind of. It's a mix of odd, good, and terrifying. The movie is about Ojo, a young girl who travels out with her father? ,I'm not sure how he's related, to her to find food. Upon the way they follow a mule to a magician's house who's making a patchwork girl. Shortly after making the patchwork girl Ojo accidentally turns three people to stone and then has to find the ingredients to make a cure. Unfortunately for her some of the ingredients are illegal and procuring them manages to get her in trouble with the law in the land of Oz.

It's all very strange. I realize it's hard to tell a story when all you have are title cards that pop up every few minutes and the rest of the story has to rely on the actions of the actors to convey what is happening. So that being said The Patchwork Girl of Oz is a good movie, but holy hell is it occasionally like a bad acid trip.

Also it has more black face than the 1939 version.

3 Birthday Fish out of 5

Squid.

The Smallest Show on Earth (1957)

So I deviated from my normal course. All of the previous movies I've reviewed are from the Drive-In Movie Classics 50 Pack so last night I decided to try something new and broke out the Comedy Classics 50 Pack. That's when I realized my problem.

The Drive-In Classics movies are generally pretty bad. They range from "so bad they're good" to "so bad they're almost unwatchable". I've seen 2 of 12 DVDs in the Comedy Classics pack in the past and I can say I thoroughly enjoyed both of them. I like old timey things, and I'm not exactly sure why. Early cinema fascinates me, but so does the early 19th century in general. You're talking to a guy whose favorite "attraction" at Disneyland is the Penny Arcade on Main Street, followed closely by the old time theater which shows old Disney shorts. Hell, you're talking to a guy whose last.fm is currently playing the Boswell Sisters.

Why am I telling you this? Mostly because I'm wondering if I can write an objective review on something I'm so enamored with. The answer is probably no, but I'm going to go ahead and give it a try. On with the show.

The Smallest Show on Earth is a good movie, and I'm not saying that just because of everything I said above. It truly is a good movie.

Jean and Matt Spenser receive a letter telling them that Matt's uncle has died and left Matt The Bijou, his movie theater. They head off on the first train to the city to claim their inheritance. Well the movie would be fairly boring if the theater was in pristine condition and everything was running well, thankfully for us it's not. The Bijou is nicknamed "The Flea Pit", and is currently being run by three very eccentric workers. One of them being Peter Sellers... how can you not love Peter Sellers?

So the movie theater is a bust, but they're hope is restored when they learn that the villainous man who owns the other theater in town once offered the uncle 5000 pounds for his theater. Except now he's only offering 500... so they hatch a plan. If they can pretend that they're going to reopen the The Bijou perhaps they can get him to sell at higher price rather than compete for customers. Unfortunately their plan is discovered before they can even get it off the ground. So they come up with a new plan... what if they actually open the theater?

I'm not going to spoil anymore of the movie because you might actually want to see this one. Sure, it's not the funniest movie I've ever seen and it's certainly not Peter Sellers greatest role, but it's a good movie. Everyone in it is very good, and overall it has some very funny parts. If you don't enjoy old comedies and their humor you probably won't enjoy the movie as much as I did, but if you do I think you'll enjoy this movie.

1 Birthday Fish out of 5

Squid.

T.N.T. Jackson (1974)

Blaxploitation? Check.
Karate? Check.
Funk music? Awwww yeah.
Bad plot? Check.
Topless karate scene? You bet your honkey ass.

I love cheesy movies. I think it's because of this that I love blaxploitation movies so much. I don't necessarily like what the stand for, but I do for the most part enjoy the genre as a whole.

T.N.T. Jackson is awesome. You have a woman seeking revenge, karate, nudity, bad '70s music all rolled into one awful and cheesy plot. Diane "T.N.T." Jackson is searching for the man who killed her brother in Hong Kong. Did I mention she knows karate? Oh yeah, she knows karate. EVERYONE knows karate. Teamed with Dynamite Wong (played by a dude named Chiquito... that's his full name, like Cher) they battle the underworld crime bosses... At least I think they do.

Of course Chiquito knows karate

To be honest the plot seems to jump all over the place. TNT Jackson seems to be working with, though possibly somewhat against the crime bosses. The whole issue of who killed her brother? I guess it was resolved, though I wasn't 100% sure who even did it in the first place. Also there's a whole subplot about heroin and undercover cops that seems to somewhat take center stage about halfway through the movie.

There's a problem with watching the Mill Creek Entertainment version of movies. They tend to not only have horrible transfers but also have a tendency to be edited versions. Maybe they cut out parts that made T.N.T. Jackson make sense. Maybe there's a scene that would have made me understand everything... but that's not what I saw, I saw the version that was completely batshit insane, but still somehow awesome.

The karate in this movie is hilarious. When the people who it appears actually know karate go to attack T.N.T. you can tell they slow down their movements so that she can block them. And occasionally her movements are super sped up, which is not only horribly noticeable it's also super hilarious. I unfortunately can't seem to put you at a certain time in embedded youtube video but skip to 1:00 into this video and watch about two and half minutes of the video for an amazing display of martial arts.


It's like when I first saw Citizen Kane

Even though its plot is confusing and garbled it still manages to be awesome to watch (though I will say I wish there was more action and less plot... not often I say that). Everything about this movie reeks of cheesiness, from the bad acting to the bad fight scenes. Sure it's not the best blaxploitation movie I've ever seen, but it's certainly worth a watch... even if it's just for the topless karate scene.

2 Birthday Fish out of 5

Squid.