The Lost Jungle

Actors: Clyde Beatty, Cecilia Parker, Syd Saylor, Warner Richmond, Edward LeSaint    

Rating: 2 out of 10, The oldest movie in my current trek through abysmal cinema. This is what happens when you make a lion tamer a movie star. I actually attended the Clyde Beatty Circus when I was a very young lad and didn’t know I was in the presence of a renowned movie star. I wasn’t. As a movie star Mr. Beatty was a great lion tamer. The plot and everything else about the movie was staggeringly terrible but the animal sequences were mesmerizing. Even in black and white and the almost quaint quality of the filming it was obvious Beatty was face to face with some real, very large, and very pissed off felines. The ASPCA would need counseling if this type film was ever made nowadays but the viewer is transported inside the cage and it was startlingly good when it did that. Even a very young Mickey Rooney was impressed.

MVP: Beatty as Beatty

Hercules Unchained

Actors: Steve Reeves, Sylvia Lopez, Sylva Koscina, Sergio Fantoni, Mimmo Palmara

Rating: 1 out of 10, I think (pray) that I’ve reached the end of the Hercules section of my foray through bad cinema and I ended it (hopefully) with the guy who was supposedly the gold standard (who knew) for this early 1960s phenomena – Steve Reeves. Herc returns home with his new wife, both wearing daring mini skirts that were apparently all the rage in ancient Greece. They get embroiled with a dynastic fight involving old friend Oedipus until they bring on the dancing girls and Hercules is spirited away as a love slave. His young buddy Ulysses and his jilted wife work to free him as this winds down into criminal mediocrity.

MVP: Koscina as Herc’s wife Iole – just dominating that mini-skirt

Hercules Against the Tyrants of Babylon

Actors: Peter Lupus, Anna-Maria Polani, Helga Liné, Mario Petri, Livio Lorenzon, Tullio Altamura, Franco Balducci, Rosy De Leo

Rating: 1 out of 10, I kept trying to figure out where I’d seen the taller, skinnier Hercules before until it dawned on me that he went on to play part of Peter Graves’ Mission Impossible team in the 1960s. This was every bit as bad as hoped for with Herc wielding an obviously plastic club and routing veritable armies who ran towards him to get clubbed. While Herc was out adventuring the evil tyrants of Babylon (including the well-endowed sister) kidnapped virtually the entire population of his home country including his well-endowed lady love. As luck would have it Babylon is equipped with a pre-historic self-destruct mechanism, and well – you can guess.

MVP: Peter Lupus with mission impossible of making this watchable

Hercules and the Captive Women

Actors: Reg Park, Fay Spain, Ettore Manni, Luciano Marin, Laura Efrikian, Enrico Maria Salerno

Rating: 1 out of 10, My forage through bad cinema continued with yet another Hercules adventure. The cosmos may have been looking out for me because the DVD failed at about the three quarters mark but if you haven’t figured it out by that point – well enough said. Hercules wants to settle down with wife and kids but is tricked into taking on the entire continent of Atlantis and the inevitable well-endowed evil queen. We can all guess how it ended up, you’ve heard of Atlantis’ fate, right? This guy reminded me of the Governator and it was interesting to see they were good friends in real life. I finally see where Arnold gets his acting tips from.

MVP: Reg Park as the big guy, an early version of Ah-nuld

Transformers: The Last Knight

Actors: Mark Wahlberg, Josh Duhamel, John Turturro, Glenn Morshower, Laura Haddock, Anthony Hopkins

Rating: 7 out of 10, Anyone who goes to a Michael Bay directed transformers movie and complains has only themselves to blame. You know going in you’re going to be subjected to incessant CGI action, relentless noise, and plot holes Optimus Prime could easily walk through. I enjoyed the cacophony and thought this might be the best of the transformer movies although that isn’t exactly high cotton. Who else but Bay could audaciously link King Arthur and his knights with Hasbro’s transformers? The movie is overly long but it’s all breathless action so it goes quickly. The first three quarters focus mostly on the human characters which was welcome as Wahlberg is always watchable and Sir Anthony Hopkins (must have been a huge payday) looked to be having a supremely good time with tongue firmly in cheek. It was Bay at his best/worst which means an action packed summer popcorn-a-palooza. I liked it, so sue me.

MVP: Hopkins as the last earl chewing up scenery amongst all the Bay madness

Hercules Against the Moon Men

Actors: Alan Steel, Jany Clair, Anna Maria Polani, Nando Tamberlani, Jean-Pierre Honoré, Delia D'Alberti

Rating: 2 out of 10, I loved Hercules movies when I was growing up, more so for the bevy of well-endowed young ladies that populated them rather than any of the many incarnations of the son of Zeus. This was a perfect example of the sword and sandal era of the early 1960s. Steel, a respectable Herc, is called upon to rescue a city whose well-endowed queen is conspiring with some recently arrived space aliens to sacrifice all of the city’s children including her well-endowed sister. Fortunately Herc’s contact in the city has a well-endowed daughter to help him out of the tight spots, such as when he’s confronted with glacially slow rock men. A joint Italian-French production, need I say more.

MVP: Steel as Hercules, actually had some screen presence

Menace from Outer Space

Actors: Richard Crane, Sally Mansfield, Scotty Beckett, Nan Leslie, Patsy Parsons, Harry Lauter

Rating: 1 out of 10, My forage through bad cinema continued with yet another poorly combined collection of episodes from the 1950’s TV series Rocky Jones, Space Ranger. Rocky is asked to investigate why a moon of Jupiter keeps lobbing missiles at earth. He grabs his usual group and arrives at the moon to find a earth like atmosphere, harem girls, and the odd mad scientist. Once again I could see how something as bad as this eventually morphed into Star Trek. The construction paper spaceships really rocked, tongue firmly in cheek.

MVP: Crane as Rocky, smirking through the whole thing