The car

From: "Rev. Ivan Stang" <stang@subgenius.com>
Date: Wed, May 7, 2003

El Queso <""the_cheese_23\"@(nospam)yahoo.com> wrote:
> Holy crap - I just found this great old cheesy flick on Bit Torrent.
> Anyone else remember this turd? It's the one from 1977 with the
> possessed, black car that goes around killing people. HELL YEAH!!! Now
> if I can just find Star Crash.

I was going to stay out of this, but you mentioned Star Crash.

I saw that in the theaters when it was fresh, and once more on TV, but
taped it in Long Play Betamax... damn... that's a GREAT badfilm.
Greatest thing of all about it being Caroline Munroe's luscious plumper
looks. Whoooo dawgies. She had fattened up post-Sinbad&EyeoftheTiger to
a near Anna-Nichole size, but was still being wardrobed in I Dream of
Jeanie outfits. And BOY does she look vapid and dumb, as in
near-retarded. Ooooh yeah. The perfect victim for Ivan the Terribly
Large. BE STILL MY HEART!

But the second greatest thing about Star Crash is its special effects,
which were done by the young Italian director-screenwriter himself (as
I understand it), in homage to Harryhausen, but... but... well, the
Talos homage has to be seen to be believed. I've done some pretty
shitty toy-mation myself, but this.... well, it got distributed, so
he's one jump ahead of me. Anyway, for a young filmmaker, Star Crash is
full of inadvertent inside jokes. Film accessories are used for props
on a record scale. For instance, the main spaceship is decorated with
what are clearly FILM CORES, little plastic doohickies used by editors
and labs to save on reels. It is the mose home-made looking epic
science fiction film I had seen up to that time. Needless to say, it's
been surpassed in cheesiness many times over.

The friendly robot who talks with a Texas accent is another of my
favorites. I think he's heard in one of our old Media Barrage tapes.
It's always a shocker to hear that twang coming from future-beings of
outer space, or robots of the ancient past. Like the narrator of the TV
cut of David Lynch's DUNE... the Alan Smithee version rather. "And
thayen, with the hayelp of the spahss, Pawel Atreeyah-deez became the
leader of awl the Freyah-men."

STAR CRASH is of an almost INFRAMANian level of badfilmitism.

Speaking of badfilm, I just today got back the transfers of the
OUT-TAKES from my horrendous 16mm student film, "Let's Visit the World
of the Future." Had the old reel put onto DV. Haven't seen these scenes
in 25 years. They were removed from the answer print, physically
spliced out, and were put together on one reel which has been in a can
for all that time.

The world has long since caught up, so I'm gonna put back in the parts
I removed in 1974 when I decided they were TOO WEIRD, and threw off the
movie's pace. Which they were meant to do, it's just that David Lynch
hadn't been invented yet, so it just seemed insane instead of a
stylized commentary on the fragmentation of MODERN LIFE IN GENERAL (for
a Slack-ignorant 18 year old anyway). There were like a dozen shots of
stop-motion GI Joe-Barbie raping and serial killing that I had pretty
much forgotten existed. A past girlfriend's tits. All sorts of STAR
CRASH like marvels. AND MY DAD, PLAYING GOD AND SATAN in a long, cosmic
scene that was removed. Man. I about lakked to shit.

Suddenly I'm remembering when my Dad inexplicably had me show that film
TO HIS NAVAL RESERVE BUDDIES AND THEIR WIVES. Those nice Navy people
were utterly aghast. I have no idea what my dad was thinking. They were
laughing -- at the funny parts that were supposed to be funny -- and
he'd say, "That's not supposed to be funny! Life is really getting like
this!" But there's all this underground-comix influenced stuff in it,
gross violence and actually FRIGHTENING nudity and reverse bulldada
social commentary that's about as subtle as a sledgehammer, which
turned off most HIPPIES in 1974, so imagine these poor baffled
straights. That was one strange night. I had almost wiped that from my
mind. It was sort of embarrassing, although I have since come to
understand that many of my Dad's friends might not have been quite such
straights as I then supposed them to be, in my primitive state. You
know how kids are.

My son in turn made a trenchant teenage indictment-of-all-authority
film (a dramatic video actually) called "Living In Sanity." It was
inspired by Stephen King's first short story, "Rage," which takes place
in a high school and features a smart lad driven crazy by the Catch-22
aspects of his world. It however did not have any special effects,
besides some teacher-shooting by the mortally alienated student. In
black trenchcoat. Two years before Colombine.

That's me boy.

Anyway... yeah, STAR CRASH. MMmmmm. Caroline Munroe.

--
4th Stangian Orthodox MegaFisTemple Lodge of the Wrath of Dobbs Yeti,
Resurrected (Rev. Ivan Stang, prop.)
PRABOB

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Original file name: Re- The car.txt - converted on Saturday, 25 September 2004, 02:05