We’ve probably all seen the moment in Future War when the news cameraman holds up what is clearly a cardboard box with a camera lense in it. Made me feel bad for the Filmmaker AND the actor. Let’s have your Mst3K moments when you felt the same. There should be many!
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Robot Holocaust. This low-budget 80s Matrix is clearly very earnestly trying to tell a story. It’s poorly done and the actors in the movie are terrible, but there’s an earnest attempt and I can’t imagine that the director didn’t realize this was not turning out the way it could have. He can’t have missed the cityscape in the background. But there’s a real attempt to tell a story.
And second, this might seem strange but I feel bad for Coleman Francis. Especially when you look at The Beast of Yucca Flats, he obviously thought he was making a deep statement and creating art. I still feel that it’s terrible and he utterly failed, but I think he felt like he was doing something really important.
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I was watching Attack of the the Eye Creatures today, and I was sorta hit with this to some extent when I considered all the technical flaws and narrative issues (all the stuff brought up in that last host segment, basically). I felt this particularly hard during those scenes in which actors were lumbering around in partial/incomplete Eye Creature costumes, with just a headpiece draped over a black unitard.
The guts of a fun creature movie were there, but you could tell that their reach far exceeded their grasp.
HOWEVER.
Then you factor in those icky peeping Air Force creeps, and whatever bad feelings you might have had about the movie and the filmmaker are lessened, because forget those guys. YEESH.
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The kickboxing actor guy thought that movie was the start of his Van Damme- style rise to stardom.
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Attack of the the Eye Creatures is a cheap remake of Invasion of the Saucer Men.
So really, don’t feel bad for them. They just didn’t care.
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Every time I try and feel bad for someone like Coleman Francis, I think about the gratuitous violence against women in his movies. Even if MST graciously cuts out those scenes, I just think, Aaaahh, bite me. You deserve to feel miserable.
Same with the Robot Holocaust guy. No offense to @TeriG intended. His straw-feminist Amazons were already an irritating, lazy, one-dimensional cliche’ decades before his film was made. I’m giving him a millennia-spanning raspberry.
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Well, I was just looking specifically at trying to make a movie. I agree that there’s something disturbing about that aspect of his films. I wonder if it preceded the divorce with his wife or not. (Yes, he was married and the woman looking for her boys in Beast of Yucca Flats is his ex-wife, the two boys are his sons.) But I read an interview with Tony Cardoza and he said that the last time he saw Coleman Francis alive, he was just sitting alone on a bench and shortly after that, he committed suicide. There was something wrong with that man.
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He gave it his all. Even if the characters in that movie aren’t beautifully written, they’re pretty sympathetic and easier to deal with than in many other bad films. They’re trying, even if they’re not doing a great job. The acting and directing in The Dead Talk Back was kind of like that, too.
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And he was kind of right, as he’s been in the likes of the Matrix sequels, Logan, John Wick, and the best episode of Barry.
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The floating head from Tormented. It’s a relatively down to earth story for Bert I. Gordon and comes agonizingly close to being something decent (I especially admire its dedication to moral ambiguity where you’re never quite sure who to root for, which for once seems intentional), but he just couldn’t let his love of cheap optical effects go.
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I bet that effect wasn’t cheap.
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I don’t feel sorry for the filmmakers — they had a vision, they pursued it, they somehow secured enough funding to commit something to film. No, I feel sorry for actors who got roped into acting in some of these:
The Leech Woman springs immediately to mind. Every single character is loathsome in one way or another. I can only imagine how bad it must have been to not be working in show biz to accept any role in that mess.
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I really don’t see the resemblance to The Matrix. If anything, it’s more like someone mixed together notes from a Terminator fanfic and a Conan the Barbarian fanfic and went from there.
According to IMDB, the actress who appeared in the prologue of Beast of Yucca Flats has no other screen credits. Can’t say I’m surprised. Nothing kills visions of Hollywood glamor more effectively than having to be on set stark naked while surrounded by a bunch of leering middle-aged guys.
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The makeout scene in Space Mutiny. I feel bad for everyone on the crew that day. Ick.
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Especially since most of the principals in LW had successful careers otherwise.
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There’s an all-powerful computer that controls the lives of the humans after an apocalyptic battle that destroyed all but a few. The humans are used to power the computer. There’s a human who has been liberated from the confines of the computer control and seeks to destroy that computer. I don’t know. I see it.
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Sidehackers and you all know why.
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No. The filmmaker perpetrated that atrocity. Nobody forced him to, did they?
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Because they jumped on a fad sport that died soon after?
The police station scene from Teen-Age Strangler, because you can just picture the director proudly going, “Cut, print, wonderful! And in only one take, too!”
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