Tag: exploitation

Really Awful Movies: Ep 257 – You

~ reallyawfulmovies

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 53:04 — 61.2MB) | Embed

Subscribe: Email | RSS | More

On this special episode of the Really Awful Movies Podcast, we delve into a Netflix series that’s making waves: YOU. Guess you could say, this episode’s all about you.

Joe is a bookstore manager in Midtown Manhattan. He becomes obsessed with a budding writer and MFA student, Guinevere Beck, aka Beck.

The two of them quasi hit it off at his place of work, before things take a more sinister turn. Soon, Joe is lurking about outside Beck’s (it should be said) palatial student housing accommodations. He peers through her window to observe the comings and goings (and especially coming!) Meanwhile, the internal monologue inside his skull tells him everything he thinks he knows about the apple of his eye, the object of his affections/obsessions.

Gradually, You reveals Beck’s entourage of friends, a veritable Sex and the City assemblage (minus the professionalism and successes), a group bursting with Me-monkey Insta-solipsism. Joe, as the trailer says, believes she has the wrong group of friends and a liaison with him will go a long way to fixing that.

Then the Netflix series sets up that class in-group out-group dynamic of the friends with the new boyfriend. Given that he’s a cerebral reader and they’re consumerist bobble-heads, they’re unlikely to see eye to eye.

You was a Lifetime show, and now it’s being sold as a Netflix Original. It has that Lifetime romance-flick-of-the-week glossy sheen, but to their credit, they do the best to depict NYC life (to the best of their abilities and budget, although we hear that the show is being moved to California for tax reasons).

Anyway, on this episode we blaze through 10 episodes of You (Penn Badgley, Elizabeth Lail, Shay Mitchell star) in under an hour.

This is a show that’s cheap, trashy, brainless fun. So that’s pretty much right up our alley, right, champions as we are of genre/transgressive cinema. Join us, folks.

We’re here every Friday, so go and subscribe to the Really Awful Movies Podcast. We also have genre film reviews (mostly horror movies) over at www.reallyawfulmovies.com

Really Awful Movies: Ep 255 – Humanoids from the Deep

~ reallyawfulmovies

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 40:05 — 41.3MB) | Embed

Subscribe: Email | RSS | More

Humanoids from the Deep is one of our favorite creature features. Exploitative, Roger Corman-produced uber-trash, this one follows the typical Jaws template of a besieged fishing village whose inhabitants are trying to come to terms with something that’s pure evil.

Featuring some genre favorites like Doug McClure and Vic Morrow, you won’t help but fall for this movie. After all, “they hunt human women…not for killing…for mating.”

Corman’s company, New World Pictures was the distributor. And Humanoids from the Deep was directed by Barbara Peeters (who subsequently tried to distance herself from the exploitative finished product). There’s a peppy musical score composed by James Horner in his debut.

Really Awful Movies: Ep 252 – Unhinged

~ reallyawfulmovies

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:01 — 39.4MB) | Embed

Subscribe: Email | RSS | More

On this week’s episode of the Really Awful Movies Podcast, a look at the Oregon regional horror, Unhinged.

Undoubtedly one of the more obscure films to end up on the Video Nasties list, Unhinged (1982) is a really solid, very low-budget effort from the Pacific Northwest.

Three college co-eds are on a road trip through the back country, when a dispatch comes on the radio about…traffic problems ahead, and offering a detailed alternate route as a time saver. Just kidding. It’s an announcement about, what else? An escaped lunatic. If you don’t love that right off the bat, you have no heart.

A sudden downpour occurs, and the girls’ little vehicle spins into a ditch (rather unconvincingly, it should be said, but hey…what do you want for $100K?). They awake, and are being tended two by a spinster Olive Oyl-like figure, her domineering mother, and a caretaker with a ridiculous mustache.

So..will the girls be held in the remote mansion against their will, tormented by this creep-triumvirate? Will they be tied to the bed like Procrustes did his victims? Will there be some kind of Stephen King Misery set-up? Are you tired of an endless barrage of rhetorical questions?

Unhinged is not your typical slasher film. There’s a lot more here than meets the Fulci eye (while not Italian, there are definitely some nods to that neck of the woods in these neck of the woods).

Despite some akimbo acting, and some pacing issues, this is a film that’s not only oddly compelling, but also weirdly endearing. There are only a few scenes that would indicate this would be Video Nasty-bound, but overall it’s fairly tame and lets the story do the talking.

With a fabulous synth soundtrack and a very memorable Barbara Bush-styled matriarch, you need to check out Unhinged (and please go and subscribe to the Really Awful Movies Podcast, where we tackle genre films of all stripes).