Bad Movies You Love

[Hibi]

Wait a minute -- I think I did see MANOS.

One of the very worst!

I think I saw it on Mystery 3000. I miss that show! In all fairness though, it looked like it was made for less than $10,000. It's not like they thought they were making a good movie!

[Bronxgirl48]

lol, I miss it too.

By the way, have you seen THE RAINS OF RANCHIPUR? My comments on it actually didn't go far enough in emphasizing the badness -- I was probably too kind but didn't mean to be, ha! Lana alternates between shellacked, steely self-absorption and breathy little-girl neediness (to Burton's Dr. Safti: "When did you know you loved me?") Her worst scene comes with the actual rain -- Ranchipur is physically crumbling and so is she, reduced to a puddle of tears as she screams at Fred MacMurray: "LET ME GO!! I NEED TO SEE HIM!! YOU'VE ALWAYS HATED ME BECAUSE I HAVE MORE MONEY THAN YOU!" This is indeed a bad movie to love. Whenever it's on I cannot stop watching.

[Hibi]

lol, I miss it too.

By the way, have you seen THE RAINS OF RANCHIPUR? My comments on it actually didn't go far enough in emphasizing the badness -- I was probably too kind but didn't mean to be, ha! Lana alternates between shellacked, steely self-absorption and breathy little-girl neediness (to Burton's Dr. Safti: "When did you know you loved me?") Her worst scene comes with the actual rain -- Ranchipur is physically crumbling and so is she, reduced to a puddle of tears as she screams at Fred MacMurray: "LET ME GO!! I NEED TO SEE HIM!! YOU'VE ALWAYS HATED ME BECAUSE I HAVE MORE MONEY THAN YOU!" This is indeed a bad movie to love. Whenever it's on I cannot stop watching.

No, I've never seen the Lana version. I like the original a lot and felt it would tarnish my feelings about it. Plus Richard Burton playing an Indian??? But your description has me vascilating now (LOL)

[Bronxgirl48]

If you get the Fox channel, it's on rotation there. Richard does not look happy in this role. With Burton's history of romancing his leading ladies, I wonder if a possible fling with Lana made everything a bit more tolerable.

[kingrat]

Yesterday I watched Battle Cry, a movie I knew only from having read that James Dean was somewhere in it. I watched because I have an unreasonable liking for Aldo Ray.

The movie really struck me, because it didn't actually seem to be about war at all. It was more like some of the glossy soaps from the fifties. I enjoyed it very much, especially after I realized that it was kind of like a male version of The Best of Everything, with war substituting for the work world of a New York magazine empire.

BATTLE CRY SPOILED

Tab Hunter gets the Hope Lange lead from TBOE, trying to make it through basic training, becoming a good soldier instead of a business exec. He comes complete with love interest back home and complications involving the older but maybe not wiser Dorothy Malone, who managed to be trampy, overblown and sympathetic all at the same time. But in this film, Tab ends up going back to the home girl.





A cute actor that I liked a lot named John Lupton played the bespectacled Diane Baker type virgin, with a lovely Arlene Francis underplaying as his partner, who hides her past as a B-girl.

Hunky (not quite hulky yet) Aldo Ray was the Suzy Parker of the soldiers... a womanizer, too cool for school, and never going to let a woman get the best of him. He of course, falls hardest of them all for Nancy Olson, who is a war widow with issues, never planning to fall in love with anyone again. She makes lines like "Oh Andy! I'm afraid!" sound realistic. Olson seems to have always been a good actress, no matter how stupid her dialogue. Of course, her standoffishness makes her the perfect mate for commitment shy Aldo. Though Aldo doesn't do a nosedive from a skyscraper, he does lose his legs.




There was even a tough, hard driven boss who finally sees the light and connects with his young underlings.... Van Heflin in the Joan Crawford role.

James Whitmore is along to make it all seem a lot classier than it really is.

I was surprised when looking it up, that it's a Raoul Walsh film (!!!). I think he did fifties soap opera quite well.

Here's the BATTLE CRY review. Enjoy.

[Allhallowsday]

Wait a minute -- I think I did see MANOS.

One of the very worst!

I think I saw it on Mystery 3000. I miss that show! In all fairness though, it looked like it was made for less than $10,000. It's not like they thought they were making a good movie!

Still no excuse. I'm sure ANDY MILLIGAN knew he was making no "good movie" called FLESHPOT ON 42nd STREET (1972) which is a masterpiece compared with MANOS.

[txfilmfan]

Wait a minute -- I think I did see MANOS.

One of the very worst!

I think I saw it on Mystery 3000. I miss that show! In all fairness though, it looked like it was made for less than $10,000. It's not like they thought they were making a good movie!

Still no excuse. I'm sure ANDY MILLIGAN knew he was making no "good movie" called FLESHPOT ON 42nd STREET (1972) which is a masterpiece compared with MANOS.

There's a word you don't see much these days!

[Allhallowsday]

...There's a word you don't see much these days!

What word? "Fleshpot...?

[txfilmfan]

...There's a word you don't see much these days!

What word? "Fleshpot...?

Yes. When I was young, I thought it referred to a wanton (another old-fashioned word) person. I was in my 20s before I realized it was a den of hedonism. Apparently entered the language via the King James Version of the Bible.

[Dargo2]

...There's a word you don't see much these days!

What word? "Fleshpot...?

Yes. When I was young, I thought it referred to a wanton (another old-fashioned word) person. I was in my 20s before I realized it was a den of hedonism. Apparently entered the language via the King James Version of the Bible.

So Tex, then you're coppin' to the idea that you didn't know the difference between a "fleshpot" and a "sexpot" back in your youth, right?!

(...well, truth be known, I probably didn't either back then)

[Hibi]

...There's a word you don't see much these days!

What word? "Fleshpot...?

Yes. When I was young, I thought it referred to a wanton (another old-fashioned word) person. I was in my 20s before I realized it was a den of hedonism. Apparently entered the language via the King James Version of the Bible.

So, in other words a brothel! I thought it referred to a person as well.

[j.lunatic]

Wait a minute -- I think I did see MANOS.

One of the very worst!

I think I saw it on Mystery 3000. I miss that show! In all fairness though, it looked like it was made for less than $10,000. It's not like they thought they were making a good movie!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manos:_The_Hands_of_Fate

"While chatting with [writer Sterling] Silliphant in a local coffee shop, [director Harold P.] Warren claimed that it was not difficult to make a horror film, and he bet Silliphant that he could make an entire film on his own." The bet was that he could make a movie...not a good movie.

[Allhallowsday]

...So, in other words a brothel! I thought it referred to a person as well.

It does.

[I Love Melvin]

...
There was even a tough, hard driven boss who finally sees the light and connects with his young underlings.... Van Heflin in the Joan Crawford role.

James Whitmore is along to make it all seem a lot classier than it really is.

I was surprised when looking it up, that it's a Raoul Walsh film (!!!). I think he did fifties soap opera quite well.

Here's the BATTLE CRY review. Enjoy.

That side-by-side comparison of Battle Cry and The Best of Everything was fantastic. Raoul Walsh directed my all-time favorite guilty pleasure, The Revolt of Mamie Stover (1955), with Jane Russell as a "dance hall hostess" who "danced" with half the Pacific fleet, became a war profiteer after Pearl Harbor was bombed and she bought up property cheaply as people fled to the mainland, and then rented it to the government at a profit. Agnes Moorehead is a great scene-stealer as the tough, peroxided "proprietor" of the "dance hall", with a goonish thug to keep the "dancers" in line. For extra $$, the soldiers can meet the dancers in private "champagne rooms" for "conversation" and watered-down drinks, with a literal punch time clock to keep things on schedule. The idiotically transparent fakery of the substitution of dancing for you-know-what makes for a cartoonish atmosphere, but it's done in such a garish, Frank Tashlin-y style that it's a good watch, with more than a few guffaws at the audacity of the charade.

[skimpole]

THE RAINS OF RANCHIPUR -- cardboard Technicolor remake of 1939's THE RAINS CAME, with Lana Turner as sexual predator Lady Edwina Esketh (married to Michael Rennie) falling helplessly in love for the very first time (golly!) with righteous, noble Indian doctor Richard Burton who unfortunately thanks to the unsubtle, banal script must go through the entire film uttering tedious philosophical summations in his crisp familiar actor voice as though it were a production of some lofty Shakespearean play. Fred MacMurray is at his most tediously cynical as Lana's old society friend. Turner eventually comes down with some form of the plague which is knocking the local villagers off like flies but in her case it turns out to just be your typical movie illness which the missionary wife treats with aspirin.

Turner wrestles with an emerging moral conscience -- "But darling, it's wrong! Everything about it is wrong!" as she comes to realize that self-sacrifice is the only road to true happiness.

No, I doubt it's a good movie, and it's conceivable I'm confusing it with The Rains Came. But I remember seeing it on tv one afternoon when I was four or five and being terrified by the earthquake within it, with a faultline occurring right through the posh imperial building where the characters are.