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There are good movies, there are bad movies, mediocre and brilliant and crap movies. There are movies that make you want to poop out from your eyes; there are movies that bring tears and joy with only a passing thought of their magnificence. Then there’s Troma. For the uninitiated, Troma is one of the longest running independent movie studios in existence. Over the past 25 years, the brainchild of Lloyd Kauffman has given us the splendorous ‘Toxic Avenger’ (All five of them, with a stage musical now opening on Broadway), ‘I was a Teenage TV Terrorist’, ‘The Class of Nuke-Em High’, ‘Tromeo and Juliet’, ‘Rabid Grannies’ and ‘Redneck Zombies’ all of which I can highly recommend not only as completely unique and hilarious pieces, but they also make the perfect introduction to this twisted and wonderful universe.

One of the more up to date offerings is ‘Julie Strain’s Tales from the Crapper’. Julie Strain is of course the B-Movie actress who was in the Heavy Metal remake and numerous straight to video fantasy epics. Here, Kauffman plays the ‘Crapkeeper’ who introduces the segments adding his own personal brand of terrible acting and satirical approach to the movie industry. Kauffman highlighted many of his views on Hollywood in the remarkable ‘All the Love You Cannes’ documentary which was released several years ago. It shows approximately fifty followers who volunteer to assist with the Troma campaign every year at the lavish French Movie Festival. To watch the commitment of these individuals who are willing to all sleep in a one bedroom apartment, humiliate, strip and dehumanise themselves for the good of a movie studio is a rare thing. It is a testament to the nature of these films. Troma is always offering the fans a chance to get involved and this only serves to build the connection that exists between them.

All of this is definitely an attributing factor to the fact that we allow films like ‘Tales from the Crapper’ to be made. This film is horrible in almost every sense of the word, but it’s also fantastic. These movies are meant to be fun, something that is greatly lacking from most cinema, they are too lame to be funny, to cheap to be scary, proper no budget cinema the way it should be. Admittedly, if you are to partake in too many Troma movies in close succession, you may find that your thought capacity is greatly minimised. It’s not my fault if they find you after the Bank Holiday weekend, bloated and dead on the couch because the movies were so terrible that they actually shut down your nervous and respiratory systems. This isn’t my fault, you have been warned.

Anal probes, strippers, zombies, more anal probes, aliens, hobos and more strippers. ‘Tales from the Crapper’ is one to add to the list. Pay a visit to the Troma website too for a quick peruse of their titles and back catalogue, it makes for good reading in itself. Expect a few more Troma reviews in the near future.

Find out more at http://www.troma.com/

There’s nothing like a double feature, especially in the cinema or (if you’re lucky) at one of the few remaining Drive in Theatres. It’s something that most of us replicate at home, watching movies in endless succession as the very concept of sleep begins to elude you completely. No? Well, maybe that’s just me then. Anyway, I defy anyone to walk past a cinema that was showing the ‘Shockorama’ double feature of ‘Billy the Kid Vs Dracula’ and ‘Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter’.

Originally the first feature William Beaudine’s ‘Billy the Kid Vs Dracula’ (1966) is a movie that conjures up multiple expectations and preconceptions on its very utterance. Vampires and Cowboy’s eh? How will that work? Quite well, surprisingly. The budget is small (as you may have imagined) and the overall aesthetic is predominantly B-Grade Western material. Washed out and grainy, this is perfect zombiehamster fodder. There’s more ham than a pork chop sandwich factory and it smells pretty good from this side of the river.

There’s something very Fu Manchu, or even Coffin Joe about John Carradine’s vampire, who makes his designs on the fiancé of Billy the Kid, who’s just a simple trusting country girl. She is thankfully alerted to the Vampires presence by some helpful European immigrants who have just arrived into town. The dominant and headstrong ‘Kid’ decides that he will fight and kill Dracula for the honour of his bride to be. At a running time of only 71 Mins, there is little room for substantial plot development, so that’s about it. This, however, is not an issue of plot, it’s a movie about Billy the Kid, and he’s fighting Dracula. What more do you want?

The townsfolk are ridiculous, the sets cheap and the acting is generally atrocious. The dialogue is unconvincing and everyone speaks as if there were multiple exclamation marks printed after every line within the script. I absolutely loved it. Short, sweet and trashy as hell. Vampsploitation all the way baby!

I have as of yet been unable to acquire a copy of ‘Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter’ but as soon as I do, you’ll be the first to know. Something tells me that the two movies viewed together may be the greatest cinematic experience of all time. Although we’ll not know until I find it, will we?

Regular visitors to this site may have read the recent article about Roger Corman’s production company which was set up in the West of Ireland in the late 1990’s and ran until the early 2000’s. I am making it my mission to seek out as many of these disastrous movies as possible, watch them and summarise them so that you don’t have to put yourselves through the torment (unless you really want to). Recently ‘Moving Target’ demonstrated just how you can make a movie about a stolen six pack of Irish Stout that contains a thermonuclear device, which also includes lots of kickboxing. They even managed to pull out a star for that one, Don ‘The Dragon’ Wilson of ‘Bloodfist’ fame.

For ‘Bad Karma’ AKA ‘Hell’s Gate’ they weren’t quite so lucky. Patsy Kensit and Patrick Muldoon were the best that they could get. When I see Patsy Kensit appear in anything, I always ask myself the same question: ‘From Lethal Weapon 2 to a provincial evening soap opera about farming? What happened?’ This helps to explain a lot, but we will return to the acting talents of Ms Kensit momentarily, first of all there was one thing that the producers didn’t quite pull off.

For a movie set in Rhode Island NY and a fictitious holiday destination off the coast known only as ‘The Island’, you are immediately taken by how much of ‘The Island’ looks like Ireland. That’s because it is, which wouldn’t normally be a problem, but the filmmakers are constantly trying to convince you that this is America. This is usually done by the unsubtle placing of an American flag on top of any surface that will hold one. An American flag outside a rural Irish shop, on the tiny ferry marked ‘Island Ferries’, on a sheep passing by a cobblestone wall, it felt like I was watching a surreal Michael Bay film for a while. All the characters are supposedly American and even the lack of any sort of modern car in the film cannot dissuade the movie from trying to convince us otherwise.

‘Your Local American Corner Store – Yesterday‘

There are several shots in Irish towns such as Loughrea and Galway and the hilarity of watching supposed high octane antics unfurl in the rural locations are unintentionally hilarious. There is even a climax in the exact same church as ‘Moving Target’s finale. They also seemed to have acquired permission to shoot only on the Docks in Galway, as the ‘inner city’ action takes place there as it did in the aforementioned Don ‘The Dragon’ classic. My old art college was used as the Mental Hospital in the movie and several people that I knew at the time were drafted on board to play minor characters. Local (and horrible) club De Burgos is also used as a seedy pickup bar in the movie, one of the few settings that work surprisingly well.

There is a plot, of sorts. Patsy Kensit is the immortal/reincarnated/badly explained ex lover of Jack the Ripper who believes that her departed lover’s soul resides in her therapist (Muldoon). Then it’s all Cape Fear for the rest of it when she escapes after seducing another doctor (eeew). Her escape is one of the most ludicrous situations in the whole feature. This is the movies though, so suspension of disbelief is necessary, I personally used mine to imagine that I was watching a good movie and had a wonderful time.

‘Patsy didn’t like Marmite‘

In short, this is awful, but I urge you to see it, for it was one of the funniest terrible movies that I have seen in a long time. Its Troma quality and that can’t be a bad thing. It was held up after filming due to the release of ‘From Hell’, Alan Moore’s fantastic graphic novel which was inexplicably given over to the Hughes Brothers (Menace II Society) to destroy. The two shared similar plots (but only just) and this also accounts for the title change, which depends on the distributor and country of purchase. If you are looking for a good start to a trashy triple bill, you could do a lot worse than this.

Roger Corman is a name that’s synonymous with schlock for any discerning fan of the Horror and Sci Fci genre. His Edgar Allan Poe adaptations with Vincent price are amongst some of the most iconic horror movies ever made. The Raven, Masque of the Red Death, The Pit and the Pendulum and Premature Burial to name but a few. He also gave many of today’s greatest directors, such as Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, their first big break in the movies.

Corman and Coppola made a movie called Dementia 13 in 1963, starring Patrick Magee and filmed it in Ireland. Many of the Poe adaptations were also filmed in the west of Ireland, with its gothic landscapes and disfigured locals proving more successful for setting the tone of these wonderful movies better than any manufactured studio lot could provide. It was Corman’s affinity for the emerald isle that lead him to establish a production company in Conemara, just beside Galway.

A lifelong supporter of new talent, Corman has put his name to many things and can generally be used as a quality guide for recognising good trashy fun. Imagine then, my excitement when I discovered that the same year that I moved to Galway, Corman had produced a feature shot in the city called Moving Target starring none other than 80’s action legend and kickboxing star Don ‘The Dragon’ Wilson. The results are almost hypnotic in what is possibly one of the most ridiculous movies that I have ever seen.

The ‘plot’ is thus. Don has come to Ireland to meet a potential love interest that he has met (i.e.: groomed) online. This love interest is so unbelievably ugly that we spent the entire movie wondering if she was wearing prosthetics, or was altered by cgi, like the inbreeds in the recent Hills Have Eyes remake. The only reason for casting this unfortunate seems to be that she has red hair, which coincidentally all the women in the movie seem to have.

In a bid to impress this meek, shrew like creature, (‘He keeps trying to kiss me, on the mouth’ she tells a friend who responds ‘Well, he’s an American isn’t he?’) he has to purchase a six pack of Beamish stout (In the most blatant use of product placement since I Robot) to impress her boss, so that she can get the day off work. He then inadvertently buys a six pack that contains a nuclear device belonging to the IRA.

I’m not making any of this up, I promise you. The only thing that makes this film more ridiculous than its premise are the production values. There is a car chase sequence filmed on the Galway docks which was obviously only hired for the day. They drive around in circles repeating the same in car shots about six times.

The ‘Oirish’ actors are all hilarious and I even saw a few people turning up in it that I know from about town. This does not however mean that any of them are any good. The bumpkin like shenanigans border on racist, but are no less hilarious for this. The acting is horrible beyond belief, the action scenes are horrifically edited and to be honest, I haven’t had such fun watching a movie in a long, long time. Come laugh at how backward and untalented they all are, it’s worth the price of admission alone.

I urge you to seek out a copy of this, get some beers and a pizza and laugh your ass off. Roger Corman, thank you so much for this because, like a daisy through concrete, there is a simple enjoyable beauty to this.

Coming soon, another review of a Corman feature shot in my old art college, starring Patsy Kensit. I bet you can’t wait.

Moving target can be purchased here: http://tinyurl.com/df7k9b

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