Post by Frameous on Oct 27, 2015 19:49:18 GMT -5
Ok this is kind of all over the place, so forgive me in advance...
I recently watched The Dark Power, and I have grown obsessed with it. Perhaps because of my love of MST3K, I have a sick appreciation for bad movies. I savor the really good ones like a fine meal. I think about what the film makers were hoping to accomplish, how it went so wrong, and why they thought they were making anything worth a damn in the first place. The Dark Power is a feast for the bad film lover. It features bad acting, misplaced and unfunny humor, and an identity crisis of a story. The tonal shifts of it are astounding to me. It starts off like a kiddie film, eases into an inept sex comedy, and then morphs into a zombie film that continues to waffle between scares, gore, and pitiful humor.
I think the riffing is pretty funny, not the best but better than many. But it's the movie itself that I keep thinking about. The director seems to be cashing in on the direct to video horror market, meanwhile trying to find a place to shoehorn Lash Larue in as a bull whipping hero. He could have thrown in the scantily clad ladies without the humor artifice, so the confusion begins. Other characters crack jokes, fart, and make fools of themselves, so perhaps the director wanted to do a comedy but then where does Lash and a haunted Indian burial ground fit in? Amid all this are some jokes (and non jokes) about Native Americans, where they try to play it both ways. Some characters respect them, others spout off puns about "red men", "trail of tears" and "Kemosabe". And then I watched the film unedited...
Maybe it was obvious to some of you, but I completely missed that the drama among the housemates was that they invited a black friend to live there. The Rifftrax edit contains a little of this, but the original cut has a scene where the bitchy girl makes this crystal clear and drops the N Bomb. I may be stretching here, but this "unwelcome guest" angle and the disrespect the "white man" shows to the Native American's home land makes me wonder if they were trying to make some kind of racial comment amid this turd of a film. I look for things like that, whether accident or not. I'm a firm believer that "creative" people often regurgitate thoughts and ideas that they are unaware of. Some do it so well we call it art, others make The Dark Power.
I can see why they would edit this out, it sours the fun of the riffing and the bad movie itself. My question is who decided to do this and why? Do they put it to a vote? There are also two shots of a topless girl in a bathtub that they cut. This hearkens back to the MST days, where they dealt with TV edits for broadcast. Yet other Rifftrax I've watched leave nudity intact (The Room, Stone Cold). So who decides to make these trims? The guys collectively? Are the VODs more subject to this because they are more like the old MST days where they kept the film clean? I saw Miami Connection in theaters earlier this month and they snip out two boob shots in that one too. Not that I really need to see nudity that badly, I just wonder who makes the editorial decisions, and when?
I recently watched The Dark Power, and I have grown obsessed with it. Perhaps because of my love of MST3K, I have a sick appreciation for bad movies. I savor the really good ones like a fine meal. I think about what the film makers were hoping to accomplish, how it went so wrong, and why they thought they were making anything worth a damn in the first place. The Dark Power is a feast for the bad film lover. It features bad acting, misplaced and unfunny humor, and an identity crisis of a story. The tonal shifts of it are astounding to me. It starts off like a kiddie film, eases into an inept sex comedy, and then morphs into a zombie film that continues to waffle between scares, gore, and pitiful humor.
I think the riffing is pretty funny, not the best but better than many. But it's the movie itself that I keep thinking about. The director seems to be cashing in on the direct to video horror market, meanwhile trying to find a place to shoehorn Lash Larue in as a bull whipping hero. He could have thrown in the scantily clad ladies without the humor artifice, so the confusion begins. Other characters crack jokes, fart, and make fools of themselves, so perhaps the director wanted to do a comedy but then where does Lash and a haunted Indian burial ground fit in? Amid all this are some jokes (and non jokes) about Native Americans, where they try to play it both ways. Some characters respect them, others spout off puns about "red men", "trail of tears" and "Kemosabe". And then I watched the film unedited...
Maybe it was obvious to some of you, but I completely missed that the drama among the housemates was that they invited a black friend to live there. The Rifftrax edit contains a little of this, but the original cut has a scene where the bitchy girl makes this crystal clear and drops the N Bomb. I may be stretching here, but this "unwelcome guest" angle and the disrespect the "white man" shows to the Native American's home land makes me wonder if they were trying to make some kind of racial comment amid this turd of a film. I look for things like that, whether accident or not. I'm a firm believer that "creative" people often regurgitate thoughts and ideas that they are unaware of. Some do it so well we call it art, others make The Dark Power.
I can see why they would edit this out, it sours the fun of the riffing and the bad movie itself. My question is who decided to do this and why? Do they put it to a vote? There are also two shots of a topless girl in a bathtub that they cut. This hearkens back to the MST days, where they dealt with TV edits for broadcast. Yet other Rifftrax I've watched leave nudity intact (The Room, Stone Cold). So who decides to make these trims? The guys collectively? Are the VODs more subject to this because they are more like the old MST days where they kept the film clean? I saw Miami Connection in theaters earlier this month and they snip out two boob shots in that one too. Not that I really need to see nudity that badly, I just wonder who makes the editorial decisions, and when?