Thursday, November 15, 2012

Project Terrible 8: The New York Centerfold Massacre

When you can barely fill 34 minutes, you should probably just not bother.  Today's PT film is The New York Centerfold Massacre, which comes courtesy of Vimeo by way of a ruined VHS Tape.  I'll admit it: I have never heard of this movie.  Mind you, it was never finished and barely-released, so I have a good excuse.  The plot involves...well, there's really not much plot.  There's slightly more to it than Kill the Scream Queen!, but less than Uli Lommel's The Black Dahlia.  Yeah, we're in THAT territory!  Basically, models go somewhere and get killed, leading us to the least-mysterious and least-planned-out mystery in all of Cinema.  Somewhere along the 27-year gap it took the film to get online (and the other three it took me to actually see it), this thing didn't age well.  To find out just how little sense this *final* version makes, read on...
The main focus: models.  They don't do Modeling, however.  Instead, they mostly sit around and bitch at each other.  Their retorts almost make me yearn for the 'clever' nature of Narcosys.
Oh and whoever put this copy on Vimeo (or who Edited for them) spliced in random Stripper on Dailymotion footage and put it through a filter  Huh?!?
In a completely-obvious Red Herring, a Casting Couch guy gets questioned.  It does lead to the film's 'best' line...

"Go ahead- be Mickey Mouse playing your Tarzan games."
I'll give you a moment to process that line and wipe up the blood coming out of your nose.

Back to the film....this shot from 30 Rock.  Subtle!
Back the shitty film quality, two models bitch for five minutes before finally heading to Soho.  They get killed by...this guy.  I say 'guy' even though it's clearly the old lady.

I mean, they've wasted five minutes showing her watching religious television...so it had better be.
A Psychic shows up...pretty randomly and tries to solve the crime.  He's basically a flimsy pretense to awkwardly-cut to the murder footage for two seconds.  Shots like...
...this.  This is apparently the face o someone who forcibly-drank Acid (as the crayon-drawn label says).  Right.
As it turns out, the killer is the old lady.  This scene is shot/edited so badly that the reveal comes in a split second and then they cut away like they have something better to do.  Speaking of which, so do I!  The End.
I wonder how this review will look after 30 years in a dank closet.  This is a bad movie.  It's not much of a movie though.  It's the barest ingredients of a film stuck together with the cinematic equivalent of Duct Tape.  What am I going to get next in Project Terrible- Grizzly 2?  The story has potential, but what they present is shit.  You want to set up a mystery about a killer taking out models?  Fine.  It's not unique- nor was it really in 1982- but it works.  This film is so amazingly-bad at this, however, that I just have to laugh.  I've never felt so bored and let-down by a film that barely clocks in at 34 minutes.  I've seen segments in Horror Anthology films that were better.  Of course, that does exclude Creepshow III.  Even if the film presented a strong narrative, the Acting is shit.  It looks like improvised dialogue...but I bet that it was all scripted.  Most of them are just downright annoying.  The saving grace- for all of the wrong reasons- is the lead Detective.  His thick accent and terrible acting made my day.  On the plus side, you can slog through this 'film' in the time that it takes to make meatloaf.
Next up, Japan rips off Star Wars...kind of.  Insert Disney Joke Here.  Stay tuned...

4 comments:

  1. Apparently, there was an hour long version released by mail order VHS in the late 80's, but that version got destroyed or something, and this is the reconstructed version. Maybe one day we'll get the complete version. Perhaps it's hidden in the same vault with the extra half hour of The Magnificent Ambersons.

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    1. I might watch a longer version, provided that that it was actually another movie instead.

      That film sucked in low-def, so I doubt that hi-def or more scenes of the women whining would have helped for me.

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  2. oh my god, this looks terrible. I'd rather rewatch Grizzly II a few more times. Lame and tedious movie, but it has its moments.

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  3. Only 34 minutes? I'm surprised this even surfaced at all - anywhere! This was possibly more painful than Manos. I feel for ya!

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