Worst of the Worst: Astro-Zombies M4- Invaders from Cyberspace - Bob's View

Back again for Worst of the Worst, and today I'm providing my take on Astro-Zombies M4 - Invaders from Cyberspace.

...what is with the M, by the way? I didn't ask that last time, but why is it "M4" and not just "4?" Just one more strange thing about this series, I guess.

So...let's start with one minor good note: Unlike Astro-Zombies M3, they do at least realize what part of the plot they should probably be focusing on this time. There are lots of scenes of Astro-Zombies attacking people in this movie.

There are in fact far too many of them.

The saying "be careful what you wish for" comes to mind.

Seen here in a bit cut from the Film.

There's just too much of it before we get to any real, actual plot...we get repeated, endlessly repeated shots of Astro-Zombies attacking random cities in various countries, all so people could use their vacation footage, I guess, and then footage of news reports about the attacks (some of which are handled decently, others of which are just awful - I particularly loved the one lady who was trying to act as a reporter reporting on a horrible disaster, but was all smiles the whole time, probably super-excited to finally get to show off her foreign language skills on film). Over. And over. And over.

But really, this is a good thing compared to the prior movie. A large portion of this film is people getting attacked by Astro-Zombies, and considering that the entire point of this sort of movie is to show people running from and/or being killed by the monster of the film until someone finds a way to survive, that's good. It is, in that way, anyway, an improvement over the prior film in the series, which focused the majority of its runtime on people squabbling over a nonsensical cloning project and only got around to having Astro-Zombies attack in the closing portion of the film, shortly before the Astro-Zombies themselves were wiped out with extreme ease.

But...the problem is that this film still doesn't get the other part of this story concept, which is to have a group of characters that we reliably follow through the attacks and can on some level root for - characters that will make us feel suspense as we worry over whether they will live or die.

We get flashes of it, mind: There's a couple who kind of start out looking like they'll be the ones we follow in constant danger throughout the film. The film really doesn't focus a whole heck of a lot on them, though, and after an initial attack or two, when it does focus on them they tend to not actually be in much danger. They do get attacked again near the end and end up finding how to stop the Astro-Zombies in the process, if I recall, but they just don't have a full plot.

Similarly, there's a bit of build to the possibility of the president's family being in danger, but...uh...nothing really seems to go anywhere with that. They even take away one of the kid's smartphones, and he just pulls out a spare (because...uh...don't you carry a spare smartphone at all times?) and nothing comes of that.

Instead, as Al noted, the film decides to focus on repeatedly starting plots with characters and then just killing them off and unceremoniously ending the plotline. He highlighted probably the best case already - a guy who steals critical technology from a research lab, uses it to contact the Astro-Zombies and try to ally with them, and just gets killed by them instead. We spend an inordinate amount of time on him for a plot that really doesn't end up relating to anything or mattering in any way whatsoever. No one goes looking for the tech he stole later, the Astro-Zombies don't seem to use it to accomplish anything, he doesn't cause any trouble for anyone, and no one else in the film cares that he's dead. It is an entirely pointless little side plot that looks like it should be at least moderately important, gets a lot of screen time, and then just ends without being of any consequence. We even have a further little side plot with his loser brother who is trying to become a music star...who dies like 30 seconds after the first guy dies.

To be very clear here, this isn't a case where the guy's introduced stealing something, works the rest of the film to try to accomplish his plan, receives a lot of character development, has interactions with other main characters where he is a threat to them, and is then undone by his own evil plot. That's what would happen in a good movie...or at least an acceptable one. No, in this film, he steals the stuff, goes home, argues with his brother, summons an Astro-Zombie, and gets killed off. There's no story break there and no point where he gets involved in anything else in the film. We just run straight through his little plot and find out it was meaningless.

Also his accent changes like four times over the course of his participation in the film.

That's the worst example in the film, probably, but this happens pretty frequently. Characters are introduced into the film for no purpose other than to die to Astro-Zombie attacks, but we spend more time on them than is necessary for that purpose. This would be fine if we were talking about following a few storylines through the film...say, 3 different sets of characters, each of whom had some run-ins with the Astro-Zombies and escaped a few times, only for some to finally be killed as their plots resolved and others to finally escape...but that's not what's happening here. What's happening here is that we keep being introduced to characters, following them slowly down the street or hearing about their life goals or otherwise spending a few boring minutes on them, and then they just get killed off unceremoniously and no one cares in the slightest.

At least this film doesn't waste quite as much time on any of them as M3 did with the plot about the author who thought the Astro-Zombie was his brother or whatever that was.

Oh, and that's not all! There are characters who don't die but still don't matter in the slightest! In particular, there's this remote viewing group that the military and/or research guys bring in midway through the film to find out more about the threat. They produce a drawing of an Astro-Zombie.

Which has already been clearly shown drawn on a whiteboard in the military briefing room in a prior scene.

In other words, the remote viewing group serves to tell the military guys precisely what they already know. We spend a pretty lengthy segment on this group, and even show them starting another job afterwards, like we're building to something else...and then absolutely nothing happens with them again. They are entirely, blatantly pointless.

Another thing...this is one of those films that is just terrible to watch if you've actually watched a prior film in a series. This film features the exact same general as the previous film, but he now seems entirely unaware of what Astro-Zombies are...despite the fact that he was in charge of cloning them in the prior film. I can only assume he's supposed to be a different character...that looks and dresses exactly the same. Or that Astro-Zombies M3 didn't happen, which...is probably a safe bet, actually, considering that nothing about its ending seems to apply to this film in the least.

...of course, the Astro-Zombies themselves, who can talk now by the way, reference some events from prior movies, so...uh...I guess some stuff happened and some didn't, and it's up to the viewer to guess?

How did Ted V. Mikels forget how to make Films?!?

Overall, the film is just really incoherent...and inconsistent. One moment Astro-Zombies are popping through computer screens, the next they're attacking by electrocuting you through your cell phone, the next they're being sent bodily through space...what exactly is their method? And once people figure out that cell phones are a danger, why does everyone keep using their cell phone? And when they do...why do Astro-Zombies just kind of stop attacking that way?

The film's conclusion is ridiculous, but it flirts with being the good kind of ridiculous, at least for bad movie fans. There is something honestly funny about seeing people moving around like they're in an epic gun battle in the streets, except that they're using mirrors against aliens with laser beam eyes. It doesn't make much sense, but I found some parts of it pretty amusing - people do all the things you'd expect to see in a gun fight, using cover, popping out for quick shots, all that sort of stuff, but they're holding little hand mirrors.

It just goes on too long, gets too repetitive, and features Astro-Zombies willfully aiming directly for the mirror - it's fine to have the lasers hit the mirrors when the person actually brings them up defensively just as the Astro-Zombie is firing, but when the person is clearly holding this tiny little hand mirror in place while the Astro-Zombie is taking aim, uh...wouldn't it just aim somewhere else? We're not talking about floor-to-ceiling mirrors here, these are little fist-sized hand mirrors. There's plenty of room to shoot something that's not defended.

Also, did the Astro-Zombies just forget how to use melee weapons? They spent the last movie attacking in extremely repetitive ways with machetes...I don't recall any of them using one as a backup weapon here. Seems like if your laser beam eyes turned out to not work you might at least try something else, right?

I know it sounds like I'm asking a lot of a movie named Astro-Zombies M4, but this is pretty basic stuff. When you're putting together a fight scene or chase scene or what-have-you, these are things you have to consider. You can't just film the same exact thing over and over and over - characters will have different strategies that alter over the course of an action scene. If one thing doesn't work, they'll stop trying it and try something else.

That's both appropriate realistic strategy and a method to ensure that the viewer doesn't get bored out of his dang mind by watching your film.

Why the hell was I in this Film?

I'm torn on whether Astro-Zombies M4 is better than Astro-Zombies M3. It has more action, which tells me that the people making this mess at least better understood the whole point of their movie...but it's also less organized and more prone to just introducing plots that go absolutely nowhere. I think in the end I have to say it is a slight improvement, but...very slight. It is better than M3, but still not a watchable film.

Worst of the Worst: Astro-Zombies M4- Invaders from Cyberspace

Another Ted V. Mikels Film- joy.  He's back for one last Astro-Zombies Film, since...um...I guess he felt like it.  I'd ask him why he kept going back to this...but he's dead and all.  

Life is sad sometimes.  

So what is this 4th and final Film in the Series about?  In this Film, there is now a Planet of Astro-Zombies and they attack the Earth in brand new ways.  They try a few different ways, which is the first sign of this Film's biggest problem.  

If you expected this to be a true follow-up to Part 3, prepare to be disappointed.  

If you expected it to be more like Part 2, you'll...still be disappointed.  

Basically, this is what happens when an old Director- Mikels was 83 when this came out- discovering 'a new toy' and using it in spite of all evidence to why he shouldn't.  

On top of that, the Story is...well, let me just portray the disappointment correctly in the Review proper...

After the events of the last Films, the Astro-Zombies are back to kill us.  Why?  Their Planet has an Asteroid coming at it and they apparently can't stop it.

I'm sorry, but am I supposed to be sympathetic for them now that two of them can talk (but seem to have the exact same voice)?!?

They show up and start killing people with their new eye lasers.

I guess I can't complain about the overuse of the same Practical Effects now...and just complain about how this all looks fake as s#%t.

The first section of the Film is all about two things over and over again.

First- the Astro-Zombies show up after random Tourist Footage of Cities...and then unconvincingly blow up land marks with F/X right out of After Effects...

Second- the Astro-Zombies now come through Computers and Monitors...but never in one shot.  

Yes, Demons 2 could do warping through a TV in 1986, but Astro-Zombies 4 has to cut away like a dick in 2012.

This is all funny and stupid enough.  Hell, it includes a Cameo by Rene's Dad from Storage Wars (why the hell do I know that?!?!?).

Here's where it goes wrong...

1) Abandoning this idea completely after about 20 minutes.
2) Continuing to introduce new Characters and Concepts (like how nobody knows what Astro-Zombies are now!)
3) Dropping said ideas almost instantaneously.
4) Never establishing one single Plot or idea for more than five minutes at a time.
5) A stupidly-hilarious final battle with a bunch of tiny mirrors.

Bad.  Really bad.  Bad in all of the worst kind of ways.  The Sharknado Films are almost always bad for being too ridiculous for words.  James Wan Films are bad for being one-note, jump-scare-fests.  Low-Budget Zombie Films are bad for the Writing and Production Values.  

Ted V. Mikels continued to find new and different ways to suck- kudos?  Astro-Zombies 2 was bad for just looking cheap and relying solely on the draw of the Astro-Zombies killing people.  Astro-Zombies 3 was bad for ignoring that idea in favor of a complicated and, quite frankly, boring Plot about cloning.  This Film is bad for not being any one Film for more than 5 minutes.  

The Astro-Zombies comment on how we are good at killing them, so they improve themselves with eye-lasers that either blow you up, burn you (in one Scene), turn you into charred skeletons (a few times) or blow up landmarks unconvincingly.  Next, they come through Monitors and Laptops to kill random people in private.  Afterwards, they abandon that idea for somehow shooting lightning through your cell phone to kill you.  In spite of that, people still use their phones not 10 minutes later and they *never* stop watching TV- ever.   

Here's a micro chasm of how this Film does things wrong.  We see random Doctors dissecting a never-before-seen Astro-Zombie (proving that they know about them!) and take a weird, glowing thing out of their head.  A guy steals it and monologues about how he's going to get the Astro-Zombies to work with him.  He opens up his laptop, allowing them access, tells them how he wants to work with them and...gets blown up.  End of Plot #164.  My God, this is tedious and stupid.  It is bad!

On the plus side, they didn't drag Tura Satana into this last one (but only because she was dead)...

I try not to speak ill of the dead if possible, but...thank Xenu that this is the last one of these.  Now all I have to worry about is another Remake of The Corpse Grinders (no, really!)...

Worst of the Worst? Astro-Zombies M3 - Cloned - Bob's View

I'm back here in the Worst of the Worst series, and today I'm taking my own look at Astro-Zombies M3 - Cloned. Al already covered a lot of this, so I think I'm going to more zoom in on a couple particularly giant problems.

AZM3C is just amazingly awful, especially, as Al noted, coming from a Director who at least had considerable experience in film-making. You'd expect someone to get better through practice, at least a little. If that's the case here, I'm terrified of what I would see if I went back and watched earlier works (Editors Note: They mostly sucked too).

The main thing I don't understand is how a film with this simple of a concept got so needlessly over-complicated and managed to be so utterly confusing. At heart, this plot is so easy: A misguided and/or evil military decides to dig up the bones of a horrible monster / psychopathic killer / whatever the astro-man was and clone it to be used as an unstoppable super-soldier. Predictably, something goes wrong, several copies of the unstoppable killer get loose, and it's up to [insert heroes here] to save the day or at least stay alive.

That's pretty easy. It's not especially interesting, but it's easy, and you could make a watchable film out of the basic idea.

This is not that Film.

In part, it's because everything is so dang complicated. Did we really need multiple factions fighting some kind of secret battle over the astro-man project? There's the military, then there's this secret side group that works for some kind of supervillain lady who shows up by hologram (and whose dialog is played so muffled that I couldn't understand most of what she said), then there's a senator who...I'm not quite sure what his role was, honestly, then there's the scientist doing the cloning who is working for the military but also seems to be in it for herself, then there's this guy who seems to be a military officer but I guess might be working for the supervillain lady, I think...and that's just the ones who seem to have a direct tie-in to the astro-man project. Chances are pretty good I missed some stuff there too.

That's exacerbated by the fact that some characters seem to be working for more than one of these factions, without any sign that they've changed sides or were playing one side and really working for the other or anything like that. There's this lady with a wide-brimmed hat and trenchcoat who seems at first to maybe be working for the senator, but then seems to be working for the supervillain, but I couldn't tell if that meant the supervillain and the senator were also aligned or if they didn't know each other. Maybe I missed something. The supervillain lady has this preserved head of the scientist lady's grandfather, too, who seemed like maybe he was against her or maybe he was for her, and I wasn't clear which. And the Doll Squad, a team of, I guess, highly trained secret agents, are called in twice in the film...once by the senator who appears to be investigating the astro-man project, and once by one of the main heads of the astro-man project.

Speaking of that, why was that even necessary? Why do the Doll Squad members have to be called in twice? The senator calls them in, then their squad leader is captured, and then we just kind of check in on her a couple times until eventually an entire second squad is called in and she just ends up escaping, coming to join them with, I guess, her own team. That entire thing could've been done more cleanly by having them just called in at first, the leader captured, and the rest of the squad working to free her to eat up a little time before getting back to their mission.

There's just too many factions involved, in too unclear a fashion, and I've left out things like the general's unnecessary twin brother, the scientist lady's maybe love interest, the author we spend just an incredible amount of time with considering how utterly unimportant he is to the plot (seriously, the movie might as well have just put a sign up that said "we were deliberately wasting your time" with a picture of a raised middle finger in his final scene)...there's so many people involved, and it just isn't at all clear who is working together, who is competing, and who appears to be working together but is actually competing or vice-versa.

But I think the thing that hurt the film's overall plotting more than anything, though, was that it focused on precisely the wrong part of the plot.

To reiterate: This is a movie about a secret government weapons project going off the rails and killing people.

When you make that movie, you focus on the "going off the rails and killing people."

This movie focused on the project itself.

Thrill to status update meetings! Get chills as the budget is called into question! Gasp as people sit around tables! Stare in wonder at the basic whiteboard with "Bio-terrorism" written on it in plain lettering, yet another sign that no one in this movie could be bothered to make the slightest bit of effort!

I swear that you're like two-thirds to three-quarters through the movie before the dang astro-zombies escape and start running around killing people. There's one or two deaths before that, sure, but they change nothing. "Oh, the mutant woke up and killed a security guard? Oh, well. We won't fire anyone related to the project or even do more than gently scold them. We'll just make vague threats about wanting to see a return on our investment and then leave everything as-is."

...yeah, speaking of, I love how passe everyone is about the scientist lady actually having managed to clone one of these things. With a full outfit and machete, no less, 'cause those are totally part of your body! I mean...look...either this military is some kind of evil empire, in which case they should be totally cool with the security guy being offed because their scientist just cloned a super-weapon, or it isn't, in which case it should be all, "we don't care you cloned something in a way that totally defies logic because an innocent person died in the process and we're arresting you for at the very least gross negligence resulting in death, see ya."

I mean, she totally sends the security guard into the room, alone, knowing that she's just cloned a creature known for flipping out and killing people. All the while, she's literally making a speech about how she just got to play god and create life and other mad scientist cliches. If there's one part of the project plot that should get more focus, it's some actual consequences for that, even if those consequences are just "character X wakes up and realizes he/she works for an evil organization and provides information to heroes to stop it" or something like that...which doesn't really ever happen, until maybe kindasorta near the end, far, far after this event and after character X gives a speech to the very scientist lady responsible for the deaths noting that he's proud of her for reasons unclear to me.

Really, though...this is where a lot of the trouble co
mes from. The film chooses to focus on the project to develop the astro-men, the trouble the project goes through, the threats to close it, the debates over whether it is the right tactic, that sort of thing. In order to do that, they need - you guessed it - a bunch of competing factions who get involved in some way with the project. There's factions developing it, factions investigating it, factions that want to take it down, factions that want to take it for themselves, factions that want to let someone else develop it but then maybe take credit for it or something like that...we get into the mess that I identified above, and a large part of it is due to the simple fact that the movie chooses to focus on the project rather than the result.

Look...you can do this so much better. Start the film with the project. Spend like 10 minutes on it, 15 tops, with clear signs things are going to go wrong. Then, boom, the astro-men escape, and we focus on one to four characters we most care about, probably the scientist lady, the guy who seems to supervise her, the scientist lady's love interest, and the supervisor guy's wife. Those four are shown running from the astro-men and trying to stay away from them while trying to get to some sort of special contact that can put them in touch with the Doll Squad and/or retrieve a weapon that can actually harm these uncontrollable monsters that someone, for some reason, thought it was a good idea to make functionally invulnerable. Meanwhile, the astro-men wreak havoc in the city, and because they're functionally invulnerable, people who try to fight them without [insert super-weapon here] end up dead.

It's a very basic template, but it can work! You can tweak it here and there if you want to put focus on different stuff - for instance, maybe the Doll Squad is sent in by the senator, still, but things have already gone to heck when they get there, so they go around trying to keep people safe while trying to find someone who knows how to kill the astro-men. Boom. Second plot, set up in like a minute.

You don't even actually have to have (much) more physical conflict than the movie had! Just spread parts of the ending rampage across the film, intersperse it with scenes focusing on the heroes trying to get from point A to point B, and then the end of the film can be mostly Doll Squad members and/or other heroes managing to finally wipe out the astro-men with the super-weapon. Rather than one annoyingly long "action" scene, you can get a whole bunch of smaller "action" scenes.

You need to also do them well enough for me to call them action rather than "action," of course, but that's a whole other matter.

The point is that while I don't think this was ever going to be a good film, it could've been a moderately enjoyable cheesy low-budget monster attack flick if they just picked the right thing to focus on and trimmed down their cast a whole heck of a lot.

One last subject: The actual "action" towards the film's end. This was just...just awful. I've seen a lot of bad films, and let me be clear - this was by far not the worst I've ever seen in terms of trying to portray violence, but it was really bad. I'll just list off a few things:

• The astro-zombies know about four ways of attacking someone, and it gets really, really repetitive.
• Hack into shoulder
• Cut off head
• Cut throat from behind
• Throw machete or other bladed implement, hit precisely the same position on chest on each person.
• The astro-zombies, being created as super-soldiers meant to lead the military to victory in any battle ever, have no discernible fighting ability, nor any urge whatsoever to defend themselves. Ever. If someone takes aggressive action at them, they do not in any way attempt to dodge, block, parry, or anything like that. It doesn't matter where they are. It doesn't matter what they are doing. It doesn't matter if they are aware of their attacker or not. They utterly fail to even attempt to defend.
• This would be acceptable if we were shown, repeatedly, that they were in fact invulnerable or regenerated as we were told they would earlier in the film. But we aren't. Instead, once the Doll Squad gets involved and is therefore there to actually try to fight the astro-zombies, the Doll Squad already has the explosive darts that can kill the astro-zombies...so to the best of my recollection, we never get any combat scene were someone tries to harm an astro-zombie and it regenerates or they otherwise fail to take it down. There's one scene earlier where someone experimentally cuts off the limb of one of the clones, but that's it. We never see their vaunted regenerative powers in actual combat.
• What this boils down to is that we get a whole ton of scenes of Doll Squad members running through town, spotting an astro-zombie, and shooting an explosive dart at it, whereupon it takes the dart with no attempt to dodge and explodes. Sometimes the movie mixes it up a little by having the Doll Squad person stab the dart in by hand and then blow it up with a remote. But that's really it. In only one scene does a Doll Squad member get caught remotely unaware and have to defend herself, and she still does that super-easily.
• There's one bit that at least stands out, though not for good reasons, where a Doll Squad person nonsensically runs up to an astro-zombie, clubs it in the face with her blowgun to knock it down, then loads the blowgun and fires a dart from it rather than just stabbing the dart in. There's no reason she couldn't just shoot the dart at first, to my recollection (I'm pretty sure I recall her running at the zombie, or at least having plenty of time to shoot before it got to her), and also no reason she couldn't just stab the dart in later. Either do ranged or melee for a scene like that, folks - or give the person a clear reason they have to switch between. It makes little sense otherwise.
•  So...basically...next time, how about instead of cloning psychopathic monsters and making them not-actually-all-that-invulnerable, maybe the military should just call in the Doll Squad.

I'll leave it there. This was an utterly awful film, though I will say it was at least better than the prior two we've watched for Worst of the Worst. Not that that's a real compliment, mind. Until next time...I'm going to go watch some films that don't make me wonder how much of my soul died during the runtime.

Worst of the Worst?: Astro-Zombies M3- Cloned

After Alien Beasts, could things get worse?

No, but let's see how close we get...

This time, we tackle one of the last Films made by prolific Director Ted V. Mikels.  Even though he's now dead, I have to remain as critical of his work as I was when he was alive.

This is the next part in the Astro-Zombies Series...

As the third Film is this alleged Series, the Film begins with Stock Footage (that looks better than what the new Film is most of the time)...

...and more Stock Footage.  That burned about 10 minutes.

In the last Film, Aliens showed up to save the day.  One of them remained and killed an old lady.

Of course, I'm not entirely clear if that matters, because...

The Military (led by Mikels in one of his 2 Roles) just digs up the bones of an Astro Zombie to make more of them.  So was that pointless?

I can tell you what is pointless though- Mikels' other Role as the General's Twin.  He whines, talks funny and then kills himself (via Cyanide that makes him melt).  Pointless.

This lady is a Scientist trying to both clone the Astro Men AND make them more than killers.  She doesn't care how many dead Guards it takes!

Thankfully, this Film is chock full of pointless, ancillary Characters that take up space and nothing more.  Wait- was that a compliment?

As if making this a Sequel to Mark of the Astro Zombies, Mikels also references The Corpse Grinders (with a can Cameo), the original Astro Zombies Film (using a mix of Stock Footage and new Audio to put Tura Satana in this) AND The Doll Squad (his nearly-forgotten '70s Action Film).

The latter plays a big role here as the Squad is sent in to defeat the Astro Men with exploding darts.  After that, someone something Sequel Bait.

Bad, confusing stuff.  This shouldn't be like this.  This is cheap Exploitation.  I don't say that like it is a bad word- Exploitation Films can be great!  This is just a mess of a Film.  For example, we see a mysterious woman in a trench coat that works for a Senator (who was The President in the last one), hires the Doll Squad...but then seems to be working for Stock Footage Satana...who is working worth or controlling the disembodied head of John Carradine...and might have tried to stop them...or helped them...maybe.  That's just one example.  The Film is a mess of storytelling and style.  One Character is introduced as doing a Book Signing and then sits down in the Store like he owns it.  So...is he doing a Book Signing in his own Store?  Why do I need to ask that?!?  Most of the Actors are pretty damn wooden and the only good ones are in small Roles.  The Film waste so much time with random Scenes and useless Characters.  Did we need to see those Teenagers chased away from Area 51?  Did we THREE SCENES of the Writer Guy if the pay-off was just a stupid death?  It wasn't even a clever or ironic death- it was an obvious one.  Other such Characters- like a second, random Security Guard, the Hitler-stache Major and the Men in Black just take up your time.  The two previous Films for Worst of the Worst were from first time or novice Directors.  Mikels' had been making Films for over FOUR DECADES at the time of this Film, so he can't hide behind that.  I'm glad that the guy had fun, but this one is easily one of the Worst of the Worst...

A plain old bad Film.  I'm glad that they had fun making it, but I sure as hell didn't have fun watching it.

Worst of the Worst: Carl J. Sukenick's Alien Beasts

Oh boy- this is a bad one.  No need for the question mark in the Title here...

So here's what happened.  Bob reviewed this back in 2014- seen here- as part of Project Terrible.  The memory of this has lingered ever since.  So when I came up with this idea- mostly as a pretense to make it through one Film- he really wanted to see ME watch it.

Well, I did.

After a solid 60-90 seconds of THAT static shot, we suddenly see a bunch of people we don't know 'fighting' on the front lawn of a House.

It is awful, amateurish and nonsensical.

This is the best summation I can give you of the 'Plot' here to help you make sense of this...

Carl leads a team that fights bad guys.
He also knows that his team are all traitors.
He needs to repeat all of his instructions repeatedly.  Repeatedly.

This make sense?

This Film is totally topical in 2017!

Just kidding- it is stupid, random nonsense and the 'Iranian Agents' are just people in face-paint.

Abe is watching the monitors.
Abe is watching the monitors.

Get used to hearing that phrase.  A lot.

And yes, that Title Card did say 'Carl J. J. Sukenick's' on it.

Between all of the random repeats, creepy bits of someone seemingly-being-molested, repeats of the Fight Scenes (sometimes with Filters) and the abrupt Ending inspired by a Peter Gabriel part of your soul dies.

Oh well, I wasn't using it that much.

There is both so much and so little going on here.  The 'Plot' involves Foreign Agents, Mutants, Lasers and good Agents who seem to be on some sort of drugs.  Aside from some half-decent make-up (like above), there seems to be no Budget here.  The opening bit takes place on what must be Carl's front lawn.  The bulk of the Film seems to take place in and around the same location.  Nothing looks good.  Barely anything sounds good.  In the infamous bit I mentioned near the beginning, he rambles the Plot to an 'Agent' who stands there confused in close-up.  He tells her right after that to not freak out...and then says the same 'Plot' again, only more slurred and stupid.  This was all done in Post-Production- assuming there was much of one- and he still picked the worst takes- assuming that there were more.  That is the really messed up part: this Film had a bunch of Editing and work done on it after shooting was done.  He added stuff like Filters, Insert Shots and more.  This wasn't something he did over a weekend and just used the first take of everything.  This one required actual work done after the fact- even if it was probably done on a bender.  He had plenty of chances to either 'fix' this or just scrap it entirely.  When all is said and done, this is *technically* a Movie, but just barely.  It has a semi-Plot and it does sort-of wrap up.  It feels more like the coke-fueled ramblings of a mad man (which it likely was) and it is time that I can never get back.  Even free on the Internet, the price is too high for this one.  What is Carl up to these days?

Seriously, this is just as bad as The Time Machine- just in a crazy, random and ridiculous way.  It is one of the worst things that I have ever seen in my life.

Worst of the Worst?: The Time Machine (I Found at a Yard Sale) - Bob's View

There are some movies so bad you just can't watch through them alone and keep your sanity. For those times, Al and I have designed Worst of the Worst, where we'll sit down together to watch a film and provide moral support and perhaps a shoulder to cry on when we break. Then, we can each put down our thoughts about the same film. Maybe you'll get two different views!

Or maybe, like today, we'll just both agree the film is horrid.

The Time Machine (I Found at a Yard Sale) is pretty infamous already. Al gives a good coverage of just what it is in his own review, but to recap, it's a low, low, low budget film (albeit one shot on RED because that is apparently vitally important) about a guy who finds a little box that happens to be a time machine at a yard sale and goes home and does unwise things with it.

Also, the main character's name is Robert Moore. Thankfully the last name is spelled differently, or I might have had to take this personally.

I like to start my reviews with compliments if at all possible, so here goes:

• The main character is better at walking than Rod from Birdemic.
• The dialog is sometimes delivered with something approaching actual human behavior simulation by the automatons on screen.
• I kind of like the busted stopwatch that's used on the title screen.

Here's the thing...this idea? You totally can make a low budget film about time travel and actually make something pretty good, if you're otherwise pretty good at making films. What you have to do is restrain your concept. Make a time travel film about a time loop that covers a few days, maybe. Or make one where you travel back or forward only a few years, where things won't have changed much technologically and you won't have a large costume expense.

Don't, say, make a film where you travel several thousand years forward in time. Twice.

And don't rip off the Mutara Nebula fight from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan either.

TTMIFaaYS does not know the meaning of the word "restraint" when it comes to ideas. Nor does it know the meaning of the words "focus on one plot and adequately develop it." It takes what could actually be a perfectly fine idea for a low budget sci-fi film that could let a person show off their abilities in writing or direction or acting or whatever you want, and does it in exactly the wrong way to be of benefit to anything.

It's actually a hard film to review just because it gets too much wrong...but I'm going to pick a couple things to focus on here that were particularly bad.

First up, I've already mentioned it, but the choice of how to use the time machine in this film was just plain stupid for what they were going to be able to accomplish. You do not put yourself in the position of having to get out of portraying a massive futuristic environment. If you are making a low budget film, the words "thousands of years" should simply never show up in your script concept. You are asking for trouble then.

Furthermore, you should absolutely not include the word "spaceship." That is also a no go for a very low budget film. A spaceship, when introduced, needs to be used. When that spaceship is used, it has to go somewhere. Usually that somewhere is space. Making a spaceship move, and making it move through space, are both potentially quite expensive endeavors.

The solution in this film was to use a spectacularly poor 3d model for the spaceship, and take publicly available NASA photographs to use as backdrops that the ship could fly past. That's not a good solution.

First off: At the very least, if you're going for this, get one of the ship models from DAZ or Smith Micro or one of the other 3d art sites. It won't be something you custom made, but many of them can be customized and at least you'll have something with some reasonable textures and shapes rather than kind of a metal pancake.

Second: Don't just use still photographs from NASA as backdrops. That simply doesn't cut it for a watchable film, at least not unless you make a real effort to dress them up in some way and use them logically.

And third: If you're going to use a basic "stars going past" animation for when you're in warp speed, consider at least having the stars move quickly. Every time they show the stars moving animation in this film, things move at such a crawl I thought they were going to have a plot point about engine trouble.

This film just reached too far, honestly. Doing a "far, far future" concept or a "adventures in outer space" concept was just never going to work...and they did both. So what we get is a film that's full of shots of our main characters sitting in a cockpit that consists of....nothing much, just a couple seats, a control stick, and a panel...and staring at the alleged viewscreen off camera and telling us what they see in as unenthusiastic a tone as possible. It's like listening to a book on tape, but with images on screen that are so dull they kill off the imagination you'd otherwise be using to picture what was going on.

You better really get used to this shot. You will see it a lot.

The second major problem? This film goes through multiple plots in its (not nearly short enough) runtime. Robert buys the time machine and gets a basic handle on its abilities, then travels several thousand years forward, then kind of helps a woman (She-Ba) escape what I think was slavery, then travels several thousand years further forward (because it went so well the first time), then finds a spaceship, then joyrides in it, then gets a message that the former owner of said ship was smuggling something for a rebellion and decides to complete said mission, stops at a gem world, stops at a dinosaur world, fights an enemy ship, completes the mission, finds a bunch of diamonds, goes back to buy clothes, gets told that there's another mission, goes on that mission, gets trapped on an ice world, nearly freezes to death when his ship is...shot or something...before he and She-Ba remember they have a time machine (because I honestly think the scriptwriter forgot until this point), then escapes by using said time machine, takes She-Ba to meet his parents, randomly discovers a treasure map, goes treasure hunting, discovers the treasure, goes to chill on the beach, and finally (spoilers!) decides to go back many many thousands of years in the future on an urgent mission to help rebels who are many many thousands of years from even being born yet, which seems to me to suggest that maybe he could take a little while longer to chill on the beach, but apparently She-Ba doesn't agree.

You might be thinking, "holy crap, that sounds like a lot of stuff in that movie." And you'd be right! There is a lot of stuff in this movie. There is too much stuff in this movie. Nothing gets adequately developed.

So...here's what you do. Pick one thing for the movie to be about, as a main plot, and stick with that. You can have a subplot, maybe two, but keep the primary focus on one thing. "Time Machine" is in your title, so I suggest sticking with that, but if you must, get the characters to the spaceship, introduce the smuggling plot, and make the rest of the movie about that mission. Come up with a few problems that can get in the heroes' way, and make the rest of the movie about them surmounting those problems until they can finally get to their destination and deliver the package they were supposed to deliver. You can make a much, much more focused, direct, and interesting plot that way.

It's weird. Watching this film, it felt like they glued several extremely short TV episodes together from a series where each episode has its own mostly independent plot. It's like if you took Burn Notice (apologies to Burn Notice for mentioning it in this review) and took only the bare minimum necessary from five or six different episodes to make a movie length plot, but mostly focused on the stuff from the episode plots instead of the stuff from the season-long plot.

...that would still be so much more interesting than this.

But really...the main problem with all of this is that it is just...so...boring. The above problems are major, and fixing them would make a better film, but the overall presentation is just so dull that I'm not sure that there's much of a way to save it. I can blame a lack of special effects caused by a low budget for why the makers chose to focus on the characters in the ship instead of showing us what was happening outside. I can blame a lack of special effects caused by a low budget for why the fight with the enemy ship was so basic and dull. I can blame overreaching on a concept for why the space travel is so uninteresting. I can blame a lack of focus for...well...the lack of focus.

But I can't blame any of those things for why the film chooses to make us watch a man retrieve orange juice from his fridge, pour it, and drink it down as slowly as possible in real time, not missing a single moment of that scintillating spectacle. I can't blame any of those things for the repeated lengthy shots of trees, or gems, or other backdrops with absolutely nothing happening. I can't blame any of those things for that really bizarre scene where we stare at Robert and She-Ba staring at each other and giggling, then they fade and we stare at lake (I guess?) for a full 18 seconds with nothing going on, then She-Ba fades into view and brushes her hair, and then it all fades out again.

Seriously, what was that? I'm guessing it was an extremely awkward way to imply they were sleeping together? Maybe? Was that it?

And lest you think I'm complaining overmuch about the orange juice scene, I just want to emphasize something. He opens the fridge at 6 minutes and 34 seconds into the movie. He sets the empty glass he just drank from in the sink at 7 minutes and 41 seconds into the movie. The movie spends one minute and seven seconds just making us watch a man slowly retrieve a bottle of orange juice from the fridge, pour a glass of orange juice, put the bottle away, and excruciatingly slowly drink the orange juice before setting the glass down in the sink.

HE EVEN SWITCHES HANDS, PEOPLE.

Counting the credits, this is an 84-minute film. That means that roughly 1/84th of this film is "man drinks glass of orange juice while staring wordlessly and expressionlessly at something off camera." Now, there may be an optimal ratio for amount of your film taken up by a person just standing there drinking something and staring off into space wordlessly, but I'm pretty sure 1/84th isn't the right one. Cut the orange juice drinking while staring into space content by at least 50%, people. Learn some speed drinking techniques. Just drink it down. One big gulp. You can do it. Or just, y'know, cut at some point, like a sensible person would.

Aside from that...the sound mixing here is just plain awful. The dialog is far, far too quiet in many scenes, so that even if you're trying to be interested in the plot you can't hear what's going on. I had my TV turned up to double the volume I normally watch it at and I still couldn't hear a darn thing in some scenes. And this is when there's not really much background sound at all! When there is background noise you've just got no hope much of the time.

There are things wrong with this film that a little thought could fix - a change to the script, a re-ordering of events maybe, a little more focus, and some of this gets better. But there are things about this film that are just plain bad, and there's no fixing them without utterly changing the directing, the acting, the editing, and...well...everything else about the film.

There are bad movies that are kind of fun to watch, and there are bad movies that are kind of fun to watch together at least because you can get a good series of jokes going between you and your buddy. The Time Machine (I Found at a Yard Sale) is neither of those. It is deadly, deadly dull, and even having Al watching it with me only just made it possible to get through. I cannot recommend it as a watch even for bad movie buffs.

To close, here is a short and incomplete list of some of the films I have watched that I would have rather watched than this movie (if someone held a gun to my head and made me choose):

• Narcosys
• Southland Tales
• Hard to Be a God
• Freddy Got Fingered
• Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie
• Air Collision
• D.C. Sniper
• Thor: Hammer of the Gods
• Inland Empire
• The Asylum's Monster
• Deadly Prey

In another situation, I would never choose to watch any of those films again, and they are all films that I only watched in the first place because I was asked to review them by Al for his birthday or by someone for Project Terrible. To add a few more that I haven't reviewed myself but have seen...Manos: The Hands of Fate, Red Zone Cuba, and Birdemic are all miles better than this film.

This was mind-numbingly dull, unfocused, and just inexplicable. The Time Machine (I Found at a Yard Sale) is one of the single worst movies I have ever seen, and the worst part is that it really didn't have to be. If the people making this film had just paused to think for a little while about their concept, maybe they could have found something that was within their financial means and within their skills. A nice, simple time travel plot set entirely in modern day and just using the time machine to solve regular life problems, as opposed to travelling some 20,000 years into the future and then forgetting the time machine existed, could have made for a decent, watchable low-low-budget sci-fi flick that served as a decent thing to have on a resume.

Instead, we got this.

Don't watch it. Ignore it, and hopefully it will go away.