“The Incredibly Strange People Show” wants to be UK’s answer to “The Goove Tube” or “Kentucky Fried Movie” but ends up coming closer to that dreaded Anthony Michael Hall/Randy Quaid season of “Saturday Night Live.”
It’s opening is promising. The so-called producer (a homage to classic schlock director William Castle) explains to the audience that a toxic gas will be released, killing everyone over twenty-five years of age during the film. We could only be so lucky. After that, it falls into a witless array of confusion that only a mother could love.
After it’s clever opening title sequence (maybe the best piece in the film) we’re drawn to the antics of Max and Moritz, two slackers of the hour who sit in front of boob tube watching bits of underground cult cinema. Flesh eating zombies, bad daytime TV, women prison flicks, they all here and they’re all worse than the original creations that they’re spoofing. Here’s a quick dose of these various thin witted skits:
Bug Man from the Killionth Century: A 50’s style space monster movie that has a combination of effects, costumes, and acting so bad that it couldn’t even pass as a film made by two drunk teens with their parents video camera.
One Kiss Away From the Hole: A “Cell Block H” spoof of the woman prison system. Good-looking woman in catfights is great stuff. Ugly woman getting sexed up by sweaty, male prison guards (or at least I think that’s what his job was), not much fun.
Skedge hair ointment commercial. Absolutely no clue what’s going on.
Home-icide: This was a semi humorous commercial of about a dial murder service. This was one redeeming piece of the movie that made me laugh.
Its storylines for these shorts make as much sense as a Mad-Libs book. There is such a language barrier to the humor of this flick that after some studious research I went to the website and actually found a glossary on what they were trying to accomplish with this movie. First rule in filmmaking, if you have to create a glossary for your audience to explain the movie you’re making, don’t make the movie. We cut back and forth to various shows via the remote control only to get lost in the shuffle. We never know where we are in the storyline. It’s finally a matter of cutting your losses and hoping that the next brigade of channel surfing will be worthy of a watching.
Most films like this fail because they’re already tapping into a subject matter that was awful in the first place. The exploitive films of the 50’s are really just happy accidents; bad acting, directing, and effects were created because the producers actually had no budget, script, or chops to pull it off. They weren’t purposely terrible to create a style, they created a style all their own from being so terrible. These films of yesteryear are lightning in a bottle and should never be attempted again. To try and remake something that already was a train wreck is almost an impossible task. Making a movie in the spirit of these films like “Matinee” or “Mars Attacks” can make great cinema. They attempt to create this homage to 50’s horror cinema while at the same time putting a creative and original twist to it. To try and pull this style off by almost duplicating it without some originality is a recipe for disaster.
One last comment so it doesn’t look like I’m such a heartless bastard is that the creators of this movie do have a fondness for classic horror cinema. The endless inside jokes, characters named after late great B-movie stars; there is some love here, it just got lost in the translation.
As we come to the end of this debacle, one of the two chaps on the couch kills himself by a quick zap of the remote control. I only wish someone would have done the same to me during this viewing.
