Month: August 2018

September: A Month of Bad Movies

September will feature at least four Jack’s Bad Movies (each separated by a week or so). The reason? Fanx Salt Lake Comic Convention (Sep. 8-10) has a panel titled “A Different Kind of Marvelous: The First Live Action (Made for Television) Marvel Cinematic Universe:”

Long before Iron Man and The Hulk started the Marvel Cinematic Universe on a course against Thanos, and even before Ang Lee’s Hulk, Raimi’s Spider-Man or Ben Affleck’s Daredevil, Marvel Comics struggled gloriously on screens, big and small, to bring big ideas and heroes with heart to life, subject of course to budgetary limitations and commercial breaks. In the 1970s and 1980s, Captain America, Doctor Strange, Spider-Man, The Hulk, Daredevil, and Thor all made live action appearances, often with catchy, disco infused theme songs, custom vans, feathered hair, and exciting special effects (you will believe a man can slowly scramble down a wall). Our panel will visually explore the better and lesser appreciated entries in the early Marvel television oeuvre, discuss the successes and limitations of the television films and series in context, and discuss how these enthusiastic early entries opened the door for Marvel movies in the 1990s, and ultimately to the modern MCU. Excelsior!

As it happens, I will be participating on that panel. In preparation, I’ve been watching the older Marvel related properties. Against all odds, most of these appear to be quite bad. At the suggestions of Himarm and CreationEdge, I decided to post them to coincide with the panel I’ll be participating on and spread them out over the whole month.

Jack’s Bad Movies: 5 Headed Shark Attack

IMDB’s Description:

Shaped like a demented starfish, a monster 5-headed shark terrorizes the open ocean before invading the beaches of Puerto Rico, endangering the once peaceful island paradise.

5 Headed Shark Attack
You will never see this depicted creature in the movie.

This movie is apparently the third in what is at least four ‘X Headed Shark Attack’ movies, the first being 2 Headed Shark Attack, and the second being 3 Headed Shark Attack, produced by the SyFy Network. Now I firmly believe there should be a hyphen in that title between the number and headed, but whatever. I haven’t see the first two movies, but because we jumped from 2 to 5 heads in three movies, I expect this movie to be at least 2.5 times better than the original.

The movie opens on a boat somewhere near Puerto Rico. Two men are photographing 4 moderately attractive women, presumably as some sort of photo shoot (but possible to just get some sexy-times). None of these characters names are important, as you will soon learn. After wasting about five minutes on pointless closeups of girls in bikinis, one of the girls notices a disturbance out on the water. This isn’t Jaws (as much as this movie wants to be), where the movie spends most of its time eluding to the monster to have a big reveal near the end. Instead, the movie immediately shows us a great white shark, and then a four-headed shark (that number is correct) eats it. The main photographer gets all excited and starts clicking away on his camera as all six people stand on the stern looking at the large shark fin. Then the four-headed shark rears out of the water and with four mouths instantly consumes six people.

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Orchid Dragonmaster

If poetry is allegory,
then the master lures with opioid orchids,
sequestered in the great depths of western range,
the master cultures the flowers to omnipotence –
the hatchlings suckling on nipped buds.

Mature, they scour the seven directions of the continent:
the master’s guild summoning their allegiance –
saddled fireeaters rushing porpoises in the gangetic hunt;
clawswyrm tilling the stepped arteries of the far east;

Old, they are the roofs of cities in the south,
their shackles bending the city basin.
Their shackles welded by their own sunburnt madness.
And released, they can think only as those who bear wintery embers.

Old souls, their asylum created in their death, they seek
their own rot and carcass,
in flight north to final winter,
and in fleshy death startled eternal
as kindred fire of the guild.

composed by LakshmiNarayanan Ayyangar

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