Midnight. Plan 9. Nuff said.

...Fine. 

Bela! Not Bela! Flying Saucers! Over Hollywood! Tor! What? Idiot! Hot! Day! Night! Murdered! Dead! Somebody's Responsible! Wicker! Rattan! Up There! Out There! In There! Bela! Not Bela! Your lights! Spook detail! Solarmanite! Earth! Idiots! You see! Stupid! Stupid! All must be destroyed!

Beware of future events in your future! (And watch out for all those flying paper plates.)

As the audience and the auditorium recovered from the Plan 9 simulated UFO/paper-plate onslaught, the reprieve was short-lived as the next short spooled up, and then I almost spit up the last few Slim Jims I'd snarfed when a familiar tune tinkles from an unseen clavichord. Oh no, they're showing Gavotte again. What's a Gavotte? you ask. Well, you remember Jay Sherman from The Critic? And how he used to sing that haughty little ditty, "I like French films; pretentious foreign French Films. I like French films; three tickets s'il vous plait." Yeah, well Gavotte is basically Jay Sherman's wet dream. Not a single smidgen of dialogue is spoken as two midgets decked out in full Renaissance gear wrassle and beat the crap out of each other over a comfy chair. This goes on for, like, six hours. Or at least it feels like six hours before this greasy turd-burger mercifully grinds toward the finis. That's French for "End, please."

Man, at this point my stomach had twisted itself into a knot, but I don't think it had anything to do with Gavotte and a lot to do with those Jerky treats that I've been burping up for the last ten minutes. Note to self: Don't eat anymore of those. Ah, what's a little trichinosis among friends, right? Gut it out son, gut it out.

What's next?

On this week's episode of Charlie's Angels, Charlie sends the Angels to the Philippines to infiltrate a band of terrorists. All part of a plan to get them arrested and inside a Filipino jail, where one of the Angels has already been planted deep undercover as an assistant to the warden. And all of that is part of a plan to recover a cache of cash stolen by another band of terrorists, led by this week's special guest-star, Sidney Haig as Pancho Villa's great, great grandson, Philbert; and don't miss extra-special guest-star John Ashley as Bosley's treacherous, turncoat nephew/sling-shot thong model, Dinkley. Will Kris, Sabrina and Kelly survive this jungle hell? and approximately 27,000 rounds of ammo fired at them? and will they do it all again next week, where no matter what happens, we never get the sense that any of them are in any real danger? and all the bad guys are buffoons that my 99 year-old grandmother could outwit and beat down WITHOUT the benefit of a wet-noodle?

...What?

Bitter? You bet your sweet bippy, I'm bitter. In the long and lurid world of exploitation movies you'd be hard pressed to stumble across a film less exploitative than Savage Sisters. Long on promise, short on delivery doesn't even begin to come close to this travesty. Which is odd when you figure that producer Ashley -- here already in full A-Team mode, and who made The Big Doll House for cripesakes! -- and director Eddie Romero are basically remaking Black Mama White Mama -- by no means a great film, but better than this thing. I mean, Who the hell wants to see a G-Rated Women In Prison movie? Anyone? Anyone..? Bueller? Somewhere along the way, these guys lost their nerve or something, as the film doesn't have the courage of its convictions to follow through on anything, really, which leaves us with a lot of insipidness and the total waste of a great cast; though Haig and Vic Diaz -- a/k/a Buttcrack -- tried real hard to salvage something, but not even sleaze queen Cheri Caffaro can save this patient -- and when I say sleaze, I say it most reverently.

Sorry for the rant; just had high hopes for this film is all. So yeah, expectations be a harsh mistress seldom satisfied. The only glimmer of happy-happy, joy-joy came when I hit upon a notion of a Charlie's Angels spin-off featuring Gloria Hendry, Pam Grier and Tamara Dobson. Or maybe Caffaro, Dyanne Thorne and Audrey Campbell?

That would have so rawked.

When the next short spooled up, I recognized it as one they showed last year about the gal trying to find her proper place in the world by basically running around and playing grab-fannie with everyone she meets, then winds down with some men's gay porn magazines. So, with my stomach still in full rebellion over the fetid jerky I ate earlier, I decided to skip it and abandoned the theater for a few minutes to clear the baffles -- if you know what I mean.

When I came back, the short was over and the emcee was on stage, warning us ahead of time that the next film's print probably wouldn't hold up, and to bear with them as we limped through it. No sweat, we all said. How bad could it be? But they needn't have worried, the print was the least of our worries. And as it played out just fine, with nary a break, we all got one big, stultifying dose of...

Nope. Not one little film break. None. Nada. Just one big old can of suck better known as Invasion of the Star Creatures. 

Long and the short of it: Two snafu-prone army privates get lost while on a recon patrol and wind up in a cave. Said cave turns out to be the staging ground for an invasion by a planet of hostile Amazons. Seems their master plan is to turn all the men-folk into an army of carrot-monsters (-- or something), and the only thing standing in their way of world domination are those two aforementioned dopes. Sound intriguing? It isn't. Nor funny. Nor ... Wait, did I mention this was a comedy? Well, I think it was supposed to be a comedy, but it turned out to be an anti-comedy; a rare species of film, indeed, where the anti-comedy is to comedy as what anti-matter is to matter. And we all know what happens when those disparate particles come into contact, right? E'yup; a really big boom, triggering a chain-reaction that could unravel the entire universe, and then all life as we know it would cease to exist. Luckily, for all of us, all the players involved were up to the task and not one iota of actual comedy appeared in the film, sparing us all from certain annihilation.

And on one other positive note, we also found out the threshold where odious comedy relief becomes malignant comedy relief. And for the record, it was during lap 36 of the Scooby-Dooesque cave chase.

Next!

First up was a silent Fleischer Brother's Koko the Clown cartoon: Koko's Hypnotism. Now, I don't know where you stand on old Koko, but personally, I think he's psychotic; if not an all out sociopath. I mean, Have you seen Koko and the World Control Center? Sorry, that guy just gives me the creeps -- and this short didn't help change my opinion at all as Koko and his deadly muse, Bimbo, crawl off the page and hypnotize the animator into stripping down to his skivvies, and then take a swan-dive off a chair into a goldfish bowl. Yikes. Make the bad clown go away, Mommy...

Next came A Chairy Tale, a gift from our friends, the National Film Board of Canada, that was either a morality play on cooperation when a stubborn chair rebels, or some Ritalin-addled idiot who doesn't know how to sit properly. Unfortunately, a tired crowd gone surly after Star Creatures tended to buy most into the idiot theory, as demonstrated when the short ended and, I believe, Marissa took a chair on stage and proceeded to beat the living crap out of it.

If it wasn't obvious by the tone of the recollection thus far, at this point, after Savage Sisters tanked and Star Creatures sucked my soul dry, I was on the verge of cracking up. B-Fest had stretched me over the forger's anvil and was ready to bring down the hammer of Street Trash and smite me most verily. But then the mercurial schedule shifted and The Hypnotic Eye came to my rescue. Here, a rash of morbidly bizarre and disfiguring accidents have been plaguing a certain city; a few of them fatal. As an example, we see a gal lather up her hair to wash it, and then stick her head into the open flame of her gas range to rinse! All the victims are female, none of them can remember what they did or why, and the only link to be found by Detective Obtuse and Inspector Oblivious is they all went to see The Great Desmond, a famed hypnotist. When the investigation stalls, Detective Obtuse's girlfriend does a Lois Lane and gets in over her head on the old snoop and scoop and succumbs to the power of THE HYPNOTIC EYE. Will they be able to save her before she takes a long walk off a very short backstage catwalk? Who am I to spoil it?

The Hypnotic Eye is a pretty good little noirish pot-boiler that, unfortunately, is sorta derailed in the third-act by a fifteen-minute sidebar when Desmond works his magic powers on his audience -- and, hopefully, the theater audience, just as the plot was beginning to sizzle. And by the time he's done making us all cluck like chickens, the momentum had drizzled away and the film sorta belly-flops over the closing credits. Kudos to Chris from Stomp Tokyo for providing the balloon props for the follow the bouncing HYPNOTIC EYE-ball-along, although Brother Ragnarok, from the Brotherhood of Bad Movies, and I spent most of the film using ours as flatulence simulators.

Speaking of flatulence simulators, time for Street Trash; though ipecac inducer is probably a more accurate plot description. So, try not to puke when you watch two brothers settle in amongst several other homeless hobos living in a junkyard. Then, try not to upchuck when you find out the place is owned by a sweaty necrophiliac, but is actually run by some psycho-vet named Bronson, who keeps the refuse-rummies in line by lopping off the man-tackle of any rabble-rousers -- and then uses the dismembered appendage for a hearty game of keep-away (-- re-enacted on stage by three BMMBers and a can of Pringles). Unfortunately [?], these games are interrupted when the greasy owner picks the girlfriend of a mob boss for a posthumous junkyard gang-bang, bringing on several hit-men and some heat by a Neanderthal cop named Bill. None of that matters, however, because the audience is more interested in that bad batch of Tenafly Viper -- somewhere in the same genus and species as Osco Scotch -- making the rounds amongst the dregs. For once it's consumed, the consumer either quickly melts into a Technicolor puddle of goo, or explodes in a rainbow of slime, resulting in the squishiest movie I've ever seen.

However, the film kinda lost me when they inexplicably abandoned the exploding bums about halfway through. (I'm thinking the budget ran out.) And for the life of me, I can't remember how this film ends. I seem to recall a funny bit with the mob-boss/hit-man disintegrating while that dude from Frankenhooker cracks wise over the credits. Beyond that, I got nothing.