Geretta Geretta

  • Warrior of the Lost World (1984)

    Warrior of the Lost World (1984)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, October 2021) As someone who has read metric tons of written Science Fiction, I’m probably more sensitive to bad Science Fiction than most people, and tripe like Warrior of the Lost World makes me seethe on a number of levels. It’s not just dumb science fiction filled with stolen clichés and cheap shortcuts—it’s painfully unimaginative and content to rely on material that would be too juvenile for teenage audiences. Much of the story is an obvious rip-off from the Mad Max series, with some generic authoritarian government nonsense (complete with red-white-black imagery not at all derived from Nazi Germany) on top of it. Our protagonist (Robert Ginty) looks like Chuck Norris, rides the country with his “smart” motorcycle (a thrice-talking machine so detestable that we can only cheer when it’s brutally-but-not-enough destroyed toward the end of the film) and gets rid of the oppressive regime. A few semi-known names fill up the cast, from Donald Pleasence as the top bald villain to Fred Williamson as a traitorous sidekick and Persis Khambatta (with a fuller head of hair than in Star Trek: The Motion Picture) as the mandatory love interest—plus I will never be unhappy to see Geretta Geretta pop up even in small roles. An extruded product of the 1980s Italian film industry (which had an unfortunate specialty of churning out cheap knockoffs of popular film), Warrior of the Lost World is post-apocalyptic science fiction at its laziest. There’s some money in the car chases and semi-familiar names in the cast, but that’s really not enough to masquerade the creative bankruptcy of everything else. Semi-notorious in the bad-movie genre (it was a Mystery Science Theater 3000 pick), it’s barely useful as a means of recalibrating expectations vis-à-vis dumb-but-expensive Hollywood films, but that’s not much of a barometer.

  • Rats—Notte di terrore [Rats: Night of Terror] (1984)

    Rats—Notte di terrore [Rats: Night of Terror] (1984)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, August 2021) Often mentioned as one of those so-bad-it’s-good cult favourites, Rats: Night of Terror is actually more fun than expected, albeit for narrow definitions of “fun.”  The film’s opening half-minute slams you in the face with paragraphs of narrated exposition boiling down to: this is a post-apocalyptic film. The following ten minutes are dedicated to introducing (in a fuzzy sense) the rather unlikable characters of the ensemble film: stylishly-dressed bikers stumbling into a bar that has some food and basement hydroponics, and then fighting off an unusually large number of flesh-eating rats. Like: bucketful of rats thrown at the actors, many of them (the actors) screaming senselessly. None of this makes sense, from the redundant exposition to the actress getting eaten to death by a single rat in a sleeping bag. It’s certainly not good, but it can be entertaining in wacky ways: watch the ineptness of writer-director Bruno Mattei, laugh at the absurd death scenes, leer at the pretty actresses (no, I can’t pick between Geretta Geretta or Moune Duvivier either), scream at the lousy seen-it-from-a-mile ending, gasp at the awfulness of the special effects or shrug at the endless pacing issues of a film that barely makes it to 97 minutes. Here’s the thing: it may not be good, but it is rather fun, and that’s not always obvious when discussing bad movies — too bad and no one’s having fun. Rats: Night of Terror has just enough to it (oh boy, that “computer” scene) to be entertaining.