IT CAME FROM KUCHAR (Jennifer M. Kroot). 86 minutes. Opens Friday (June 11). Rating: NNN
BIRDEMIC: SHOCK AND TERROR (James Nguyen). 90 minutes. Opens Saturday (June 12). Rating: N.
Both films at the Bloor. See Indie & Rep Film.
You make a movie called Hold Me While I’m Naked, people are going to remember you. Just ask George and Mike Kuchar.[rssbreak]
Shooting grainy 8mm on a shoestring budget (or less), the Kuchars made experimental, openly amateurish melodramas and exploitation pictures with titillating titles like Corruption Of The Damned and The Devil’s Cleavage. Their films tremble with seething sexuality – or maybe that’s just because the cameras are hand-held.
Jennifer M. Kroot’s engaging documentary It Came From Kuchar gives the brothers their due as icons of the underground film movement of the 1960s and 70s, interweaving footage from such Kuchar epics as Sins Of The Fleshapoids and The Craven Sluck with glowing testimonials from famous fans like Atom Egoyan and Guy Maddin.
Kroot also catches up with the brothers themselves, now in their late 60s. George, it turns out, is teaching film production in San Francisco.
It’s all entertaining enough, if a little frustrating. Kroot keeps trying to make a case for the Kuchars as underground filmmakers rather than sleazemeisters who were embraced by a hipster elite as savants, and she can’t quite close the deal.
Speaking of bad things being embraced by good people, consider James Nguyen’s Birdemic: Shock And Terror, which also comes to the Bloor this weekend, playing a midnight show Saturday (June 12) and June 25.
Birdemic, as you may have heard, is a terrible movie that’s been anointed the next so-bad-it’s-good cult classic by the same online fan base that discovered Tommy Wiseau’s The Room. But the zeitgeist is barking up the wrong tree here. The Room may be an awful movie – indeed, there’s no “may be” about it – but Wiseau’s demented auteurist vision makes for a truly fascinating experience.
Birdemic, on the other hand, is just crap. Made with a noticeable lack of money and talent, it’s inept from start to finish – a dreary boy-meets-girl story that turns into a laughable Birds rip-off halfway through, then ultimately decides to make some points about global warming. It’s also frequently inaudible, because writer/director/producer Nguyen used live audio for every scene rather than re-dubbing the dialogue so we’d know what people are shouting at each other during the cheesy digital bird attacks.
This isn’t one of those movies that’s so bad it’s good it’s just so, so bad. Even the Kuchars would have scrapped the footage and started over.
