Fiction

Minty Belasco's Top Ten Most Hideous And/Or Splendid Movies Of All Time
(Translated From The Original Croatian)
by Mark McLaughlin

Introductory note from the translator: Last year, while vacationing in Europe, I visited film critic, fashion designer, and international trend-setter Minty Belasco, who was living in an apartment above a Goth nightclub in Munich. Minty is tall, thin, pale, and extensively tattooed. His age is anyone's guess. He is the author of seventeen books on a variety of subjects, including menswear, ancient Egyptian mummification rituals, bonsai trees, and his favorite topic of all, movies – the cheaper and trashier, the better.

His books have been published in Russia, Poland, France, India and Japan. But not one has been published in the United States, because as Minty said, "Most Americans don't want to know what I think. Besides, that's where Momsy and Daddy live, and I'm not talking to them."

Minty's parents, Momsy and Daddy, are in fact multimillionaires Regina and Cuthbert Belasco, owners of Belasco Beer, Belasco Premium Cigarettes, Belasco Fried Chicken, and Belasco Funeral Homes.

Minty can write and speak in thirty-five different languages, but these days he only writes in Croatian. He told me, "My new massage therapist speaks Croatian and I'm just mad about that tongue – that language, I mean."

The article below, written by Minty, appeared in a Croatian film magazine with a name that translates to Eye Feces. Fortunately, I know several languages myself, so Minty said that if I wanted to go to the bother of translating the article, he would give me his permission to sell it to an American editor, making it his first publication in this country.

On behalf of America, I thank you, Minty. Some of us really do care what you think.

***

Minty Belasco's Top Ten Most Hideous And/Or Splendid Movies Of All Time

No. 10 and Stinkingly Hideous:
I Took Piano Lessons From A Zombie (1939)
Lots of folks consider this a horror classic, but I think it's a steaming bucket of goat dung. Glubb the undead piano teacher strikes the keys at random while staring off into space. Are we to assume that only a mindless zombie would play the piano that way? That's just how avant-garde pianist Feng Pao Goldstein, a visionary, a genius, used to tickle the ivories. I once went to one of his concerts, and I loved listening to Feng as he played the baby grand in the middle of that cattle-yard. You see, even the locations of his concerts had to be avant-garde. He was on life support for five months after the stampede.

***

No. 9 and Hideously Vile:
The Amnestyville Horridness Part XVII:
Better Latte Than Never (1997)
The movie that started this series, The Amnestyville Horridness (1979), was pretty much a supernatural kitchen-sink drama about a family trying to adjust to a new house and all its nutty little quirks: creaky floorboards, drafty hallways, faucets squirting pus and tentacles flailing out of the refrigerator. It wasn't great, but it had interesting main characters and some nice creepy moments, with a satisfying ending that still left the door open for a sequel. Well, so far no one's been able to shut that damned door.

In the first five sequels, the house changed ownership time and time again, before the local priest wised up and burned it down in No. 6. But that didn't end the Amnestyville curse. In this one, No. 17, a haunted coffee-maker from the evil house is given to a perky, innocent family in a suburb of Chicago. Soon their happy home is crawling with undead spirits, all hopped up on caffeine. The machine is never shown making latte, so the title is just a cutesy witticism. Actually, that's the only clever thing about this plodding exercise in plot recycling. Elements from the previous sixteen movies are tossed in like wild greens in a salad from Hell. To be fair, the coffee-maker angle does deliver one nice chill – like when we find out that the couple's breakfast coffee was brewed from the cremated remains of another couple that died in sequel No. 16.

There's one thing I can't understand about haunted house movies. Why don't the people just buy another house? Houses can't cost that much – Daddy had dozens of them. He even had one he never told Momsy about – that was where he kept his lover Pasha. I can't remember if Pasha was male or female ... probably a he/she. Daddy always had trouble making up his mind.

***

No. 8 and Ridiculously Hideous:
The Legend Of Flaming Arrow (1993)
This big-screen, mainstream release was about five-thousand times worse than most of the cult films and shoestring-budget drive-in oldies I usually watch. Classically trained actors think they can play anything from baby chicks to Siamese twins. Fine-boned blond British actor Basil Cheltenham has played Hamlet and Romeo, but sorry, he is simply out of his league as Indian warrior Flaming Arrow.

This was supposed to be a very intense film, and a bit of a dark fantasy, with Flaming Arrow going on spirit quests in his own head and talking with bear gods and eagle ghosts and other celestial Nature types, but the whole effect is ruined by Cheltenham's presence. They dyed his hair black and gave him brown contacts and slathered him with shoe polish to darken him up, but under all that one can tell he's still just a snooty pretty-boy. My nanny Helga raised me right: I simply will not tolerate pretense.

***

No. 7, Hideous Corporate Propaganda:
Let's Learn More About Soybeans! (1993)
This wasn't ever a theatrical release. It's a trade-show videotape I watched while spending the weekend at my friend Roger's beach house. Roger's family is even richer than mine, if that's possible. His brother sells soybeans and soybean-related products, whatever those are. The brother had left the tape behind so Roger could learn more about the world of soybeans and perhaps want to get involved in it, but Roger is doing quite well as a butt model. That's his rear in all those Calvin Klein underwear ads.

This wretched little trade-show video is narrated by some fat, awkward soybean executive with a triple chin and sideburns. It seems that soybeans can be made into anything – cattle feed, protein shakes, plastic, medicine, cars, buildings, you name it. Roger and I got drunk on rum-and-cokes and made fun of the tape from beginning to end.

It's funny, though. I look around at things now and think: Is this made out of soybeans? Is that made out of soybeans? Exactly how much of my world is made out of soybeans? Ten percent? Fifteen? Fifty? More? The mind boggles. For all I know, I might be surrounded by the damned things. So hurray for soybeans, I guess.

***

No. 6 and Hideously Nauseating:
Sidewinder Sally (1954)
Usually I hate big, lush Hollywood musicals, especially ones set in the Old West – crusty geriatric campfire cooks and square-jawed ranch-hands bursting into song over sunsets, sycamore trees and newborn calves staggering toward their loving moo-cow mommies. Yes, usually I hate them, but there's something I hate even more: big, lush Old West Hollywood musicals starring Marla Malone.

Saccharine-sweet girl-next-door leading lady Marla stars as Sidewinder Sally, a scruffy Nebraska tomgirl who cleans up right purty. In fact, she's gosh-darned glamorous, with straight white teeth, shining golden hair and perfect skin in a wild-and-wooly frontier without toothpaste, shampoo or astringent.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "Minty, don't you usually critique movies with monsters and killers and aliens in them? Sidewinder Sally is just some cornfed cowboy chick." To which I reply: "Whole generations of women grew up feeling woefully inadequate because they weren't as perfect, as winsome, as talented, as zit-free as Marla Malone. Men loved her, but they all knew they she was too good for them. Why would the flawless Marla want some loser with a potbelly, a bald spot, halitosis and a dead-end job? So doesn't all that make Marla a bit of a monster, making male and female victims alike feel like crap, spreading a loathsome epidemic of low self-esteem?" If that ain't a monster, I don't know what is.

It is amusing, though, to see Marla strutting around in buckskin pants, shooting rifles and punching varmints. Sidewinder Sally's more of a man than my weak-chinned, drunken Daddy ever was.

***

No. 5 and Directed by a Hideous Moron:
Baby Schnookums of Arabia (1998)
I wasn't sure what to make of this one... I'm not much of a history buff, but I'm vaguely aware of the existence of some soldier or diplomat or whatnot named Lawrence of Arabia, who used to have real-life intrigues somewhere in the Middle East. Arabia, I imagine. But why make a kid's movie – a feature-length cartoon with an orchestral score and everything – about his baby brother? And by baby, we're talking diaper, pacifier, the works. Baby Schnookums toddles off into the desert to have hee-haw-larious adventures with asps and mummies and guys with swords. He eventually joins up with a talking flying carpet named Ruggles and a baby camel named Humphrey. Momsy used to ride camels on her safaris. Elephants, too. Momsy was quite the hunter. I once went with her on one of her hunting trips and she bagged three lions and some kind of enormous pig. She'd hunted in that part of Africa before – the local guides call her ‘Insane Death Goddess.'

But back to the movie. All the symbols on the walls in the pyramid scenes were wrong. I know a bit about hieroglyphics, and the curse above the entrance of the tomb in the movie was supposed to say: HE WHO ENTERS THIS TOMB MUST PAY THE TERRIBLE PRICE. But actually it said: BEETLE BIRD BEETLE, GUY-POINTING-LEFT, BIRD BIRD, BEWARE OF CROCODILES, BEETLE BEETLE BIRD, PHARAOH STINKS.

***

No. 4, Hideous and Slightly Splendid:
Don't Look In The Crawlspace (1972)
Why do some houses even have crawlspaces? Like any normal kid, I grew up in a lovely big mansion, with occasional trips to the summer house, and neither of those places had any dark old smelly crawlspaces, as far as I know. People were meant to live in airy, palatial surroundings, not stuffy burrows. To my notion, a house without pillars just isn't a house. It's a shack. I have no idea why some people live in trailers. A house on wheels? That's just wrong. I refuse to set foot in a house on wheels. It could roll off a cliff or something. The house in this movie doesn't have wheels, but it does have cannibals living in its dark, wet hidey-holes. And they cook their victims in a cave below the house – they don't just eat them raw. So they do have some class, though they don't bother with a recipe. Ideally, human flesh should be served dotted with cloves, slow-roasted and generously brushed with either a ginger glaze or plum sauce. Or so I hear.

***

No. 3, Equally Hideous and Splendid:
Living Dead in the Horror Museum of Wax (1988)
I found this Franco-Italian horror opus altogether intriguing. True, they set it in a fictional town – Hellwich, which sounds like a terrible sandwich – in Massachusetts, and it was painfully clear that the writers and director had never been to America, let alone New England. Nights in Massachusetts don't echo with the chatter of monkeys and the snarls of lions. Men in bars don't cry out, "More ale, serving wench!" But still, the movie makes up for those weensy flubs by being wonderfully energetic and creepy. The zombies prowl the town by night, then just before dawn, they go back into the museum, dip themselves in a vat of molten wax, and then stumble to their displays and harden into encased figures to be on show during the day. Then at the end of the day, they break out of their wax and the hunchbacked museum janitor cleans up all the broken wax and throws the chunks back into the vat.

One thing I don't understand is this: molten wax is pretty hot, right? And the zombies immerse themselves in it. Wouldn't the zombies be cooked by now? But then, maybe evil supernatural creatures are more heat-resistant. They're built to endure the flames of Hell – so what's a little molten wax?

***

No. 2, Hideous With Lots Of Prehistoric Splendor:
Dracula, 10,000 B.C. (1964)
A vampire caveman! It sounds like a stupid idea, but I loved it. Plus, the part of Drah-Ku-Lah is played by Tony Carpelli, a very handsome Italian actor with just a touch of a lazy eye, and I've always thought there was something really sexy about a lazy eye. Years and years ago, my sister Taffy had a boyfriend with a lazy eye. He was German, a foreign exchange student named Klaus, and he and I used to spend entire afternoons taking nature walks in the timber behind the summer house. Well, we told people they were nature walks. Last I heard, Klaus became a spy, but not a very good one, because he was caught and he's in a Siberian prison now.

Cave-vampire Drah-Ku-Lah terrorizes a bunch of Neanderthals and it's up to Von-Hel-Sing, the really smart caveman who's a little higher on the evolutionary scale, to save the day. The dinosaurs look pretty fake, and I really don't think dinosaurs and cavemen lived at the same time, but still, you really can't have a caveman movie without a few dinosaurs. I mean, the prehistoric world without dinosaurs would be pretty boring. Just a bunch of cavemen fighting pigs and monkeys and big rats. Who wants to see that? My favorite part is when Drah-Ku-Lah bites the pterodactyl and then the pterodactyl turns into a vampire. A few minutes later, it flies into a big tree and a branch spears it through the heart, so it doesn't have time to turn any of the other dinosaurs into vampires. I wonder how Klaus is doing in Siberia? I'd send him a sweater, but that would just make the other prisoners jealous.

***

No. 1, Tremendously Hideous and Deliciously Splendid:
Horror In Der Haus (2003)
This direct-to-video horror movie is a complete mish-mash. A sixtyish voodoo queen living in a ghetto befriends an extremely old German guy living by himself in a big spooky house surrounded by an electrified fence. In the house is a locked door with the metal letters K.K. nailed to it, and the doorknob always has an icicle hanging from it. That may seem like an especially odd detail, but trust me, it works into the plot eventually. The old guy turns out to be a mad Nazi scientist doing experiments in longevity, and he's about a hundred and twenty years old. He has a lock of Hitler's hair in a little jar, and he keeps trying to clone it into a full-grown Adolf, but the hair-guck that Hitler used had corrupted the DNA. So he tricks the voodoo queen into turning the hair into the person it used to be, telling her that it was a precious lock from his dear departed wife. The voodoo queen takes pity, whips out her big book of spells and works some magic on that evil snip of hair.

So, Adolf Hitler is born again, and not just as a baby – he's all grown up, moustache and all, and speaking English with a thick German accent, so I guess the voodoo queen must have thrown in a linguistic spell. From this point on, the movie just gets more and more ridiculous. Eventually Hitler becomes a rapper, Big H, who sets his rants to a hip-hop beat. Did Hitler have any sort of musical talent? I guess the voodoo queen threw in a music spell, too. Big H makes everybody in the hood think he's their friend, but needless to say, that's all one big lie. He steals the voodoo queen's book of spells and raises all his old Nazi buddies from Hell, and soon they're goose-stepping through the streets, up to all their old nastiness again.

Then the director tries to play a tune on our heart-strings. By this time, the elderly Nazi has fallen in love with the voodoo queen. He sees the error of his ways, so he decides to become a good guy and stop reborn Hitler. In a movie this stupid, anything can happen, and while I don't want to give away the ending, I will tell you that the K.K. on that door stands for Kris Kringle – yes, even jolly old Santa Claus gets caught up in the whole confusing, catastrophic brouhaha. This movie is like a massive ten-car accident: it's not pretty, but you really do need to have a peek, just to see how sickening it was.

The world is full of great movies, good movies, mediocre movies and poorly made movies. But truly bad movies are like two-headed calves: rare, strange, loathsome and miraculous. So visit your local video store, rent some of these tapes and feast your eyes upon their hideous splendor. If you are like me, I am sure they will make you vomit with rapture.