Mondo Kane

It really looks like everyone watched a lot more compared to last year's challenge (Nice!) As you can see, I went absolutely nuts during this final week with so much free time (Though I love marathons, I highly doubt I'll ever be able to repeat that anything like that again) But it was all worth it considering that I didn't even have a computer for awhile (Lost so much stuff on my hard-drive and was on the verge of calling it quits) If anything, the endurance & dedication to watch so much sleaze & schlock soon after made me forget that loss (And there's your proof for exploitation-film's positive effect!)

Awards time!

Favorite movies I saw for the first time:
The Chinese Boxer
Hit!
Dirty O'Neil
Hells Belles
Twins of Evil
Pit Stop
Up Your Alley
No Blade of Grass

Didn't expect to like, but ended up enjoying:
Stunt Rock
The Arena
Rats: Night of Terror
C.C. and Company
Death Riders
She
Van Nuys Blvd.
Antropophagus

Disappointments:
Fade to Black
Autopsy
Executioner II: Karate Inferno
Chesty Anderson, U.S. Navy

Zzzzz:
Die Sister Die
Fiend
Burnout
Future-Kill
Kidnap

"WTF did I just watch?"
Fluctuations (As I said before, Thundercrack made perfect sense compared to this)

Thanks again,C-God, for giving birth to this wonderful project.

Ash Ketchum

When I started out on this challenge, my plan was to catch up on tons of Shaw Bros. movies and Sonny Chiba box sets and various Japanese exploitation films in my collection (the Rica trilogy, the Female Prisoner Scorpion films, the Yakuza Papers, etc.). I had enough of those on DVD to keep me busy. But then I started going through my lists of stuff I taped on VHS off TV over the decades and then I opened the closet where the boxes of old VHS tapes are stored and I realized I had tons of stuff in there I’d never watched. I thought it would be useful to just plow through all this stuff since so much of it qualified.

So, in addition to the samurai and kung fu and ninja films, and in addition to the Italian westerns and sword ‘n’ sandal, I decided to plunge into the world of the Hollywood B-movie from the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s. And that’s where the real surprises were.

LADY FROM CHUNGKING (1942) – on the Mill Creek Combat Classics set. A World War II movie from the Chinese point-of-view. Anna May Wong plays a Chinese patriot working undercover as a farmer in a town occupied by the Japanese. She was the only Asian female movie star in Hollywood in the 1930s and ‘40s and this film gave her the opportunity to play a character more like herself than the exotic “China Dolls” she played in bigger-budget films. I must say that the Mill Creek Combat Classics set with 50 films is full of great surprises. I watched nine films from it for this and could have just plunged into it even more. None were losers.

I watched Lawrence Tierney in four of his starring roles in B-noirs from the 1940s. You may know him from RESERVOIR DOGS and “Seinfeld,” but he was one of the toughest tough guys in the 1940s. DILLINGER (1945) is his most famous film from that era, but I liked the other three I watched better—SAN QUENTIN (1946), THE DEVIL THUMBS A RIDE (1947) and BODYGUARD (1948). All are short, snappy, fast, and filled with great dialogue. BODYGUARD was filmed on location all over Los Angeles. SAN QUENTIN is about a prison break and Tierney plays an ex-con pursuing the escapee all over California. In DEVIL, Tierney plays a crafty criminal manipulating a carload of people as he tries to elude a police dragnet. The great thing about these films is that, unlike crime films today, nothing stupid happens in them. They’re all pretty plausible.

I watched five films in which characters commune closely with animals. In four of them, the lead actor interacts with animals in the frame in real time. I wasn’t aware of this common aspect of these films in advance. It was just happenstance. The films are: ZOO IN BUDAPEST (1933), THE ENCHANTED FOREST (1945), JUNGLE JIM (1948), SONG OF INDIA (1949) and, completely out of left field, a Hong Kong film called THE MIGHTY PEKING MAN (1977). In three of the films, the characters interact with tigers. None of these were special effects shots. I was very impressed. SONG OF INDIA is worth noting because it was a Hollywood film in which every character was Indian, although most of the cast was white. The lead actor, Sabu, was Hollywood’s only Indian movie star.

UFO (1956) was a semi-documentary about flying saucers. What it did was use actors to reenact an actual investigation into UFOs by a civilian hired by the Air Force. There’s one scene in an air control tower where all we see are the radar blips and the faces of the men in the room and all we hear are the reports over the radio from air force pilots pursuing the UFOs. It’s very suspenseful. It’s not sensational or speculative at all, it just lays out its case, interview by interview, reenactment by reenactment, for further investigation into the phenomenon.

CRASHOUT (1955) – superb crime drama with a tough guy cast about a breakout of six cons from a maximum security prison. It follows them as they try to get food, clothes, and transportation on their journey to the spot where one of them has loot from a bank robbery hidden. All in the midst of a police dragnet. These are not nice guys. They do bad things. It’s all pretty realistic. No softening. No whitewashing. It’s brutal at times.

Additional titles I consider among the best of the ones I’ve seen:
THE LAW WEST OF TOMBSTONE (1938)
THE RENEGADE RANGER (1938)
FRONTIER MARSHAL (1939)
THE NAVY WAY (1944)
SWAMP FIRE (1946)
FLIGHT TO MARS (1951)
THE MONSTER THAT CHALLENGED THE WORLD (1957)
X-THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES (1963)
…in addition, that is, to the Zatoichi, Sonny Chiba and Lone Wolf and Cub and Shaw Bros. productions I watched.

There were several movies I’d seen in childhood that I revisited for this challenge, often for the first time since:
QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE
GOLIATH AND THE BARBARIANS
GLADIATORS SEVEN
X-THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES (1963)
THE YOUNG RACERS

Everything I watched came from my collection or a film library at my office that I have access to (all on Beta SP). With one exception: I watched JONAH HEX on HBO.

The number of first-time viewings out of the 87: 54

Number I watched on DVD: 35
Number I watched on VHS: 43
Other formats: 9

Number in black-and-white: 40
Number in Cinecolor: 5
Number in other color processes: 42

Anyway, thanks to CaligulatheGod for moderating this. And thanks to everyone for participating. I had a great time.

shadokitty

Finished my challenge off with a good Ernest Borgnine movie, Emperor of the North, in which Ernest was a sadistic railroad conductor, and Lee Marvin was the hobo who wanted to ride his train.

number2

Stats:

Here's the final numbers -
As of the morning of May 1 (based on what people have posted)
There were 46 people in the challenge.
A total of 2146 movies have been watched
for an average of 46.65 per person
or 69.22 movies by the group watched every day
or 1.50 movies watched per person per day.

6 people (13.0%) crossed the 100 movie mark (3 of them over 120!)
Congrats to Chad (104), Shack (105), Dimension X (105), JHCA13 (122), Mondo Kane (125), and number2 (135)

8 people (17.4%) were at 75 or over - KaBluie (83), Ash Ketchum (87)

18 people (39.1%) were at 50 or over

Assigning a arbitrary average of 80 minutes per movie, if you watched every movie from everybody's list, back-to-back, without stopping and started on January 1st, you would finish approximately 119 days later on April 29th.

Did anybody else finish the checklist?

number2

My personal rundown -

135 movies watched
118 new (87.4%), 17 previously seen (12.6%)

By decade (excluding trailer compilations) –
1930s – 2 (1.5%)
1940s – 1 (.75%)
1950s – 14 (10.6%)
1960s – 15 (11.4%)
1970s – 29 (22%)
1980s – 34 (26.8%)
1990s – 12 (9.1%)
2000s+ - 25 (18.9%)

Average year (mean) – 1981
Average year (median) - 1981
Most watched years - 1972 & 1981 (7 movies each)

Oldest movie watched – The Ghost Walks (1934)
Newest movie watched – Hobo With a Shotgun (2011)


By format –
DVD – 36 (26.7%)
NetFlix Instant – 82 (60.7%)
Online* – 15 (11.1%)
TV – 1 (.74%)
VHS – 1 (.74%)

*Online defined as downloads, YouTube or other streaming video

Worst movie – Double Agent 73
Runners-up – Corrupt, April Fools, Thankskilling, Evil Weed

Best movie – none, really

Most Fun Movies – Them!, The Batwoman, The Astro Zombies, Little Cigars, Bruce Lee in New Guinea, Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter, OSS 117:Cairo Nest of Spies, Dhoom 2, Hobo With A Shotgun

WTF Movies – Angel Angel Down We Go, Cannibal Holocaust, Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam (Turkish Star Wars)

The Man with the Golden Doujinshi

I hit 75, which is a nice number.

I'd like to spend the next few days trying to see how much of the checklist I accomplished.

Dimension X

I finished with 105 movies. One more than last year (thanks to the midnight to dawn overtime). I'm going to try to finish writing something about each film tonight or tomorrow, and then go back and read all the lists that I'd just scanned through now and then during the month.

Fluctuations has to be the biggest WTF? flick I've ever seen. It's been five or six years since I watched those two films, but as I recall, Thundercrack at least had some story elements. Fluctuations is just random weirdness.

DVDTalker12324

i had a blast though only 20 films. still feel pretty good about that though since its a big increase over last years 6 and i have a 4 month old. can't wait till next year already. i love genre movies and this always gets me excited for watching westerns, film noir, kung fu flicks among others.

of the few i watched the standouts where:
Django
Fist of Fury
The Mack
Master of The Flying Guillotine


thanks CtG for putting this together, i'm already creating a list of must watch films for next years challenge.

BobO'Link

I managed to squeeze in a couple more peplum films for a grand total of 17 this challenge. Far short of the 50-75 I wanted but still fun on those days I could make time to watch a film.

Now on to the Make-Your-Own-Challenge: "Movie Serials Challenge".

asianxcore

Congrats to everyone to participated in the Challenge. Good times!

I tried to shoot for 100 originally but thought 50 was more of a realistic goal

Chad

Shipped too late. Oh well, there's always next year. Between that and the Mill Creek sets purchased specifically for this challenge, I'll conceivably have enough content for the next five.

Hit triple digits on 4/29 as expected(!) with Junkie Nurse (Boppin' at the Glue Factory) and then went on to do a double double-feature ('90s Gamara and Sonny Chiba two-fer) yesterday to reach a final tally of 104. This was a blast! Easily one of, if not the most fun I've had with any challenge to date.

I still plan on updating my list with a few more mini-reviews on select films and some awards over the next couple of days.

The Man with the Golden Doujinshi

How well would film noir work with this challenge? Also, what about non-spaghetti westerns? I remember there was earlier conversations about it but I'm not sure what I should be looking for, in general.

I'm trying to come up with ideas for next year.

DVDTalker12324

i found the Budd Boetticher collection last year and its full of great B-movie non spaghetti westerns.

The Tall T
Decision At Sundown
Buchanan Rides Alone
Ride Lonesome
Comanche Station

BB basically made 7 cheap B westerns with actor Randolph Scott that at the time went mostly unnoticed but are considered classic westerns now with Seven Men From Now being his most famous (which is not in the box set). the five films in the set are basically lone man stories of vengeance.

Shack

There's a lot of B-Movie Noir, both on Netflix and at the Internet Archive. I watched quite a bit of noir, probably at least a quarter of my list, and there were some really good cheapies in there.

The Man with the Golden Doujinshi

I'm mainly wondering if I'd be safe working on this list for next year. http://www.icheckmovies.com/list/250...al+noir+films/

asianxcore

**Awards**

Best 1st Time Viewing: Sugar Hill (1974) & Bitch Slap (2009)
Best Repeat Viewing: Death Proof (2007) & Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry (1974)
Best Overall Gore: Aftermath (1994)
Biggest Disappointment: American Ninja 3: Blood Hunt (1989)
Best "Classic" Bad-Asses: Bruce Lee (Game Of Death) & Sho Kosugi (Nine Deaths Of The Ninja)
Best "Modern" Bad-Asses: Danny Trejo (Machete) & Rain (Ninja Assassin)
Best "Classic" B-Vixens: Chantal Contouri (Thirst) & Dawn Dunlap (Forbidden World)
Best "Modern" B-Vixens: Julia Voth (Bitch Slap) & Michelle Rodriguez (Machete)
Best "Random" Vixen: Shelley St. Clair (Black Samson)
Best "WTF" Moment: The Vomit Gore Trilogy (2006-2010)
Sleaziest Director: Daisuke Yamanouchi
Funniest Film Moment: Random boob slip (Forbidden World)
Most Annoying Audio: Snuff 102 (2007)
Coolest Camera Shot: Eihi Shiina; Blood Shower/Umbrella (Tokyo Gore Police)
Worst Film: Girl Hell 1999 (1999)

ororama

Most of the movies on this list are B-movies, but there are also quite a few A-movies. This challenge has frequently encouraged the perception that B-movie means that a movie is bad. A and B just indicate the relative budgets of the movies. B-movies tend to have less-well known actors and directors, but that's not so easy for most of us to judge now, since the reputations of many artists of the Hollywood studio system have faded, and it would take some research to figure out what the budget of a movie was relative to other movies of its time, or whether a particular star was at peak, rising or falling at the time of a particular movie.

The rules of this challenge focus too much on safe lists, which have the capacity to make the term B-movie (or drive-in movie or exploitation movie) meaningless (although it is understandable that no one wants to rule on every movie that someone might want to watch during this challenge). If, for example, The Maltese Falcon, Key Largo, Notorious and Cape Fear are B-movies, I don't know what a B-movie is. On the other hand, D.O.A. and He Walked By Night are still B-movies, although they are critically well-regarded, and have a lot more fans than many dull A-movies of their time.

If you stay away from Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Humphrey Bogart, Joan Crawford, John Garfield and Kirk Douglas, you'll avoid a lot of the obvious A-movies from the list, and have plenty of entertaining B-movies to choose from. And why not watch as many of the A-movies from the list as you can before the next challenge? I've only checked 84 from the list myself, although there are about a half dozen others that I probably saw long ago, but I'm not 100% sure of.

Shack

I did a bit of reading about the noirs I watched because I wanted to concentrate on first-time views, and in fact I watched a few things that I didn't list because they were in the end too close to A-list. Yes it's mostly about budget but also run time can be a clue, as by definition the movies on the B-side of a double bill would be shorter.

And I agree that B doesn't have to mean bad. I enjoyed a lot of the films on my list, probably more than the big-budget hits I saw on other lists. For instance, I always was a Sam Fuller fan but am now ready to search out everything he made.

SterlingBen

Wrap-up post and list finalization hopefully comming Friday if/when I get my computer back/have to buy a new one.

jmsmath

I would just like to echo the previous sentiments on here and thank Caligula for hosting this. I only got through 45, but had a blast and am already looking forward to next year. My Girls, Guns and G-Strings Andy Sidaris collection should be arriving today, so I already know where I'm starting!

Ash Ketchum

There are quite a number of worthy B-noirs on that list. I can sift through them and identify some of them a little later today. Not everything on that list can be considered noir.

Just off the top of my head, I'd like to recommend early Anthony Mann--don't know if these are on the list or not:
DR. BROADWAY
TWO O'CLOCK COURAGE
DESPERATE
RAILROADED
RAW DEAL
T-MEN
HE WALKED BY NIGHT (credited to Alfred Werker)
SIDE STREET

I watched the following Lawrence Tierney B-noirs for this challenge:
DILLINGER (Monogram)
and three from RKO:
SAN QUENTIN
THE DEVIL THUMBS A RIDE
BODYGUARD.

Add: BORN TO KILL and THE HOODLUM.

Early Richard Fleischer would work too:
BODYGUARD (listed above)
THE CLAY PIGEON
FOLLOW ME QUIETLY
TRAPPED
ARMORED CAR ROBBERY
THE NARROW MARGIN
..then he went all big-budget on us.

Throw in some Cornell Woolrich (aka William Irish) adaptations:
STREET OF CHANCE
BLACK ANGEL
PHANTOM LADY
DEADLINE AT DAWN
FEAR IN THE NIGHT
NIGHT HAS A THOUSAND EYES
THE CHASE
THE WINDOW
Val Lewton's THE LEOPARD MAN
plus...a few even more obscure ones I've never seen.

Woolrich was to noir what Lovecraft was to horror.

These should keep you busy.

takingchase

I'll chime in too and thank Caligula. The safe lists are absolutely awesome and definitely help set this challenge apart from others on here so thanks for putting them together.

omike

I have to add my many thanks to caligulathegod for running this challenge and doing an excellent job of it.

I had a really good last week so I manged beat my goal and watch a total of 80 movies. I ended up with an MSTK3 episode featuring Attack of the Giant Leeches. I also manged to complete the checklist. I still have to add my comments to the last movies and finalize the checklist but that should be done in a day or two. I'll also post some best and worst then.

I had a blast watching all these movies and reading all your comments. Thanks to all who participated.

Chet Desmond

It was a blast. Thanks and great job caligula!

Shack

Yes, thanks to caligula for running a great challenge. It was great to see so much friendly discussion about the movies and our lists. As always with these challenges, I regret I don't have the time (or often creativity) to write great reviews and descriptions as some people do. I do know that my Netflix queues are packed for the next few months at least!