Friday, October 4, 2013

147 - Chillerama

    An anthology of four stories.  A giant sperm terrorizes New York.  A teen gets bitten by a were bear.  Hitler creates a Frankenstein's monster, framed against the last night that a drive-in theater is open.
    As I was watching this, I kept on feeling amazed that I hadn't abandoned it.  I've tried to clean up the description a little bit, but this is packed with juvenile sexual humor.  Not that there's anything wrong with that.  If I saw this when I was in high school, I would think it was fantastic.  Somehow, I'm comfortable enough with sexual material that I didn't react correctly to this.  A lot of material just was ignored.
    There's an effort to be taboo, or at least in bad taste.  The story with Hitler is titled The Diary of Anne Frankenstein, and involves Hitler killing Anne Frank and stealing the secrets of creating life.  He assembles a monster from Jewish parts.  There's an abandoned segment, which is clearly intended as a joke, titled Deathification, which involves dramatic footage of people spraying crap - or using crap - in a variety of ways.
    The one segment that I seriously didn't care for was the second one, the Werebear story.  I liked that it made an effort to have musical elements, and that it was a nice fifties throwback vibe, but I just didn't care for their treatment of gay characters.  Normally I'm not too picky about this.
    Despite the ridiculousness of it, I enjoyed the framing device.  The drive-in had characters that were defined reasonably well, and there was something about the location that played well.  I didn't mind the zombie stuff (even though it involved neon blue stuff, and some of the turned people were just wearing what looked like glitter) but I thought that the sex-crazed angle to the zombies just seemed kind of dumb.
    It sounds as if I really didn't like this movie.  That's not true.  I'd never re-watch it, but I actually felt like I would have liked this, much like Kentucky Fried Movie or The Groove Tube.  As an adult, I still found an occasional laugh, just not as many as were intended.

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