I almost always have to do a little fudging on X because there are so few things that really go with X. But in this case I'm going to use it to cover some of those supernatural movies that are like stuff that would have been on the X-Files--if it were a really, really bad show.
Manos the Hands of Fate: A "classic" of MST3K and later on Rifftrax. It was written, directed by, and starred a fertilizer salesman--and it shows! A bumbling family gets lost in the desert and wind up at the house of "the Master" which is caretaken by a weird guy named Torgo who can barely walk. A good portion of the movie is just him shambling around with the family's luggage. Soon the Master and his cult of "wives" awaken and, well, badly shot, incoherent mayhem ensues! This is really one where you should watch it just to see how terrible it really is because there are no words that can really capture it. The fertilizer salesman guy really gave Ed Wood a run for his money.
The Curse of Bigfoot: A really, really cheaply made movie with cheesy papier mache masks and camera work that looks like the Zapruder film. There are movies within movies as a guy bores a high school class with his tale of a bunch of idiots who stumble across a guy in a bad costume, er, Bigfoot. One of my favorite riffs is when Bill Corbett screams, "Who directed this, the stool sample of a Golden retriever?!" A golden retriever's stool probably could have done a better job.
Eegah: This is one of those "classics" that is consistently ranked with Plan 9 from Outer Space as one of the worst movies ever. It's not as poorly made as an Ed Wood film, but it's still not very good. Basically a teenager who looks like a young Donald Trump and his girlfriend encounter a giant caveman called Eegah who's played by Richard Kiel, whom you might remember as Jaws in a couple of Roger Moore 007 movies. Eegah takes the girlfriend and her father captive and only by distracting him is she able to keep him from raping her, which is kinda creepy. She and her father are rescued but Eegah tracks them to a pool party, where he's killed. Hooray! There's plenty of bad acting and poor plot logic in this "classic" MST3K episode. (Fun Fact: Science has shown that cavemen were generally smaller than today's humans, not bigger.)
Boggy Creek II: The Legend Continues: This was a late 90s MST3K episode but I'm pretty sure they never showed the first one. Whatever that might be. Anyway, in this early 80s movie a guy who looks sort of like modern Michael Douglas and three dimwit college students attempt to find a Bigfoot-type creature. They eventually track down some redneck who's captured a baby creature and the mother creature is trying to get it back so they help to rescue it. The creatures are clearly guys in cheap suits and the acting is not great. It is better than Curse of Bigfoot, which isn't saying much. In the intermission skits the evil Pearl Forrester tries to create her own Boggy Creek monster to lure in tourists, complete with a twangy guitar ballad by "Brain Guy." The "monster" is just her sentient ape henchman Professor Bobo and when a tourist realizes this he is nonplussed. What's the big deal about a talking gorilla? Yeah, really.
The Final Sacrifice: A classic MST3K episode from the late 90s for one reason: Zap Rowsdower! Seriously, that's the name of a guy in this late 80s Canadian "horror" movie. And no he's not a superhero, though he's kind of like Logan in the first X-Men movie--only without the claws, adamantium skeleton, and healing factor. And like Logan, Rowsdower meets a kid and tries to help, only this kid looks like a cut-rate Wesley Crusher. He's looking for some ancient city his father was killed trying to find by a cult of guys in black or red executioner masks who have black widow-looking symbols on their arms. They're led by a dude in a black trench coat who has an inexplicably deep voice. And so mayhem ensues as Rowsdower and the kid try to find the city with the help of a grizzled prospector who sounds like the guy in the Muppets band with the gold tooth. As you'd expect from a movie made in southern Alberta in the late 80s, it's pretty cheap-looking and you're not dealing with A-list actors. In the intermission skits Mike and the bots create their own anti-Canada song and later fight a nasty case of hockey hair.
The Bermuda Triangle: This is an Italian-made 70s movie about a boat full of idiots who get caught up in the Bermuda Triangle. A little girl dubbed by a middle-aged woman finds a creepy old doll that seems to be at the heart of the disaster. One-by-one people keep dying, but then at the end it turns out they had all disappeared years ago so the boat just vanishes. Great ending! Besides lame dubbing, acting, and effects, it also features lengthy underwater scenes where they scuba around and kill sharks who aren't bothering them in the slightest. A preemptive strike, I guess.
Frankenstein Island: This early 80s movie is pretty bizarre. Four guys crash their balloons on an island populated by women in leopard bikinis, 300-year-old van Helsing, his wife, the brain of Dr. Frankenstein (who appears in ghostly projections of John Carradine), and eventually a crappy-looking Frankenstein monster himself. There's bad acting, cheesy effects, a complete lack of plot logic, and Cameron Mitchell, whom you might remember from Deadly Prey, Supersonic Man, and Space Mutiny. Or probably not.
Soultaker: This 1990 movie was written by its female star as a vehicle to showcase her talents--such as they are. It's sort of a precursor to the Final Destination movies as the girl and her friends die in a car crash. They're pursued by a "Soultaker" played by Martin Sheen's brother Joe Estevez. Before he died he was a Confederate officer who had a thing with a girl who looks like this girl so he wants to take her to Purgatory or whatever with him instead of taking her soul, but the girl's boyfriend tries to stop him. The third act implodes as it doesn't seem to have any consistent rules about how the whole soultaking thing works. This was an MST3K episode in the last season and was notable because there was a cameo by Joel Hodgson (as Joel, who does some repairs on the ship but doesn't help them escape) and TV's Frank who's become a soultaker. Unfortunately you can only get this episode used on DVD because of rights issues. Another Fun Fact is this movie was made in Mobile, Alabama at the same time as two other movies in this Challenge: Firehead and Future Zone.
Werewolf: This movie also includes Joe Estevez, though only in about the first third of the film. This mostly features Eastern European actors who dig up the corpse of a werewolf. First one of the diggers is cut and becomes a werewolf who's killed pretty quick. Then an evil archaeologist infects a security guard with crushed werewolf bone and the guy dies while changing into a werewolf while driving. Then the evil guy hits a writer named Paul with a werewolf bone and he becomes a crappy werewolf who kills some people, including the evil guy, and then infects his girlfriend because like Twilight that's what she wanted. Hooray? The werewolf makeup is pretty bad, the accents are inconsistent, and the bad guy's hair keeps changing styles and color from one scene to the next. Between this, Soultaker, and Rollergator you really have to think Joe Estevez doesn't have the best knack for picking scripts. The intermission sketches on this MST3K episode feature Mike and bots pretending to be a Grease-type girl group singing about a werewolf boyfriend and Crow infecting Mike, turning him into a were-Crow or basically another Crow T Robot.
Subspecies IV: The Awakening: Maybe it'd help to watch the three previous cheaply-made shot-in-Eastern-Europe movies. Probably not. Basically there's a woman who was turned into a vampire in previous movies and some friends tried to rescue her, but the movie pulls an Alien 3 and kills all of the friends at the beginning--before they could have any lines. The vampire is taken by a female doctor to an old hospital, where a white, cut-rate Javier Bardem doctor wants her for experiments or junk. But her ugly master with strangely large hands wants her back, but until someone invites him in, he can't go. And then a lot of mayhem happens and in the end an old woman who's the caretaker for a cemetery saves the vampire and the female doctor from the vampires by opening a door. And, um, the end? This movie is from 1997, but doesn't look too much older than that at least. Otherwise a lot of hammy acting and overall cheesiness. Mmmm, ham and cheese. A Fun Fact is that the director, Tim Nicoteau, worked on a lot of other movies on this list like Oblivion, Tourist Trap, and more, sometimes as a director, but more often as an editor.
Carnival of Souls: Much of this movie is pretty dull and in one post I already talked about how a big surprise was given away by bad camera work. But really the story itself is pretty good, like The Sixth Sense or a Twilight Zone episode, where a woman seemingly survives a car accident but later is haunted by white-faced ghouls when she goes to Utah for an organist job. She's especially drawn to a rundown carnival near the Great Salt Lake. It just needed a little more drama and some better cinematography to be a decent movie.
The Power: This Rifftrax is an early 80s "horror" movie that literally makes no sense. So there's a college professor lecturing on ancient Aztec deities and has a little idol that allows him to give a smart ass student a nosebleed. Then the tiny idol kills him. Then for some reason the professor's tubby friend goes to Mexico where some old guy and a kid have the idol. Or is it a different idol? The fat guy tries to steal it but it mutilates him. Then somehow some teenage boy in suburbia has the idol. He gives it to a reporter who looks like early 80s Paulie Shore. The idol possesses Paulie Shore-looking guy who kills some people before a girl friend of the teenage boy kills him. And then she has the idol, which she uses to to kill the fat guy when he tracks her down. There's no logic to how the idol gets from place to place, so I really have no idea what's going on.
Giant From the Unknown: This was an old 50s B movie on Rifftrax last year. The "giant" is not really a giant so much as possibly slightly above average height, though it's hard to tell from the camera work. And he's hardly from the unknown; two professors and one professor's daughter look for him, already knowing he was a Spanish conquistador from the 16th Century or so. The pseudoscience is that he was embedded in some rock that somehow preserved him until a lightning strike revives him and he goes on a rather dull rampage. Being from the 50s you have casual chauvinism and racism in the form of "Indian Joe" who's obviously a white guy; fortunately it's in black-and-white so you can't really see how bad the makeup is. And as the riffers point out at the end, the plot makes no sense because at the beginning the townspeople talk about something killing cows and some guy...and yet the "giant" isn't revived until the middle of the film. So who killed the cows and that guy? They want you to think it's the giant but it couldn't have been. And yet they never say who it is. The killer is [puts on sunglasses David Caruso style] Unknown. Yeeeaaaaah!
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