It’s the summer! It sucks. Stay inside and watch stuff. Here’s some ideas.
Max has Leviathan (1989) if you’re in need of a boring underwater Alien (1979) rip-off to watch at 5am when your cat is too busy being a dick to let you sleep another hour. This works for that. It was nice. I had the lil guy on my lap and nearly fell asleep again.
A bunch of disgusting men and scant few women are doing some deep sea mining for a sketchy businesswoman. They find a wrecked Russian ship down there and their resident sex pest decides to investigate. He brings back some vodka and they drink it and finally, at least 30-40 minutes into the movie, things start to happen! I love when that happens. The rest of the movie is pretty gooey and relatively good and dumb. It has one of the “greatest” Go Fuck Yourselves endings in any movie I’ve ever seen. I simply must respect that.
Mario Van Peebles is my kind of peebles. He made bad movies, but he tried! Bless him. In Full Eclipse (1999, on YouTube), perhaps his finest work outside of New Jack City (1991), he rather brilliantly plays a cop guy with a disgruntled, very dumb partner. His partner dies, presumably, ignominiously, in a ventilation duct. His partner is then resurrected and recruited by a mysterious group with a fun werewolf serum. His partner then kills himself with a silver bullet because he thinks life as a werewolf mercenary sucks big style. Learning nothing, Mario is seduced by a sexy lady werewolf and recruited into what this black ops werewolf crew with silly, matching X-Men outfits. They go on missions and clean up the streets. It's an Uzi-riffic '90s time. It's very dumb. Do you want to see some softcore weird werewolf sex? Yeah, you do. Of course you do.
Alligator (1980) is on Tubi, where it belongs. I mean this as a compliment. A cute baby alligator named Ramon is scornfully flushed down the toilet by a little girl’s father. Rejected by humanity, Ramon grows up in the city’s sewers, feasting on the discarded bodies of hormone-pumped lab animals from a shady corporation, his metabolism, and anger, rising rapidly. Now Ramon’s time has come. He will have his revenge… on us! This Jawsploitation classic was written by John Sayles, and stars Robert Forster in a role positively driven by male pattern baldness. I know the little feller ate a bunch of people, but I loved that guy. He was misunderstood.
Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan (1972) is on Archive.org (and apparently very little else) and I think I’m in love with this film. Horny Madam Chun Yi is a vicious pimp lady, busy kidnapping poor women and then selling them off to creeps across the land and running the Four Seasons Brothel. One of these women, Ainu, at first resists but is eventually forced to capitulate. Going undercover for 10 years as a compliant courtesan, Ainu slowly seduces her Madam, while at the same time working behind-the-scenes to kill off all those who wronged her. Intimate Confessions is one of the rare, true hybrids of action and romance/eroticism, combining beautiful cinematography and costuming with righteous dismemberment and bloodshed combined with nudity and feelings, and fun! It has without question the best lesbian lust rack focuses in all of cinema. This is girl power. This is the best movie ever made, maybe. I think so, anyway.
I.S.S. (2023) S.U.C.K.S. (2024). You can find a copy at Bloomington’s Vulture Video. But don’t! Get something else. Otherwise, you better like watching annoying people and lil wiener boys argue and stare angrily at each other in space. You get the added bonus of a camera rotating sickeningly, realistically, ceaselessly, in case you want to test if your motion sickness firmware is up-to-date. Mine was! I.S.S. is another perfect example of something I struggle with, that being my overwhelming and somewhat selfish desire to find hidden gems, drawing me to crap like this to wonder “Why is nobody talking about this?” and then I watch it and I find out why nobody is talking about this. Because it’s awful!