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