Creepozoids (1987) – I suppose I shouldn’t insult a $75,000 monster movie made for Charles Band’s Empire Films (back when you had to shoot to use most of that money to shoot on film, not digital video), especially when trimming the budget just a little resulted in utter crap that same year like Mutant Hunt or Breeders or Robot Holocaust… But dang. During a vague apocalyptic future war, a band of deserters seek shelter from the seriously acidic acid rain in a facility that turns out of have been a weapons-grade biotech research installation… and stuff happens. It really should have been a simple Alien ripoff, but then there was something added about an infectious virus that mutates its victims, except that storyline is abandoned after twenty minutes… then something about the ant-like man-in-suit creature not actually wanting to harm people, except what it mostly does it spray them with some blank gunk which makes them vomit tar before dying… Expectations of the identities of the “final girl/guy” are defied, but more, I think, in a “the first draft screenplay is what was filmed so we didn’t really think it out” sense than from any real intention of subverting genre tropes. I guess if what you really want from a movie is a shower scene with Linnea Quigley, this fits your bill. Otherwise, meh.
Visitor of a Museum (aka Posetitel muzeya) (1989) – A quick survey of reviews for this Russian film shows they all all make reference to its connection to Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), so I’ll continue the tradition: Yes, this is reminiscent of Stalker, though writer-director Konstantin Lopushanskiy doesn’t attempt the insanely long unbroken shots that only Tarkovsky could pull off. But it’s set in an existential landscape of surreal future blight — in this case, largely in a frickin’ huge garbage dump — as a solitary “tourist” tries to decide whether to go to the “museum,” a relic city under the sea only accessible once a year when the tide takes three days to go out and three days to come in. Meanwhile, although he meets with a handful of “normal” people, most of the population is composed of “degenerates” (according to the subtitles), mutated and deformed people crawling the dump and praying a single prayer to God: “Let me out of here.” (The fact that most of the degenerates are played by actual deformed people — and more than a few of them look like “pinheads” or other mentally deficient people — makes this even more disturbing than Todd Browning’s Freaks (1932).)
Like Stalker, the unreal world is constructed out of very real-world settings: the aforementioned colossal dump, several abandoned Soviet-era factories and other official buildings, and the mud-colored sea churning violently right outside the tourist’s rented room. And like Stalker, you may not be sure what it means, but you know that it means.
The Adventures of the Wilderness Family (1975) – A movie that could only be made in the hippy-dippy ’70s: Because the daughter is systemically allergic to modern life in Los Angeles, a family of four moves to an abandoned cabin in the Rockies so remote that they have to be flown in. (There is a middle ground, guys.) With no survival experience and only as much luggage as could fit in the back of a standard station wagon, they manage to build a new spacious log cabin, wear clear and new-looking clothes all the time, somehow feed themselves without planting a garden or hunting and gathering every day, and make friends with bears, raccoons, etc. And despite the fact that they only take a gun with them when specifically hunting and the fact that they let the children wander off alone MULTIPLE TIMES (because that’s the best way to make friends with cougar cubs and their mother), nobody dies. There were two sequels made; I can only assume that the unofficial subtitle of the third movie in the series was “Inexplicably Not Dead Yet.”