Worst for me I think is Combat Shock, from Troma. Terrible dialogue and acting? You know it. Vietnam flashback scenes shot in the Staten Island swamps with virtually no props, not even a rifle? Check. Papier-mache mutated baby puppet? Check. Absolutely interminable ten minute scene of two junkies arguing under a bridge? Check.
Troma films do not compare to the anti-saga of
The Creeping Terror.
The acting was subpar, even compared to its B-movie sci-fi/horror competitors. Props were sparse. But there’s more.
The footage of the alien craft landing was actually film of an American rocket launch run in reverse. You can tell because you can see the flames of the thruster disappearing into the base of the rocket’s cylindrical body… with “USA” clearly visible in the side…the flipped “S” being a dead giveaway.
The monster itself strongly resembled a bunch of guys under a big oriental rug. It moved more slowly than my mother using her rollator. It ate people via an opening near the base of its front. Many of its victims had to assist the monster to ingest them.
It’s victims also were very clumsy and had a tendency to ignore OBVIOUS alternative routes of escape.
If that were the extent of its badness, I might accept other challengers to its crown of awfulness.
But there’s more.
It was so patently bad that the film was shelved after studio execs saw the final cut. But a few years later, another executive overruled that decision, and ordered it released so the studio could at least recoup some of the money they spent on it.
However, it had been poorly stored, and its condition had degraded. Certain sections of the audio were either garbled or inaudible. So the studio decided to use narrator overdubs.
Problem was, they no longer had the script to work from. So they simply made up stuff that could conceivably match the action on-screen. The quality of said writing
ex nihilo was on par with the narration found in “hygiene”/sex-ed films of the era, both in delivery and content.
Seriously. At one point, one character is sitting alone on a couch opining about the change in his relationship with his newly married buddy after the newlyweds wandered off screen for a moment.
Final cherry on top? The alien ship taking off from earth was the same cell-flipped footage as the opening, run in the correct chronological sequence.
THAT is what they released to the theaters.
But Lovecraft got it wrong. Humans are very good at dealing with the knowledge that the universe is much bigger and stranger than they can imagine, and that their place in it is insignificant. They don’t go mad, they just compartmentalise the knowledge and get on with their lives.
Welllllll…SOME people do. Others, not so much.
