#110 - Spooks Run Wild

Take everything that was bad about King of the Zombies, amplify them, and then add even more things that are unbelievably difficult to sit through, and you have Spooks Run Wild. Seriously, this movie wasn't even good in a nostalgic sort of way. It wasn't even good in an "it's so bad it's good" sort of way. The fact that it's a Bela Lugosi movie other than Dracula, which is the only movie of his I have seen, doesn't even keep this one from drowning into the depths of despair. The thing was only an hour, and it was too hard to sit through. In fact, the disc was damaged, and I couldn't even see the last chapter of the movie. Normally, whenever that has been the case, I have them resend the movie and I don't write anything about it until I have watched it all. With this one, I refuse. I won't do it. You can leave your comments that tell me how that breaks my rules about seeing a whole movie from beginning to end, but I don't care. I'm never intentionally letting this movie into my place of residence again. And just for the record, it is the second movie on the Ghostly Grins DVD. For those with short memories, I won't be watching the last movie on the disc because it is a sequel, but I am getting that movie and it's predeccesor whenever blockbuster.com decides to send it to me.

You wanna know what really sucked about the movie? It's called The East Side Kids. Six kids, who are apparently hooligans, as well as from being from some sort of an east side, are the main characters of the move. It seems that they are also intended to be the humor of this movie. The problem with all of this is that at best, they only occasionally display some sort of humor-like substance. The rest of the time is spent with humorless tedium. They try too damn hard to sound like the humor of the day. I say, leave it to the proffessionals. It's why they are legends, and you ended up sweeping floors in some warehouse in a forgotten back lot for a shut down studio. I'm not a fan. Can you tell?

You wanna know what REALLY sucked about the movie? The picture quality. If I wanted to watch a worn out VHS tape, I would have checked out one of my own. If I wanted to watch a worn out VHS tape via digital technology, I would have transfered one of my own to DVD. Is it too much to ask that if you take the time and effort to put a movie on a DVD, you actually take the time and effort to make the damn thing viewable. It looked and sounded like a poorly transfered videotape. The contrast was so bad, that some dark scenes were IMPOSSIBLE to see. And it's a monster movie, so there are a shitload of dark scenes. And I know that some older movies have the occasional case of choppy editing. I have learned to accept it since it's usually quite rare or infrequent, except for this one. Some scenes have three or four "jumps" all on one camera angle. Ridiculous.

How is it that people can cram so much bad into one hour? I know they do it on TV all the time, but movies are a different beast. They serve a completely different purpose. These days, they'll a least stretch out the crap they put onto the big screen to at least an hour and a half. You would think that with only one hour to work with, you would try to use your time wisely, but they don't. They wasted every single second. If I could see the movie better, or at least the whole thing, I don't think it would make on bit of difference. This movie was dreadful.