Movies so bad that they're fun

It’s really a rather minor distant borrowing. Here’s the sequence as planned.

Directing Peter Pan in China. I tried to work in physical bits both to give a break from speaking English to the children and to give the audience something they could easily follow.

Towards the end, a party is being held for Wendy and her brothers in the Lost Boys’ hangout before they fly home. We can see inside the hangout (due to the missing fourth wall) and see a good stretch of open ground outside the hangout running along the stage until the wings/edge of the stage/woods. (All the Darling siblings have changed back into their nightclothes in preparation for the return home.)

As the party winds down, one of the Lost Boys leaves. He opens the door that leads to the open ground, walks out a good distance, then realizes he has forgotten to close the door. He turns back, and a pirate jumps out of the wings and drags him offstage. Despite the open door, no one inside the hangout notices. (After the first abduction, everyone simply accepts the open door as the way things are.)

The next Lost Boy leaves. At about the same location as before, he turns to wave goodbye, and a pirate leaps out and drags him offstage. Again no one notices.

Two Lost Boys leave, only to be met by two pirates. And this continues, with whatever variations and repetitions will keep it interesting and amusing until only Wendy and Peter are left.

Wendy says goodbye to Peter, but he says little or nothing acting indifferent and turning away. Hurt, Wendy leaves slowly seeming on the verge of tears. She gets halfway across the stage.

The open door to the hangout is set-up so that the hinges are upstage, away from the audience, so that the audience sees the interior of the door. The door slams shut. Captain Hook has been standing behind the door!

Inside, Peter, thinking Wendy has slammed the door, turns to look at the closed door briefly, then turns away again sullenly. Wendy hears the slam, but thinks it is Peter, as Hook slowly creeps up on her.

Peter has rejected her! Sorrow. But no, she can hear his soft footfall behind her. He has come to say goodbye after all? She turns, sees Hook and tries to flee, but trips on the hem of her nightgown, falling on to her back. She is about to scream when Hook leans/looms over her, puts his hook to his mouth and simply says “Shhhhhhhh……”

Lights out.

Here’s the Bava bit at a minute two seconds:

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The vaguely Fascist-leaning uniforms and what Barry Sulivan said at 1:08. Bad vibes.

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As I recall, by this point in the narrative it was reasonable to assume the planet’s inhabitants were all enemies.

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I was honestly hoping the following text was Peter Pan as told through the lens of Chinese Wuxia, which honestly i now 1000% need in my life.

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BOTW….
If you know you know. :blush:

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I just watched that movie tonight! Not for the first time, but it had been a couple years and I forgot how it went. I think it genuinely succeeds at being fairly creepy and unsettling in a few parts, while also being cheesy, very 50’s-style sci-fi… like Alien and Plan 9 from Outer Space mixed together. Maybe a little old school horror in there too, with all that spooky fog rolling around and the walking dead toppling their spaceship-part headstones… even though it has no actual vampires, it captures a little bit of the mood of a vampire movie. I can see why I didn’t quite remember how it went… the “EARTH IS NEXT OMG!” ending is straight out of a less-than-stellar episode of The Twilight Zone and definitely falls on the Plan 9 side of things. Still, it’s really interesting to see a sort of “missing link” film like this, where it’s obviously in the process of transitioning between hilariously dated tropes and techniques that we’d still consider relatively modern and effective today.

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Re-saw the original Children of the Corn last night. I had forgotten how, about a half to two thirds of the way through the picture, Linda Hamilton decides she just doesn’t want to act anymore. She puts in the bare minimum of effort so it doesn’t seem like obviously bad acting, but no more than that. She wakes up after a mob of armed children have knocked her out and tied her to a cross. Her response: annoyance. I’m not even certain if that annoyance was acting.

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