Ooh! Excellent topic, RHS!

My cine-scab is the movie “Steel Magnolias” — the whole danged movie! I HATE it, but can’t not watch it. It’s the epitome of everything I detest, but yet I love the creepy moment when Julia Roberts’ husband comes home to find the baby crying piteously and the spaghetti boiling over and her in a coma on the floor. Yikes! Totally jarring and kind of a truly horrifying scene in this estrogen-fest that overall makes my skin crawl, and yet, there’s something that makes me watch if it’s ever on. I guess I’m fascinated by so much female hysteria onscreen at one time, though I know that so many people LOVE the movie, genuinely.

Your choices are a lot more fun, though! :-)

Hey, Medusa,
I thought I was the only person who cringed throughout Steel Magnolias, especially that tour de force scene of self-indulgent acting by Sally Field at the cemetery. Yes, I know others revere it, I just can’t help feeling uncomfortable watching it.

I feel lots of embarrassment about the movies that I know are dumb, politically incorrect and an insult to the audience’s alleged intelligence, but love anyway, so I guess that’s one reason why contributing to this blog is a good pressure valve for me. ;-)

One example of a movie that has a cringe-worthy effect on me, but that I’ve watched more than once–largely because it is a Humphrey Bogart movie–is Dead Reckoning (1947). In a scene in the car driven by the permanently stone-faced but sort of fascinatingly insolent Lizabeth Scott, the “hero,” Mr. Bogart, goes into the following long, creepy reverie:
“You know, I’ve been thinking: women ought to come capsule-sized, about four inches high. When a man goes out of an evening, he just puts her in his pocket and takes her along with him, and that way he knows exactly where she is. He gets to his favorite restaurant, he puts her on the table and lets her run around among the coffee cups while he swaps a few lies with his pals…”

Very creepy, but, there’s something about it…

My cine scab would be Red Dawn. I have heard that one of the studios is working on a remake-yikes! I know it is about patriotic teens taking on the evil commies who have invaded and taken over the USA, and while I don’t root for the commies in the movie,the scene where patriots in a pow camp attempt to sing the National Anthem, and none of them are on pitch-it’s awful!!

Another one is Gremlins. Stupid plot, and the scene where the Gremlins have truly gone amok-smoking, drinking, shooting guns-I mistakenly let my kids watch it with me a couple of years ago, I had forgotten how dumb it was and my kids quickly pointed out all of the plot holes, and they asked how could the gremlins know how to smoke, drink, shoot guns, get guns, when they had just been created a couple of days earlier!? At our house, if someone sees a new movie we ask, “Was it better than Gremlins?”
My kids still can’t believe it was a popular movie.

Woolverines! I think Red Dawn is great… I particularly like Jennifer Grey’s dying line “I’m killed…” as if she’s read too many Zane Grey westerns. Hey, wait a minute. Jennifer Grey… Zane Grey…

And I think your kids are being too hard on Gremlins. Isn’t their behavior attributable to human behavior, aren’t they just mimicking what they see on TV and in real life?

I was told a story a few years ago by a friend of mine about how destructive his (I guess) college friends were and how they would come over this one guy’s house and totally trash the place, at one point jumping on top of a bed under which were stored several framed paintings, causing the bed to buckle and crash down on top of the paintings, shattering the glass in every frame. The poor guy whose house was so invaded? Chris Columbus. I think he must have written Gremlins as an act of exorcism.

moirafinnie,
Even at my most crassly mannish, I can’t imagine thinking women being four inches high would seem like a good idea. In fact, it’s my most crassly mannish aspects that think that’s a particularly bad idea. It’s been a while since I’ve seen Dead Reckoning, though, perhaps I should do that.

Jenni, Red Dawn is a great choice. I wish I’d thought of it. Gremlins, on the other hand, have you considered the possibility that your children suffer from anhedonia and need psychiatric treatment?

RHS,
An amusing anecdote about Chris Columbus and the college guys trashing his house. I could see that episode in life giving one the idea for Gremlins!

Neil,
Had to look anhedonia up and no, I don’t think my kids have that.
Movies they do like: Star Wars(except the Clone Wars one-that’s probably their cine-scab!), Wizard of Oz, all 3 Spiderman movies,Shreks,King Solomon’s Mine(Stewart Granger version), Frankenstein and Young Frankenstein, The Wolfman, Swiss Family Robinson(the youngest son is another cine-scab for me in this film!),Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Music Man, most Disney animated films,Pixar too. Just a start, there are more they like, but I have to get on with my afternoon!
film

Oh, I really did mean that as a lighthearted reply. I’m sorry if I came across too far otherwise. Anyone who enjoys both wolf and music men is all right with me.

Neil,
Quite all right, no offense taken. :-)

On that quote from ‘Dead Reckoning’, in the A M Sperber biography ‘Bogart’, he says Bogie wrote that speech himself and had tried to get it included in another movie previously – afraid I don’t remember which one.
Also Bacall mentions this idea of four inch high women in her autobiography (‘By Myself and Then Some’) and says it’s an idea Bogart used to talk about. Very odd…

From your list Hot Summer definitely makes me cringe but I can’t stop watching it. There is an out of control musical sequence set at some noisy bar in the 1958 film Fraulein where Theodore Bikel, I think, gets so emotional and hyperactive, spinning around, singing and dancing/kicking like a madman, that the whole movie comes to a grinding stop as you watch in horrified amazement. I saw it on Saturday Night at the Movies several times as a kid and always waited and watched for that completely inappropriate musical number. There is a similar out-of-nowhere musical interlude performed by the uber-lung Olivera Katarina in the sleazy erotic drama Ann and Eve (1970) from Sweden’s Arne Mattsson. It’s another showstopper in all the wrong ways. You will laugh…long and hard.

After watching that clip of Bobby Van I cannot understand why Lost Horizon was such a big flop when it first came out. The only other Lost Horizon song with music and lyrics just as bad, well, except for all the other songs in the movie, has got to be The World Is a Circle:

The world is a circle without a beginning,
And nobody knows where it really ends.
Everything depends on where you
Are in the circle that never begins.
Nobody knows where the circle ends.

What makes these songs even worse is the fact that they were written Burt Bacharach and Hal David. What the heck were they thinking?

Also glad to find out that there are other people who think Sally Field was embarrassing in the cemetery scene in Steel Magnolia. Funny thing, I had the same reaction when I watched her in Sybil but that time it was because she was dead on as a crazy person walking down the street talking to herself.

As cine-scabs go, this one is pretty hard to beat:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwQ6v_nYPMs

It’s the unquestioned low point of the MORE TREASURES FROM AMERICAN FILM ARCHIVES box set, yet the only part of that set I play regularly. Go figure.

The clip from “Hot Summer” reminds me of all those terribly earnest and overwhelmingly perky “Up With People” TV specials from my childhood. All that and bad dubbing! So irritating, yet impossible not to watch.

Funny…I made a mix-CD of Burt Bacharach tunes (by various artists) for my girlfriend, and threw on Question Me An Answer as kind of a joke; the song is patently insipid, and Bobby Van’s weird, adenoidal delivery just makes it moreso. Just when you thought Burt would never top Beware of the Blob…

The thing that makes Bobby Van’s big number in Lost Horizon so endlessly rewatchable (to me) is the rote way he just plows through the thing. It’s as if he’d been singing that song all his life and could just go through the motions, even with all those impressionable kids around him. Watching him perform, it really does seem like he thinks he’s the only one in the room – his movements and shtick are all so locked-down and reflexive. It’s fascinating! That the song, on top of everything else, blows large curd just makes this a deliciously crusty cine-scab.

I also dislike the musical number performed in”Frankenstein Meets

The Wolfman”..but..for a different reason.

This is a horror movie about “Larry Talbot”/”The Wolfman”(played by

Mr.Lon Chaney,Jr.).Who after he is brought back to life following a failed

attemp to rob his grave.

He is trying to find a means to be killed..so that he will not turn back

into”The Wolfman”and kill someone else.

In the village of”Varsaria”..the former home of “Dr.Ludwig Frankenstein”

..he meets the daughter of the dr.”Baroness Elsa Frankenstein”(played by

actress and singer Illona Massey)and he asks her to please give him her

father’s records on the secrets of life and death.

She refuses and “Talbot”is bitter about it(She does not realize his

urgent need to find those records and have a surgen use them to

save him from another dangerous spell)so..that night.

When the town is celebraiting the “Festival Of The New Wine”

..that jerk is singing that tune..a happy upbeat tune in a horror

movie.

This is suppose to be a horror film..it’s suppose to be scary

and in that scene..”The Frankenstein Monster”(played by Bela Lugosi)

is going to attack the village.

There is no reason for a serious scene to have a happy tune

be performing as a prelude to violence and horror.

The song is unessiscary,annoying and disruptive to this

scene.

And that is why I dislike this musical number.