Sandcooler

"Beverly Hills Bandits" is not going to win many awards, but I will give it this: it might have the weirdest, least appropriate cameo in film history. Understandably, anyone who makes a movie for three dollars is desperate to get any name actor attached to the project for some minor clout. With that said: was there really nobody else available except Ron Jeremy? I don't know much about selling a film, but Ron Jeremy doesn't seem like a huge asset when marketing your family comedy. It doesn't help that he looks really miserable to be there. When you're embarassing a porno actor, your script might not be very good.

Apparently the working title for this movie was "Homie Alone", which pretty much covers it. It's a complete rip-off of the holiday classic, just with (mostly) black actors. If I can give the movie any credit, it does show you how brilliantly the original "Home Alone" was executed. Some of the physical comedy is lifted directly from the source material, but none of it works because a decent gag requires some serious thought. You need to shoot and edit these scenes just right so the timing works out. Alternately, you can also just point the camera at some community theatre actors who are desperately trying to convince us they're being electrocuted. Comedy is incredibly difficult to film, which they clearly didn't figure out until it was too late.

"Beverly Hills Bandits" was written and directed by Vitaly Versace, whose complete disregard for copyright law is strangely impressive. One of his earlier films is "The Last Vampire On Earth", which lifts plot points and even entire dialogues straight from "Twilight". He's almost like a modern day Bruno Mattei, but Mattei a) shot his movies in Italy, where copyright used to be more lenient and b) STILL got sued for "Cruel Jaws" (guess what movie it rips off). Thankfully, Versace occasionally takes a change of pace and films an exploitation movie about the Anders Breivik massacre. It's quite a fascinating filmography, but even to his standards "Beverly Hills Bandits" is an absolute chore to sit through.

"Drive-In Massacre" manages to keep up appearences for about five minutes. The opening scene is genuinely entertaining, despite (or maybe because of) the crude effects. It immediately puts you in the right mood for a trashy whodunit, but unfortunately that's not what you are getting.

Most of this movie is about two bumbling, uncharismatic cops who are trying to solve the few and far between murders. Despite several long (and I do mean loooooong) interrogation scenes, they make absolutely no progress whatsoever. It doesn't help that the writers couldn't be bothered with coming up with a third act, giving us one of the saddest, most anticlimatic endings in cinema history. It's also very much possible their funding ran out. Either way, the movie feels very unfinished. Thankfully for them, drive-ins weren't exactly known for their high standards.

With that said, the movie isn't completely without charm. It does have that typical sleazy atmosphere we know and love in 70s exploitation movies. It's not exactly a big surprise director Stu Segall mostly made pornography, though curiously there's no nudity in the film. The best part of the movie to me is how nobody in this town gives a damn about these killings. The drive-in theatre stays open (!) and is actually more popular than ever (!!). This movie is epitome of 'there's no such thing as bad publicity'. Hey honey, you want to go to that place where two people got slaughtered just yesterday? Of course, I thought you'd never ask.

The most baffling part of this movie is a sequence with George 'Buck' Flower, who's also one of the credited writers. Flower has had an interesting career to say the least, mainly because he played a hobo in pretty much every movie he was ever in. In this one he plays a maniac who holds a little girl hostage, which has pretty much nothing to do with our main 'plot'. Apparently they added this scene later on because the runtime was too short. Hell, they should have added an ending instead.

Jommeke is Belgium's most famous comic, so it makes perfect sense to give it a film adaptation. What doesn't make sense, however, is that the adaptation was written, directed and edited by the original cartoonist Jef Nys. Making a film is quite different from drawing a comic, but he got together a shoe-string budget and went for it. The result is one of the worst Belgian films of all time, but I can't deny it's extremely endearing.

Nys clearly had to work with his budgetary limitations, so he shot some of it in his own house and used his own family as the cast. That last fact gives the movie most of its unintentional humor. This has got to be worst acting ever captured on film. Obviously, you can't blame children for stumbling over their lines, unnatural readings and occasional glances at the camera. I will blame the adults though for somehow being even worse than the children. None of the actors have ever been in another movie, but the dude who plays the poacher acts like he's never even seen a film. It appears most of the dialogues weren't even recorded on set, so how does everyone sound like they're desperately trying to remember their lines?

Another great source of potential memes is how Nys didn't change the script of the comic at all. Obviously, this doesn't work out too well. Dialogues from children's comics can work on the page, but will sound weird and stilted on screen. The same goes for staging a gag. Making comedy work on film is very, very difficult. A wide shot of your kid pretending to trip over a fence is not a comedy bit, not even to the rather primitive standards of pop culture in 1960s Belgium.

It should be said that I might be making the movie sound more interesting than it actually is. Nys had about twenty minutes of material here, but stretches the movie out to an absolutely ridiculous 68 minutes. If you like long scenes of kids digging a hole or walking down a road set to boring library music, this will quickly become your favorite movie. The climactic (cough) chase scene between Jommeke and the poacher goes on at least ten times as long as it needs to. Damn, these people must have been exhausted.

Obviously, this movie shouldn't be held to anything resembling standards. Jef Nys had fun with his family and sold about 30.000 copies of this film in the process, who could fault the man for that? It's an amateur film, making it impossible to rate. If you're not making good cinema, you can at least make good memories.