Crystal Force

This movie sure isn't gonna win academy awards, but if you're a cheese lover or horror movie buff it's definitely worth viewing. The story is your average horror setting helpless girls, and a monster, etc. And the special effects are not stunning. But what this movie does have is an incredible scene where the monster acosts the beautiful actress Kathrine McCall in a dream/sleeping reality senario. If you find that interesting check this movie out if not get something with a decent story cause this one's a waste of time unless your into "B" flicks.

Ever see a film and, after it's over, wonder what you just wasted your time on?

Crystal Force, unlike other bad movies that just plain fall on their faces, does so in style. And that isn't, dear reader, a good thing.

What makes Manos: The Hands of Fate and like movies so enjoyable is their sheer stupidity, but Crystal Force tries to show some pseudo-intelligence. Thinly veiled as a horror film (it's horrible, not horrorful), this lite-porn heavily handedly didactically illuminates every out Freudian symbol, every stereotypically Western dichotomy, and every reference to classical literature that the screenwriters tried to work into the script. And, of course, for no reason whatsoever. You don't watch these films to become enlightened. If you enjoy watching these films at all, you enjoy their anti-intellectualism, their bestial and unrefined nature.

Crystal Force offers little of these things, and instead gives us failed arty posturing.

Of course, when critiquing films like this, you needn't mention the bad acting, terrible script, cheesy special effects, synthesized soundtrack, and out of focus camera work. It's all part and parcel with the genre.

The rampant sexuality and covert Greco-Freudian undertones to this manically underacted, post-graphic horror schlock are the only elements discernible in the anti-riveting, effects-driven ab-climax, which comes at the end of a rather long (approximately seventy-seven minutes longer than my average, American, male attention-span for complete drivel: I think I could more easily watch thirty or forty minutes of C-SPAN bloopers than this film again)and, one wants to say, pointless "film". Until those last six or seven minutes--really an almost revolutionary or, at the very least, anti-conventionalist stretching of the dogmatic ideal of climax/resolution or, heck, even plot--I found it hard to actually look at the "movie": my eyes would slide off of the screen to examine the oaken flooring of my home, and, then, I was more interested in the amount of time remaining, counting down on my VCRs little blinking readout than in the MacGuyveresque solution to the monster problem. Notwithstanding the already-mentioned lack of everything becoming what normal people would typically refer to as a "film" except for credits (both beginning and end), I could almost admire the ability of G.L.Reed to play both a seemingly hypertrophied, pseudo-Satanic Duck/Reptile from some other dimension and manage both the art department and properties on this shamefully modern "movie."