Jamie
We are killing ourselves with bonuses here, but fortunately we are really hitting some big time BMT films with them. Like *checks notes* Transylvania 6-5000? Weird. Did you know the title of this is based on a song Pennsylvania 6-5000 from 1940? It’s such a disastrously misguided title that I have to twist myself into pretzels to even justify it. Really the only justification is that Dow Chemical funded the film as a way to convert their Yugoslav dinar into American dollars. Otherwise that money had to stay in Yugoslavia. I can just imagine the ancient executives at Dow Chemical being like “just one note… call the movie Transylvania 6-5000. The kids love that swing music and jazz cigarettes.”
To recap, Jeff Goldblum and Ed Begley Jr. are two reporters for a tabloid. Goldblum aspires to bigger and better things, so is particularly dismayed when a grainy homemade video suggesting the existence of a Frankenstein’s monster gets them assigned to the wild goose chase. Off they go to Transylvania where Goldblum assumes they will find nothing. Jokes on him because Frankenstein is real. Not according to the townspeople, though… or the police… or anyone, really, and Begley Jr. is laughed at whenever he inquires. Goldblum is more fascinated by a lovely tourist, Elizabeth, but slowly also gets a feeling that the town itself is not what it seems. As they begin to have run-ins with several other monsters, such as a vampiress and a wolfman, they grow suspicious of a local mad scientist. Things start to really get out of control when Elizabeth’s daughter appears to be kidnapped by the Frankenstein’s monster. This culminates with them finding the laboratory of the mad scientist, who appears to have created all of the monsters they have run into. But they eventually also learn the truth, that the mad scientist is trying to help them. They reveal this to the town, who eventually welcomes the monsters with open arms. This enables Goldblum and Begley Jr. to get a crazy story out of it all and the publicity of their dreams. THE END.
This is barely a movie. Mel Brooks must have had so much sway back then to get this and Silence of the Hams made simply because someone remotely connected to him (but not Mel Brooks himself) was involved. It’s like a one note SNL sketch stretched out for ages as people scramble around. I guess one positive note about it is that I thought it got better as the film went on (and on and on) and we get some early Michael Richards doing a bunch of crazy shit, which is always a bit fun. But when I say they are scrambling, I really do mean they just kinda bop around doing bullshit for 90% of the film. Not even funny bullshit mostly. But… it’s better than Silence of the Hams (raves Bad Movie Twins).
Hot Take Clam Bake! Keeping the Mel Brooks connections going, are we sure this isn’t riffing on The Elephant Man? Hear me out. We have that hot Brooks connection. We have a doctor taking “freaks” under his care to try to help them be more accepted by society, which he ultimately succeeds in doing. They were shopping the film for five years. It’s a 1985 film. What was five years before that? The Elephant Man. Is it a sequel? Is it a prequel? Is it a reboot? I think it’s a reboot. You heard it here first: Transylvania 6-5000 is a reboot of The Elephant Man franchise (“and it’s better than the original!” – Patrick). Woah! Now, Patrick… that really is a hot take. I don’t think I’d go that far. But you do you. Hot Take Temperature: John Hurt.
Patrick?
Patrick
‘Ello everyone! *Gif of me manically running around a hotel while a young Michael Richards chases me* Let’s go!
The Good? Oooooooof. I mean, some of the jokes I guess. We’ve watched a few spoof films in the past few months. This, I didn’t really expect to be a spoof film, but in many ways it is a spoof film, spoofing the classic Universal Monster Films. And there are little kernels here and there that I can appreciate. The trick on getting into and out of the insane asylum. The monsters all being people looking for medical treatment. Some of Michael Richards gags. As over the top as it often is there are on occasion small funny bits.
The Bad? The film is very unfunny, it very weird, feels interminable, looks like shit, and is basically just two actors playing right into their schtick. I like both of their schticks, but it is just not enough to sustain the whole thing. It is unbelievable this is a wide release film. It looks soooooo bad. It is such a weird film. It is really just a much smaller step up from Silence of the Hams than you would expect.
The BMT? I don’t think so. The film just is too bad and not funny. Same with Silence of the Hams. I would be embarrassed to show this film to someone and that pretty much precludes it from being a true BMT film.
I had to try out this image batch operation on some posters. So I scraped the top 200 posters for 1985 off of IMDb and asked the very scientific query: “Give me all the posters which feature Jeff Goldblum”. The results were: Silverado, Into the Night, Transylvania 6-5000. Those three are correct. In that those are the three major films Jeff Goldblum was in in 1985. The only quibble is that it can’t really differentiate between the name being on the poster and the person appearing on the poster. I don’t think he’s on the Silverado poster, but his name is there. Still, fun.
A real Setting as a Character (Where?) for Transylvania, which, this could be the best Romania film we’ve ever seen. There is a MacGuffin (Why?) in that they are chasing a story about the real deal Frankenstein (and they get more than they bargain for). And again, I liked the twist (that all the monsters are just regular people getting medical treatment), so there. The film is Bad, straight up, not funny and scattershot.
Learn all about monsters I guess in the Quiz. Cheerios,
The Sklogs
Bad Movie Twins 