Puss in Boots (1988)

This is a horrible, horrible film, but still intriguingly watchable, because Christopher Walken plays a human cat.

The story follows the old fairy tale. An old miller is sick and gives his possessions away to his sons. To his oldest he leaves the mill, to the second he leaves his horse, and to the third he leaves his cat. The boy eventually learns that the cat can speak... and in this version, turn into human who acts like a cat, and the cat asks for boots. The boy works hard to buy his magical cat boots, and then the cat manipulates the king and his court to ultimately marry the princess to the miller's son through a series of tricks.

As I said in the intro, the reason I watched this film in the first place, and the thing that kept me watching, was the fact that Christopher Walken prances around like a cat. And he sings. It's horrible! The funny thing is that he actually pulls it off. Creepy, scary Christopher Walken is a tricky, sneaky, dancing, prancing, singing, bounce-in-his-step, cat personified. It's comical. I would not recommend that anyone actually sit and watch this unless you are seriously in the mood for cheese. The songs are quite bad and the acting is atrocious. This is more of a film that you can bring up as a little known fact as cocktail parties, if anyone has those any more. I know you're tempted, but seriously, don't watch it.

Killer Workout/ Aerobicide (1986)

This is one of those movies that's so bad it's almost good. The story is about this girl named Valerie, who after getting seriously burned all over her body in a freak tanning bed accident, changes her name to Rhonda and opens up a workout facility. All seems to be going well until her aerobic clients start getting mysteriously killed off. A lieutenant from out-of-town starts investigating the case eventually starts to suspect Rhonda is responsible for the killings, but various incidents interfere with her arrest. At the end of the movie the killer walks free.

The story wasn't so bad. It actually sounded kind of humorous, and who doesn't like a cheesy slasher from the 80's. I think that only especially bad thing in the film was the lieutenant's acting. He was always properly scowling and suspicious, like a good one-dimensional cop should be, but he'd make these eye-rollingly worthy jumps of logic. When he suspects someone as the killer you will know because he will actually start telling that person in a conspiratorial way that he or she is guilty. The funniest of these are when he starts suspecting Rhonda and find out that she was badly burned. He then says to her that she was the killer because she had to see all of these beautiful bodies when she would always have to hide her own, and that the sight of her body would make any man sick to his stomach. He doesn't have any evidence (and never does in any of his accusations) but because he's definite that anyone that ugly would never be able to live happily he arrests her. Also funny on her part, when he does accuse her she gets mad and flashes him her burnt chest screaming 'is this what you wanted to see?'. But yes, poorly written and acted.

Besides the poor dialogue there were basically two components to this movie, people getting killed by a hand without a body, and zooming in on the butts and breasts of the girls while they're doing their workouts in revealing clothing. Definitely not a classic of its time, but it is pretty fun to watch if you're over the age of majority.

Faeries (1981)

Faeries is a very short movie, not even half an hour, and is based on Brian Froud's book Faeries. The story is about a youth named Oisin who is out on a hunt with the men to bring in some game for his birthday feast, but they have been unlucky are just about to give up and go home empty-handed. Just as the men are lamenting at even bringing the boy, a deer runs by Oisin and his horse chases it off into the forest. The deer stops to graze in a ring of mushrooms and just as Oisin is about to shoot it, it turns into a lovely young woman who states that she is Princess Niamh of the faeries. The princess takes Oisin with her to fairyland because they are in trouble. The king was showing off his magical ability and made his shadow come alive, but over time the shadow grew more powerful and began sucking power out of the king. The shadow took over most of the faerie realm with it's darkness (which weakens the powers of the seelie court) and was going to go after the princess next. It is of course up to Oisin and his assigned companion Puck to go after the monster in it's castle and defeat it, bringing peace to faerie realm once again.

The movie was decently done. Even though it was a short film it felt like a feature-length film. The animation of the faeries was very Froud like, which was interesting to see applied in a cartoon and was pretty accurate in regards to some creatures. Certain poses of some of the faeries looked like they came right out of the book. There were some cheesy lines and a few easy way outs that will have you rolling your eyes, but hey, it's the 80's. Overall worth while.