Ah, Invasion from Inner Earth. Never sat all the way through it, and growing up there were ample opportunities to do so.

Some correction to Dan’s fine and funny previous article: Invasion From Inner Earth is not Canadian, visual evidence to the contrary. It was made in and around Rhinelander, Wisconsin, a frozen outpost near the Upper Michigan border. The film’s creator is the legendary “bad” filmmaker Bill Rebane. To set his ouvre into perspective, two of his more notable features– Monster A Go-Go and The Giant Spider Invasion– were featured on “Mystery Science Theatre 3000.”

(My business partner talked to Bill Rebane on the phone a few times. When we first set up our DVD authoring business, he called to see how much we would charge to make a DVDs of several of his films. I recall we estimated around $30 per, which was way, way too much for him.)

This phrase in the body of Dan’s article intrigued me:

And anyway, I managed to get my paws on something that I had long considered the worst movie ever made. I have since decided that estimation was callow and naive - it is, however, probably the worst movie ever RELEASED.

Dan’s assessment of the awfulness of this film is even more intriguing considering it was released in 1974 (it was actually filmed in 1972). Pre-digital films were in no way easy or cheap to make. A low-budget movie in this era was in all likelihood shot in 16mm or 3-perf 35mm, in the old-school mode: crystal-sync sound, slated shots, dailies, resulting in work prints and mag audio film which were hand-edited into double-system masters on a Moviola. Even crummy movies required a small army of skilled technicians and the costly services of a film lab just to get the post-production done.

There was a thriving market for exploitation and drive-in fare in the 1970s, and even artistically challenged films like Mr. Rebane’s (because they were, after all, some form of monster movie) could get wide distribution. As a kid I saw The Giant Spider Invasion in a movie theatre, the second half of a double-bill with Demon Seed (which was a big-budget sci-fi film, despite the Exorcist-themed title. Its logline: HAL 9000 has baby fever).

So, results notwithstanding, It took a lot of money and effort to put out even bad films back then. Their shortcomings could be blamed on lack of budget, which made the director’s vision difficult to fully realize (Of course, a bad script is a bad script, but as Dan pointed out, a director like Ed Wood could squeeze some entertainment value out of a crummy story). But the observation that no budget was primary factor of their badness is probably wrong.

We’re now deep in the digital filmmaking era. The former limiting factors of analog filmmaking– lab costs, sound synching, negative conformation, etc.– are simply not issues anymore. In fact, if some addled auteur decided to create a shot-by-shot remake of Invasion From Inner Earth — snowmobiles, red-gelled flashlights, the whole smash– It could be produced single-handedly, and essentially for free. And as this ill-advised remake would be shot on an HD prosumer camcorder, edited with full digital effects and digital color correction (also for free), it would also be of superior technical quality to the original. In fact, the addled filmmaker would have to work very hard to achieve the authentic grainy, crummy, cheap look of the original.

Alright, what’s up then? Why is it in 2008 we’re deluged by unwatchable, self-indulgent, badly written indie crap? Did you know there were some 5000 movies available to the domestic distribution market last year, most of which were unreleasably bad?

It’s a crisis. There is a widely distributed article from IndieWIRE that details the problem of too many truly bad digital movies and a vanishing market for them. From Andrew O’Hehir’s 6-24 follow-up article on Salon.com:

Then there’s the fact that while enthusiasm, access to technology and an eagerness to become famous may be widespread, talent and craftsmanship are not. As anybody who’s ever served on a film-festival selection committee learns the hard way, most of those movies should never have been made in the first place and definitely should not be inflicted upon the public. There has indeed been an explosion of ultra-low-budget filmmaking — just try to wade through the self-produced movies available on YouTube — but so far it has not revealed a nation full of unheralded Orson Welleses in embryo. If anything, it has produced a deluge of abysmal crap that makes the genuine discoveries harder to see. As Gill acidly observed: “The digital revolution is here, and boy does it suck.”

We used to have a hearty laugh at old-school bad filmmmakers like Bill Rebane, Edward D. Wood Jr., Ray Dennis Steckler (The Incredibly Strange Creatures etc. etc. etc.) and Arch Hall Sr. (Eeegah!). But think about how hard it was to make a releasable movie in the days before Digital Video and Final Cut Pro, how much money and how many resources it took to simply commit a script to film. Considering what we’re dealing with now, maybe we were a tad unkind.

–Skot C.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 at 5:53 am and is filed under Digital Wonderland, General, Motion Pictures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.