Ourweekly columnStaff Pickstakes you back to a time when video stores reigned supreme andthe "Staff Picks" section was the placetofind outwhat films were worthy of one's time.Of course, our version ofStaff Pickshas a decidedly skintillating angle, as we suss outwhich films from a particular subgenre are the best to find great nudity. This week, we're looking at that cottage industry designed to deceive audiences everywhere into watching an inferior product known as Mockbusters!
While the age of the video store certainly made the Mockbuster more prominent, the notion of a Mockbuster has been around since the late 1950s. A Mockbuster is a film designed to directly copy a big budget studio film in an attempt to deceive the more gullible people of the world into thinking it's the same film. The thinking man may have walked into a Blockbuster Video in the summer of 2007, seen the film Transmorphers sitting on the shelf, and thought, "Well, they don't release big budget movies like Transformers in theaters and on video at the same time." However, the Mockbuster industry isn't aimed at the thinking man, but rather built exclusively around that old idiom that a fool and his money are soon parted.
From the titles to the DVD cover art, these films are engineered for maximum confusion in the marketplace. Production house The Asylum is perhaps the best known of the Mockbuster Studios, churning out such titles as the aforementioned Transmorphers along with The Da Vinci Treasure, AVH: Alien Vs. Hunter, The Day the Earth Stopped, Paranormal Entity, Atlantic Rim, and the list goes on and on and on. While they haven't abandoned Mockbuster films altogether, the success of their Mega Shark and Sharknado franchises have allowed them to move away from them to at least some small degree.
There's even animated Mockbusters, with such bargain basement animation studios as GoodTimes Entertainment, Brazil's Video Brinquero, and Germany's Dingo Pictures that have preyed upon impressionable young children with equally gullible parents.Who needs production values, decent special effects, good acting, writing, or directing when you can rely upon the stupidity of the public to keep these studios in business? The deceptive business practices have led to many legal battles over the years, but the films continue to get churned out and likely always will.
All five of our recommendations today come to us courtesy of The Asylum, the king of the Mockbuster, further proving that they really do have a corner on the market...
Snakes on a Train (2006)
Besideschanging just three letters from 2006's Snakes on a Plane, there's actuallyzero similarity between that modern attempt at a B-Movieand its Mockbuster counterpart Snakes on a Train. Where the former was about an assassination attempt on a plane pulled off through the use of venomous snakes, its train-based imitator features a voodoo curse being placed upon a woman (Julia Ruiz), causing her body to become a host for snakes. She and her handler Brujo must now get from Mexico to Los Angeles via train to have the curse lifted. I get thatSnakes on a Plane doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but Snakes on a Train somehow manages to throw even more logic out the window.
The film is credited as coming to us courtesy ofThe Mallachi Brothers, though they don't really exist. Sounds cool though, doesn't it? Sounds like The Chiodo Brothers or The Wachowskis. There's something about it that must seem to lend more credence than the name Peter Mervis, who is the real mastermind behind Snakes on a Train. That's right folks, there is no such writing/directing entity as The Mallachi Brothers, but rather a soul-patch sporting dude named Peter Mervis who used the made up name for this film and this film only.
One area where Snakes on a Train actually manages to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Snakes on a Plane is in the nudity department. Both films have exactly one topless scene, and though no one gets bit on the tit in this one, there is a terrific topless scene from Amelia Jackson-Gray late in the flick...
**Available to stream via Pluto TV and Hoopla
Exorcism: The Possession of Gail Bowers (2006)
Hey, remember that movie TheExorcism of Emily Rose? It's okay if you don't, it was a totally forgettable courtroom drama with a particularly heavy hand that was marketed as an exorcism movie. In early 2006, though, the film was still on the brain for some folks, leading The Asylum to strike while the iron was lukewarm and produce the impossibly titled Exorcism: The Possession of Gail Bowers. Erica Roby, an Asylum regular, stars as the titular possessed woman, whose parents hire an old priest to perform an exorcism, despite a past exorcism having left him blind.
The film rather hamfistedly attempts toestablish a shared cinematic universe as well, with the fictional Blackthorn Industries employing Gail's father. This same corporation was responsible for a zombie outbreak, the creation of a Frankenstein-esque monster, and a covert operation on a island inhabited by monsters in three films released in 2005. This would be the end of the line, however, as the whole thing was scrapped immediately after the film.As far as nudity goes, this possession is a regular old family affair, as not only does Erica Roby go topless as Gail Bowers, but so too does Noel Thurman as her mom Anne in two very similar looking nude scenes more than likely shot on the same day...
There's also bonus boobage from Rebekah Kochan as an ill-fated horny teen...
**Available to stream via Hoopla
Invasion of the Pod People (2007)
One of the big dangers in the Mockbuster industry is that one can never be sure which big budget movies are going to be hits and which are going to flop. So it is with 2007's Invasion of the Pod People, made to capitalize on what they surely expected to be the success of 2007's The Invasion starring Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman. Hollywood's umpteenth attempt to adapt Jack Finney's 1955 novel "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" was a colossal failure, meaning that appetites were hardly whetted for a knock-off version.
This take on the classic body snatching tale takes place in the world of a high-class modeling agency run by the ruthless Samantha (Jessica Bork). One of the models, Melissa (Erica Roby, once again) notices that Samantha has a real change of attitude after bringing a strange plant with her to work. Now instead of being a regular old Witch-with-a-B, she's nice and cheerful. Red flags continue going off as other models begin exhibiting similarly uncharacteristic behavior including—GASP—lesbianism, leading to a full on invasion of the bo... pod people, yo!
In a true moment of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," Erica Roby goes topless once again while laying down, making this her signature move...
Jessica Bork shows up later to seduce Roby, going topless for an abbreviated lesbian hookup...
Meanwhile fellow models Amanda Ward and Lorraine Smith also take a trip to the Isle of Lesbos, making this a borderline softcore porn parody of Invasion of the Body Snatchers more than a Mockbuster...
**Available to stream via Pluto TV and Hoopla
200 M.P.H. (2011)
Let's take a break from punny titles and focus on a Fast Furious rip-off timed to coincide with the release of Fast Five in 2011. 200 M.P.H. doesn't borrow from any particular film in the series so much as it borrows from all of them and none of them, simultaneously. It feels the script was written by someone whose research consisted of only watching the trailers and looking at the posters of the FF films. For example, there's no Vin Diesel surrogate to be found, but they did manage to find three guys—including one Asian guy—who all had the same haircut and are more or less indistinguishable from one another besides their varying heights...
