Best of the Worst: Blood Shack (aka The Chooper)

oh my god is that a zima my apologies to our canadian friend colin he loves the zima this is the last one it's been sitting in our fridge for three years it's been expired since uh 2018. see what happens good luck how is it it's gross it's not as good as you remembered it i think some of the carbonation has been lost i think you missed what you were doing rich it's okay what it's not as good as you remember it oh you're talking about the trooper okay did you get a clean take of him saying that yeah well speaking of not as good as you remember it we're here today oh i'm not cutting out the part we didn't get the joke oh my god i wasn't you're going to do that to someone who's not rich evans i forgot what we watched today we watched rat finka booboo yeah i got two movies in front of me i remember watching one so already i'm confused [Music] should we point out that we're doing this discussion as a last minute thing before winter murders us all right yes this is a a hastily thrown together best of the worst because it's going to be too miserable to go outside in wisconsin for the next week and a half technically it's going to be miserable to go inside because the reason we're filming this is because our studio is going to be too [ __ ] cold to film it will be snowed in and it'll be too cold to film back here before before a string of 14 plus days of one one digit temperatures we're getting dumped on by snow so so we decided to revisit an old favorite and that went great connie welcome to another spotlight episode we're talking about a movie that we watched close to 10 years ago i think it predates best of the worst uh it it helped coin a phrase that we use on best of the worst and we have not seen it in a decade so we decided to revisit blood shack aka the trooper it's it's memorable to us because it was one of the like the original movie nights yeah at least it might have been the first one i went to uh so the trooper is a film from 1970. there are there are roman numerals that that fly by and our quick read of the newman and our quick read of the newman and our quick read of the roman numeral mike i'm suing you for copyright infringement or the new the newman roman romules uh we sound like someone that made the trooper we saw we saw mnl and three x's and that's just to signify that at one point it was supposed to be a porno the three axes this is a porno filmmaker his name is ray dennis steckler he did a couple legitimate movies is it for this is it the same mattress yeah that's why those stains are there now [Music] oh look at she's sleeping right on the mattress oh gross why ugh why would you not why would you just go in your underwear well the movie told her to you know why uh so as the lead actress a porn actress and maybe the blonde was i have no idea i want to be in my next it's a real movie does that mean i don't have to get naked well i'll meet you halfway you'll be in your underwear how about that oh but i gotta lay on that same mattress did you clean it from the last time action meet me halfway that was the last film i was in we're stalling we're stalling because we don't want to talk about the trooper no we can talk about the trooper let's talk about the trooper well first of all what is the plot of the trooper take your time it's very complicated so make sure you remember it all i'm going to talk about it because okay real quick this this like you said this is 10 10 years back when we first started really getting into the b movies we were laughing we had a great time then we realized that there is a whole ocean [Music] of b-movies out there there is a universe this is the port that we set sail from it's a beautiful metaphor rich and this is the port we set sail from yes and um we're going back this is the this is the small town we grew up in we're going back to our stomping grounds we're going to go home again and we go oh my god is that you know is that the school i used to go to it's so small and awful gross is that where i used to hang out on the weekends that's the old mall you know it looks like like a dump that so this is us going back to our roots our b movie roots which is the trooper oh no he's just right there does he have a fencing sword it's like a swashbuckling sword right [Music] are they just running in a circle it's not a very big [Music] eat your heart out alfred hitchcock but is it fun that's why we're here today it is it is our spotlight i know i feel bad it's our spotlight because it was a lot more fun 10 years ago but that was that was before some gems like miami connection yeah that was before neil breen [ __ ] that was before len kabzinski for our diamond cobra versus white fox what what was that a video we did i don't remember that one like if i were to go to our channel and would i find that video i don't know did we do a video on that but the oh the important thing that i was trying to get to was that there are uh strangely two versions there's a longer and a shorter version uh the the shorter version is like 42 minutes the longer version i think is an hour ten yeah um and there's a couple of scenes in the longer version that seem important that have been cut out of the cleaned up shorter version it's kind of a mess yeah the shorter the shorter version is bloodshack the longer version is called the trooper yes the trooper is the original title uh and and in that we see the original title sequence and so it's like a bunch of artwork which is cool yeah yeah um so at some point somebody said you shouldn't call your film the chooper no not the [ __ ] that sounds weird let's [Music] he kind of landed on the cop get your gun you're not fast enough for the jupiter get up troopers he stabs like one of those those little birds [Laughter] okay so there's a there's there's this 150 year old beat up shack in the middle of a absolutely giant plot of dirt and dead vegetation and everybody wants this shack even though people that go into the shack all are mysteriously killed by the supernatural entity known as the trooper uh yeah people people are just drawn to this shack it's a legend it's a local legend because teenagers show up children show up look the kids are curious everybody's curious about this building because it's famous for its hauntings which is the trooper like a group of teenagers there's two guys and a girl and they're like we don't want to stay here and she's like i'm going to stay here myself just abandon her in the middle of nowhere i'm gonna i'm gonna prove the legend wrong i'm gonna stay overnight in this building i dare that trooper to come get me i'm gonna spend the night here that's what you think that's right mister i heard about your ghosts and how it kills people well i ain't a chicken not like my friends i dare it to come get me well maybe they're smart now maybe you just better get out of here too no way baby yes and so then she goes to sleep overnight on the filthy mattress originally she takes out like a sleeping bag and she puts it on top of the mattress and my thought was oh my god she's not gonna sleep on that filthy mattress and then the next shot she's taking off all of her clothes and she's lying down on the filthy mattress but but she is warned by an important character in the film we haven't mentioned daniel he's the caretaker of the run-down disgusting 150 year old shack with the [ __ ] stained mattress he he he's in charge of the upkeep of this which explains a lot really i want to fix up this place picks up the ranch house tear down that old water tower it's about to fall down on somebody anyway get rid of that old house that's a historical monument it's been there for over 150 years [Laughter] you know the only history that places guys about 150 years history is definite you know that but the point is the back story is uh the the owner of the land the estate has passed away about a year ago right and daniel is the is the caretaker the groundskeeper he maintains the property by hanging out and throwing beer bottles into a garbage can also randomly shoveling some shoveling uh the man he's cultivating he's cultivating the dirt you gotta keep keep it fresh he doesn't like wearing a shirt and he doesn't like uh warning people about the trooper but by gum he has to do it over and over and over uh go ahead and stay but if the trooper comes to get you well you just deserve it trooper will get you the chipper will get you stay out of there the trooper will get you i warned you i told you um but we discovered throughout the plot of the film that there is a bit of uh the hatfield mccoy kind of family feud that goes back 150 years um caroline were introduced to caroline she is an actress my uncle jim wrote some of the best horror movies i ever acted in yeah i saw a couple they're pretty good special drill killer for those crazy man got out you know i'll start we don't know that in the edit we watched bloodshack she's not an actress she's just a woman she's she's a niece she's the niece of the guy who passed away she occasionally comes by and tours the property stays for a couple of days has a whole assortment of outfits that she brings with to get dusty she makes sure that dirt's getting shoveled by daniel yep and uh she tours the property she gonna sit on the dirty mattress everybody sits on the dirty mattress i'm feeling this lady yeah yeah she put her foot down [Laughter] she's got all these like like like high fashion outfits i'm not rubbing my naked ass on that mattress and her great-great-grandfather and this guy named tim something who wants to buy the property his great-great-grandfather those two grandfathers had a poker game where they were the what was up up for the the pot in the poker game was the deed to this property and it's it's speculated that um carol's grandfather cheated during the poker game which led to a showdown at noon this is a lot of exposition how do we know any of this through extensive voiceover while people are walking daniel told me the reason tim foster wanted the ranch so badly was that he felt it belonged to him you see back over a hundred years ago they're half belonging to tim's great grandfather jen and put up the ranches as stakes well my grandfather's day there they were out in the streets of town grandfather silas all the way to close distance ever since daniel can remember he said he'd leave the deck of cards have been stacked against him who needs scenes when he can just film people walking and add voice over let all this property rightfully belong to the fosters how do you convey information tim foster was right though when he said i owned a lot of good property for one thing it was the biggest [Music] is this the worst possible way of conveying expositional information like not in terms of the filmmaking because that saves them a whole lot of time so many scenes they just don't have to shoot like an opening text crawl would have been much better right uh like a fantasy film yeah it's like the opening of star wars [Music] i mean you could have a scene of of discovery or you have a scene that takes place in like 1864. how you start your film yeah yeah flashback your your bottom of the barrel of choice is filming people walking around while it's a long lens you just read the the plot do you think they didn't have any plot when they shot the movie he just filmed them and they're like we'll figure it out later and add voices that's the worst case scenario the next one is someone just straight up telling her yeah well or your grandfather did this at this camera third is discovery maybe she had no idea about the history of the property goes to the library goes to the library and then looks at a newspaper wow and the old librarian comes over oh i know about the chupa property or you know the james cameron method i'm here to help you i'm reece searching techcon bn38416 assigned to protect you which uh terminator the the expository dialogue like time travel this and that it's just all just told during an exciting action card chase all right listen the terminator's an infiltration unit part man part machine underneath it's a hyper alloy combat chassis but outside it's living human tissue flesh skin hair blood grown for the cyborgs i mean that well that's the the famous that's the legend of blood shack and that's where our phrase in the early days the best of the worst came from is that the movie was notoriously short because there's so little story to the movie that uh to pad out the running time they just went to the rodeo and shot a bunch of b-roll which led to our expression shooting the rodeo which is whenever you see a movie where there's clearly padding just to stretch out the running time where they just go to a parade or they go to some sort of public event to add uh production value to your film and pad out the running time yeah it's not specifically just padding it's it's uh uh serendipitous padding where it's like there happens to be a rodeo happening in this middle of nowhere dirt town because they they do have a scene where they go into town and it is something to be desired their town in the meantime i called up mrs potts and asked her if she would show me around who's mrs potts take the who kids kids the neighbors this is now their mother [Laughter] there's mrs potts is the mother okay we haven't been introduced to her but now we understand those are hurricanes yeah you know they just took the cameras out mos no no audio equipment they they try to tie it in a little bit because like tim shows up yeah and she's there but then they just had voice over to explain what he's talking to her about instead of us seeing what he's talking about the music is making oh no he's there tim foster i'd say the rodeo scenes in this add a lot to the movie they break up the amount of scenes where daniel tells people to not go into the shack or the trooper will get them it's like the perfect comedy run yeah yeah and it's a flat angle left to right this just needs the scooby-doo gang [Laughter] he's great he is great every time he shows up the movie just just uh lights up he's the reason i like this movie ten years ago cause he just he just awkwardly runs in for the side of the camera with his knife held up over his head it's like that scene in the exorcist three just like yeah they do it like five times in this and they're lacking any sort of style or pacing to make the scene actually scary he is wearing like an all black outfit with just the face it kind of resembles like a fencing outfit without the mask he's never on camera for very long i think his face is always exposed yeah right yeah and um he his sword is like a i don't know what kind of sword it is like a three musketeer sword with the with the curved uh it's funky looking it's very funky it's not necessarily it kind of looks like a like a a fencing sword but it's it's not as pointy and thin it's not as thin the blade's too fast but it's certainly not my point is it's not a scary weapon it's a silly weapon it's not it's not your classic butcher knife it's not a butcher knife and it's not a machete both of those fall under scary and his outfit it looks like a cat burglar outfit mixed with a fencing outfit with with the mustache so it kind of me it's like a fencer meets three musketeers in the desert what would have been more appropriate is like a a cowboy a a potato sack over his head yeah uh yeah a scarecrow potato sack costume a a dusty cowboy with like uh yeah like a burlap sack face with just the eye holes cut out classic executioner's hood sure um the was it the town that feared sundown tell the dreaded sundown yeah texas arcana yeah yeah uh something like that that's that's falls in theme with the 150 year old building yeah and not a not just a black jumpsuit not just a black cat suit jump jumpsuit uh fencing outfit with the three musketeers sword you want to imply that it's the vengeful ghost of the dead great great grandfather right right instead it's one of the it turns out the shocking twist is it's one of the only three characters in the film oh my god it's tim the guy who wants to buy the land that's not the trooper he's not 150 years old that's tim foster he's just trying to scare you off your ranch don't let anybody ever tell you the difference don't ever go in that old house or the trooper will get you and the oscar goes to him he's just trying to scare you off your ranch don't let anybody ever tell you the difference don't ever go in that old house or the trooper will get you [Music] [Applause] but there is uh prior to tim a trooper that existed before him that's the question is the trooper that we see in the movie before the big reveal that it's tim at the end is that supposed to be the real trooper i and the only time it's tim is in that final scene i think this is just going back to scooby-doo logic there's uh there's always been an old legend about the killer ghost in the area that never really existed well daniel at the beginning after he he disposes of the body of the blonde girl that stays overnight because he's he he responds very nonchalantly like oh he's used to this by now he's like oh i gotta dump another body no i warned you i told you the trooper would get you but you wouldn't listen no so where are these other bodies coming from bad filmmaking or maybe maybe maybe tim's just been trying this this goofy uh murder plot to run the people off the land for like the last 15 years it just hasn't ever worked but he's still trying right around the time daniel got hired yeah yeah because yeah the first murder potentially probably would have been the blonde girl daniel probably should have said oh my god like oh call the police someone's been murdered like i can't i've always heard about the legends but i've never experienced an actual killing on our property so were the legends real uh we're gonna assume tim picked up on the like you said the scooby-doo effect picked up on the history decided to play it to his advantage to get carol to sell him the property because he wanted it it had secret a secret water reservoir yeah that's thrown in a line of dialogue something else i forgot what it was it was water they didn't say there was like a lake under under there yeah or a river or something which maybe meant that the land could be fertile i don't know anything about farming but well you live in like a desert area any source of water is useful yeah so maybe it was like if you didn't know about the the groundwater then you maybe didn't bother trying to plant crops yeah so maybe he knew but oil would have been better yeah that would have been more movie-like more easily translatable i understand how somebody can profit off of this the layman needs thunder we don't know a lot about farming as as milwaukee and i'm sure it requires more than digging dirt though right but if the if there's an oil deposit directly under the trooper house that makes sense to the layman as of why someone would find that valuable movie makes lots of mistakes easily correctable mistakes easily correctable mistakes [Music] oh my god i warned you [Music] we often talk about with these movies a lot of times they feel like the filmmakers are like what do we have and so they put whatever they have in the movie to add to the production value and then in the case of this movie they're like what do we have we got a shack a blood shack we got a shack and we got a a sword that we found at an antique store how do we make a movie around this well my kid was a pirate for halloween last year and so we've got a plastic pirate sword yeah that's all they got and even that wasn't enough to make it feature length all these things so they had to stretch it out with shots of puppies and cowboys let's go to the rodeo four times during the film daniel had to walk around that shot where caroline is walking up to the house oh yeah in her inner uh her uh flag pants i think you need to do a side by side of the the pan shot of the golden gate bridge from the room and see which one which one wins which one's longer one is meant to stretch the running time one is pure incompetence yeah which one's which jay yes correct answer [Music] do [Music] [Music] [Music] daniel like there's no noises it's just weird there's like a shadow they're going to add those later rich they haven't gotten around to it yet what you do if you want to build tension is you have a blonde girl sit on a filthy mattress and react to sound effects that we as the audience don't hear okay see we know there's tension because daniel keeps running in and says you gotta stay out of that house the trooper will get you yeah and he keeps doing that tension is is lingering on a shot for a very long time as a character in american flag pants walks across the desert it goes on for a long time that means it's building tension will this shot ever end i don't know that is tension hitchcock always said tension is uh when there's a bomb under the table and the audience knows it's there but the characters don't but ray dennis teckler has taught us that tension is when nothing happens [Laughter] who is the horror master [Laughter] we do get a similar scene to psycho the post shower scene in psycho where norman bates has to to clean up after mother and uh and put the body in the back of his car you know what jay i think everyone in this film needed a shower scene because there were some dirty people it was was was daniel and you've seen the faces of the little girls do they have parents do you remember the fight scene yes see this is all they do on the ranch they shovel that's all you can do dirt i'm sorry god it's getting violent jesus christ wow [Music] oh come on stop it when the little girls are just playing with a shovel we keep cutting the little girls i'm like why are we cutting the little girls playing with a shovel and then and then it's revealed that the little girls are standing right next to this violent fight between two grown men it's like that comedy shot and i don't know if it's in one of the naked gun movies or if it was on police squad where we cut back and forth between driving shooting and then the bad guy shooting and then we cut to the wide shot and they're right next to each other and then we assume because we've seen movies before that the little girls were going to dig up one of the bodies that daniel has been hiding because he's covering up for the trooper for no good reason why is daniel covering up with the trooper we never really know i guess he's just concerned about the the legacy of this property and he doesn't want it to be sullied he's a damn good caretaker that's why but but that fight scene that was that was poised for some classic alfred hitchcock tension with those two fighting one of them is the killer right and you see like where the girls are playing with the shovel you see like kind of freshly buried lumps boom boom every now and then the camera is panning with their looking over their shoulder and the camera kind of moves a little bit and then finally they're just playing around and one of the third freshly covered up holes and then they have to speed up the fight he's desperately trying to knock out tim before they get to that point and then finally the girls do and then that first girl's hand kind of comes out but nobody notices it and you know something like that in fact in fact tim's hat during the fight gets knocked off and falls like on like where the hand has been revealed right hey there you go that's a running theme in this movie is hats falling off [Music] can we talk about the famous hat falling off scene daniel's on the porch and his hat falls off and it was the most exciting thing to happen in the film that's okay trooper you keep knocking them off i'll keep bearing them they're not gonna tear this whole house down i gotta find the bodies first they'll never find the parties where i put them what the hell but they'll never knock this whole house down he's talking to the trooper [Music] but his head fell off in the take and they just left it he's he's talking to the trooper people who's that blows off and then he's like looks at the camera you see a hand like a blurry hand like this just in the corner of the frame and then he keeps talking is that also flies off when him and uh carol are walking yeah they're saving film they don't you know that's a they're saving money hats off to the director so tumbleweed i think you know what i would say even though this isn't the most exciting bee movie in the world i think if you're this type of person that saw star wars and i was like oh this was influenced by flash gordon shorts so you went back and you watched those flash gorn shorts knowing that they're not as good as star wars you know hey i've seen you know miami connection i've seen all these b movies i should go back and see blood shack yeah i and i would say i have seen duller worse movies on best of the worst yes we usually destroy them but this one has a special place though i know yeah there is lots of lots of baffling stuff in this uh the repetition of the dialogue is funny yeah it kind of wears on you where he's just constantly telling people to watch out for the trooper the word the trooper which is a nonsensical word to begin with loses all meaning about 15 minutes into the film yes it's never quite explained and then the the the desperate attempts to save the movie by adding voice over is funny the chooper attack scenes are comical um there's just a lot of good stuff in it and it doesn't it doesn't wear out its welcome it it well that's for sure it ended sooner than we were expecting yeah i don't know what i'm going to do i think i'll just worry about it tomorrow i'll just worry about it tomorrow uh was she there was just a murder and they call the cops an attempted murder yeah oh we're done [Laughter] i thought it was 70 minutes it's not even 60 minutes and it's just like all those like movie beats that needed to be there like the big ending you know where there's like a big like i said the the the rodeo people coming to the ranch at the end and throwing a big party and then the trooper comes out and and has like kills multiple people in this big epic ending that none of that happens it's so low budget and so restricted but it still holds up in terms of watching a relatively short b movie that's kind of bizarrely fascinating to watch it has that you kind of have to look at it from the lens of like the story behind the movie where you're looking at it from the perspective of the filmmaking and what was going on behind the scenes that that adds a bit to it if you're just watching it as a b movie yeah it's not hilarious or anything well maybe we'll take a little break from ray dennis steckler and uh maybe watch another film by a notoriously bad filmmaker well let me let me know when we're gonna do that get me uppity up to date i will rich okay [Music] stay away from this house now that was your mother on the phone she was at home now come on get going if you want to play around here anymore stay away from this house

Channel: RedLetterMedia

Views: 1,257,421

Keywords: redlettermedia, red letter media, red, letter, media, plinkett, half in the bag, mike stoklasa, jay bauman, rich evans

Id: _8qGSkcX6R0

Length: 36min 50sec (2210 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 16 2021