Filmbrain's Screen Capture Quiz: Round 16, Week 7

Though best known for his work in the 80s as a producer with his cousin Yoram Globus (everything from Cassavetes' Love Streams to Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo), Menahem Golan is also the director of over forty films. A few, including Over the Brooklyn Bridge and Hanna's War are actually fairly decent; others less so. For example, who can forget Over the Top, the film that exposed the hard truth about the world of professional arm wrestling? Yet far worse than that Stallone disaster is The Apple, a 1980 Israeli-German-Canadian production of a quasi sci-fi musical with heavy religious overtones that contains some of the worst singing and dancing ever to have been committed to celluloid. Then again, there isn't a singer alive or dead who could do anything with Coby Recht's positively lifeless tunes. Why Golan chose to cast his musical with actors who can't sing (including Vladek Sheybal) and dancers who can't dance remains a mystery, but its level of awfulness is such that you can't help but admire it, or at least stare in slack-jawed wonder. In fact, it's too good not to share. Though it was hard to choose just one scene, here's the reggae-tinged How to Be a Master. Enjoy:

This week: Sometimes you get so lonely... A film as strange as The Apple, but much, much better (and then some.) It's a rather inconsequential scene, perhaps the film's most gratuitous, out of place moment, but fascinating nonetheless. Name it. Submit your answers to this address. Good luck!

Comments

[Holly]

Glorious, Breathtaking Genius. Did you mean the BEST singing and dancing ever committed to celluloid?

[Filmbrain]

Yes, of course...I can't imagine what came over me.

[Ashley]

Wow. When I think German/Canadian sci-fi, the first thing that pops into my mind is the (I'll be generous) campy series Lexx, which until now I thought was just a fluke. Is there something about that combination that begets this sort of...unconventionality?

[MINTONmedia]

Ah yes...the very film that when I first saw it (at 3am amidst a group of wasted party stragglers plopped before a TV that inexplicably had unlocked the entire array of digital cable channels) elicited the comment, "I can FEEL my brain cells dying."

Thems were the days. Sigh.