"The Lost Skeleton of Cadavera" would have been better off sticking with the necrophilia angle the title almost promises. At least then I might not have had to chew a leg off to escape the meta-trap set by its self-fellating “creators”. Alas, no torso vaginas here. So…

It’s not too gratifying to say that this movie sucked, because that’s exactly what it was built to do. In fact… Hmm… Seems like I shouldn’t throw this stone. Screw it … Incoming! This bullshit should’ve been called “Fisting Ourselves: Why What We Think About Film is More Important than the Work Itself”… or something. Anyhow, a bunch of film hacks went and made a latter-day 50’s sci-fi flick. Not a spoof, mind you, but a true-to-form recreation (cone-bras, infantile props, poor lighting, and a butcher’s editing included) of every campy “It came from the Kuiper Belt” flick of the Red Menace era (I may just have plagiarized the praises on the DVD box there. Apologies.). Duplication being the worst form of insult, this idea makes as much sense as building an exact, working copy of your local federal building right next door to the original, filling it with incompetents and calling it an homage. Which is to say, “fuck that”.

Have we as a people become so divorced from creativity that recreating our own hazy memories of horseshit is considered a productive use of hyper-advanced A/V technology? And anyhow who actually thinks that an homage is something other than chloroform and a canvas bag for a thing which some weakling covets so much that he needs to make a skinsuit out of it? I dunno, Babs. But the people who made this flick are probably just the type of unhinged haters who will tell you that your favorite music is all wrong and that, anyhow, even if you started to listen to the right stuff you’d be so far behind that they’d trash you for being a poser and a follower. Of whom? Not the fucking music, that’s for sure.

Maybe that’s being unfair, though. I mean, it’s just as likely that these assholes simply were out of any decent ideas of their own and didn’t want to have to start turning tricks on Sunset Blvd for food. So, they pitched a story about a scientist, his wife, a couple of stranded aliens looking for fuel or something who are pretending to be human, and a mystical skeleton with some kind of psychic powers to the idiot running the local indie studio (“Get this. You’ll be able to see the strings!”), and called it “Retro Camp”. I imagine the exec hopped straight over his desk and immediately started blowing these people for their genius, too; so thankful was he not to have to write Clerks III. “Remake the unremarkable? Why, that’s just dumb enough to work! You clowns have got yourself a DEAL! Secretary! Bust out the Zima and Funyuns.”

So, yeah… Eureka. "The Lost Skeleton of Cadavera" is found, and we’re all skullfucked for it.

--michael3b