The Most Obscure Movies I’ve Seen

I watch a lot of movies. So, today I’ll share the ones with the least number of votes on IMDb. I lTeft out shorts and documentaries, because it’s quite common that not many people have voted on them, because people don’t necessarily think to.

Maybe I should have taken out the Finnish movies as well, since the potential audience for them is quite marginal compared to many other movies, because of the low population, but than again, they are also the more interesting cases.

Anyhow, here’s the ten.

1. Meidän poikamme ilmassa – me maassa (1934)

Weird that not that there’s only 25 votes on this. I guess the audience aren’t really IMDb-users. The name translates roughly as “Our boys in the air- we on the ground” and it’s basically a propaganda piece on the importance of an air force in Finland. It’s rated 4.3, but that feels high. It’s quite bad. Think political discussions, multiple awkward romance stories and a forced dogfight (although, that’s not nearly as bad as one might think).

It’s weird that this has remained so obscure, because it’s the first movie in a collection of Finnish movies released a couple of years ago. It’s also possible that the collection didn’t sell very well, because a collection of well over 200 movies no-one has heard of isn’t the easiest sell.

2. The Bogie Man (1992)

No recollection of what this is or even where I would have seen this. It’s highly unlikely that I would have given this a score accidentally. It does star Robbie Coltrane, but this was a TV-movie with 25 votes. It’s apparently based on a comic book, which I’ve never heard of, doesn’t include a plot description on the page and the two user reviews didn’t really ring any bells.

I would find this mysterious, but I bet there’s a lot of movies I have no recollection of.

3. Hilfe, Hilfe, die Globolinks! or Help! Help! the Globolinks! (1969)

Compared to the two previous movies, this an outright hit with a whole 39 votes. Imagine that? This is a German TV movie with great ambitions. It’s about a school, which has to fight aliens attacking them and they find that the only way to do so is through the power of music. Quite boring, actually, but the alien designs are great, even if they are quite simple. They did what they could with 60s TV budgets.

4. Mobile Horror

Another movie I have no recollection of. It’s from 2010 and has a whopping 86 votes. I did find a description by the Finnish Public Broadcasting Company, which tells me that this is based on a play and is about a company fighting for it’s existence in the world of mobile phones. Sounds quite horrible and unimaginative. I’ve given it 5/10.

5. Kuningas jolla ei ollut sydäntä (1982)

I actually thought this would have been a bigger thing, since it was well-known in my childhood. At least I though it was. We are getting to triple digits here with 116 votes. It’s an interesting attempt at a fairytale, but when I saw it as an adult, you could see the seems quite clearly as the structure is simply awful, so maybe it’s rightly obscure.

The name is roughly “King without a heart”, although the Finnish name is grammatically incorrect. It’s a about a king, whose wife dies, so he tries to rid himself of emotions and does so by removing his heart at the behest of his prime minister.

6. The Tony Ferrino Phenomenon (1997)

I wanted to say this was early Steve Coogan, but actually I think he was pretty well known when this TV movie aired. Apparently, with 123 votes, he wasn’t big enough to support this.

This was about the life and career of Tony Ferrino, a fictitious musician. Not that I remember much beyond that.

7. Doggiewoggiez! Poochiewoochiez! (2012)

A whopping 124 votes. Ever seen Holy Mountain by Jodorowsky? Ever thought about remaking it by using various pieces of footage about dogs? Well, you should’ve done it sooner, because this is that. Yes. I’m not kidding.

8. Final Flesh (2009)

So, apparently there are these companies that make tailored porn. I guess I shouldn’t’ve been surprised. You send them a script and they do it for a price. This movie is… well, they didn’t send them porn scripts exacctly (although there’s some nudity involved), but the producers sent out three of these scripts with a loosely common theme and had these porn troupes produce them.

Number of votes: 140.

9. Gipeun bam gabjagi or Suddenly at Midnight (1981)

This one I saw quite recently, so I remember it quite well. It’s about a housewife, who is obsessed with her new maid and her maid’s weird doll. She is afraid that her maid is having an affair with her husband.

This is an interesting movie. It was shot at a time in South Korea when they were dismantling certain censorship laws, so this goes for the sexy. It’s just that it does that quite awkwardly, often not quite knowing where to ponit the camera. It’s still pretty good. Probably the best on this list, although strangely obscure at 143 votes.

10. Kalevala – uusi aika (2013)

One would think that eluding to Finnish national epic of Kalevala would garner at least some sort of viewership. ‘Uusi aika’ means ‘new era’. It’s about the Finnish mythological characters in a modern setting. It jsut happens that everything is poorly executed. It also stars the worst excuse for an actor, Tommi Eronen. I don’t know why he keeps getting work, when there are actual good actors in this country as well.

I actually got this from Lauri, but it has become sort of a joke within the Guild, where having the worst score in our movie quiz means you have to watch this movie and write a review of it. Maybe we should stop this practice, as it could be seen as inhumane.

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