Best of the Worst: The Vineyard, The Big Sweat, and Scarlet Warning

TL;DR

The Best of the Worst crew watches three obscure bad movies directed by James Hong, Uwe Boll-adjacent Ulli Lommel, and cult oddity Palmer Rocky.

Key Points

• 1.The Vineyard was directed by legendary character actor James Hong. Known for Everything Everywhere All at Once and Chinatown, Hong also starred in the film as Dr. Elson Po, a 700-year-old man who harvests blood from young actors to stay young.
• 2.The Vineyard's plot involves blood wine made from a convoluted recipe. Po mixes 50/50 blood and wine, grows grapes over buried zombies, and scrapes a stolen jade amulet into powder as an ingredient.
• 3.James Hong lures young actors and models to his island mansion under the guise of a film audition. The irony noted by the hosts is that the actual audition scene is never shown on screen despite being the film's central premise.
• 4.The Vineyard features zombies that can be temporarily stopped by throwing 'sacred earth' on them. The sacred earth wears off after about 30 minutes and is overpowered by Po's imprisoned mother screaming from the attic.
• 5.A martial arts expert character is introduced but never performs martial arts. He only walks strangely, fails to open doors properly, gets scratched by Po's mother, and then disappears entirely from the film's third act.
• 6.The Big Sweat was directed by German avant-garde filmmaker Ulli Lommel. Lommel started making German art films, worked with Andy Warhol, then in the 1980s pivoted to making low-budget trash films.
• 7.The Big Sweat stars Robert Zadar of Maniac Cop fame as an FBI agent. The film's central gimmick is a 45-minute car chase sequence that was largely stolen footage from the 1971 film Gone in 60 Seconds.
• 8.The Big Sweat contains only about 12 minutes of original footage. The rest is roughly 68 minutes of car chase footage from the 1970s, creating jarring continuity errors where characters shift between '90s fashion and '70s sideburns and bell-bottoms.
• 9.The film's FBI scenes are locationally challenged, never filmed in any official-looking building. Agents receive missions at a Pepsi machine at a rest stop, conduct briefings in decrepit shacks, and the final agent appears living out of a van in a tank top.
• 10.Scarlet Warning 666 was written, produced, directed, and starred in by Palmer Rocky. Originally titled It Happened One Weekend, it was shot in Dallas in 1974, laughed off screen at its premiere, then reworked and retitled multiple times over decades.
• 11.Palmer Rocky plays twin brothers caught up in Satanic occult rituals on a country estate. The film was rescued from obscurity by Grindhouse Releasing and issued its home video debut, with Rocky adding an original rock soundtrack featuring his own vocals.
• 12.The hosts note all three films share an aura-filmmaker quality reminiscent of their legendary 'Horse' episode. The group unanimously agreed the real bugs crawling from a mouth in The Vineyard were the single genuinely scary moment across all three films watched.