You know you’ve got a stinker on your hands when the argument starts about what Medusa’s sisters were named.

That is the case with a 1964 Hammer film, “The Gorgon,” which fails to grip despite starring the dynamic duo of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing.

I watched it with my friend Steve, who is precisely the sort of person who is going to say “Wait a minute, I don’t remember a Gorgon named Megaera.”

He did get off a good one, as the dopey hero goes back to the evil castle where he has already been zapped by the Gorgon once.

“Well, that’s a gorgone conclusion,” said Steve, planting his feet on the coffee table and looking pleased with himself.

Hahahaha.

That’s as good as it got.

Two coils, for good atmosphere and snaky-headed Gorgon.

With nothing else to do except watch meaningless college football on TV, I went fishing on Saturday, Jan. 2.

“Wait, what?” you exclaim. “Isn’t it cold and snowy? Aren’t the streams iced over?”

The answers: Yes, a bit; not really; and no.

We had a minor snow storm last week that dumped at most a couple of inches of slushy stuff, and it is pretty much gone.

The Housatonic is running high, but the feeder streams are in nice shape.

And of course the Farmington is a year-round river with a regulated flow.

I chose to clamber up Sages Ravine and throw little streamers at brook trout. Big streamers, too.

And in the eternal quest to do things in an unorthodox manner, I rigged up a three-fly cast with a Madame X at the top and two bead head size 12 Wooly Buggers (olive and black) beneath.

That wouldn’t be remarkable except I was using a seven-foot four-weight rod in a itty-bitty mountain brook for itty-bitty wild trout.

It worked.

Later on I used a bigger streamer and hooked (but did not land) a substantial fish for this water — maybe 10 or 12 inches.

Soon enough it will snow and make this sort of thing impractical, but it sure was fun to get out on the second day of the year and catch fish.

 

 

Of the many things that were awful about the late 1980s and early 1990s, let us consider the “Witchcraft” films, and the many attempts to replicate “Animal House.”

“Witchcraft II: The Roman Numerals Begin” (aka “Witchcraft II: The Temptress”) features a threadbare plot about witchcraft, stupid teenagers, and Delia Sheppard as The Temptress, who anticipates Miley Cyrus in the final scene by twerking, insofar as twerking is possible while casting evil spells and clad in a tight dress and garter belt.

It takes an awful long time for the Temptress’ dress to come undone. A competent temptress could have seduced an entire regional school district in the time it takes this gal to throw some pixie dust on a dopey parent.

Nice incestuous touches though, and high-waisted jeans.

 

“Fraternity Demon” answers the question “What happens if you chant ancient spells during a frat party?”

Why, a scantily-clad female demon shows up.

Depending on your level of intoxication, this can go either way. The stone-cold sober computer nerd  gets yanked by his crank, if you get my drift. So from his point of view…

But fun-loving Tony has the time of his mortal life, in an extended scene  underneath Isha, the demon (played in a rather detached manner by the immortal Trixxie Bowie).

This scene has some wonderful dialogue:

Isha: More? More?

Tony: Uggh. Aagh.

Isha: Oh, oh, oh. It’s been centuries.

Tony: Grrr. Uggh.

Isha: (Wriggling) More? More?

 

So while the Witchcraft flick accurately captures some of the horror of the time — the feathered hair, the acid-washed denim — the makers of “Fraternity Demon” actually thought about their movie a little.

One coil for the former, and three for the latter.

 

 

Top: Belcebu, the world’s worst Satanic rock band getting down while the audience enjoys themselves in unique ways. Bottom left: Johnny smacks around a martial arts babe while a lesbian blood sister does calisthenics. Bottom right: A slow night in the dungeon of Count Regulu, after he delivers one of his patented 15-minute revenge lectures.

It looked promising: the immortal Christopher Lee in an adaptation of “The Pit and the Pendulum;” made in Germany, in 1967, perhaps trying to out-hammer the Hammer Studios in girls ‘n’ gore.

What could go wrong?

Well, everything.

Just the coach ride to Count Regula’s castle takes about 15 minutes of screen time.

And once they get there, the count seems determined to talk everybody to death.

As I scour the offerings on Amazon Prime, I realize there is a reason these films are being given away, in effect.

It’s because they are lousy.

Another case in point: The incomprehensible “Belcebu: Diablos Lesbos” (which even I can figure out), or “Belcebu: Tomame, soy tu puta del infierno” which is a little trickier but boils down to “Take me, Beelzebub, I’m your bitch from hell.”

This exciting Spanish horror film is shot in the dark. I had to check the settings on the TV to make sure I hadn’t set it on super-dim by mistake.

There’s this junkie hooker and she goes to jail for a while and when she comes out she goes back to her old ways but in the meantime her old squeeze Toni has become Belcebu the death horror Satan rock star and they have a party and there’s sex and devil stuff and really horrible devil rock and fat businessmen in their shorts and the Devil in the bathtub and heroin and everything burns up and it’s in Spanish with half-hearted subtitles.

Rounding out this Trio of Tripe is “Blood Sisters of Lesbian Sin,” which stars a guy who looks like a tall Tom Cruise, minus the Scientology, and some witch sisters from Golgotha County, only one of whom appears to be of the lesbitatious persuasion.

This film was shot with decent lighting and features eight distinct sets of breasts.

Plus lines like this: “Please don’t hurt me any more. I can give pleasure as well as pain.”

The last two flicks are distributed by Troma, but on Amazon, at least, the viewer is spared the idiotic Lloyd Kaufman introduction that the DVD won’t allow you to skip.

Taken together these three turkeys get two coils.

 

 

“The Wild Women of Wongo” (1958) is the film that answers the question “What if there were two tribes living on two islands and the men on the island of Wongo were ugly brutes but their women were comely, and the men of the island of Goona were all Adonises but the women looked like Boris Yeltsin with bosoms?”

That’s the set-up. Add a dragon cult, a third tribe of ape men, and a parrot, and you’re ready for some alliterative fun.

We’re talking high priestess with her very own temple. Men of Wongo, looking like today’s hipsters. Men of Goona, looking like they are waiting for Bruce and Geoff to get back with the amyl nitrate poppers. Women of Goona, looking like the staff at a Grand Union in upstate New York.

And the Wild Women of Wongo, the leader of whom looks like she might be Honeysuckle Weeks’ mother.

Parrot as Greek chorus. Stock footage of alligator, as god. Girl wrestling alligator. Worship of rubber alligator on a stick. Ape men, looking like Goona men with mud smeared on their faces. Spears. The worst example of white people dancing ever captured on film. Bewildering. Two and a half coils.

Wait for a nasty October day — raining, about 45 degrees all day, and be sure to wake up at 5:30 a.m. with the window open, a puddle on the floor, and the covers kicked off.

If you can meet these or similar conditions, you are ready to make beef stew.

Get up, shower, shave carefully, and dress properly because you have to go interview people while the stew is, er, stewing.

Obtain a couple of pounds of stew meat, a bag of carrots, a big onion, a 32 ounce thing of vegetable stock, and six red potatoes.

Back at the ranch, take your jacket off, roll up your sleeves, light a cigar (optional), and get a skillet hot.

Put some oil in the s., and some chopped up onion, and let it rip for a moment. Meanwhile you can peel and chop the carrots and don’t peel and chop the spuds.

Stick the meat in and brown it. That means cook it a little but not too much. Dump it in the crock pot, along with the chopped up stuff. Put in all the drippings. Add the stock, some garlic, and whatever spices you want.

Now here is the crucial thing: put the crock pot on the lowest cooking setting. Not the highest. Not the “keep warm” setting either, if your gizmo has one.

You are not going to touch the thing until you get home, several hours later.

This method is foolproof.

The Scary Nun. She is onscreen for five seconds.

I finally got around to watching “The Devil Inside,” a “Blair Witch” type of “found footage” flick that has been declared the Worst Movie of All Time by the kind of mouth-breathers who worry about what Kanye tweeted about Taylor.

The film is a supposed documentary that follows a young woman to Rome, where her mother is being treated for either demonic possession or serious whack-a-doodleness, take your pick.

As with any such setup, there are long stretches of boredom as the actors utter dramatic lines such as “We have to talk” and “Are you all right?”

But the actual demon stuff is pretty good, even if the demon uses all the lines that were cut out of “The Exorcist.”

Some demon action 

Two things enraged the couch critics:

A deus ex machina ending, in which everybody probably dies in a car crash

And a title at the end advising viewers, if they want to get the final low-down, to go to a website that is — surprise — a marketing tool.

Why these strategies bother people so much is a mystery to me. The car crash is no stupider than the rest of the flick, so why, all of a sudden, has the willing suspension of disbelief gone out the window? Hell, a car is a machine. How about props for being true to ancient Greek theater tradition?

And as for the website that turns out to be a marketing entity…what exactly were people expecting? Golly, a website used to sell things you don’t need or want. What an intrusion. Like the biggest rock band in the world getting slammed for giving away an album of new material — and clogging up everybody’s iPhone, making it difficult to follow what Taylor tweeted about Kanye.

Worst Movie of All Time? Are you nuts? “The Devil Inside” is a half-decent thriller that requires extensive use of the fast-forward button to get through the “acting.”

“Are you all right?” “Wait, I say that.” “Say what?” “Are you all right?” “Wait, I say that.”

It is no “Manos: Hands of Fate,” shot in the dark outside El Paso with a limping star who can’t speak and whose pants are falling down.

It is no “Bloodsucking Freaks,” with an Italian cop movie grafted onto a hideous tale of a real-life Theatre of the Macabre, creating an extended non-sequitur.

And it is certainly no “Deathstalker II,” in which a frat boy in a furry loincloth takes on a wizard who was cut by the Village People for being too gay.

Love it or, as is far more likely, hate it, but don’t try to elevate “The Devil Inside” into the Pantheon of Poop. It is not nearly bad enough.

You can see strikes — and my slow reactions. I got better after I warmed up a bit.

Sage’s Ravine — water very low, with stretches of dry streambed. Kept going — the water was running downstream so it’s coming from somewhere, right? Got this brookie from what appeared to be dead pool. Caught a bunch in here a month ago.

Upstream, the water was running again. Low, but running. Must be a lot of underground springs and seeps and whatnot. This brook trout came out of this pool, and a bitch of a cast it was, too, if I do say so. I was squatting like a baseball catcher, which at age 53 is not as easy as it once was.

Meanwhile, along the banks of the mighty Housatonic, it is smallmouth season. I still don’t know much about smallmouth bass, but I am improving. This one took the brown Wooly Bugger I put on in lieu of a crayfish pattern.