High Impact Hand Safety & The Prince of Egypt [1998]

We had a series of shorts this evening. First, we started off with a new classic: High Impact Hand Safety. This 18 minute safety training video is the funniest gore movie we've seen in a minute. The film is a safety training video that is 90% recreation of brutal factory accidents with the same scream and a lot of prosthetics.  Just when you think they are done, there are more. You start to get almost frustrated at how stupid people are the more you watch them clean machines without shutting them down first. Still we all picked favorites afterwards. As a companion piece, we also watched a German parody YouTube video called "Forklift Operator Klaus" that is very similar but intentionally over the top. You'll get laughs from both.

Spoon Rating: 9

After that, we decided to do another Dingo Pictures, this one being The Prince of Egypt. It was extremely minimal on the details of the story, which Erik's Catholic upbringing and Adam's religion minor were annoyed by. The thing with Dingo Pictures is that there's definitely a sweet spot of how many you can watch before they get pretty repetitive and we are probably past that point. Most Dingo Pictures are good, but they are all good for the same general reasons. This one is mostly notable for having some really solid smash cuts. The first was of Moses calmly saying, "I'm going crazy" before we get a wide shot of him sitting in front of the burning bush and that's our intro to God, who looks like Ron Pearlman. The other solid one involved the Egyptian armies first chasing with high energy music and then just a bunch of soldiers walking casually with no music at all.

Spoon Rating: 5*

*May be higher or lower based on how many Dingos you've already seen.

We also watched some commercials by Jim "The Hammer" Shapiro. Well, worth looking into if you've got two minutes.

Exit Wounds [2001]

The dice decided that we would have to deal with another Steven Seagal and a rapper movie although this one was a lot more convoluted than the last one. Seagal is a loose canon cop who doesn't play by the rules and gets sent to anger management for a hot second where he meets Tom Arnold. Meanwhile, DMX is a drug dealer except he's actually a dot com millionaire who is only pretending to be a drug dealer to try to expose some crooked Detroit cops (and get his brother out of jail, it seems?). The film also has Michael Jai White who Adam was very excited to see fight Seagal as they are two martial artists only to have them sword fight instead. The film seems to set up a potential love interest with the police commissioner but then she unceremoniously dies in a car crash two-thirds of the way through with no romantic set up anyway. This movie has some writing issues. It was at times completely incomprehensible. We got a few laughs with some good dummy work and weird directing, but this movie was far more painful than fun. 

Spoon Rating: 2

Serial Mom [1994]

It didn't take us long to figure out what we were getting into with this movie. While we all settled in for a bad movie, we were quickly treated to a title card that told us we were about to watch a John Waters movie and we immediately realized our mistake. John Waters doesn't make bad movies. He makes camp, black comedy, weird films, but definitely not bad movies unless you simply don't get him. Either way, we decided to settle in for a good night.

The plot follows Kathleen Turner as a neurotic housewife who goes on a murdering spree for often the most minor of offenses. She starts by just phone harassing a neighbor for cutting her off in a parking lot, then progresses to murdering her son's math teacher for his criticism of her parenting, offing her daughter's ex, killing a couple for interrupting her husband's weekend, and a few others. She is caught and brought to trial where she manages to get herself free on many technicalities, only to then murder a juror for wearing white shoes after Labor Day. 

It's not a bad movie at all. It's at least three stars out of five on a regular rating. Not my favorite John Waters (that's Cry Baby) but definitely a good time. 

REWATCH: Samurai Cop [1991]

Last Monday we rewatched the legendary Samurai Cop.

Read my original review here. 

They Feed [2005]

After two weeks of unremarkable films, we were starting to get a little worried. we've got a stack to get through still and a lot of them don't look promising. This one was immediately mysterious. Who is They? I think we could all guess what they're feeding on at least. We all decided to place beats on the They. Adam and Sarah guessed vampires, Kay guessed zombies, and Erik changed his initial vampire vote to ants pretty quickly. When we saw the DVD menu, we thought vampires was correct, but Erik was actually the closest.

As you can see from the girl on the left, this is very much a mid-2000s movie. The music consisted of two bands the director probably knew, one trying to be Tool and the other trying to be some generic rock band of the era. After an opening of people dying in the woods, we get our main crew. We have pink scarf girl over there who is an over-the-top annoyance, following her more reasonable boyfriend into the woods. They meet up with a couple who are either siblings or platonic friends, and a couple where the guy is a douche who's blackmailing his reasonable girlfriend because he knows she slept with the boss for a job. Quickly the assholes have sex and the reasonables flirt while third wheel guy gets killed by . . . worms. They're consistently wiggling (probably from bad CGI) and have langolier teeth and I love them. We tried very hard to figure out why these people are in the woods and it seems they are out here looking for a crashed plane they never find. Only far later do we get the information that a bunch of them are scientists. Slowly, the worms track down the rest of them leaving the reasonable couple for last. At the presumed climax, the worm chase seen gets intercut with a park ranger wandering around to gentle music and it is the biggest example of delayed gratification ever. The end of the film is actually quite strange. We are taken to a new year's party their (presumable) boss is hosting when he finds out they all died and seems to imply that he planned it. Then, the one girl who was not coupled emerges from a hole in the ground: half girl, half worm. A worm mermaid. Freeze frame.

Overall, this movie is worth a watch. It can drag a bit during the relationship drama stuff but the worms themselves are so good, and there are a lot of beautiful examples of lazy film making. If you had given us a camera in 2005, we probably could have made something at least on this level. 

Spoon Rating: 5

Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation [2004]

Again we did a dice roll (well, Jade did but since she's a month old we just put the D20 in her hand and waited for it to drop) and this time we got Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation. I barely even want to talk about this movie. Sarah ditched to work on her doctoral thesis and when she came in a little later and asked how it was the review was, "It's so bad that we're talking over it and Adam doesn't care." 

We already expected this movie to lack the satire of the original and just get turned into a dumb military movie but after some completely incomprehensible fighting, the movie just follows a bunch of soldiers stuck in a building with some infected by the bugs. It's very horny in a very boring way as everyone slowly gets infected. The pregnant soldier escapes while the big damn hero stays behind and becomes the highlight of recruiting videos. The movie pays vague lip service to the original with some rando saying that the woman's baby will be good for the grinder, but otherwise, this movie doesn't even try to have any meaning. It's just a bad The Thing. 

Don't bother. Just go rewatch the original.

Spoon Rating: 2

Jurassic Attack [2012]

Or maybe it's called Attack of the Dinosaurs? The box said one thing and the menu said another. It doesn't matter. 

This movie is presumably the brainchild of a bunch of guys who liked Jurassic Park, Predator, and the Halo games and it really shows. It's got a cliché plot of a bunch of US soldiers (many with non-US accents) going into the Amazon to rescue a scientist from one of the locals who's trying to stop? get? a bioweapon. They find dinosaurs on the way back as well as a lost scientist who has been living among them for five years and is in full on delusional Grizzly Man mode. It's pretty mercifully short at under an hour and a half but a lot of the scenes just featuring the characters are boring with dialogue not weird or poorly acted enough to be interesting (although we did invent a gay subplot based on the weird tension between the main hero and main villain). The real prize is the dinosaurs which are rendered in horribly cheap CGI and an absolute delight every time. The only other curiosity about the film is how abruptly it ends, but it's not really funny so much as just mildly surprising.

I can't recommend this film just for the CGI though. It's a pass for sure. Interestingly though, for the next 18 weeks unless something else comes up or we do a rewatch as a palette cleanser, we are going to be working through DVDs that Adam and Sarah have just had for years that we haven't gotten to yet. We rolled a D20 for this one so we'll just have to see what we get next week. 

Spoon Rating: 3