We're Your Parents [2025]

In our exploration of vertical media, we decided to try a completely different genre: horror. This film is very short at only about a half hour but it took us nearly an hour just to find the version of this film showing all the parts in the correct order. It was ultimately kind of a waste of time because while we got a few laughs, it really wasn't worth the effort.

A girl returns home for Thanksgiving with her parents who are acting weird. They give her cranberry sauce that seems to drug her and when she wakes up they are still acting weird. She pieces together that there is something going on in the basement, and the reveal is that her real parents are tied up there with their eyes sewn shut and the stand-ins are evil clones who wanted to use her DNA to make a new baby. That is the level of explanation we get. It's kind of Coraline but lazier. The girl's dads die and she defeats the evil mom. The end.

We probably would have been better off with A Boyfriend For The Homophobic Alpha or Cry Your Eyes Out On My Tomb or something.

Spoon Rating: 4 

Riki-Oh: The Legend Of Ricky [1991]

This post is late. We watched this film on Monday, September 21st but I forgot to write a post. Thankfully, while I forgot the specifics, this movie is impossible to forget on a broad level. This film is apparently part of the "splatter" genre, something we did not know or expect going in and it lives up to that title.

The film takes place in a capitalist hellscape version of China where prisons have been privatized. For some reason, this means that they are just violent as hell. People routinely lose body parts or just get completed vivisected for being part of the wrong gang. Our hero, Ricky, is in for manslaughter after killing the mafia boss responsible for his girlfriend's death and no one likes him so he just martial arts his way through them but he has the special gift of super strength which basically means he explodes people with his fists. He fights gang members, minor bosses, and finally the warden who morphs into a big monster at the end but it doesn't help. Probably the most insane death in the whole film involves a guy committing seppuku in shame after losing to Ricky but decides in the process to try to strangle him with his intestine. That's the kind of movie this is.

Being that we do live in a capitalist hellscape heavily privatized prison system here in the USA, I can say that the most unrealistic thing about this film was that all the horrific violence was allowed without a way to monetize it. Crazy murders for no reason is unrealistic, but crazy murders for profit? Absolutely likely. We're only about ten years away from Chain Gang All-Stars.

Spoon Rating: 6*

*It's got a lot of funny moments but it is so deeply unpleasant to watch that much gore that I don't recommend watching it more than once unless you're into that kind of thing.

You Belong With Me [2024]

We've watched a lot of vertical dramas but this one was a triumph for a really unique reason: it had a genuinely likeable main character. This probably shouldn't be a triumph, but in general vertical dramas really rely on creating female main characters who are meant to be one-dimensional figures of pathos. They are so comically mistreated that you are supposed to feel bad for them, but they are so willing to just lay down and let life happen to them that you get quickly annoyed. This main character certainly has bad things happen to her, but she doesn't just lay down. She snaps back, she gets revenge, and she is confident in her ability to run her own life. The actress who plays her actually played her like a person. While it made the movie less bad, it made it far more enjoyable. 

The plot of the film is pretty conventional for a vertical drama all things considered. Kristine Wilson, the main character, decides to sleep with her fiancée Eric Lockwood's uncle who's the same age as him, Henry Lockwood. This is revenge for Eric sleeping with her adopted sister Giana. The even more complicated part is that Eric is her boss and Henry is his boss. Kristine doesn't try to hide what she's doing and asks Eric to please just break off the engagement for both their sakes but he refuses, using her family needing his as the reason. She decides to tell Henry about all the embezzling Eric has done and gets his job. Kristine and Henry continue to see each other casually, but they are functionally together even if they don't fully declare it until the end. The only real complications are Henry's fiancee, Nicole, who isn't really into this engagement anyway and takes the break up completely fine, and Henry's father who has seemingly arranged all these marriages and wants them to go according to plan. There's another plot going on about the search for the rich Roberts family's long lost sister and after some DNA tests it is revealed that Giana, not Kristine, is the actual Wilson sister. Kristine has a bit of an identity crisis, but she accepts that she can only really rely on herself. The Lockwood patriarch doesn't like Kristine at this point and wants her gone so she throws a Hail Mary and claims to be the long lost Roberts sister. She met the Roberts brother at an auction and he's totally cool to help her out, but they are both surprised to find that she actually is his sister. In the end, Kristine and Henry get engaged.

As I mentioned, Kristine is actually a really well-developed and likable character played by an actress who really is doing a good job. This is contrasted heavily with the unavoidable vertical drama bad movie qualities: the silly cookie cutter plot, the melodramatic acting from other people, and the low production quality. One thing that makes this movie really stick out is actually the bad music and sound effects, which often add comedy to scenes that are really not meant to be funny, including a sexual assault scene. 

Spoon Rating: 6*

*This one was kind of hard to rate because it definitely has the trappings of a bad movie, but because of the strength of the main character, it's also enjoyable in a non-bad movie way and we got some laughs that we actually intended by the film. Therefore the Spoon Rating isn't super high, but it is a high recommend, especially if you've seen other vertical dramas.

Stickfighter [1994]

It's been a while since we've seen a solid martial arts bad movie, and this one was extremely fun. Although the lead actor did not direct it, he did write it and that was somehow apparent from the beginning because it has vanity project written all over it.

We start with our main character and his best friend, who are both cops, making a drug bust that ends with them shooting a bunch of guys but also the best friend gets shot and dies. The better cops show up and the main character quits because he's too much of a loose cannon who doesn't play by the rules. This is further emphasized by a series of scenes of him fighting every rando who threatens him while he hangs out with his best friend's sister and the designated love interest of the film. She also tells the audience that he has a ton of fighting skills and is specifically called "stick man" for his ability to fight with sticks. They go to get info from main guy's dad's friend from 'Nam who owns a strip club, which seems to just be an excuse to have more than one topless woman in the film. Turns out one of the guys killed in the bust was the son of some big druglord who now wants them both dead. Main guy and love interest don't have sex in a hotel room where they are sharing a bed although it's not clear why she wants to or why he says no. The next morning during a fight scene, the main guy throws a guy over a banister and uses him like a human sled down the stairs. It's amazing. There are some side plot moments with the cops who apparently know he's going around killing people without being a cop anymore but it's cool? Also two of the cops have more romantic tension than the main couple, and I want to know their story. Eventually the goons come for the strip club owner and kill him while the main guy and love interest have loud sex upstairs. Main guy schedules the final showdown on the phone and proceeds to work through like 15 guys in various silly ways. 

I know the plot sounds kind of generic, but this film is special. The sheer amount of people he fights is absurd and absurdly paced. The lead actor is as wooden as a door frame. The dialogue is full of too on-the-nose lines or quips that aren't actually quippy. There's a scene that only exists to be transphobic and plenty of sprinklings of misogyny too. And the film ends with the big bad dead in a car that explodes as our main guy is walking away. You did it. You made an action film.

Spoon Rating: 7 

Doting Snake Lord [2026]

So let's get this out of the way: he's kind of doting but he is neither a snake nor a lord. But honestly? The lack of consistency is really par for the course with this AI vertical drama.

We get immediately dropped into the action as two dragons who look like people with wings and tails are giving birth. They are sisters, I guess, from different dragon levels, Elena being a gold dragon (the top tier) and Veronica being a green dragon. The question is who will give birth to a golden egg, thus earning the title of mother of dragons and presumably providing an heir or something. Both give birth to golden eggs but then somehow Veronica switches them and terns Elena's black. She's evil and also got pregnant by sleeping with Elena's husband, Grayson. She then kicks Elena into a pit that causes her to go back to three days earlier so she can redo her fate. This is all revealed in the first five minutes and the plot really slows from there. Elena denies a marriage to Grayson and instead decides to go have sex 1500 times for three days straight with a lowly black dragon who no one cares about. When birthing day comes on that third day, Veronica gives birth to a gold egg and Elena gives birth to nine black eggs and gets made fun of and called a slut. For the next 50 minutes the same thing happens over and over again. Questions are asked about what will come out of the eggs. People say the eggs are hatching, but they still don't. The black dragon says he's actually a primordial dragon or a dragon god and Grayson doesn't believe him even as he proves it again and again. The black dragon is called small, lowly, or trash and Elena is called a slut. Veronica says that if Elena doesn't give birth to a gold dragon, she wins and Elena gets to be fed to her spawn. Black dragon says, "Don't touch my children!" Repeat and repeat. Finally, after the least fun edging ever, the babies are born and Veronica's is a wyvern, even lower than a dragon because she's secretly a wyvern herself and the black eggs produce a bunch of basic amphibians and reptiles that then morph into Spyro clones who are basically everyone's gods now. Elena and black dragon go off to bang more and make more gods or something.

This film falls into that weird category of definitely worth watching, but it would be agonizing to watch a second time just because of how repetitive it is. The AI used on it is definitely worse than last week so there is a lot of fun to be had as the side characters change looks completely three times, the voice of the annoying bird sidekick shifts from male to female, and sometimes lines just make no sense. "Wyvern" is pronounced differently every single time. You could also drink every time they say "dragon" and then you only have to watch the first ten minutes before you are completely comatose. When you wake up, someone can just tell you the end and you missed all the nonsense.

Spoon Rating: 7 

After The Sacrifice Her Family Regrets [2026]

So Sarah has messed up her Facebook recommends again in the name of discovering yet another level to the vertical drama rabbit hole: AI vertical dramas. She already has a lengthy list (including some sort of Hades/Persephone retelling that I'm fully ready to be annoyed at), but since movie night was unexpected today and I just got back from a nearly six week trip, we decided to try something familiar. Very familiar in fact. 

After The Sacrifice Her Family Regrets is beat for beat the plot of our first vertical drama 30 Years Frozen, 3 Brothers Regret. So aside from AI, what makes it different? They're elves. That's it. Instead of being frozen for science for 30 years, our martyred main character sacrifices herself to be tortured by demons for 300 years to save her kingdom. She has a pet dragon instead of a dog. She gets locked in a dungeon instead of a basement. There's still a blind brother who she gives her eyes to, there's still the evil "sister" who caused the brothers to turn on the main character, there's still the moment after she wakes up when she doesn't remember them. It's the same exact film to the point of a lawsuit, if that would even be allowed here.

The debate we ended up having about this film was whether it was more enjoyable if you have seen the original film it ripped off or if it would be better to go into it cold. It's hard for us to ever know, but we did come to one conclusion: it's probably better to watch it with real actors. Ethical issues aside, the scenery-chewing is just so much more entertaining when it's real people. Sure, one of the elf brothers looks exactly like Legolas, but his emoting can be wild and he's still just a digital creation. It's more special to watch a real human try to act in these films.

Spoon Rating: 6 

Charmed To Meet You [2026] & Charmed To Meet You Too [2026]

Originally we watched these on June 22nd.

In the same vein as that Lifetime drama-esque film produced by KFC, we have two short vertical dramas produced by Crocs. They're both rom-coms with the first one about a girl putting jibbits on some guy's crocs as a way of flirting and the second one following her meeting someone else after the first guy accidentally washed off her number and couldn't find her. Don't worry. He also wears crocs. Both films were kind of dumb in the Hallmark movie kind of way but even more so because flirting with jibbits is a wildly expensive choice.

Spoon Rating: 4