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 

The Forbidden Dance [1990]

It's been a while since we've seen a good classic bad movie. This recommendation came from a friend of a friend, and she knew what she was talking about. This film has everything: a nonsense plot, a didactic environmentalist message, a lead actress starting her career who will go onto much better things, a shaman, an actually good theme song, mixed race John Waters, sex trafficking, and, of course, lots of gyrating. If you liked Dirty Dancing . . . this will probably still suck. It's awesome.

Our plot starts with a bunch of native people in the rain forest of Brazil dancing and doing capoeira to a song that just says "capoeira" over and over again. That's kind of the vibe of all the music that isn't the theme song. There's another song later on that's just the word "lambada" over and over again because that's the name of the dance. Suddenly their festivities are ruined by a bulldozer driven by a white man in a cowboy hat. He has bought the forest and is here to destroy it. In response, the chief's daughter, the whitest person in the village and the only one who speaks English, decides to go to LA to confront this man about him destroying her land. That seems to be about the extent of her plan, but she does bring her shaman with her who has an insane howl. The princess, Nisa, is played by Laura Harring, then know as the first Hispanic Miss USA but to us she will always be Rita in Mulholland Drive, my favorite David Lynch movie. She is found sleeping near a fountain by a Hispanic maid who gets her a job working for a rich family in Beverly Hills. They have a lazy son about her age who only cares about going to the club to dance and so after he sees her dancing in her room, he takes her out. Many racist comments from his friends and others ensue because they've apparently never seen a woman who doesn't have blond hair before. When the parents find out and discuss plans to fire her, Nisa runs away and goes into a club that she thinks might be a place she could get a dancing job but it's basically a front of a brothel and she's immediately scouted for sex trafficking. Rich Boy's friends find her there and after harassing her, Rich Boy goes there to save her. For some reason they decide that the solution to her homeland being deforested is to win a dance competition so she can use the platform to call out the company destroying her home. Did you forget that this was about saving the rain forest? Because the movie seemed to. 

We get a short training montage where we are treated to eyesore after eyesore of 80s men's fashion contrasted with 80s women's fashion that is surprisingly okay. Then suddenly we are at the competition where the only competitors seem to be Rich Boy's Racist Ex with a crunchy frizz halo and her partner who are kind of better than our leads. In spite of this, the leads win and Nisa finally has an ugly 80s hairstyle after managing to go the whole movie as the only woman with good hair. After winning but before their official performance, Nisa is kidnapped by Evil Cowboy Hat Capitalist after a tip off from the Racist Ex. He takes her to a club he seemingly plans on running, puts her onstage in her sex trafficking dress and asks her to do her sexy dance for him. We were confused why he was doing this - personal pleasure? humiliation? - but it seemed like he was just confused about her purposes in America and was offering her an audition for a dancing job. She uses the dance to seduce and trick him so she can escape with Rich Boy. They make it to their performance, which is going to be broadcast along with a band called Kid Creole (the John Waters look-alike) and The Coconuts, but Rich Boy hurts his ankle in their escape. Thankfully the shaman shows up with Nisa's father who has just arrived in America and fixes the ankle with snake venom. Sure, solve one problem with a bigger problem. Makes sense. They dance and when it's over Nisa talks about how they all need to boycott the evil company destroying her home. And no rain forest was ever destroyed again.

From the wildly different levels of conflict to the fashion to the melodrama, this film is a delight from start to finish. I will be unironically rocking out to "Lambada" by Kaoma.

Spoon Rating: 6 

My Five Aunts Have Superpowers [2026]

This Chinese vertical drama is extremely poorly named. There are five aunts (in spite of the poster only showing four) and there are superpowers, but the aunts are not the ones with them. Also somewhat amusingly, the version of this film we watched sometimes had the segments out of order and we ended up watching the very beginning at the end and it did clear up some confusion so I will explain it as it is supposed to be watched.

A guy gets an invite from one of his mom's distant cousins to move in. There's a misunderstanding that he's an intruder when he goes into the house and he gets beat up by his hot aunts. Things are resolved and in his new bedroom he finds a pair of broken glasses that activate a supercomputer that will give him superpowers every time he saves one of his aunts. Thankfully for his stats maxing, his aunts get into issues a lot. The film is mostly a series of vignettes of him using his powers to solve his aunt's issues and getting more powers: saving Doctor Aunt from a gangster who blames him for his impotence after a car accident, saving Business Aunt by finding a water stream, saving Steamer Aunt by winning a pool game, saving Teacher Aunt and Business Aunt from rape during a business meeting, sorta-not-really saving Business Aunt yet again by winning a poker match and getting a lucrative deal for her company that she just hired him at, verifying the value of a present for grandma with Business Aunt, and finally saving Biker Aunt from rape. Every man is a rapist. Every aunt has sexual tension with the main guy. After saving Biker Aunt she reveals that all the aunts are adopted so they can be together. Considering how much time he spent with Business Aunt, it wasn't clear that Biker Aunt would be the endgame but whatever, we're reaching the two hour mark. They reveal their relationship at grandma's birthday, and she is reasonably weirded out.

This was our first step into Chinese drama and honestly? The English ones were way better. This one did have a little bit of extra fun added with the bad, possibly AI, dubbing, but there were so many segments that dragged, and the episodic story was pretty unsatisfying. As a bad bonus, this film had a disgusting male-rapist-gets-raped-by-"ugly"-woman joke that I haven't seen in a film in well over a decade. Get it together, China.

Spoon Rating: 4

REWATCH: Various Shorts & The Pricemaster [2001]

Today was a special night because John, my friend and coworker, finally came to a movie night! Because we did a vertical drama last time, we decided to do a collection of shorts and favorite commercials including "Instant Adoring Boyfriend," the Game Crazy training video, a "Rainbow Sponge" compilation, "You Could Stop At Five Or Six Stores," Mike's Golf, Eagleman, Phil Davidson, Cami Secret, the Uroclub, Tiddy Bear, Booty Pop, etc. 

The highlight was a video John offered up called "The Pricemaster." To be clear, it wasn't bad but a delightful piece of performance art that immediately became a part of our obscure set of BMN phrases. The film starts with a quote from "The Medium is the Message" and a short cold open that clearly lays out that the medium is "garage sale." At this garage sale in Texas, there is a small stage for the Pricemaster: a figure clad in a red balaclava, gold mask, silver jacket, and red harem pants with Togo-esque structure. He speaks into a booming, reverb mic a few key phrases including "Make me an offer" and "I am the pricemaster." Whenever someone makes an offer, he raises it by hundreds, thousands, or millions of dollars. He also repeats those same phrases in Spanish. Sometimes he does weird, slow dance moves. No one buys anything. He is flanked by a sign that says "Thank you for shopping here. Your business is appreciated" but no business happens. It's beautiful.

No spoons but probably 4/5 stars.