[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]
Have you ever watched "E.T." and thought to yourself, "This movie is good and all but it could really use more obvious product placement and even weirder looking aliens?" Enter "Mac And Me", a movie made six years after "E.T." that seems to have come into existence solely because Coke, Skittles, Sears, and McDonald's paid heaps of money to be prominently featured in it. Appropriately, mac and cheese was part of what we ate for dinner and we had a pre-movie feature from the 1960s about the dangers of marijuana and heroin. They really should have discussed the dangers of Coke because the aliens in this story are clearly addicted by the end of the film.
On another planet, a family of aliens who wiggle awkwardly and have circular mouths that never close find their way onto a NASA contraption and are brought to Earth. The littlest one gets separated from his parents and ends up going home with a family consisting of a mom who works at Sears, the nearly-mulleted older brother, and the younger brother in a wheelchair. For an unreasonable amount of time, the younger brother and their similarly-aged neighbor try to figure out what all the weird stuff going on in the house is caused by when they discover Mac (mysterious alien creature). During this time we learn that he's a destructive little shit who can shoot electricity from his hands but he does save the boy after his wheelchair goes rolling off a cliff, which he really should have died from. They discover that he only likes Coke and Skittles and they make it their mission to help him get back to his family. The boy dresses him like the world's most frightening teddy bear and takes him to McDonalds where there's a crazy synchronized dance party going down with Ronald McDonald. He leaves with his brother, the neighbor girl, and the girl's older sister and they find the alien family in a cave close to death. But what can they do to revive this alien species they know nothing about? Give them a Coke. Towards the end, the boy is injured trying to save them from the government agents who want them dead and it's clear the aliens will need to bring him back to life with their electricity hands. After so many stupid, cliche plot points, Kay announced, "If that boy walks, I do." Turns out, their magic alien powers can bring him back to life but not fix his paraplegia but the movie still ends with the insanity of the aliens taking their vows as American citizens. In the last shot, a cartoon bubble appears on the screen threatening, "We'll be back!" Mercifully, a sequel does not exist.
This movie is hilarious. The aliens are a constant source of unintentional humor, the product placement is so blatant that you can't help but laugh, there's incongruously upbeat music on occasion, the acting is weak, and the cliff fall scene I mentioned earlier is the height of accidental comedy. It was similar in feel to "To Catch A Yeti" but while we did laugh a lot, we weren't quite in the gasping-for-air hysterics that we were in with that movie. Still, for bad movie watchers, this one should be a requirement.
Quotes:
"Isn't he too old for a teddy?"
"He's from Illinois."
[one Sears employee to another]
"How long have you been in lingerie?"
Spoon Rating: 8
Adam's Grandma's Review: "I liked it. I think it was a 9."
[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]
Apparently, "Delta Force" may have been something of a rip-off of this movie, one that was much more of a failure: "Megaforce." Megaforce itself is a secret, elite military force that tries to go around covertly solving the world's problems with the latest in technology. It is also one of the most unintentionally funny movies we've seen in a while.Unfortunately, Sarah could not join us so we had to try really hard to figure out the plot on our own which was difficult because while most of the movie was weird and funny, the plot was explained in large, boring chunks that none of us could be bothered to listen to.
We follow an old British man and his young female companion to the middle of nowhere where they encounter a dumb cowboy who is part of Megaforce. The Brit and the lady are both in the military of some country and are there to assist(?) with some sort of conflict that we thought was on the US/Mexican border but actually takes place in two fictional countries. We also weren't sure if it was the future but one of the quotes below made it clear that it was still the 80s (of some decade). The head of Megaforce is Commander Hunter, a man of eternal headbandedness and jaunty poses who has a romance with the female major that is mostly based on him questioning her competence and ultimately not letting her participate in the campaign because she's an outsider. There are some lengthy explanations of the attack Megaforce plans to lead, some long sequences of "futuristic" motorcycles that have guns on them, and a few scenes involving the team themselves who are mostly made up of slight racial stereotypes. In a sea of very shiny, half-zipped jumpsuits, Megaforce leads some very unexciting attacks on the bad guy who looks like a white Kanye and is an old friend of Hunter. All this fighting eventually leads to the highlight of the movie: a scene where Hunter flies his motorcycle onto a plane using the cheapest effects available in the 80s. We laughed throughout the entire thing.
"Megaforce" is a solid display of the best things about dumb 80s action movies and is already on our rewatch list. Although there were some very dry scenes of explanation and somehow even drier scenes of action, there's enough crazy in between to make it well worth the journey. At least now we know when it's safe to take bathroom breaks.
Quotes:
"That's totally inapplicable to anything going on here."
[repeated line]
"I want to remind you that the good guys always win . . . even in the 80s!"
Spoon Rating: 8.
Adam's Grandma's Review: "I liked the end part."
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Kay could not make it to Bad Movie Night because of a snowstorm so the rest of the crew rewatched the absolutely wonderful "Robot Monster." But because Kay is the one who writes this blog, there's nothing more that can be said. Feel free and encouraged to read the review of "Robot Monster" from the first time we saw it.
Spoon Rating: 10
[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]
I don't think we've ever watched a bad foreign film that wasn't dubbed before. "Don't Torture A Duckling" was an Italian movie that was clearly originally in Italian and then dubbed and "The Seven Magnificent Gladiators" was an Italian production that was, I think, always meant to be in English (also, at the time it was made, all Italian films were dubbed for cost reasons). This movie, though, marks our first subtitled bad movie which does lead to questions like, "Do we not understand the plot because the subs are bad?" Luckily, Kay minored in Japanese and can vouch for the fact that, no, the subtitles are not the problem. It's the movie.
After a particularly dynamic opening in which four teenage girls attack some suited dudes with a suitcase, at one point using what can only be described as a literal "booby trap" in the form of a bra insert that releases gas, we get what passes for a backstory. Our main character of the four girls, Yuki, talks about how she went to a dance school on the southern island she's from where she and her three comrades were drafted for the elite program. The program consisted of learning to fight and read coded messages in the dances of a popstar named Cocoe in order to ultimately bring down the "government" and maintain the "independence of the kingdom". We never get any real detail into this political conflict aside from what we can infer. It's not clear whether this is a futuristic dystopia or an alternate history. There might even be some kind of small reference to the poor treatment of Koreans living in Japan by the Japanese but that could be reading too much into it. Either way, Yuki's motivations for becoming part of the resistance seem to be that she was born during a riot and her mom was killed by a falling bolt from a military plane (which she dug out of her mom's skull and wears around her neck). During a series of missions, all of Yuki's comrades die, she is saved by the humorously floating ghost of her mom, and her former neighbor who's protecting her also dies. She finds out everyone at the dance school was captured and she goes to where they're held, managing only to save Cocoe who she sends floating away down the river while she fights, presumably to her death.
Amid fight scenes and dance scenes, there is some weirdness to be had here. Occasionally there are really rapid camera movements that Adam pointed out, "would be scary if this was a David Lynch movie but they're just funny here." Also, at one point a duck is swimming down the river and it turns out to be a guy in scuba gear with a duck on his head. It is nuts.
Spoon Rating: 6.
Adam's Grandma's Review: "I liked the dancing."
Have you ever watched "E.T." and thought to yourself, "This movie is good and all but it could really use more obvious product placement and even weirder looking aliens?" Enter "Mac And Me", a movie made six years after "E.T." that seems to have come into existence solely because Coke, Skittles, Sears, and McDonald's paid heaps of money to be prominently featured in it. Appropriately, mac and cheese was part of what we ate for dinner and we had a pre-movie feature from the 1960s about the dangers of marijuana and heroin. They really should have discussed the dangers of Coke because the aliens in this story are clearly addicted by the end of the film.
