Halloweentown [1998]

[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]

In honor of Halloween time, we decided to watch "Halloweentown," a nostalgic movie for Sarah and Kay that we were pretty sure wasn't particularly good. Overall, it's what you expect from a Disney Channel original movie in the days before "High School Musical." It's cute, simple, has a whiny pre-teen/teen for the audience to relate to, and it's very predictable. Bad is a strong word but I wouldn't go so far as to call it good. It's our childhood.

The film centers around the Cromwell family where a single mother abhors Halloween and keeps her three kids (Marnie, the whiny teen, Dylan, the excessively practical one, and Sophia, the little quiet one) from experiencing anything relating to it for reasons unknown. Her rules are rocked slightly when quirky grandma who loves Halloween shows up for the day and helps to make their evening fun with costumes and stories. Marnie awakens in the night to overhear her mother and grandma talking about how they are witches but how her mother wants her kids to grow up normal and powerless. Marnie is not having that so she and her siblings follow grandma and hop the bus to Halloweentown, where she lives. It is a town full of all the monsters and demons you expect living peacefully together with the exception of a weird plague thing that's turning them evil. Grandma tries to make a spell to help save the town but it doesn't work out and just as they go out to start working on a new one, mom shows up to ruin the fun, and then mom and grandma get frozen in a movie theater. It makes a bit more sense in context. The kids take it upon themselves to complete the spell and destroy the bad guy who happens to be their mom's ex. They succeed and mom has a change of heart about the whole "witch" thing and invities grandma to come and live with them to teach them the ways of magic.

This film is pretty harmless. It's actually a solid kids movie albeit, it's 90s as all get out and has some weird makeup and bad green screen as a result of a low budget. Overall, it holds up in that respect. In order to make sure the night was actually ruined, Adam reminded us of the short-lived 90s Nickelodeon show "Weinerville" which is an actual nightmare that we had repressed. 

So yeah, "Halloweentown" is fun and not bad. If you want suffering, watch "Weinerville."

Blackenstein [1973]

[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]

It's been a while since we watched a blaxplotation film so here you go: "Blackenstein" or "Black Frankenstein." It was between this and "Blacula," which I'm sure we will watch in the future. This movie was a pretty weak effort all around but it is worth noting that the picture I used for this post is of the DVD cover and not the original poster for the film because the original poster is just a picture of the woman on top of the title with her breasts on display as she shrieks. Classy marketing.

The film centers around Dr. Stein (a white dude) who is doing experiments on various people, which include finding ways to regrow limbs and stop the aging process. He is joined at his mansion by a Dr. Winifred Walker, an old student of his who requests his help for her boyfriend who lost his limbs in Vietnam. Too bad Dr. Stein's assistant Malcomb has the hots for Walker and decides to intentionally infect her boyfriend so he becomes, well, Blackenstein. He kills people and eats them. Walker tries to cure him, partially with the help of a brown bottle with a handwritten "DNA" label. Malcomb tries to rape her. Blackenboyfriend saves her. He gets eaten by police dogs. Weirdly enough, the Wikipedia summary of this movie is five paragraphs long.

In spite of this movie being overall not good in any way, the director clearly spent a lot of time playing with shots and utilizing the hour they had with the exterior of the mansion through long lingering images of it. The director also decided to keep the monster kind of obscured until the end where we get to see it in all it's poorly madeup glory. Most annoying to me is not how unexciting this movie was but the title. Frankenstein was the name of the doctor, not the monster. In this movie, the main doctor is a white guy named Dr. Stein and his Igor is the one who messes up the experiment. At no point does anyone think to call the boyfriend or the assistant Blackenstein and "Black Frankenstein" is obviously in no way accurate. 

Whatever. Feast your eyes on this:

Spoon Rating: 2

The Controller [2008]

[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]

This movie is basically what happens if you make "Saw" focused on one victim and base his wife's survival on a video game. The most notable thing about it has nothing to do with the movie itself and everything to do with our experience of watching it: Keith managed to predict the ending right at the beginning of the plot layout. And it was one of those predictions that made us all go, "That seems really likely but is the movie really going to just do that." It did. It was lame.

The film is centered around a billionaire owner of a video game company who constantly laments that he's tired of winning. Let us all play the world's smallest violin for him. He wakes up on the day of his wedding anniversary to find his wife missing and his old office turned into a gamer room. An ominous voice on the phone tells him he must play the game he owns and successfully defeat it without dying in order to save his wife. One problem: he has never played the game or seemingly any video game for that matter. He recruits a team of the top five players in the country: guy number one who has an interaction with a cop that has the dialogue and music of a porno, your typical Mountain Dew basement dweller, a guy who works for the company and gets distracted by his wife looking for sex, a stay at home dad who gets distracted by his kids, and a Duke University student. He offers them each a million dollars to help him. The movie from there has even less of the excitement of watching someone else play a video game because at least you could watch funny people play. Also, the graphics are only slightly better than "Foodfight." They win, of course, and it turns out the wife set the whole thing up because she wanted to give his life some "fun". He somehow isn't mad at her for this stunt and ends up becoming a player with the crew who helped him.

This movie is weak. The bland acting is sometimes funny but a lot of the attempts at humor are cringe-y, the plot is kind of stale, and there really wasn't enough "WHAT" to make it worth your time. 

Spoon Rating: 2

REWATCH: Mortal Kombat: Annihilation [1997]

[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]

"Mortal Kombat: Annihilation" was actually the 16th movie we watched at Bad Movie Night. Watching this movie predated this blog and predated the Facebook group that predated this blog so I have no original post to link back to. I think a lot of us forgot how bad this movie even was until we saw it a second time. The first time we watched it was almost FIVE years ago so I think forgetting about it is pretty forgivable. It's a good thing Adam somehow managed to remember it and offer it up for a rewatch. But make no mistake: this movie is bad and hilarious and even Sarah could barely follow the plot (although her falling asleep halfway through didn't help; she tried). The rewatch was worth it.

The movie starts abruptly with some loud noises and really bad CGI skies that look like a Windows screensaver from 1995. Adam was the only one who seemed to remember anything about the original "Mortal Kombat" movie but it turned out that knowledge of the original will only barely assist you in following this film. Some bad guys are trying to blend their world with our world and this is why the sky is so ridiculous. Also, the film seems to take place in Thailand, Jordan, and France simultenously based on the iconic structures in the film. The big bad is a guy named Shao Khan. His second in command is revealed to be Kitana's mom who is still alive when she was supposed to be dead (in the previous film, I guess). She has the power of high-pitched wailing and one of the best melodramatic line reads in the film ("Mother, you're alive!" "To bad YOU. WILL DIE."). Shao Khan quickly kills Johnny Cage, the Jean-Claude Van Damme expy, and then Sonja Blade, the Cynthia Rothrock expy, mentions it constantly for the rest of the film. The good guys divide up then since they have six days to find a solution to the bad guy problem. Sonja goes to find Jax, her partner with mecha arms. Raiden, a god, goes to chat with higher gods about the situation. Liu Kang, our kinda-protagonist and Bruce Lee expy, goes off with Kitana, loses some fights to random characters who needed to be thrown into the movie since they were in the video game, and Kitana gets kidnapped. 

Liu Kang is told he is not ready to go against Khan. First he must go to the desert to meet a guy named Nightwolf, drop some peyote, and go on a spirit journey. He meets a girl named Jade on the drug trip and there's no way she will not betray him eventually. The good guys all meet up again and find that Raiden has made himself younger looking for some reason. Liu Kang is still "not ready." More hammy lines. More nonsense plot. More fighting. 

Ultimately expressions about Liu Kang not being ready were used five times in the film. But since the good guys win I guess eventually he was ready. When the film was over we watched a play through of the original game. Keith described it as, "Kinda more engaging than the movie."

Spoon Rating: 8

Lady Bloodfight [2017]

[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]

So did you watch "Bloodsport" and think, this is good but what it really needs is for all the major roles to be played by women? Enter "Lady Bloodfight," a film about a bunch of women from around the world in a martial arts competition and it borrows from every Jean Claude Van Damme movie and every rip off of a Van Damme movie ever made. It is also about as mediocre as one. I wouldn't call this movie bad in the traditional bad movie sense so much as it's kind of lazy and a kind of enjoyable. Keith said it best when he summed the experience up as, "Not as bad as a good movie, but not as good as a bad movie." We didn't make the mistake of watching a good movie, but it wasn't funny enough to be a bad movie. If you want ladies in a bloodfight, it will give you ladies in a bloodfight.

The film centers around these two Chinese women who were enemies who fought in a kumite (literally "sparring"; the name of the competition) and tied. They were given the chance to either split the prize money or train apprentices to fight on their behalves. They chose apprentices. One of the women is very spiritual and ends up running into an American girl, hilariously named Jane Jones, who fought off some muggers. The girl wanted to fight in the kumite anyway because her dad disappeared during a competition 18 years ago, but she initially denies the offer. The woman proves her training ability by . . . bringing a dead bird back to life. The other woman ends up training a girl who broke into her dojo to steal her sword and her style is a bit more brutal and merciless. We get a long series of montages of the two pairs training with calm, spiritual training versus harshness.

At the kumite we are introduced to a friendly Aussie girl who get brutally murdered in a fight with a psychotic Russian girl with prison tattoos and a bunch of other people we don't really see. We also get a shower room scene because this film was obviously directed by a man. The subplot about Jane's father comes up again when a sketchy dude with a mustache and a gold chain talks to her about money and it becomes clear that he 1. killed her father to rig that kumite 2. killed the brother of one of the Chinese women who was the fiancé of the other, causing their riff in the first place and 3. wants to kill Jane too in order to rig this kumite. In the final showdown between the two apprentices, his crimes are revealed and Jane wins the fight, which I guess is supposed to be some kind of proof that tranquility beats anger or something. And the two women become friends again. And Jane sees the ghost of her father and it's silly.

Spoon Rating: 2*

*This rating is contingent on the fact that the film lacked unintentional comedy with some small exceptions. The movie itself was neither good nor bad.