[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]
It's been a while since we've had a musical, and some of us (okay, Kay) have been planning on watching this one for a while. "Love Never Dies" is the totally unwanted sequel to "Phantom Of The Opera." While the original musical "Phantom Of The Opera" was based off a novel from 1909 by Gaston Leroux, "Love Never Dies" was somewhat based off the 1999 novel fanfiction "Phantom In Manhattan" and oh boy, is it not like the original. "Phantom of the Opera" is an emotionally complex coming of age story for a middle aged man that has some psychological horror elements and "Love Never Dies" is a story about a love triangle where everyone is awful. For understanding sake, we watched the filmed 2011 Australian production of the show. Also for understanding sake, this is mainly what one would need to know about the original musical: a man with a deformed face who's a musical genius, unsocialized, and a murderer (The Phantom, Erik) trains a chorus girl he's obsessed with (Christine) to sing and blackmails the theater owners into putting her in lead roles and producing a musical he wrote. He kidnaps her, her fiance (Raoul) comes to save her, the Phantom lets them go after she shows pity for him and gives him a kiss, and he's never heard from again. Okay.
Ten years after the events of the original, the Phantom now owns a theater, circus, freak show, thing on Coney Island. Madame Giry, the ballet mistress in the original who was the Phantom's protector, works for him as does her daughter Meg, who was a ballet girl in the original and is now basically a stripper. Christine comes to New York to sing at the opening of a new theater and you find out Raoul is a drunk and a gambler who wasted his fortune and they have a kid named Gustave. One night the Phantom bursts into Christine's hotel room and they sing a song about how they banged on the night before her wedding to Raoul in spite of the fact that it doesn't make sense how she would even know where he was or why she would go back to him for a one night stand. He wants her to sing at his theater and threatens her son, because apparently he's still a jerk and learned nothing at the end of the previous musical. She agrees out of fear and an apparent addiction to abusive men. The Phantom suspects that Gustave is actually his son because he's musically talented, which kind of means nothing because his mom is an opera singer and Christine presumably had sex with both men in a short enough time frame that there's really no way to prove paternity.
In act two, Raoul has a sympathetic moment where he wonders why Christine loves him and then he makes a drunken bet with the Phantom where if Christine performs, Raoul will leave without her and leave her to the Phantom but if she doesn't the Phantom will give them enough money to pay off his debts and let them leave together. This is phenominally stupid since she signed a damn contract to sing and this also makes her an object with no option to make her own choice about which dude to stay with. In a subplot Madame Giry and Meg also don't want her to sing because they believe this will lead to the Phantom turning all his attention to her and them losing their jobs. There's a lot of build up and then she sings. Raoul leaves. She and the Phantom make out somewhat until she realizes her son is missing. Meg kidnapped him, literally to get the Phantom's attention, and then moves to shoot herself in the head because she's sad and crazy now. Meg and the Phantom struggle for the gun, Christine gets shot somehow, she tells Gustave the Phantom is his real dad, he runs off screaming, and Christine dies. Raoul and Gustave show up right after, the Phantom contemplates suicide until Gustave expresses kindness and acceptance towards him, ending the show IN THE EXACT SAME PLACE AS THE FIRST ONE.
This show is terrible, primarily because the plot is mostly based around a poorly formed love triangle (or square if you think Meg has any part in it) and every character has become a piece of crap or, at minimum in the case of Christine, regressed to who they were before the first musical. The music varies from good ("Devil Take The Hindmost") to boring ("Look With Your Heart," "Love Never Dies," "Once Upon Another Time," heck most of the songs) to ear-splitting ("Bathing Beauty") to hilarious ("Beneath a Moonless Sky," "The Beauty Underneath"). Most of the comedy comes from melodrama like the Phantom bursting into the hotel in a fit of dry ice and booming music.
It's a decent bad movie pick for musical fans, really, as long as you can stand to see everything from "Phantom" go to hell. It's probably best watched with a drinking game for every time someone says "beauty" or "beautiful" but you may end up in the hospital.
Spoon Rating: 4.5
[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]
A lot of the movies we watch at Bad Movie Night have a tone problem. Tone problems often create the most comedy and are usually accidental as a result of a bad acting or production. In the case of "The Pit" a good portion of the problem can be traced back to the music. The music is entirely original compositions by the same person who apparently didn't get the memo that this move is supposed to be dark and creepy. Instead the score is peppered with comical stings and rimshot-esque noises whenever another person is fed to the monsters living in the pit. Of course, even with better music, this movie would still feel kind of like a few different people's visions. The writer of the film even released a novelization that stuck closer to the original script which was described as having a more sinister tone. But how sinister can a movie about monsters in a hole in the ground, an evil teddy bear, and a sex-obsessed 12-year-old be really?
The plot follows Jaime, a boy with no friends but a collection of nudie magazines and a teddy bear who tells him to murder. The film starts with him getting a new babysitter who he gets a crush on and manages to convince to wash him in the bathtub because apparently she knows nothing about 12-year-olds. He knows of a pit in the woods full of what he calls "Tra-la-logs." The babysitter says he means "troglodytes" even having not seen them, and he decides to do away with everyone mean to him by feeding them to the pit. We are treated to a series of pit feedings before Jaime decides to prove to the babysitter that the pit is real and she falls in accidentally and gets eaten. At this point we were 2\3 of the way through the movie and wondering where it could even go from there. Jaime lets the monsters out of the pit since he has "run out of bad people to feed them", they go around killing, and the townspeople off them with no one the wiser about Jaime's misdeeds. In the epilogue, Jaime ends up moving in with his grandparents and on his first day of hanging with his step-cousin, she pushes him into a pit of monsters, ending on a freeze frame.
Feed me, Jaime.
The saddest moment of watching this film was when Adam pointed out that the troglodytes were somehow less offensive to look at than the garbage pail kids and we had to spend a lot more time looking at those.
Spoon Rating: 5
Grandma's Review: Nightmare. Poor Jaime.
[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]
I'm not sure if anyone was curious about what happened to Penny, the new stripper in "Showgirls" who gets knocked up by James Smith and stars in his Private Dance show, but Rena Riffel, the actress who played her, decided we all need to know. Apparently this movie had a Kickstarter and, according to Wikipedia, is a parody but considering the first movie, it's hard to tell. Either way, it is full of references to the first one and has a bunch of actors reprising their roles because they had nothing better to do. Also, Rena Riffel wrote, directed, and starred in it and her influences include David Lynch, John Waters, and amateur porn.
After a bad Windows rainbow screensaver, the film starts with Penny and James in unhappy domestic life where Penny is still working as a stripper. She also wears five pounds of make up and fake eyelashes at all times. Penny gets a business card from a "Hollywood director" and decides to leave to become a dancer in some fictional city called Seven Sisters. She hitches a ride with some performers she found in a trailer park but one of them murders the rest of them and then dies, leaving Penny flush for cash. She gets a fancy apartment and a slutty maid who's working on her masters to pillow fight with.
Her first step in her career begins when she meets a creepy dude in some sort of beer garden who takes her to an occult house, complete with Lynchian nightmare performance. Creepy Dude gets somewhat interested in her career and takes her to a fancy party, which she wears a prom dress to with a child's birthday tiara. She meets a former prima ballerina and gets pimped out to a foreign royal, which she's originally mad about but then just kind of accepts it. Penny tries to improve her dancing at home while she watches some televised dancing program that is not nearly as scandalous as the Goddess show from "Showgirls" and is clearly filled in the dark wing of a theater. The lead dancer breaks her leg and the prima ballerina takes over. The prima ballerina also offers to teach Penny ballet and they dabble in some light girl-on-girl and drinking what appears to be Mountain Dew out of wine glasses.
Penny then gets pimped out to and sleeps with the show's producer, the former lead dancer, and the producer's bang assistant or something, which gets her an audition for the show and a spot in the show. Creepy guy claims it was his pimping that got her the part and she pushes him down the stairs and shoots him with blanks.
She and prima ballerina decide to leave for San Francisco where prima becomes her pimp while she walks the streets. She ends up taking over for prima during a show where she died (?) and James shows up again to tell her she's doing great but that he wrote a new number for her and she should come home. She refuses, and later gets arrested with some other streetwalkers for the murder crime in the beginning, and she spends only six months in jail. Slutty maid gets her free by solving the crime and tells her she wrote her thesis about her. Turns out while she was in jail she became famous for her false conviction.
This movie is long at two and a half hours. For a parody, that's a bit exhausting, especially when most of the jokes are just references to the most notable lines and scenes from the first movie. There are some funny bits, but it takes forever to get to them in between the references and plot twists. The production value is low and the acting is bad, but possibly intentionally. One of the most amusing things about the film is actually the public domain music, which includes an ominous rendition of "Pop Goes The Weasel," electric guitar "Nutcracker," and circus music. Either way, the movie really doesn't have enough to warrant a watch.
We ended the evening with the 12 minute long "Game Crazy Training Video" which we highly recommend for its very serious use of 90s slang.
Quotes:
"I made a deal with God and lapdancing is as far as I go."
"You have a beautiful smile. You have to keep it lubed up."
"Twin sister. She died in an accident. A bubble bath accident."
Spoon Rating: 3
[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]
We spent the majority of the evening watching "Showgirls 2: Penny's From Heaven" and I will be writing about that next week, but we started our evening with this little 20 minutes feature: "The Prophet of Oz." Basically it's just "The Wizard of Oz" but low budget and with Jesus. Dorothy and her guinea pig Squeaky get transported to Oz where they meet an "angel from heaven" who tells them to go speak to the prophet of Oz but avoid Satan. Dorothy needs to find out if she is born again. The scarecrow has no faith. The tin man can't pray. The lion has no compassion and seems to be wearing someone else's skin as a mask. The prophet tells them Christians are full of malarkey. BUT WAIT. They are in an abandoned church basement, one of the few sets that isn't awkward green screen or the nearest available field, and there's a Bible lying around. Dorothy reads from the Bible to determine that they all had that stuff inside of themselves all along (although curiously it looks like she was reading from Revelations, which is less "faith and compassion' and more "end of days). The sets are a joke and the acting is so flat we assumed all the actors were the pastor's family and were shocked to see that wasn't the case. Really the most impressive thing about this film is the costumes but I think it's safe to assume they were rented from a place that provides costumes for local productions. Those places always have a "Wizard of Oz" set and probably had no idea what nefarious purpose they would be used for.
All in all, give it a watch. It's kind of amusing and short enough that if you are somehow unreasonably bothered by it, it won't last long.
Spoon Rating: 5
