[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]
Sometimes one must ask the question: is this movie unpleasantly bad or just not for me? In the case of "Urban Cowboy" the answer is both. In the beginning we thought this might be promising as a bad movie. It initially reminded us of "Road House" a bit and we basically decided to watch it because the DVD case screams "homoeroticism that lacks self awareness" like "Top Gun." The movie didn't deliver on either end.
The plot of "Urban Cowboy" is simple and horrible. A guy from a remote part of Texas moves to the big city of Houston where he spends all his time in the same large bar. He meets a girl there, treats her horribly and beats her, but she marries him anyway in a strange smash cut 30 minutes in. It was at that point we realized the movie was two hours and fifteen minutes long and it had only just finished its introduction. We watched the rest of the movie on 1.5 speed with subtitles and it didn't make it any worse or better. Cowboy wants to mechanical bull ride but doesn't want his wife to because misogyny. They fight a lot. He hits her more. He gets jealous of her bull riding skills when he forbid her to do it. He sleeps with an oil tycoon's daughter to show her. She sleeps with and starts shaking up with an ex-con who also beats her but more often. Eventually this all boils down to a riding competition between the cowboy and the ex-con. The cowboy wins. The ex-con tries to steal the prize money and the cowboy saves the day while also getting his wife back for some reason. No one has learned anything. The cowboy is still a jerk but now has $5000, presumably enough to upgrade their trailer. The wife really likes abusive men and takes back the cowboy with literally no evidence that he has grown or changed. If this is anyone's fantasy, you have to analyze your life. At least the devil went down to Georgia guy was there.
So apparently people in the 80s liked this movie because while many reviews talk about how it hasn't aged well, it still has a weirdly high rotten tomatoes rating. Ignoring the fact that nothing about this story appeals to anyone in the Bad Movie Night crew, the movie has a very real flaw as a regular film: the writing. This movie seems to have a basic understanding of plot points but not things like "dynamic character" or "payoff" or the fact that things should happen to move the plot forward and connect plot points.
Even if you are a cowboy or cowboy lover, I don't understand why you would like this misogynistic, boring dribble. You'd be better off reading a Harlequin romance.
Spoon Rating: 1 Lone Star.
[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]
Back in the late nineties when most of us Bad Movie Nighters were in our late elementary school years, I remembered seeing television advertisements for this film on Nickelodeon or some other channel that primarily catered to kids. Even at ten I was skeptical of any movie or album you could order directly off the television and I found myself wondering, "who even does that?' The answer is Sarah's mom and Sarah used to watch this movie constantly as a kid and fall asleep to the soundtrack. After she discovered that Tim Rice wrote the music for "Lion King" and this, she remembered that it was a bizarre, trippy nightmare and decided we should all experience it. It's only an hour and fifteen minutes but it felt so much longer. Also, here we go with another entry thanks to Andrew "tory-voting" Lloyd "frog-face" Webber.
So the plot follows the Bible but if you're a heathen like me, you don't know what that is so I'll explain. Joseph is the favorite son of Jacob much to the chagrin of his eleven brothers who were not born of Jacob's favorite dead wife. Jacob gives Joseph a really tacky coat that drives the brothers to attempt fratricide and when that doesn't work they sell him into slavery. Joseph attains pretty high rank as a slave in Egypt but then gets sexually assaulted by his master's wife and thrown in jail. He managed to get out because he's really good at dream interpretation and uses it to win the Pharaoh's favor and become his right hand man. Joseph's brothers, now destitute without him, go to Egypt to beg for food and Joseph makes them grovel. He then plans to punish one for stealing a cup but forgives him and reveals his identity. Happily ever after.
This movie is an acid trip. First of all, it has a useless framing device about it being set as a school play in an elementary school with all the actors in the play also doubling as admin. The only purpose this seems to serve is to justify the existence of an ear splitting children's choir in some songs. The aesthetic of this film is basically a low budget kid's show during the scenes with Joseph's brothers and then Dr. Caligari's Tim Burton-esque gay nightmare while in Egypt. The original stage musical came out during the era of popular tribal musicals for adults like "Hair" and "Godspell" but that only explains so much. The music is all over the place involving songs in styles of western, cabaret, tango, Jamaican steel drum, Elvis rock, and more standard Broadway. Oh, and it's supposed to be FUNNY. It's sometimes funny but not in the right way.
Should you watch it is a bit of a debate. Sarah says yes. Adam says no. Kay says it's a fair candidate for watching. Keith was mostly ranting about the liberties taken with the original story. Decide on your own.
Adam's Review: "Proverbs, Chapter 4, Verse 15: Avoid it. Do not go to it. Turn away from it and pass on."
Spoon Rating: 4.5
[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]
This movie failed to deliver in a big way. The title(s) tells you to expect a revenge film but there is only even getting for the last 15 minutes of the film. So what does the other hour and fifteen minutes consist of? Utter nonsense and clear evidence of a vanity project.
John De Hart wrote, produced, and starred in this meandering adventure through the life of an ex-cop. Without Sarah around, the first twenty minutes or so were pretty hard to follow until we realized that we were overthinking it. Right in the beginning the main character and his eccentric friend, Huck Finney, (and yes the name is deliberate) are framed by their evil boss and fired. De Hart wrote in a bunch of self-indulgent moments including singing with a band at a really white trash bar, reciting a bit of Hamlet's most famous monologue (he really wants you to know he did the reading in 11th grade English class), and having many overly long sex scenes with the stripper he hired to play his girlfriend, one of which directly rips off "9 1/2 Weeks" and all of which are uncomfortably scored with jangly, overly sentimental folk love songs by De Hart. De Hart finds out his girlfriend was involved with a guy in a Satanic cult that sacrified a child, and this is put on the back burner while other stuff happens involving Huck Finney being high or something. His character was erratic without explanation. The girlfriend realizes that De Hart's boss who got him fired is the leader of the Satanic cult and then dies in a motorcycle accident perpetuated by the cult, I guess. It wasn't clear. De Hart gets revenge. In the last minute we find out the girlfriend is alive and technically there was no need to get even at all. We felt cheated.
Overall, this movie had some funny parts, usually because of the music, but a lot of it was boring.
Spoon Rating: 3
[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]
What is there to say about "Redeemer" expect that there were a lot of things that were unexpected about this film. We didn't expect it to be dubbed; it's actually a Chilaen film. We kind of expected it to be a religious film but it definitely wasn't. We kind of expected it to have a coherent backstory conveyed to the audience at a reasonable and clear time, but it didn't. We also were hoping that it would be fun, but it wasn't.
The film is about a guy who is a former hitman for cartels, now attempting to redeem himself after accidentally killing the son of a gang boss by . . . killing gangsters. He is very religious but in the fandom kind of way; he's very obsessed with his own concept of Christianity, which apparently allows him to kill. Before every killing spree he plays a game of Russian roulette and considers the fact that God did not let him die to be a sign that his murdering is okay. He also wears a scapula at all times to get into heaven and has a portable altar he brings with him. It is acknowledged by other characters that he is crazy. Most of the movie involves him going around killing with occasional flashbacks that allow you to piece together the backstory I explained in the first sentence. Towards the end he encounters the man whose son he killed and they have a showdown. It is basically the most stakesless fight because they are both horrible people, so how are we as the audience supposed to care who wins? There's also a side story with another crime boss who is obsessed with getting a cool nickname (in the film he is dubbed into something like Portuguese or maybe just Chilaen Spanish which sounds little like Spanish elsewhere but apparently he was originally American), and this goes no where.
I have nothing else. I don't think we laughed once during this film. It's too earnest.
Spoon Rating : 1
