[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]
It's strange to think that the paranormal romance genre is basically dead at this point. Books, like all things, go through trends and young adult literature is no different from adult literature in this regard. It's unclear what the current young adult lit trend is (maybe diversity?) but before whatever is going on now there were twisted fairy tales, before that there was dystopia literature, and before that there were paranormal romances. Of course, a trend needs an origin and, as most of us can easily remember, for paranormal romance that was "Twilight." The idea of girls loving monsters, but like, hot ones, was all the rage. In fact, since this movie was based on a book that took from both paranormal romance and fairy tales, it's kind of ahead of its time. However, it's timeliness could never have saved it from it's utter lack of things that work about it. While it was marketed aggressively and stared Vanessa Hudgens at the peak of her career, nothing would have made this a hit, but it's a decent bad movie.
We are introduced to our "Beastly" protagonist, Kyle, with a working out montage and a way-too-on-the-nose song about being vain. He then gives a class president speech about how people should vote for him because he's good-looking and life be like that. In spite of having no redeeming qualities, he banters with Lindy, the Belle of the movie, at a party and then gets rightfully cursed by a witch (there's just a witch at this school; it's fine) to be ugly forever unless he can get someone to say they love him within the year. His uggo look is . . . well, it would fit in totally fine at a metal concert or in the body mod community. It's mostly a bunch of tree-like tattoos with some nasty looking ghashes, a few metal bits, and eyebrows that look like Arabic script. His image conscious father takes him out of school and isolates him in a mansion with his maid and a blind tutor, and he starts stalking Lindy at night. This results in him saving her from some drug dealers who go after her and her father. After her father kills one of them in the tussle, Kyle blackmails him to let Lindy stay with him for protection. Everything about this is questionable. But, of course, they bond and he gets nicer and they go to his lake house and then she has to go home because dad overdosed. At the last second before she goes on the school trip to Machu Pichu she says "I love you" and we are baffled to see that she is the dumbest person in existance because she really didn't know that Kyle is the same person as the tatted dude she fell in love with in spite of the fact that no one else made this mistake. They go to Machu Pichu together. I guess it doesn't matter that she's completely face blind and he's still mediocre at best as a person.
This movie is a solid watch. It is full of logic lapses, attempts at hip dialogue, telling instead of showing, music that sings the mood to you, and a premise that just doesn't fully work in the real world. The only way it won't deliver is if you are specifically here for monster loving, in which case you should probably watch "WolfCop" instead (except for the love of all things, don't watch "WolfCop"). Hey, it's a post "Shape Of Water" world and we as a society just weren't ready in 2011, I guess.
Spoon Rating: 6
[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]
Let's talk about fame for a second. When a lot of people think about fame they think specifically about the biggest actors, musicians, etc. but they tend to forget that there are certain communities that have their own famous people and if you don't follow those communities, you won't know anything about the big figures in it. You could be someone who doesn't follow sports and walk by one of the most famous athletes in the world without knowing it. That being said, sports is a community people have heard of but there are even communities unheard of by most people. This is all to say that we watched an interview with the director of this movie where he talked about actors in this movie like they were famous and we weren't sure if he was completely delusional or if they really are famous, just in specific communities we are unfamiliar with. Of course, no one in this movie could act at all so who knows where these people might actually find their fame.
The curiously named "Fist Of The Vampire" is a movie intended to combine a bunch of things the director apparently likes: fight clubs, crime, vampires, metal music, and girl-on-girl scenes. A trio of vampires - nu metal, leather lesbian, and the one who looks most like a vampire and is actually the director using a pseudonym - run a fight club and also dabble in drugs. These concepts are really bizarre because vampires for the most part seem to not really need money. If they had some in the bank when they died, they probably have enough interest to be fine and they don't need to pay for things like food or healthcare. Either way, they are being watched by a DEA agent who enters the fight club as a fighter for reasons unclear and a cop; at the end they have a shoehorned in romance. Random murders and fights happen for most of the duration until the final battle. We find out that the DEA agent is a boy from the beginning of the movie who watched the vampires kill his parents.
This movie is fantastically poor quality but not so poor as to diminish the enjoyment of it. The sound is a little off. The green screen use is just the right kind of bad. The acting is uniformly bad but in unique ways (the DEA agent's boss has a particular over-enunciation tendency that makes his performance a joy). There's bad CGI gunfire and explosions but practical blood effects. The beginning of the movie is set in 1977, which is shown by added lines to the footage like it's abandoned film from the 30s. The movie is punctuated with a diverse music selection from knockoffs of Evanescence, Slipknot, surf rock, and other styles that saw popularity in the mid-2000s. All of this combines to make it a real adventure.
It's definitely worth a watch and was even enough for us to contemplate watching other movies by the director. Especially because in the interview with him, he made it sound like this movie was in improvement over the two that came before it.
We want to know what worse is.
Spoon Rating: 6
[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]
It's been a long while since we watched an Andy Sidaris movie. So long that I hadn't noticed his name was spelled wrong in the tag. So it goes. Andy is a connoisseur of a few things and it only really takes one movie to get an idea of what those things are. He is an auteur with an aesthetic defined by vague action plots, fast moving transportation machines, and lots of female nudity. We had started our dive into his work in 2013 with "Malibu Express" and "Hard Ticket To Hawaii" the first of which was disappointing but the latter was a gem of badness. It had seemed inevitable that we would make it back to him eventually since Adam bought a 12 pack of his movies but what specifically brought our focus to his work was the intersection of Adam having this 12 pack and a book his brother-in-law bought him about bad movies espousing the quality of "Do or Die." Alright then.
"Do Or Die" follows two "government agents" on a journey around the US from Hawaii to Vegas to Louisiana as they are hunted down by pairs as part of a "Most Dangerous Game" knockoff run by Pat Morita. In Vegas at a model aircraft convention they pick up two other cops or agents or something to assist them, one who is banging the dark-haired girl and the other who is Erik Estrada and is clearly going to hook up with the blonde girl. In Louisiana they acquire two more couples who include a girl who sings French chanson/country mashups in assless chaps, the guy she's banging, a woman with giant fake boobs, and the guy she's banging. This movie had a sex scene for every couple including a hint of one with Pat Morita and a girl young enough to be his daughter. After defeating five of the six teams sent to kill them, the blonde girl finally realizes that Pat Morita's goons had put a tracker on her watch, which was how they kept finding her. They battle the final team, two guys proficient in martial arts, and trick them with dummies in a makeshift shed that they blow up. It ends on a bit of a cliffhanger as Pat Morita's daughter/girlfriend puts a tracker on him and the four couples somewhat vow revenge against him. As far as we can tell, there isn't a sequel.
This movie has so many marks of an Andy movie: absurdly long scenes of girls getting dressed, cool looking but impractical guns, explosions, a lack of establishing locations, characters barely speaking except to dictate the plot, just everything you want. At this point, we can make Andy Sidaris bingo. While this movie wasn't particularly exemplary over say "Hard Ticket To Hawaii" and we don't feel like we need to watch it again, the repeated amusement we get from his movies means that it is worth watching at least one Sidaris movie of whichever title you pick, if not more. And we've got nine more to choose from.
Quote: "Speak to me, you son of a bitch." (how I'm answering the phone from now on)
Spoon Rating: 6
[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]
It's a spice world and we all just live in it. Not sure why Adam dug this one up but it took a few weeks for us to get to it because people kept being absent from Monday movie night and we needed everyone there to enjoy this piece of 90s esoterica. Kay and Sarah had a good basis of knowledge to explain the significance of the Spice Girls in their time and to explain both the real names and "spice" names of all the members*. Adam had the generic 90s concepts as a basis. Keith was befuddled. And yet, none of us could really make sense of this movie. This movie didn't have a plot. It didn't even have subplots. Things just happened for a feature run time and then it was over.
The film follows the Spice Girls in what is purported to be their regular lives as a lead up to a concert at Royal Albert Hall that is going to be a live broadcast. They travel in circles around London in a Union Jack bus that's bigger on the inside and designed with five sections to specifically reflect their manufactured personalities. For the reference those are:
- Scary (Mel B): She yells, I guess. She also dresses in a lot of animal print and even if the other four have managed to dress in a way that doesn't specifically reflect the era, she always looks as 90s as possible with the highest of platform shoes. I think her personality is that she's rebellious and takes no crap.
- Baby (Emma): Her part of the bus is like a play room and she always has either a stuffed animal in her hand or a lollipop in her mouth. She wears a lot of baby doll dresses and is possibly the youngest of the four. The weirdest moment is when she names all her stuffed animals for a man in a tiny bathing suit as an explanation for why there'd be no room for him in her bed.
- Ginger (Geri): She has red hair. That's the point of the name. Or maybe it's because she's spicy. Interesting since it's the only spice. She's the one who's always saying, "Girl power" and the movie frames her as the one who knows things, reads a lot, and engages in discussion with random men about feminism.
- Posh (Victoria): She's the fashionista one although she mostly just wears black and heels, which is admirable. If Baby is the immaturely stupid one, Posh is the adult stupid one. She doesn't do much aside from drive the bus in the final act and stand very straight.
- Sporty (Mel C): As her name would indicate, she is the sporty one. She wears athletic wear 95% of the time, spends a lot of time on an exercise bike, and occasionally will be holding a random sport ball. She's snarky and also seems to be the only one who has a range of more than half an octave.
The Girls meet aliens, have a photography montage, go to dance camp, stay at a National Trust property for a night, have two young fans join them on the bus before they go steal a boat and ride (and accidentally swim) the Thames, perform a concert in Milan, take their pregnant friend to a nightclub, help that friend give birth, and finally perform at Royal Albert. In the background their tour manager wears monochrome suits and freaks out a lot while taking orders from his boss, Roger-Moore-always-holding-a-small-animal. There's also a photographer following them who is trying to find dirt on them for some Daily Mail knockoff and Alan Cumming trying to make a documentary or something about the Spice Girls but he can never get very close to them. And some people trying to pitch a Spice Girls movie which somehow turns into narrativing the movie as it's happening and culminates in fourth wall breaking during the credits. Oh, and Meatloaf is their driver.
This movie is fascinating in a way but not fun to watch. Keith said it's like "A Hard Day's Night" and that seems likely that was the vibe they were going for. The only real enjoyment you might get from this is if you are a Spice Girls fan. Otherwise there's a lot of what, but very little of it is funny. There were however, two jokes that land and one that kind of lands. One is a visual joke of all the girls walking by in army fatigues only to have Posh bring up the rear in a camo dress and heels. The other is when Ginger tells the pregnant friend to keep her legs closed and Scary comments, "She should have done that nine months ago." The one that kind of lands is when an effect of the tour bus going over Tower Bridge is cut with an obvious model of the bridge and a Matchbox bus. There. Now you know the best parts. Unless you're a fan or a 90s completionist, you can skip this one.
*In the US they had three platinum and three gold hits; eight platinum, one gold in the UK.
Spoon Rating: 1
It's strange to think that the paranormal romance genre is basically dead at this point. Books, like all things, go through trends and young adult literature is no different from adult literature in this regard. It's unclear what the current young adult lit trend is (maybe diversity?) but before whatever is going on now there were twisted fairy tales, before that there was dystopia literature, and before that there were paranormal romances. Of course, a trend needs an origin and, as most of us can easily remember, for paranormal romance that was "Twilight." The idea of girls loving monsters, but like, hot ones, was all the rage. In fact, since this movie was based on a book that took from both paranormal romance and fairy tales, it's kind of ahead of its time. However, it's timeliness could never have saved it from it's utter lack of things that work about it. While it was marketed aggressively and stared Vanessa Hudgens at the peak of her career, nothing would have made this a hit, but it's a decent bad movie.
