[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]
I need you to look at the poster for this movie to understand why it was our choice for the night. That is a set up for a "Harry Potter" rip off based on the font or at minimum some for of "Lord of the Rings" influenced fantasy. We were wrong. Right in the beginning, with so much shaky cam we all felt like we needed some dramamine, it said that the plot was based off of John Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," which is a Christian allegory Everyman adventure from 1687. The basis lends itself pretty well to a dystopian story, which appears to be the setting, but overall it wasn't quite weird enough to be really worth the time.
Chris (changed from Christian) wanders into a church one day and meets Evangeline, a woman who introduces him to the concept of books and later teaches him how to read. There is one book in particular that is specal (guess which one). Evangeline finds out that Chris is estranged from his fisherman father and encourages him to leave the City of Destruction where they live to go to the Celestial City. Along the way he loses a friend named Duck to a swampy bog with a monster in it, meets up with a girl named Faith and later saves a girl named Hope, learns the art of the blade from a cowboy named Grant, fights off bugs that rival the "Birdemic" birds in quality, and hangs out in Satan's (Luc's) pleasure house before realizing it's all an illusion and fighting off his mech with his slingshot a la David and Goliath. In the end he gets pulled out of the water by a fishing net so we assume he achieved his goal of finding his father, but it's not really clear. The dad narrative was pretty superfluous. Why doesn't he just want to get to the Celestial City because the world is crap? They should have spent a bit more time fleshing out their universe instead of wandering around a national park.
Either way, it's not exciting enough to be an adventure, not bad enough to be especially funny, and only a mediocre adaption of the source material anyway. Allegory unclear: Luc's fun house seems fun. What is truth anyway?
Spoon Rating: 3
[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]
I mean, the title says it all, doesn't it? I don't even think I really need to write a review for this one. You can just let your imagination bring you to the world of "Karate Dog" and it will probably be better than actually watching the film.
Basically, Pat Morita has a talking dog he taught martial arts too, Morita gets killed by assassins, the dog is taken in by an idiot detective, the mystery of why Morita was killed is uncovered and has to do with a dog racing business run by Morita's former student Jon Voight, who uses an inability to remember his lines as some kind of vocal affect. Chevy Chase does the voice of the dog, and he wants you to know he's just here for a paycheck. There's a lot of really bad CGI of the dog fighting or even just standing on his hind legs (I guess the film didn't know that some dogs can be taught to do that). I think this movie was written in 20 minutes. The only really funny part was when they did a "Mission Impossible" parody that involved the dog putting an ID into a machine and a human hand covered in a fur sleeve emerged from the bottom of the screen.
That's it. Skip this one.
Spoon Rating: 2
[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]
We went way back to the beginning for this one. This film, "The Amazing Bulk," was the 18th movie we watched at movie night; when we first watched it, it was a new film. Although we have referenced it on occasion over the years, we have never rewatched it, probably because it was so many years ago that we usually found something more recent to rewatch first.
But this movie is a triumph of bad CGI. Adam suspected that they were going for a "Sin City" kind of thing that just doesn't pan out when a lot of your sets are made in MS paint. Delightfully, whenever someone is sitting in a car, you can see the couch they are sitting on in the background as if it's meant to be the seat. At the end, there's an extended sequence of the Bulk running through the country and encountering every bizarre animal or thing they managed to acquire from the CGI team. Oh, and the running is hilarious, both of the Bulk himself and the humans. The acting is bad too but mostly not in the funny way, with the exception of these two cops who have seen many serious cop movies and want you to know that. The plot is of little consequence: it involves a scientist who looks like a member of a mediocre early 2000s rock band, injecting himself with a superhuman serum that turns him into the bulk. He ends up stopping a crazy German guy who wants to blow up the moon. That's about it.
The thing to know about this movie is that it is fun and pretty short at only an hour and 15 minutes, but should you rewatch it, you should wait a while in between viewings. There's mostly only one joke (the bad CGI). It's a fantastic joke, but you need time for your brain to forget just how bad it was.
Spoon Rating: 7.5
[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]
We have been talking about watching this one for a while, but it kept getting pushed back for other things. Keith was the primary influence on watching this one, but Kay had seen the musical movie and wanted to see the original.
The plot is basically that a bunch of people get high and experience effects that are nothing like pot and actually range from caffeine to cocaine and meth. There are three kids, Mary Lane and her brother Jimmy and Ralph, and they get involved in the reefer through Jack, a drug dealer who seems specifically interested in targeting kids. Jimmy takes what he thinks is a regular cigarette and it causes him to drive like a maniac and nearly kill an old man crossing the street. Curiously, none of the kids seem to realize they aren't smoking cigarettes in spite of the obvious difference in smell. During an altercation at Jack's pot den, Mary Lane gets shot and Ralph is framed. The actual murderer was Bill, a guy who just seems to live in Jack's house and it's not long before Bill also kills Jack. Blanche, Jack's girlfriend, is overcome with guilt and jumps out a window. Ralph is set free, and we are again warned about the dangers of the wacky tobaccy.
Overall, it was about as enjoyable as most propaganda films that we have watched. It was really lacking a voice-over, but it did have a fear-mongering school principal who can break the fourth wall.
Spoon Rating: 5
After the film we had a brief musical interlude of the theme song of "Reefer Madness: The Musical" and then we watched a video on Occult Demon Cassette called "A Witch's Spiritual Hoedown." Unfortunately, the title was misleading and it wasn't about witches, or even hoedowns, at all. It was a video of a church service that lasted 22 minutes but had only three never-ending songs. There were a lot of mullets and a variety of white-worship dancing. We all got varying degrees of amusement from it, but agreed to never watch it again.
