Tuesday, August 31, 2021

Shocking Dark [1989]

There's a certain joy in seeing low budget movies that are clear homages to other films. A lot of low budget filmmakers, in the absence of creativity, just want to make their version of their favorite science fiction or horror film, and there's a charm to it. It feels honest. Then there's "Shocking Dark." This movie was also released as "Aliens 2" and "Terminator 2" in a very transparent marketing ploy. Although, the titles are not really unwarranted on some level. This movie follows the exact plot of "Aliens" to the point where it's barely worth doing a plot summary. Adam, who remembers "Aliens" well, was losing his mind all night. The only major difference is that it is set in Venice in the not so distant future where they have to go through these underwater tubes set up by the Tubular company to find out what's infecting the water. They basically wander a warehouse in sci-fi suits. So where does the terminator come in? About 3/4 of the way through the movie, it is clear that one of the guys on the task force is a robot very obviously designed around the terminator. Our Ripley and Newt of the movie escape through a time pod. He follows them. They still beat him in the end, and since they're in the past they have time to save Venice before the Tubular company can mess it up.

Overall, this one dragged a little but when it was good, it was really good. The acting was often over-the-top, especially in how everyone screamed like they were being murdered regardless of the context. The characters were completely flat, and there were some little bits of side racism between characters that they never had time to grow out of. And let me not forget the dummies. So many good dummy moments. Ultimately though, I think this one suffered a lot for being a cynical attempt at tricking people into buying the wrong movie. Still worth one watch though.

Spoon Rating: 5

Tuesday, August 24, 2021

Popstar [2005]

When Erik brought this film to our attention last week, we were a little skeptical. While this Aaron Carter vehicle is not a Disney Channel original movie, its marketing definitely feels like it, and we've had mixed results with DCOMs in the past. Honestly though, because this movie isn't confined by the standards of a DCOM, it had full invitation to be a lot weirder, a little less formulaic, and also slightly horny in an appropriately PG-rated way. Erik also invited his sister Kat who, in spite of being born in 2003, apparently has a lot of feelings about Aaron Carter. Since Adam has always culturally lived under a rock, we started the evening with a viewing of "Aaron's Party (Come Get It)" and a brief Wikipediaing of him to realize that 1.) he is still making music and 2.) he's only 33. Adam, Kay, and Sarah were shook to realize he's our age, but also to realize that he was 18 when he made this movie. Why is that surprising? Partially because he was past his prime at this point but mostly because his costar, seen on the movie cover looking like his mother, is 25 and it's really obvious and distracting. 

As you could probably surmise, the film is about Aaron Carter being a famous popstar who has to go to a normal high school because he's failing his homeschooling. Our geriatric love interest there is the "smart girl" since she got a perfect score on her SATs, but hey, that must be pretty easy when you've been in high school for ten years. I keep emphasizing this point because it was consistently distracting throughout the film. While Aaron Carter may look a little haggard, he still looks like an 18-year-old. Our girl Jane here, is not a young-looking 25 and it is uncomfortable. They also clearly cast the other high school girls with actresses in their 20s to try to make it not so distracting, but even then she still looks incredibly old. Anyway, Aaron, called J.D. in the film, flirts with Jane when he finds out she's smart and then gets calculus tutoring from her. It helps that she's a mega-fan and he has absolutely no problem with her room being covered in pictures of him because he's an egotist. The movie doesn't have much of a plot but instead has a bunch of scenes. Jane gets upset that J.D. won't say they're dating to magazines. The popular girl who always has her entire midriff out tries to blackmail J.D. into going to prom with her (prom never happens in the film by the way). There's a magical janitor played by former pop star Leif Garrett who gets shoehorned into a relationship at the last second with Jane's sister who got left at the alter. A stereotypical nerd keeps asking out popular girls to no success. J.D.'s manager keeps dating young girls but ends up with Jane's mom in the end. J.D. has test anxiety so he takes his calc final alone on a stage. I'm not really putting these events in order, but it also doesn't really matter. The film is more about the vibe.

So how's the vibe? Excellent. The acting is terrible whether it's Aaron Carter's unconvincing reads to the lead actress trying SO hard to seem younger than she is with muffled dialogue and awkward walking. The plot, as you can see, is kind of a mess with too many characters doing too many things and everything wrapped up far too neatly in the last scene. The editing is clearly meant to be creative, but it renders a lot of things ambiguous or incoherent. And I didn't really even get into the vague horniness, particularly of the adult men in the film towards "teen" girls. The early-2000s were a different time. 

This one was definitely worth it. 

Spoon Rating: 7

Monday, August 16, 2021

Druids [2001]

Did you watch Braveheart and think, this is good but what if it was a lot more convoluted? Or did you watch Gladiator and think, I like this time period but what if I got that with far more inept film making? Well, let me introduce you to Druids. This movie came out right in that sweet spot of the beginning of the "swords and sandals" genre revival expect there aren't really sandals since this takes place in Gaul and the costumer also had no idea what they were doing anyway with either the Gallic characters or the Roman ones. This movie maddened everyone at bad movie night in different ways. Kay was maddened by the inaccurate and lazy costuming. Adam was maddened by the absolute lack of war strategy competence. Erik was maddened by how the movie is called Druids but druids only appear in the very first scene and the last and hold absolutely no barring on the plot. And Sarah was maddened by how hard it was to keep track of the plot.

With that in mind, I can only give a broad overview of what happened in this film. A kid-of-some-renowned's father is killed. Druids make a really vague prophecy. The kid grows up to kill his uncle and try to unite the tribes of Gaul. And that's just the first half hour of a two hour movie. Most of the film involves this guy, an actual figure in history named Vercingetorix, trying to unite Gaul, destroying Gaul in order to piss off the Romans, and then fighting against the Romans in a battle that he ultimately lost. It really strongly feels like the French Braveheart in its tone. The French title of the film is actually VercingĂ©torix: La LĂ©gende du druide roi or Vercingetorix, The Legend of the Druid King, which is a much more accurate title but the name probably didn't work in foreign markets. Why not just call it The King of the Gauls? Well, probably because so few people know who the Gauls are anyway. But druids? People know them. Or they think they do since historically speaking we actually know hardly anything about them.

This movie provided us with a few laughs from bad acting and dialogue but most of our fun with this movie came from us being exasperated by the poor choices. On it's own it doesn't hold up without people to make fun of it with.

Spoon Rating: 2.5