Mondo Cannibal [2004]

It's been a while since we saw a movie that was specifically going for gross out moments and controversy. Mondo Cannibal, the movie of the week, ended up being pretty divisive for the bad movie crew. I usually explain the plot just to explain it, but here it serves as a warning. This movie had two scenes that were genuinely pretty scaring. The first was the brutal killing of a baby alligator that seemed to be completely unstimulated. The second was a scene of gang rape of a girl. It wasn't real at least, but it was really rough. 

The rest of Mondo Cannibal is about this news crew going into the Amazon to find a cannibalistic tribe to shock people into watching the news channel more. Grace Forsyte is a desperate news presenter who leads the way with her ragtag crew of "guy who cares deeply about the journalism but turns to evil the fastest," girl who never wears a full shirt, and some sadistic crew members. They witness a pregnant woman being stabbed and eaten through her belly and realize what they're in for. After a lot of other messed up things, they very quickly turn to burning down villages for the story and then the aforementioned rape. See, they became the real savages! The film ends with them all dying, except the cameraman I think because he had to stay alive to film the others getting eaten (as a death bed request). 

So why did we even bother with this film in the first place? Well, there were some weird effects with the cannibalizing, lots of bad dubbed dialogue, and a few random other moments that inspired laughter. The problem is that they don't outweigh the two things mentioned above. We easily knocked it down two stars for each of those because of how unwatchable they make the film. It's close to Black Devil Doll From Hell in that sense. If you think you can handle them, imagine the rating higher and go watch it.

Spoon Rating: 3

October Kiss [2015]

The thing about Hallmark movies is that they are never especially bad in the fun way, but they are never bad in the painful way. Hallmark movies are easy viewing: safe but unremarkable. That is definitely true of our film for tonight, October Kiss. While most people seem to want to fall in love at Christmas time specifically, this sole film is there for the surely notable crossover of Hallmark movie watchers and people who are so into Halloween that they really want their love story to center around it. And while we did have some fears, this movie did not shy away from its Halloween setting. We got a decorating scene, a slow dance to "Spooky," and the titular kiss happens when our mains are dressed as a mermaid and knight respectively. 

The plot centers around the hilariously named Poppy Summerall who clearly fell into this film after her summer Hallmark romance grew cold. Poppy is a 30-something who has managed to not nail down anything resembling a career or financial stability because she is incapable of committing to anything. In the opening montage we see her poorly teaching yoga and having an older student cover for her, quitting a job at a pizza place after her manager hits on her, and then walking away from a date two minutes in when the guy observes that she'd fit in his mom's wedding dress. She lives with her sister, the sister's two kids, and the sister's theoretical husband who never appears. Poppy shows herself to be good with the kids so her sister gets her a nanny gig for a "hot" widowed dad with the intention of making it a set-up as well as trying to get her hands on some damn rent money from her sister (in theory). After a rough first day on the job, she makes a deal with hot dad that she will stay at the job until Halloween. Obviously, she slowly wins over the kids with the fact that she acts like a child herself while hot dad goes on dates with a coworker of his who seems genuinely nice. The whole movie we were waiting for the coworker to turn into a bitch to justify hot dad going for Poppy instead, but she never does. Instead it just seems like the coworker is an allegory for hot dad's neglectful workaholic tendencies while Poppy represents quality family time. In the end, hot dad balks on an important business meeting to spend Halloween with his kids and mack on Poppy, the 30-something child. Reasonable coworker takes a job in Tokyo since she realizes he will never love her. We think she should have her own Hallmark movie about finding love in Japan, but there's no way Hallmark would be progressive enough to have an Asian man as a love interest in anything.

Overall, we got a few laughs but most of our amusement came from mockery. There was one scene we all genuinely liked where Poppy has the kids dress in business attire and give a performance review of their dad's fathering when he comes home from work. I'd respect the hell out of my kids if they did that. We also played Hallmark Bingo using this card. We didn't win, but we made our own after combining elements of that one with some of our own thoughts.

Spoon Rating: 3.5

Legend of Zelda: Wand of Gamelon/Faces Of Evil Cutscenes [1993] & Dark Dungeons [2014]

This Monday was a nerdy and kind of unusual evening. We started off with a YouTube video per recommendation of Erik of a supercut of all the scenes from two early 90s Zelda games. Even without context, they were surprisingly funny with their super low budget animation and often tonally strange voice acting.

It was a decent use of 20 minutes.

Spoon Rating: 5

Afterwards we watched a movie that we are honestly having a hard time critiquing because it wasn't bad but also, on some level it was. We just can't parse the level. 

Dark Dungeons is a short film about the evils of role playing games as based on a Jack Chick comic of the same name. Clearly the Chick track was very anti-RPG and supposedly the plot and major points of it are taken directly from the comic, like the fact that a girl commits suicide because her character died. However, the film was made by people who saw the comedy in the comic and played into it intentionally. The campiness (and the heavy sapphic undertones) were very deliberate even if the original comic was meant to be serious. 

Did we laugh? Of course. We laughed a lot. We were especially struck by a scene of the girls asking their DM if they could ascend to the next level to gain more power and asking what the level was. The DM replied epically and maniacally, "LARP!" Oh, also they do real magic and raised up Cthulhu. As you do when you play D&D or whatever.

It would be hard not to recommend it, but we can't really recommend it as a bad movie. We all agreed that we would love to see a version of the movie made by believers who think the Chick comic is accurate and then maybe that would be a true bad movie. For now, if this sounds like fun to you, watch it.

Friend Request [2016]

We decided to watch Friend Request on the recommendation of Kay's friend, Alex. Kay ran the idea past her students and while most of them agreed that it was bad, some thought it was funny bad and some just said it was regular bad. Overall, we were similarly on the fence.

The movie follows a college student who gets a friend request from the weird girl named Marina, who has no Facebook friends at all but posts a lot of gothic art. Marina quickly reveals herself to be a creepy stalker so she gets unfriended and then goes on a posthumous killing spree of all the main girl's friends after she committed suicide. There's a whole folklore tie in about how Marina is some kind of witch who is using a black mirror (the laptop, you get it?) to hide her soul in, which does kind of tie into a witch's scrying mirror but there isn't any actually lore to back up the possession thing. She also controls bees for some reason and uses them to kill. The film ends with Marina possessing the main girl, who now stalks around in a hoodie, looking for people to friend request.

This film had some good laughs in the bad acting, weird lines ("Unfriend that dead bitch!"), and confusing editing, but we aren't sure if we'd recommend it. The strangest things about it were really that it was directed by a Verhoven (no relation to Paul) and that the whole thing had a saturation that made it look kind of cheap. If bad horror sounds like your jam, go for it.

Spoon Rating: 4.5