The National Tree [2009]

This movie was selected purely on the fact that the premise is so incredibly strange and, honestly, dumb that we decided it had to be watched. Here we have a bona fide Hallmark film about a "seventeen year old" kid who enters a contest to have his tree evaluated to be the new "national tree" after the old one was struck by lighting. What this means is that the tree his parents planted for him when he was born will be uprooted and replanted on the White House lawn. Why does this matter at all? Mostly for dead mom and father-son bonding reasons. 

The son, named Rock because a rock needed to be moved for this tree to be planted, is a vlogger on the most 2002 website possible where he's got a few international friends and an online girlfriend. After winning the contest, his curmudgeon dad decides they should take the tree himself, being really salty about the removal of the tree in general but never actually expressing his feelings to his son. They are traveling with a woman connected to a toy company sponsoring the move, who has an sir-not-appearing-in-this-film fiance and totally isn't going to be set up with the dad by the end of the film. On the cross country travel they encounter tens of people excited about the tree because I guess not much happens in those towns at all, the son maneuvers the tree through a fire, they meet up with grandma, and they meet up with the son's online girlfriend who stows away with the tree and nearly freezes to death. Once they finally make it to DC, they get the bad news: the tree is going to be cut and put in a stand, not planted. The son is ambivalent but the dad is shook by his callousness. The son has a turn around and cuffs himself to the tree, riling up the crowd, and the tree is planted.

This movie is pretty wild. The acting is funny, both from the clearly 25-year-old son trying to act childish and the dad who is just mad about everything. There are some strange camera moments to punctuate this. And again, the premise itself is so weird that it frequently becomes comical how important this tree is. Sarah asked a good question at one point: Who is this movie for? It's light on the romance and even light on the Christmas cheer and nationalism given the premise. It seems like the target audience might just be old people who want clean entertainment and who want to live in a simple time where a guy carting a tree across the US is actually worthwhile news. We wouldn't watch it again, but it was definitely worth the one time.

Spoon Rating: 5

Falling For Christmas [2022]

This post is late due to internet issues, but although this movie has been talked about a lot, there isn't really that much to say. This movie isn't even the one that comes up when you Google Image search Falling for Christmas because apparently another movie was made with that name in 2016. Sarah quickly identified the movie as a remake of Overboard, a movie no one else had seen, and it's also another of those movies that was made by Netflix but is for all intents and purposes a Hallmark movie. The main reason this movie is talked about is because it's being heralded as Lindsay Lohan's return to film.

The film is about a hotel heiress who gets amnesia after falling off a ski slope. She gets taken in by the widowed owner of a failing, rival ski lodge and learns how to do chores and fall in love. She gets her memory back and ends up moving in with the lodge owner and becoming a stepmom to his plucky daughter. That's functionally the whole film. There's a bit of a side story with her "comic relief" fiance who also got lost in the woods, and he seemingly has a happy ending too when he realizes that he's gay or bi but it's presented somewhat subtly because "Hallmark." I guess that's progress.

The film doesn't have many laugh moments. There are a lot of cliches, a random old guy who's the Santa stand-in, and very little reason for these two to fall in love. Mainly it's interesting to watch the uncanny valley of Lohan's face. After a lot of drugs and plastic surgery, she doesn't look quite how she should. She's only 36 and when her face isn't moving, she looks like a normal 36-year-old with some lip filler. The second she has an expression though, there's just something off about her. This isn't meant to be a criticism, clearly she's had a rough time, but the byproduct of this as an actor is really interesting since she has to make faces for her job. 

Overall, you probably shouldn't bother with this film; if you really like this kind of movie, there are funnier ones out there.

Spoon Rating: 2.5

Blood Beat [1983]

This film is very poorly represented by its poster. There was no sex in the movie. The vibe of this movie is some sort of combination of Things and Hereditary but without the humor of the former or the quality of the latter. Frequently something would happen in this film and we would all look at each other in the hope that someone understood what happened but no one ever did. The lore of this movie is kind of nonexistent, and the film kind of feels like an attempt at justifying someone's purpose of samurai armor.

The plot is about a woman's two kids coming home for Christmas with their significant others. She's a painter who refuses to marry her boyfriend, and her son's girlfriend thinks she can read her mind. There's some deer hunting. Sometimes the girlfriend freaks out and has visions of a samurai. People start dying. This samurai seems to have something to do with the mom, but it's not clear. It might give her the ability to paint or just possess her to make its own paintings? The samurai is defeated kind of easily by her two kids who may have magic powers that they got from her. That's the end.

We only really got two brief laughs. Mostly we were confused.

Spoon Rating: 2

Killpoint [1984]

Gonna be honest here: I definitely watched this movie and I definitely don't know what it's about. Some guy named Night Hawk stole guns? Some guy named Marx killed a prostitute? I literally couldn't follow it and even the Wikipedia summary is only two sentences long. And that's not because it's badly written (but it is). It's because every once in a while an absolutely wild scene would happen and I would forget everything else that happened before it. Most of those scenes involved Cameron Mitchell talking to or about his tiny black poodle who mysteriously disappears 3/4 of the way through the movie. Some of them were just scenes of Leo Fong, staring dead eyed into the camera, not a trace of acting attempt made. There were some moments of downtime and some lengthy, very poorly choreographed fight scenes, but ultimately the crazy energy of this movie was pretty consistent throughout. I liked it, but I already don't remember it.

Spoon Rating: 5.5

Sorceress [1982]

This movie asks the question, what if Andy Sidaris played Dungeons and Dragons? 

The plot is kind of hard to follow for basic logic reasons. An evil sorcerer goes after the mother of his children in order to sacrifice their first born to a god who gives him power. The surprise is that she had twins and won't tell him who the older one is. The twins are given connection powers by a wizard or something and then they are raised as boys (for no discernible reason) by some peasants. They encounter a Pan-like man and a red-bearded viking who take them to a Middle Eastern style brothel where they meet some blonde guy to help them. They are captured shortly after and the guys who caught them do a spell to see which is older. The older one is taken to an Egyptian style palace with the blonde guy as her consort, given soma (yeah, like from Brave New World), and then set up for the sacrifice. There's a final battle. The good guys win and it's kind of implied that the blonde guy gets both twins?

This movie is lame. Most of the film operates under the "rule of cool." There's a lot of boobs peeking through absolutely hideous costumes. The lore doesn't really make sense. The acting and fighting are unconvincing. There's gotta be better fantasy out there.

Spoon Rating: 2

Standing Ovation [2010]

There needs to be a name for the genre of films that seem like Disney Channel Original movies but aren't. Popstar was the last movie we saw like this and, honestly, this kind of movie is actually a win, far more than actual DCOM since those actually have some standards. This time we have Standing Ovation, a movie that combines the inappropriateness of Popstar with the absolutely nonsense of something like Deadly Lessons. It was a ride.

On paper, this film is pretty basic. It's about a quintet of preteens call The Ovations who are trying to win a singing competition against their rivals, The Wiggies, a quintet of high school seniors or something who look 23 and are all the adopted daughters (or sugar babies?) of a rich wig manufacturer. There's also an annoying "little sister" character who is no one's sister but is trying to join both groups and her voice is like nails on a chalkboard. The main girl of The Ovations, Brittany, is struggling with trying to keep her Irish grandfather from gambling away what little money they have while her songwriter brother is off giving his songs away to The Wiggies. Brittany meets a girl named Joey who definitely has mafia connections and agrees to be her manager. She's also 12 by the way. Joey has her own mission to get revenge on the man who robbed her family, leading to her father's early death. Again. she is 12. I honestly hesitate to say much more about the plot because part of what makes this movie so off the wall is how many times it genuinely surprises you, often with Joey. It's kind of like if Step Up was combined with a bad neo-noir. It's also a musical and while the dancing is fine and the production of the music is pretty okay generic pop, the lyrics of some of these songs are just pathetic or curious. The boy groups sings a song about how Beyonce, Britney, Rhianna, and Whitney all want them in their dreams but they're saving themselves for you, girl. Oh, and the wigs are bad but The Wiggies all wear pretty cute 50s throwback clothes to make up for it.

This movie genuinely shocked us with a lot of moments while still having the most predictable last 15 minutes ever. Adam might have hit the nail on the head with the assessment that the movie feels a bit like it was written to have adult characters initially but then they changed it to kids for marketing purposes. Or the writer is secretly a bit inappropriately fascinated by little girls, if you get what I'm saying. But hey, the writing is bad (fat jokes and gross out humor: why), the camera work is occasionally hilarious, and it's full of cringe or WTF. I wouldn't really want to watch it again myself, but I definitely would to watch someone else's reaction. Give it a go.

Spoon Rating: 6

Chuck E. Cheese In The Galaxy 5000 [1999]

Since we just had Halloween (where we watched the original Hellraiser instead of a bad movie), we couldn't think of anything scarier than this: Chuck E. Cheese In The Galaxy 5000. Although obviously this was made for children, it has such a strange vibe it's hard to think of what parents would actually decide on this film to show their kids. Also strange is that apparently Chuck and his buddies (Helen the chicken and love interest, the Texan dog Jasper, the purple alien Mr. Munch, and Pasquale the Italian stereotype) are all in a band, which would clearly make for a better story than this.

The plot is that Pasquale introduces a kid named Charlie to the crew because he needs $50,000 to help his aunt and uncle replace their tractor. Farming is actually a motif in this movie for some reason (was the franchise established by a farmer?). The crew decides to enter into a race on another planet to win the prize money. Sure. Sounds easy. There they meet two very queer German bodybuilders and a stereotypical blonde who is into Chuck. Helen tries to make Chuck jealous using the gays who then lock her up after explaining their evil plan to win the race with zoom gas, designed by a mad scientist named Dr. Zoom. Apparently it makes you go fast but think slow so it's probably a drug allegory. Team Cheese ends up winning the race after Chuck gets some training from Pasquale in disguise as a Scottish stereotype. There are a lot of bad songs. Blonde goes off with the bodybuilders, which means she has no gaydar and is presumably into three ways. Dance party!

This movie was actually pretty fun to watch. It's stupid enough to make fun of easily and doesn't really drag at a swift one hour timestamp. 

Spoon Rating: 5

Slaughter High [1986]

 Let's cut to the chase with this one: this movie sucked. Thankfully next week since it's Halloween, we will be treating ourselves to a good movie instead.

The film is about a bunch of popular kids torturing a really dumb nerd who ends up dropping nitric acid on himself while the chem lab is on fire. They return to the school for a high school reunion, but it was just a ploy to get them in one place so the nerd can kill them. They mostly die in stupid and not funny ways but there's a great mud sound effect at one point. The final victim is the girl who pretended she was going to have sex with him to lure him into the girl's locker room. She fails at throwing a stick at him and he gets her too. Then all the kids come back as zombies but surprise, it was all a dream the nerd had while in the hospital. The film ends with the nerd killing his doctor or something with a satisfied smile, but none of us understood why. It was lame.

Also, all the actors sounded like they were doing accents but from where we'll never know.

Spoon Rating: 2

Night Of The Lepus [1972]

In what was clearly an effort to try to horror-ify as many nonthreatening things as possible, we get tonight's film, Night of the Lepus. If you don't know what a lepus is, they tell you twice within the first five minutes that it's the Latin name for rabbits. 

Apparently there is a situation with too rabbits in Arizona so they decide to transgender the rabbits with some hormones to keep them from being as fertile (instead of calling it open rabbit season in a place where everyone seems to own a shotgun anyway). The scientist injecting the rabbits even admits that he's not sure what the results will be so that bodes well for the experiment. Then his stupid daughter decides to switch up a control and experimental group rabbit because one was her favorite. They let her keep it and she immediately loses it in the wild. From there we get exponentially-increasing-in-size rabbits that are out for blood. They are more determined to just make everything bloody and occasionally dismember than they are to eat, but we mostly just get a lot of slow motion shots of them running through unconvincing miniature sets. At one point we do get a man in a suit, but it was pretty briefly lived. The movie does start to drag, but at least they never stop being cute and they never look menacing no matter how many under the snout shots and growling noises they try. The humans eventually set up an elaborate plan to electrocute them all on some trains tracks that works.

This movie is good for a few laughs from it's pretty poor effects but ultimately it feels like a 50s horror film in the way it drags and the way in lacks any irony. Camp would have really improved the movie in this case for inexplicably, they tried to ground it somewhat in reality. A giant, fluffy murderous reality.

Spoon Rating: 3

Temptation: Confessions of A Marriage Counselor [2013]

We realized we have never watched a Tyler Perry movie at bad movie night and because we really wanted to avoid his comedies for fear that they might be painful, we decided to go for a drama: Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor. There are times when a movie is divisive enough that we can’t really decide if it’s worth watching or not. That’s the function of the 4.5 spoon rating and this movie was definitely one of those. Kay and Sarah came down on the side that this one is worth it and Adam and Erik came down on the side that it’s not quite there. If you like campy and preachy cheating movies, you’ll probably like this one.  

The film has a really silly frame narrative of a marriage counselor telling the story of her “sister”, Judith, who got married to her childhood sweetheart, Brice. She wanted to be a marriage counselor but could only get a job at an upscale matchmaking company while her husband became a pharmacy tech at a mom and pop pharmacy with the mom from The Nanny and Brandy. In spite of this, they’re apparently broke? One day Judith meets a rich investor, Harley, who is almost comically forward with her even after finding out she’s married. Because we needed to give Brice a bad quality, he has forgotten her birthday for the last two years. It’s obvious that Harley is gunning for Judith and she keeps looking at him with this mixed aroused-disgusted face. Kim Kardashian then gives her a less virtuous makeover before she goes on a business trip with Harley. On his private plane he makes his move and she VERY clearly says no many times. Then he tells her to stop pretending and that she put up enough of a fight and things proceed. That’s not consent and is an obvious predictor of how Harley will continue to treat her! When she gets home, her super religious mom is there for a visit and realizes that she is under the devil’s influence. Judith starts just openly cheating for a while, and Brice even drags her out of the sin den that is Harley’s house but then things end between them. Judith and Harley fight a bunch and he hits her. Brice bonds with Brandy but she says something like, “We both know we’re not attracted to each other” and then later tells him she has HIV. Guess where she got it? Brice saves Judith again. We return to the outer frame where we realize Judith is living solo and kind of sad with HIV as her punishment while Brice has gotten remarried and has a kid as a reward.    

This movie has a good amount of unintentional comedy, mostly in the super unsexy sex talk, culminating in a tackle through glass, but the dissenters said that it wasn’t quite funny enough or that it had too much down time. Chose for yourself!   

Spoon Rating: 4.5

REWATCH: Petey Wheatstraw: The Devil's Son-In-Law [1977]

Read the original review here.

S. Darko [2009]

This film is just rude. It is an unauthorized sequel to the cult classic Donnie Darko, with no one from the original involved except for the lead actress who played the little sister in the film. This film wants so badly to be like the original with its subtle blue tint to its use of the rabbit figure to the time travel paths and theory, but it just makes no sense. 

It's a fanfic written by someone who didn't really get the original but wanted to use the general ideas and aesthetic. I don't often describe movies we watch on bad movie night as pretentious, but this definitely is. It is trying for the occasionally iconic dialogue of the original but mostly the dialogue sounds like a bunch of people speaking their intrusive thoughts. Plotwise, we have two instances of people going back in time to save someone and it ultimately ends with no real difference to the status quo except that a missing child who was found in one timeline never is. Oops. I don't have much to say about the plot but that's because the plot doesn't really happen. Donnie's sister and her annoying friend have their car break down on a road trip and hang out in a town full of creepy men and Jesus freaks (sometimes both in one person). That's all. Elizabeth Berkley is here for a post-Showgirls role. We like to imagine this is where Nomi Malone eventually ended up: in Utah and in love with Jesus.

Cinematically the film frequently looks more like a music video than a movie and the editing employs a lot of speed up or slowed down shots for no real reason. We get some moments that seem like they're trying to be symbolism, but the film lacks the depth to really say much of anything.

The one nice thing I can say about the movie is that the score is pretty good. All the songs with lyrics sound a bit like discounted versions of Echo & The Bunnymen or INXS songs but what can you do?

Don't waste your time with this film no matter how many copies you find at Goodwill.

Spoon Rating: 2

REWATCH: Girls Just Wanna Have Fun [1985]

We have a bad movie first here people: an accidental rewatch.

We rolled a d10 and got this one from our Book Barn stack not realizing that we actually watched it back in 2014. I only just now realized it because when I entered the title into the tag section, I realized we already have a tag for the movie. 

Were the signs there? Only sort of. Sarah realized very quickly that she had seen it before but being that we were all born in the 80s, we assumed it was some kind of childhood memory thing like Kay's love of Teen Witch and Adam's affinity for Mother Goose's Rock n Rhyme. Later on when Shannon Doherty's character said the line, ""You think I'm punk?! That's not as cool as new wave but it's better than preteen!" I felt extremely strong deja vu. I basically wrote it off as having seen a clip of it somewhere.

So, oops? I'll just link to my original review because frankly I'm hilarious and don't want to try to write a new one.  

Have a bunch of pictures of Helen's Hunt cranium accessories. 

Spoon Rating: 2*
*It's a low spoon rating because we honestly laughed at a lot of the actual jokes. It wasn't a bad film. Maybe like 2.5/5 stars but obviously pretty forgettable.

Tales From The QuadeaD Zone [1987]

From just the title screen I found myself saying, "I'm getting some Black Devil Doll From Hell vibes from this" not thinking about what I was saying too deeply. On a quick search twenty minutes into the film to figure out what the name of something was since the sound was so bad, we discovered the truth. Tales From The QuadeaD Zone is actually the second feature film of Chester N. Turner, his first being the most scarring movie we ever watched at movie night. I screamed, both in delight at how quickly I noticed the similarities and also fear of what this might mean, but thankfully this movie wasn't scarring at all. It wasn't particularly great either though. We also never learn what the QuadeaD Zone even is.

The film has a bit of a frame narrative. In the outer frame we have a woman who lives with the ghost of her dead zone. He has given her a book of tales to read him. How he manifested this book in the corporeal realm is never explained or even really commented on. The first tale is called "Food For ?" which is about a family or cult that doesn't have enough food to go around and apparently refuses to share and how each meal they have to grab for food when the bell rings and hope they're eating that night. One of the people grabs a gun one day and offs the right number of people so everyone can eat. The second tale is called "The Brother" and after a long build up of guys breaking into a funeral home without explanation and then stealing a body, we find out it's the body of one of their brothers. The brother plans to get revenge by dressing the body up like a clown and burying him in his basement instead of his fancy grave (the smell tho?). The brother's ghost inhabits the body and they fight to the death. Finally, we have the conclusion of the frame narrative. The woman's husband comes up and they fight, which ends in her stabbing him. The police arrive and she commits suicide in the bathroom while thinking about how she will be reunited with her son. The film ends with their ghosts sitting down to read more tales.

Like Devil Doll, this film has poor quality in all major movie aspects from editing to sound to writing. Some of it really drags and "The Brother" especially was really confusing at first. But unlike Devil Doll, I didn't have a PTSD moment recalling the film to write this post. Obviously the superior film. Adam has the two movie box set and apparently the film also has commentary from the director and lead actress, so that might be something worth exploring one day.

Spoon Rating: 3

Shark Exorcist [2015]

This movie was utterly inexplicable. I'm not totally sure where to start with this. Obviously the title is wonderful but we've watched a lot of angry fish movies that were ultimately disappointing. This was not one of them probably because the budget didn't allow for anything even remotely competent to happen. Instead you get a bunch of blonde girls in bathing suits who all are dressed and styled like it's 2003 but they have smartphones, one single CGI shark scene that they use multiple times, and a discount nun and priest outfit with a bonus Party City pirate knife. That knife is the only prop in the film, but there's some fake blood and a bit too much green vomit for most people's taste. The whole thing was shot on location in mostly a state park in Tennessee (although they went to Nashville to shoot one scene at the Parthenon). There was clearly very little budget left for editing, sound editing, other CGI, or really anything that could make the film look like anything other than a series of vaguely connected home movies.

As for the plot, we are supposed to believe that:
1. An evil murdering nun kills someone and throws them into a lake as a sacrifice to a "water spirit."
2. This causes a shark (IN A LAKE) to be possessed by a demon with the capacity to possess a person who could then bring them bait in the form of other people.
3. A blonde girl gets possessed by the shark, which makes her really into baths, seafood, and vaguely hitting on girls who might be good shark bait (one of whom seemed to have a developmental delay and it was uncomfortable).
4. A priest is enlisted to help with this demonic shark possession, which results in him sacrificing himself so the shark possess him. He then immediately bites the blonde's ombre friend.
5. In the film's only other CGI shot, ombre friend lures another blonde friend into the water to get eaten by the shark while standing on the dock.
Also, after the credits, there's a series of shots of a girl we've never seen before walking around what appears to be an aquarium gift shop, lovingly petting and cradling the shark plushies. Then she stares intently at a fish tank. This goes on for like seven minutes, and while it was probably the most incomprehensible of the filler scenes, it sure as hell wasn't the only one. I still don't know what was up with the witches in the graveyard, but it was nice to see some characters who didn't dress and style themselves like discount Nicole Ritchies.

Is all that okay with you? It should be. This movie is excellent.

Spoon Rating: 6.5

Forty Days And Nights [2012]

Not to be confused with the rape movie pretending to be a romantic sex comedy, Forty Days and Forty Nights. This movie is about a rainstorm of literally Biblical proportions. We have Sarah's mother, Kelly, to thank for this one as she found it because it was free on Roku and she immediately thought, "Oh, this is a Monday night movie." And she was definitely right.

This movie is a complete winner from a special effects and set design perspective. They are absolutely atrocious, and its hilarious. From the very beginning we get a title card telling us we are in the Sahara when we are very obviously in California. No one even bothered to look up the differences between the very orange Sahara and a somewhat vegetation-covered California desert. Amazing. The desert then gets flooded with special effects that amount to a rain machine and a bunch of close-up shots of a beach. This continues the whole film. Sarah was in shock for a solid three minutes over a lab storage scene where samples were all being kept in plastic water bottles. The boots interior was all plastic and it had a hole that made it look like the boat was made of aluminum foil. The acting was great too. Everyone was wooden except the lead actress who still sometimes reacted to things in an unrealistic way and had the unfortunate experience of having to shoot some of her scenes in a see-through wet tank top without a bra (although she apparently found a bra in the woods because she was suddenly wearing one in the next scene).

I guess I could talk about the plot, but I don't really have to. There's a big world destroying rain storm. The military freaks out about it. They try to save bees. One guy gets kicked off the ark for telling his girlfriend about it. Ultimately everyone is okay and so are their families even though a bunch of people did die before the rain just stopped. Just watch it for the aesthetics. It's enough. Trust me.

Spoon Rating: 6

Bad Movie Night Update

So it's been a while since there's been a post about Bad Movie Night so here's a full rundown of the month of July and why there haven't been any posts.

On July 4th, Kay was on a road trip and movie night didn't happen anyway.

On July 11th, Kay had just come back from her trip and instead of a movie night we all just hung out and chatted.

On July 18th, no one was particularly motivated to watch a movie so we rewatched "High Impact Hand Safety," a bunch of other bad movie shorts from Adam's playlist, and some decent Saturday Night Live sketches that Kay had collected into a playlist.

Then yesterday because Adam had cancelled his classes, we had an earlier Bad Movie Night with Erik finally in attendance. With the extra time we decided to rewatch our favorite Bollywood film Singham and order a ton of Indian food. Baby Jade was enthralled by the film so we know she'll grow up right. 

Next week there may or may not be a movie night because Kay is going away again, but, as usual, normalcy should pick up again in late August at least.

Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace [1996]

This movie really made us all ask a question of sequels: is it better to make a sequel assessible to people who did not see the first movie, or is it better for a sequel to presuppose that anyone watching it is already familiar with the original? This movie definitely did the latter and as we were all unfamiliar with Lawnmower Man, this movie was an utter mystery for most of it. Adam would not give specifics on how he found this movie although whether he forgot or was protecting his sources, we don't know. Either way, this movie is a ripoff of basically every sci-fi movie that came before it and the Man himself sometimes seems like he's doing a bad Jim Carrey impression on top of that.

The plot, as far as we could piece together, is about a guy called Jobe who invented a computer chip that controls an entire virtual reality world. Some Republicans who only care about money are using him to do their dirty work but he has been corrupted and wants to destroy the world to live in the virtual world. This is a very stupid plan. There's a doctor with horrible white dude dreads who is trying to stop him with some other scientist he has romantic tension with and some kids, one of whom is a friend of Jobe and remembers him as his family's lawnmower man. We never learn if this means something other than, you know, a landscaper. The world gets saved but also Jobe goes back to normal. This is the best I can do with this plot as none of us understood it.

The movie was really mediocre. Most of our joy came from the liberal use of the verb "to jack". Often it was "jacking in" or "jacking out" but at least once it was "jacking off" and we were pleased.

Spoon Rating: 2

 

Skull Forest [2012]

We had our potato and cheese soup with a side of Len Kabasinski, the director of Fist of the Vampire coming back to our screens with Skull Forest. This is a film that gave us genuine headaches through its incredibly liberal and poor use of shaky cam and Dutch angles and was also yet another "Most Dangerous Game" rip off. Overall, not bad.

The film follows mostly four women who are hard to tell apart since three are blonde and two look like sisters and none have names. We called them The Mom, The Businesswoman, The Slut, and The Cop. Of course, we foresaw that The Mom was going to survive according to horror movie rules. On the flip side of this game we have a cast of characters who were introduced at a gala with stock music playing. We couldn't really remember most of them outside the racist stereotype native girl and the Russian sambo fighter. One of them was also the director. After a series of wacky murders, we get down to just The Mom, who at one point had to crawl naked out of a grave, and the director. The film ends right as she whacks him in the head with a shovel. 

It's a simple film and short at just an hour and 15 minutes, but it was pretty good. Laughs were had.

Spoon Rating: 5.5

A Talking Cat!?! [2013]

It's been a while since we've seen something decent so we decided to rewatch A Talking Cat!?!. Read the original review here.

Mayflower II [2020]

Part of the selling point of this film was Sarah telling us that it had a budget of only $30,000 and it took six years to make. Obviously, it looks terrible. It's also Christian. It even stars the "Jewish" couple from The Unexpected Bar Mitzvah. The real problem with this movie is that it's completely incoherent. To give a little credit, it's clear that the writers had a dystopia in mind and really wanted to show and not tell, but the end result is that we never knew what was going on at any given moment. Still, I'll try to relate the plot.

There's a guy whose brother is some kind of Christian radical in a world where all Christians have to conform to a specific view of Christianity. We are never really told what this view is. Our guy is told about a secret ship his brother has stashed away for an escape called the Mayflower II, but when the brother's prayer meeting is raided by the cops, our guy and his wife take off in the ship alone to Mars. There's a colony there, that is definitely a mashup of a college campus and a midrange hotel, but you aren't allowed to leave. We don't really know why except that it's supposed to be a prison of sorts. However, they do leave when they learn that the government is planning an attack to blame on the Christian radicals. They go to Earth to save them and they all escape in the Mayflower II ship bound for who knows where. Probably starvation realistically, but apparently this was the first of a planned trilogy.

The sheer confusion we suffered watching this really brought down the viewing experience but there was a lot of fun to be had in the cheap sets and costumes and the fact that the main actor only has one distressed face that he uses the whole film. We wouldn't recommend a watch, but at an hour and fifteen minutes it could have been worse.

Spoon Rating: 4

Stone Cold [1991]

This is an action movie, and it does not take that title lightly. There is so much action in this movie, that the plot is really hard to follow. There are so many explosions, that appears to be where the entire budget went. There are so many fights and shoot outs that we all collectively could not remember that the main girl who was the love interest got unceremoniously offed with ten minutes left in the film. That's what I have to say for Stone Cold really: it's not boring but it's not strictly bad-movie-good.

The plot seems to be about a cop (probably) from Alabama who is in New Orleans to infiltrate a white supremacist biker gang. Apparently the Nazi affiliation isn't the issue so much as something to do with drugs. There's a guy named Chains who seems to lead it all and he hates the DA who is called Whip and wants to give all the bikers the death penalty or something. Every scene that isn't some sort of fight or chase is only about 30 seconds long so it's hard to gleam what's happening but the main mullet man did have a partner right at the beginning who disappears for most of the movie to reappear at the end. There's a helmet with a head in it, a biker funeral that's really a Viking funeral, some bar fights, a character known only as "the Bolivian," a severed and tattooed ear, at least two major car accidents, an exploding gas station, plenty of topless women, and a lot more explosions than I can really remember. The best part of the movie was the last ten minutes or so where we got some exploded dummy action and a scene of a motorcycle going out a window and slamming into a helicopter, causing an explosion. 

So was it worth it? Well, we don't regret watching it, but we can't really recommend it unless you stick to just the end.

Spoon Rating: 3

Cop Rock: Episodes 1-2 [1990]

Every once in a while at Bad Movie Night we have the dubious honor of watching something that isn't funny-bad or painful-bad but mysterious-bad, unusual-bad, curious-bad. The only times I can really remember that happening were with After Last Season, the money-laundering scheme that was hidden behind a movie no one was meant to see, and Deadly Lessons, a movie I am completely incapable of summarizing. Both of those films we gave 5 spoons to with an asterisk saying that you should maybe just watch it for the strangeness, and that's exactly how we feel about this television show. To be clear, Cop Rock is a canceled show of eleven episodes that's half police procedural and half musical, and you probably should not watch the whole thing. We watched two episodes before deciding that was enough. If any brave soul wants to attempt the whole thing, you can but we decided two was enough to get the picture.

We went in wondering if it would be an episodic show but it turned out to have a few consistent threads: the mayor is corrupt or something, two of the cops really want to bang but one is married to a potentially lying detective who isn't as hot as her coworker, a cop gets killed in the first ten minutes of the first episode and his partner gets a new partner who likes to sing Motown, one of the cops abuses people in the interrogation room, etc. The problem is, there is no investment in any of these characters at all (and I kind of couldn't tell any of the white guys apart either). The show is really blandly written. In fact, were it not for the musical aspect, this show would have flown so far under the radar as to be invisible. It's really a very standard and boring police procedural until someone suddenly starts singing. Of course, when they sing it is also a boringly written song that often sounds like a rip-off of something that would have been on the radio at the time. One song was clearly Bryan Adams, one sounded like "The Joker", and there are a lot of late 80s style ballads. Each 45 minute episode has about five songs, most of which are pretty mercifully short. Are they good singers at least? Some are. A lot aren't notable and some are kind of confusingly bad, shocking since according to Wikipedia 200 people tried out for this show. 

Aside from the obvious absurdity of the premise, this show invites even more questions when you watch it. Chief among them is probably, who is this show for? As a musical fan myself, I have asked this question a lot about shows doing the theater circuit and the answer is often a misguided attempt at getting those straight male dollars. But this isn't Broadway trying to court a new demographic; it's television. It's meant for maximum appeal on some level. Could the target be old people? Conservatives who like radio hits? Army wives? I just don't know. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is one of my favorite shows of all time and even though it's a brilliant comedy-drama-musical, it had a hard time finding an audience because of its title but won people over with its writing and clever use of music. But that's a show about more universal ideas around mental health, identity, and relationships and not a corrupt police force.

The other really weird thing about this show is the tone. This show is completely devoid of humor during the non-singing scenes with the small exception of one joke in episode two that worked. The music is also seemingly meant to be serious. However, because of the absurdity of the tone shift when the song playing is something upbeat instead of a solemn ballad, it ends up being funny: not in a laughing way but the slack-jawed-what-is-happening way. The best moment in the two episodes was a song called "He's Guilty" where they just start singing a gospel song in a court room, again seemingly not trying to be funny but succeeding by sheer audacity.

So should you watch it? I don't know. You could definitely get some amusement from the clips on YouTube of the best songs. In a way though, you kind of need to see that tone shift for yourself to really process how weird this thing is. It's not really fun or worth your time but maybe you should anyway?

Spoon Rating: 5*

*I mean, what else do you have to do?

Ghosts On The Loose [1943]

The dice gods do not like us and want us to suffer. At least it was only an hour.

Ghosts On The Loose is a film featuring a "comedy" troupe called The East Side Kids who are a void of humor. One of their sisters is getting married so the beginning is all about them preparing for the wedding by stealing flowers and a suit from dead people. Then they go to the house the couple has bought and steal the furniture from the supposedly haunted house next door. Turns out the two houses are connected by a tunnel or something and Bela Lugosi is a Nazi spy who is mad about the house being sold because he needs it for Nazi business. He tries to scare them with revolving bookcases and picture frames or something. It sucks. One of the guys comes down with German measles, which means his face is covered in little swastikas. Har har. 

I honestly can't top this review from the film's Wikipedia page, "The Los Angeles Times called the film 'a feeble and cheaply produced bit of unenticing nothingness.'"

Spoon Rating: 1

Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainville [2007]

We're down to rolling a d12 to decide on our movie, and the dice really didn't like Kay since they picked the one movie she least wanted to see, Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainville. In addition to Kay not liking serial killer things and fixating on the very inaccurate 50s costuming, Erik was prepared with the facts and ready to debunk every misstep in the retelling of Ed Gein's life. This still didn't make the movie watchable.

The movie seemed to have absolutely no concept of plot or pacing. Ed goes around killing people until he is found. He isn't really the main character since the film actually focuses on a cop whose girlfriend ends up being one of the abducted. They are insanely boring. The only interesting part of the whole thing is in the very beginning when Ed is digging up bodies with a friend who, after apparently doing this multiple times, finally questions the morality of what they are doing so Ed kills him and ties him to his truck like Achilles did to Hector (in spite of him having a flatbed truck?). We mourned his loss. 

Visually this movie is frustrating. The whole thing has this washed-out look that's like dirty faux black and white without being fully black and white. There are some gross scenes, as expected, but something about the utter lack of realism in the visuals kind of helps from anything being too traumatizing. And, of course, as a movie set in the 50s, the clothes are mostly wrong, the hair of both the men and women is entirely wrong (although one woman curiously has good 40s hair), and the makeup is basically modern. 

Do not bother. This movie cost Adam and Sarah $4, and they were robbed. With so many losers, soon we'll be switching over to watching some episodes of bad TV including the fever dream known as Cop Rock. It will get better.

Spoon Rating: 2

Turbulence 3: Heavy Metal [2001]

We rolled a critical fail on the dice role and on the movie as our film for today was Turbulence 3: Heavy Metal. Adam had seen the first Turbulence film and basically predicted that whatever the plot was it was going to end with a random person having to land the plane.

The basic premise is that a Marilyn Manson-esque rocker named Slade Kraven is going to be performing his last show on a modified plane with 40 fans in attendance. We are introduced to a bunch of random characters including a normie-ish fan who wants to be a journalist and her horny friend, a woman investigating a hacker of the cameras on the plane, the guys in air traffic control, the pilots, the flight attendants, a reporter of the concert who's a jerk and her cameraman, and, of course, the band. The show starts and Kraven quickly turns from shock rocker into literal murderer when he kills the copilot and seemingly holds the reporter hostage. The hacker and investigator learn that Kraven is actually someone else who disguised himself as the rock star in an effort to get publicity for his Satanic cult. He, the reporter jerk, and the pilot are actually all part of the cult and they have plans to crash the plane into a church in Kansas as part of some doomsday ritual. The real Kraven ends up escaping from the storage unit and gets in contact with the hacker who helps guide him in what's going on. He fights the imposter, sees the pilot kill himself, and then gets the guidance from the hacker to successfully land the plane and save the day. Hacker and investigator hook up. The normie girl gets report on the events with the help of the cameraman. Kraven is a hero. 

For its kind of wild plot, this movie is pretty boring. So much of it is just people on the phone with each other, and it feels like forever for the plot pieces to come together. The most interesting part really was trying to actually categorize the band's music (the menu song sounds like Godsmack, the first song they play sounds like Smashing Pumpkins, and the whole song performed sounds like Marilyn Manson; none of it is the "death metal" it claims to be).

Spoon Rating: 2

Time Cop [1994]

The dice determined that we would be experiencing the final of the three "double Van Damme" movies tonight, which also happened to be a favorite of Adam's when he was a kid. Van Damme plays a cop who tries to stop time crimes after time travel is invented. Of course, it is immediately used to make money to fund a political campaign. This being a Van Damme movie, he also has a wife who he has sex with and then she immediately dies, clearly setting up a future motivation to save her life. 

In general, the movie was kind of strange to follow. The plot wasn't specifically complicated, but, ironically, the pacing of the movie was really off. It was kind of hard to tell where we were in the film and every major plot point seemed to either happen way too early or way too late. Perhaps that's the real joke here: bad timing. Overall, it was just a bland Van Damme film, without anything specific to note about it. It certainly was missing some of the weird lines of other movies of his. The two main highlights involved some body horror CGI that was very mid-90s, but otherwise it's pretty forgettable.

Spoon Rating: 2

High Impact Hand Safety & The Prince of Egypt [1998]

We had a series of shorts this evening. First, we started off with a new classic: High Impact Hand Safety. This 18 minute safety training video is the funniest gore movie we've seen in a minute. The film is a safety training video that is 90% recreation of brutal factory accidents with the same scream and a lot of prosthetics.  Just when you think they are done, there are more. You start to get almost frustrated at how stupid people are the more you watch them clean machines without shutting them down first. Still we all picked favorites afterwards. As a companion piece, we also watched a German parody YouTube video called "Forklift Operator Klaus" that is very similar but intentionally over the top. You'll get laughs from both.

Spoon Rating: 9

After that, we decided to do another Dingo Pictures, this one being The Prince of Egypt. It was extremely minimal on the details of the story, which Erik's Catholic upbringing and Adam's religion minor were annoyed by. The thing with Dingo Pictures is that there's definitely a sweet spot of how many you can watch before they get pretty repetitive and we are probably past that point. Most Dingo Pictures are good, but they are all good for the same general reasons. This one is mostly notable for having some really solid smash cuts. The first was of Moses calmly saying, "I'm going crazy" before we get a wide shot of him sitting in front of the burning bush and that's our intro to God, who looks like Ron Pearlman. The other solid one involved the Egyptian armies first chasing with high energy music and then just a bunch of soldiers walking casually with no music at all.

Spoon Rating: 5*

*May be higher or lower based on how many Dingos you've already seen.

We also watched some commercials by Jim "The Hammer" Shapiro. Well, worth looking into if you've got two minutes.

Exit Wounds [2001]

The dice decided that we would have to deal with another Steven Seagal and a rapper movie although this one was a lot more convoluted than the last one. Seagal is a loose canon cop who doesn't play by the rules and gets sent to anger management for a hot second where he meets Tom Arnold. Meanwhile, DMX is a drug dealer except he's actually a dot com millionaire who is only pretending to be a drug dealer to try to expose some crooked Detroit cops (and get his brother out of jail, it seems?). The film also has Michael Jai White who Adam was very excited to see fight Seagal as they are two martial artists only to have them sword fight instead. The film seems to set up a potential love interest with the police commissioner but then she unceremoniously dies in a car crash two-thirds of the way through with no romantic set up anyway. This movie has some writing issues. It was at times completely incomprehensible. We got a few laughs with some good dummy work and weird directing, but this movie was far more painful than fun. 

Spoon Rating: 2

Serial Mom [1994]

It didn't take us long to figure out what we were getting into with this movie. While we all settled in for a bad movie, we were quickly treated to a title card that told us we were about to watch a John Waters movie and we immediately realized our mistake. John Waters doesn't make bad movies. He makes camp, black comedy, weird films, but definitely not bad movies unless you simply don't get him. Either way, we decided to settle in for a good night.

The plot follows Kathleen Turner as a neurotic housewife who goes on a murdering spree for often the most minor of offenses. She starts by just phone harassing a neighbor for cutting her off in a parking lot, then progresses to murdering her son's math teacher for his criticism of her parenting, offing her daughter's ex, killing a couple for interrupting her husband's weekend, and a few others. She is caught and brought to trial where she manages to get herself free on many technicalities, only to then murder a juror for wearing white shoes after Labor Day. 

It's not a bad movie at all. It's at least three stars out of five on a regular rating. Not my favorite John Waters (that's Cry Baby) but definitely a good time. 

REWATCH: Samurai Cop [1991]

Last Monday we rewatched the legendary Samurai Cop.

Read my original review here. 

They Feed [2005]

After two weeks of unremarkable films, we were starting to get a little worried. we've got a stack to get through still and a lot of them don't look promising. This one was immediately mysterious. Who is They? I think we could all guess what they're feeding on at least. We all decided to place beats on the They. Adam and Sarah guessed vampires, Kay guessed zombies, and Erik changed his initial vampire vote to ants pretty quickly. When we saw the DVD menu, we thought vampires was correct, but Erik was actually the closest.

As you can see from the girl on the left, this is very much a mid-2000s movie. The music consisted of two bands the director probably knew, one trying to be Tool and the other trying to be some generic rock band of the era. After an opening of people dying in the woods, we get our main crew. We have pink scarf girl over there who is an over-the-top annoyance, following her more reasonable boyfriend into the woods. They meet up with a couple who are either siblings or platonic friends, and a couple where the guy is a douche who's blackmailing his reasonable girlfriend because he knows she slept with the boss for a job. Quickly the assholes have sex and the reasonables flirt while third wheel guy gets killed by . . . worms. They're consistently wiggling (probably from bad CGI) and have langolier teeth and I love them. We tried very hard to figure out why these people are in the woods and it seems they are out here looking for a crashed plane they never find. Only far later do we get the information that a bunch of them are scientists. Slowly, the worms track down the rest of them leaving the reasonable couple for last. At the presumed climax, the worm chase seen gets intercut with a park ranger wandering around to gentle music and it is the biggest example of delayed gratification ever. The end of the film is actually quite strange. We are taken to a new year's party their (presumable) boss is hosting when he finds out they all died and seems to imply that he planned it. Then, the one girl who was not coupled emerges from a hole in the ground: half girl, half worm. A worm mermaid. Freeze frame.

Overall, this movie is worth a watch. It can drag a bit during the relationship drama stuff but the worms themselves are so good, and there are a lot of beautiful examples of lazy film making. If you had given us a camera in 2005, we probably could have made something at least on this level. 

Spoon Rating: 5

Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation [2004]

Again we did a dice roll (well, Jade did but since she's a month old we just put the D20 in her hand and waited for it to drop) and this time we got Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation. I barely even want to talk about this movie. Sarah ditched to work on her doctoral thesis and when she came in a little later and asked how it was the review was, "It's so bad that we're talking over it and Adam doesn't care." 

We already expected this movie to lack the satire of the original and just get turned into a dumb military movie but after some completely incomprehensible fighting, the movie just follows a bunch of soldiers stuck in a building with some infected by the bugs. It's very horny in a very boring way as everyone slowly gets infected. The pregnant soldier escapes while the big damn hero stays behind and becomes the highlight of recruiting videos. The movie pays vague lip service to the original with some rando saying that the woman's baby will be good for the grinder, but otherwise, this movie doesn't even try to have any meaning. It's just a bad The Thing. 

Don't bother. Just go rewatch the original.

Spoon Rating: 2

Jurassic Attack [2012]

Or maybe it's called Attack of the Dinosaurs? The box said one thing and the menu said another. It doesn't matter. 

This movie is presumably the brainchild of a bunch of guys who liked Jurassic Park, Predator, and the Halo games and it really shows. It's got a cliché plot of a bunch of US soldiers (many with non-US accents) going into the Amazon to rescue a scientist from one of the locals who's trying to stop? get? a bioweapon. They find dinosaurs on the way back as well as a lost scientist who has been living among them for five years and is in full on delusional Grizzly Man mode. It's pretty mercifully short at under an hour and a half but a lot of the scenes just featuring the characters are boring with dialogue not weird or poorly acted enough to be interesting (although we did invent a gay subplot based on the weird tension between the main hero and main villain). The real prize is the dinosaurs which are rendered in horribly cheap CGI and an absolute delight every time. The only other curiosity about the film is how abruptly it ends, but it's not really funny so much as just mildly surprising.

I can't recommend this film just for the CGI though. It's a pass for sure. Interestingly though, for the next 18 weeks unless something else comes up or we do a rewatch as a palette cleanser, we are going to be working through DVDs that Adam and Sarah have just had for years that we haven't gotten to yet. We rolled a D20 for this one so we'll just have to see what we get next week. 

Spoon Rating: 3

REWATCH: Fateful Findings [2013]

Nothing can ever truly top this in terms of Neil Breen's work. It nearly fills the entire Neil Bringo card.

Just go see it.

After you can read my original review.

SPECIAL: Live Freaky! Die Freaky! [2006]

Today was a very important bad movie night for a lot of reasons. The biggest and most obvious reason is because it was the inaugural night for our newest member, Jade, Adam and Sarah's daughter who was just born last Wednesday. At one point in the middle of a sex scene in the film Adam turned to us all and said with a small amount of shame, "This is her first movie." What else would you expect really? On a lesser note, it's a return to bad movie night after a few weeks off due to things like Kay getting covid, Erik having covid scares, and Sarah being just too damn pregnant. Finally, this night is important because we dusted off a personal classic to show Erik and for the rest to experience after a very long time.

"Live Freaky! Die Freaky!" isn't really a bad movie, but it's very hard to call it good. It's weird. Mostly just that. Adam and Kay credit "Blue Velvet" with being the start of our interest in both art house and bad movies because although it's a good movie, it sent us down the path of just "weird movies," which often fall starkly on one end of the line of good and bad. In her freshman year of college, Kay watched our film tonight for the first time after one of her friends mentioned hearing about a movie Davey Havok of AFI was in and they decided to just Netflix it (back when Netflix was a mail service) out of curiosity. They were horrified, amused, watched all the special features to try to make sense of it, and kept singing the songs a few days later. It ended up becoming something inflicted on others to get a laugh and, of course, Adam was one of those people. Even after having not rewatched it in years, one of us quotes it at least once a month.

"Live Freaky! Die Freaky!" is a stop-motioned animated musical about Charlie Manson and the Manson family voiced by famous punk rock stars. Even with that description, I swear it's even weirder than you think. It's a black comedy and a satire to the most extreme degree and has more offensive lines and pornographic clay sex than you would ever want. It's art in the worst way and a landmark event in one's life where you can divide your life smoothly into the before watching and after watching times. When you start it up, there's literally a screen that says, "You have bad taste."

There's not much more I can say about it except that if you think you can handle it, I urge you to watch it. Here are just a few (of many) memorable lines:

• "Now listen to Hex as he will be doing the majority of the killing because that is a man's job. You can have the girly jobs like painting the walls with blood and, if time permits, make some sandwiches!"
• "THE SON OF THE SON OF GOD."
• "Make sure to do something witchy."
• "This neighborhood looks positively middle class. Look at those messes... If you drove me to the valley, I'll stab you to death and rip your baby out of your stomach and fuck it."
• "Yay! I'm fucking a girl! I'm straight now!"
• "I'm snorting for two now."
• "You reek of menopause."
• "Oh, the indignity of being killed by a commoner!"