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