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