Cool Cat Vs. Dirty Dog - The Virus Wars [2024]

Yes, that date is correct. The movie said it was copyrighted in 2024 so I'm sticking to that story. Also, if this sounds a bit similar to Cool Cats Fights Coronavirus, there's a reason for that. Similar to the Cool Cat Kids Superhero situation, this movie is kind of a retread of the previous film but it's longer and does actually involve some new footage. They seemingly used most of the footage from Cool Cats Fights Coronavirus, but this film is a full hour as opposed to twenty minutes. So what was added to the film? Mostly scenes of Cool Cat and Daddy Derek going to various houses, inspecting them, and selling them. Did you know Derek is a real estate agent? He has to highlight something he does every time that has nothing to do with the plot and that would be of no interest to actual kids. There's also at least one new song, and oh man, these songs just keep getting worse. The plot, by the way, has to do with Dirty Dog creating a new virus with magic after Cool Cat defeats corona in the same way he did in the last film. Dirty Dog has a gopher sidekick that is just a stuffed toy voiced by Savage. In the end, Cool Cat stops this virus too (when the Cool Cat harrier jet dropping napalm apparently couldn't) and The Dog references shooting up a school so Cool Cat Stops A School Shooting could still be on the horizon. 

Ultimately if you want to see one of these weird virus movies, this one is more worth your time than Cool Cats Fights Coronavirus but in isolation, it's pretty meh.

Spoon Rating: 4

Blood Shack or The Chooper [1971]

 From the guy who brought us The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, we have Blood Shack, originally known as The Chooper. That is not a spelling error for Chopper. The film is barely an hour long and pretty easy to summarize. There's an abandoned shack in the desert that is supposed to be haunted by The Chooper, a being who kills everyone who enters. The shack is kind of guarded by a shirtless man named Daniel who buries people after they're killer there but isn't actually the killer. After a dumb girl who decides to stay there alone and subsequently dies, the owner of the land comes to check it out. She has a guy who keeps badgering her to sell it but she refuses. Then she goes to the rodeo a bunch. More people die from just getting close to the shack, and Daniel dutifully buries them for some reason. Finally the landowner is attacked by the Chooper and his mask is taken off to reveal that it was the guy who wanted the land. Obviously. Daniel also gets stabbed by him and dies.

The was actually pretty funny from an acting and directing stance. It's also pretty short so even if you don't like it much, it won't last long. Afterwards we watched a pasta maker infomercial that was okay.

Spoon Rating: 6

Replica [2005]

Gosh darn it, James Nguyen has done it again. This is his second film, shot in between Julie & Jack and Birdemic, and it's somehow so much more poorly made than either of them. Unfortunately, we'll never get anything this pure again since the only films he made after 2010 were sequels full of self-referential humor in the way of Sharknado. The undiluted bad movie beauty is gone. Cherish it.

The film is only an hour long but like his other two movies the first act is way longer than the rest of the film so you don't even hit the second act until more than halfway through the film. It follows a generic everyman who just got a heart transplant made from stem cell cloning; the opening plot description tells us regular cloning is illegal. He's a salesman and, because every one of these movies needs a romance with a blonde girl, he creeps on his doctor until she relents. Creeps on is the accurate expression here; he has even less game than the everymen in the other two films and she absolutely would have blocked him. After some bland dates and a Chinese expression that was utterly baffling and that online research could not verify the existence of, the doctor woman dies in a car crash. Not long after, he sees a brunette girl who looks just like her except she has a tramp stamp with her name, Claudia, and is always wearing low rise bottoms with her bellybutton piercing out (oh, 2005). At least now her intense vocal fry doesn't feel so incongruous. He creeps on this girl too and she dates him instead of macing him and then has the absolute six-feet-under level of self esteem to change her hair and clothes to look like his dead girlfriend, all while being offended that he can't seem to love her for her. Girl, this is what you signed up for when you decided to date this lunatic. In the last fifteen minutes we find out she actually is a clone of the doctor and she was made by the doctor's evil coworker for . . . reasons. Adam had theorized that she would be cloned to finish some project or something, but we literally get no explanation. Everyman and Clone go to destroy the cloning machine and tell the evil doctor beforehand what they're going to do so he pulls a gun on them. A cop shoots down the evil doctor, but the clone gets killed in the process. 

This film has everything: audio feedback, sub-Neil-Breen level green screen, skim milk level acting, Tippi Hedren footage on the television all the time, non-sex scenes, A BIRD. It's so worth a watch, and with the short run time you can even pair it with some wack commercials like we did including the TiddyBear and UroClub. Look them up.

Spoon Rating: 8

Project: Kill [1976]

This movie is not worth it; pulling off the bandage right now. It's really boring. Adam had to take Jade out of the room and we were all envious of how he managed to miss the whole thing.

The plot starts and you think it's going to be something completely different than it is. Leslie Nielsen is in charge of a group of super soldiers who are being juiced by the government. He decides to defect from the group so he stops taking his drugs and runs away to Manila. There he meets up with some old 'Nam buddies and then starts a bland relationship with a woman at his hotel. His former second in command goes looking for him and has some female sidekick that he has a completely not-believable enemies to lovers relationship with. There are also some gangstery guys looking for Nielsen. Eventually the second finds him, kills him, recoups the drugs, and then decides to just throw them in the water and not complete his job. AFTER killing his former boss. Wild. Stupid.

This film was boring. The lighting was kind of funny-bad for a second in the beginning but, oh man, that was all to say.

Spoon Rating: 1

REWATCH: Fight Of Fury [2020]

Tonight we rewatched Fight of Fury because we had Sarah's uncles as guests. Read the original review here. By the way, still no signs of a sequel.

Starcrash [1978]

Looking at the title and the date, it's painfully obvious what this movie is a ripoff of. The very beginning even starts out with the same ship shot but with a really crappy looking model. The film, however, isn't too much like Star Wars outside of a death star type device that needs to be destroyed, light sabers, and a robot sidekick. Otherwise, it just feels like it fits a lot of general sci-fi conventions (that Star Wars probably established honestly). That being said, this movie is very funny and definitely worth a watch.

Our main character is the scantily clad woman on the cover, redundantly named Stella Star. Along with her sidekick, the curiously magic most 70s man to ever exist, and a Southern robot named L (or El? Who knows?), they have to destroy the not-death-star and find Christopher Plummer's son, David Hasselhoff. Yes, they are both in this movie. We're hoping Plummer got a lot of money for his five minutes of screen time. There's a villain with an extremely square head who leaves no piece of scenery unchewed and some of the worst models and effects you could hope for shown with the upmost earnestness. The plot has some detours with Amazons only wearing slightly more clothes than our main character, an ice planet, and some troglodytes, but they eventually find themselves on the not-death-star and meet the Hoff. The last twenty minutes are a battle sequence full of wut where the galaxy is saved. 

Part of what makes this movie a joy outside of the effects and the blatant idea theft is the genuine feeling of it all. The actors are really trying. The sets are probably cheap, but thought is there. The costumes are silly, but they look more like costumes than just garbage thrown together from the back of someone's closet. The hair and makeup is actually really good. They have some real actors in this. Our lead I immediately clocked as a former spokesmodel because although she clearly has a modeling background, she can actually read her lines even if her tone is mostly just "enthusiastic" regardless of the situation. They really tried, and I respect it.

Spoon Rating: 6

Never Too Young To Die [1986]

Last week we didn't have bad movie night because of Halloween movie night, so we resumed tonight with Never Too Young To Die, a movie starring a young John Stamos, a peak Vanity, and Gene Simmons playing an evil intersex person because, yay, representation? Eep.

Evil Gene wants to use his evil squad of BDSM bikers to threaten to poison the water supply for money. The chip with his evil plans is in the hands of Stargrove, a former James Bond who is killed by the evil squad. His son, Stamos, then inherits everything and has to dodge the goons, which he is apparently great at because he's a gymnast. He meets Vanity who used to work for his father, and after about 40 minutes we get the funniest seduction scene ever. Eventually Gene gets the evil device and he and Stamos have a fight on the Hoover Dam that leads to Gene going overboard. There's also the minor character of Stamos' genius roommate who makes a bunch of weapons and stuff and a goon with a very obvious wig and fake beard who turns out to be Gene Simmons in disguise. Oh, and lots of tongue-based kissing. Lots.

This movie was pretty weird and had some really solid dummy use. It's also a really strange entry into the history of transphobic media. It's not amazing, but it's not a waste of time.

Spoon Rating: 5

C.H.U.D [1984]

This one was pretty doomed from the title, honestly. Even hearing that it was an acronym wasn't quite a comfort. Apparently it stands for Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers, and in spite of that ridiculous premise, it's an extremely mediocre movie. Mid, as the kids say. It's not bad in a funny way. It's not even really bad in a bad way. It's just kind of boring, not funny, competently made and forgettable. The only real joy we got was from a very brief cameo of John Goodman as a cop in a diner who dies immediately. 

The movie feels a little like three different people wrote scripts set around the same villain but no one really consulted with each other. One story is about a photographer who way too controlling over his model girlfriend's body until she gets pregnant and suddenly he's totally chill with whatever she wants to do. He photographs people who live in the subway so he hears about things going on there. One story is about a cop whose wife has disappeared because she got eaten by the chuds in the opening scene and he's trying to find her. The last is about a crusty guy who runs a soup kitchen and is worried about people disappearing and about the EPA doing stuff that could impact people. None of these angles are well represented and it takes forever to get to fighting chuds. Aside from the model slicing one of them in their expanding neck with a sword she just had in the apartment, not much happens at all.

Again, this isn't a bad movie. It's just a bland one.

Spoon Rating: None

Star Rating: 1.5?

Julie And Jack [2003]

When the movie for tonight was announced we didn't think much of it until we saw "directed by James Nguyen" and we knew we were in for a treat. While mostly known for Birdemic, he actually made two films before that, and this romance was his first film.

With all the signature quality of a film you made for a high school foreign language class, we get the story of Jack, poor tech salesman. His sex-obsessed friend tells him to get on a dating website because all your issues can be improved with a relationship and there he meets Lady Renegade. Her actual name is Julie Romanov and she's a computer programmer. She likes to wax poetic about the ephemeral nature of things and Ada Lovelace and does not like to talk about her past. For the first half hour, nothing much happens aside from them getting closer as they go on dates. 

Then suddenly when they are dressed for a Gatsby party and walking through the Fines Arts Palace in San Fran, Jack starts saying things about how he wishes they could meet in real life and not a simulation. We all immediately started placing bets and correctly realized that they have been dating through VR. The next thing we started guessing was, "What's the actual deal with Julie?" None of us believed she was real at that point but was she just AI like in Her or was it more of a "she's dead but programmed herself before she died" deal. Jack spends the next half hour learning about her from a former professor, business partner, an old friend of hers, and an ex before finding her parents. Her mom, played by Tippi Hedrun, reveals that she died two years ago.

Jack breaks up with her because of the sex (no, really, he says that) then goes on a brief soul searching journey to a church that talks about "spiritual love." He decides that he can just date her as the AI reconstruction of a dead girl, and they reunite in virtual reality. Happy ending? I genuinely don't know.

While lacking the glorious CGI of Birdemic, this film has so much to love in its poor acting, silly script, shoddy camera and sound work, and a lot of locations and motifs that are clearly staples of the Nguyen canon. It wasn't really a laugh a minute, but the whole thing was captivating. Maybe Nguyen missed his calling writing for Black Mirror.

Spoon Rating: 7

Dangerous Men [2005]

This film was shot in 1984 but it wasn't released until 2005, making it immediate bad movie fodder. In spite of there being 20 years to edit these beast, it still doesn't make any sense and has some of the most hilariously jarring cuts. Trying to explain the plot is difficult because it is basically three disjointed movies in one with varying degrees of storytelling.

The first plot involves a young engaged couple who is attacked by two bikers on the beach. The man in the couple and one of the bikers die so the woman immediately pretends to be into the other biker so she can lure him to a hotel room and kill him. After, she hitchhikes and the man driving her tries to rape her at gunpoint so she threatens him, kicks him out of the car naked, and drives off. This leads to her going on a killing spree of men but unlike the first two guys, none of these seem to deserve it. She just lures men into thinking she'll have sex with them then kills them when they try to have sex with her. She even pays a prostitute for tips. In a side note, she is caught and arrested. 

The second plot involves a cop who stops a biker from raping the same woman twice, the second time being a bit of a set up orchestrated by the cop and the woman. There are some parallels to the first story but they don't seem to be connected.

The third plot is about some bad biker named Black Pepper. A police detective who does at least know the cop from the second plot mentions him briefly and then later BP has a fight with the cops and the film ends super abruptly when he is caught. Aside from the reoccurring bikers, these plots have nothing in common.

In addition to the nonsense, the sound quality is terrible, the editing is masterfully bad to the point where we couldn't tell the difference between commercials and the actual movie, and the acting is subpar, especially the gloriously bad hand-to-hand combat. It's not too long at about an hour and 17 so why not give it a shot.

Spoon Rating: 5

Supersonic Man [1979]

Continuing what feels like a string of superhero movies, we have Supersonic Man, starring frequent bad movie actor Cameron Mitchell. This one is pretty limited in plot: an alien is sent to Earth to save it and given powers to make him nearly unkillable. Cool. So the stakes are nonexistent for our hero. On the other end of the spectrum, we have out villain in Cameron Mitchell, a man who wants to take over the world (of course) and likes to philosophize about the nature of man. He's pretty fun. His main evil act is to kidnap a scientist and then his daughter becomes a target. Supersonic Man sets out to protect the daughter by dating her. As with a lot of bad movies, the pacing left us wondering where we were in the film for a while until it just ended. 

Overall, there's not much to say about it but it's pretty good. We got some laughs and weren't bored, but I wouldn't necessarily say to add it to your list.

Spoon Rating: 3

The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies [1964]

This movie did not really deliver on its title. How could it, I guess? But even so, this movie didn't involve anyone or anything becoming a zombie in any literal sense of the word. If by "stopped living" you mean "became more primal and was imprisoned in a house" than I guess the title applies. But all of that is revealed in the last ten minutes of the film. 

To back it up, this movie takes place primarily at a carnival and follows a few different characters, most of whom are dark-haired women who all kind of look the same. There's an evil fortune teller named Madame Estrella, distinguished by her mole, who throws acid in the face of a man who spurns her for her sister in the beginning. There's a dancer in the show who drinks a lot, much to the chagrin of her boss and dance partner. There's a girl who goes to the carnival with some "bad boy" in a hoodie and his foreign friend and they're clearly our POV characters. Estrella tells the girl during a fortune telling that someone close to her will die and says she can't read the fortune of her bad boyfriend (foreshadowing is a narrative device ...). The boyfriend then goes to a "strip tease" show starring Carmalita, who lures him backstage where Estrella, her sister, hypnotizes him to kill the classy alcoholic dancer and her partner. We have no idea why. Also, this happens 50 minutes into an hour and twenty minute movie even though this feels like a midpoint. Later, boyfriend tries to strangle his girlfriend after witnessing a spinning umbrella with stripes. He goes to Estrella where she throws acid in his face and tries to get him to join her harem of disfigured goon men but he kills her and Carmalita. We get a seaside chase scene and the cops all shoot down the men including boyfriend.

The strange thing about this movie, aside from the lack of anything actually resembling a zombie, is that it really doesn't develop a plot until the film is more than halfway over. The entire first half of the film is just full of dance numbers from tons of different dancers, singing performances from at least three different people, and montages of the POV characters going on amusement park rides. The question is why? Are all these performers friends of the director? Did they plan out the plot and realize the movie was vastly too short so they added in all the acts? It was reminiscent of The 420 Awards of all things. 

Either way, the film wasn't painful and we got a few good laughs but it's nothing to write home about. Maybe watch the MST3K episode instead?

Spoon Rating: 3

REWATCH: Creating Rem Lezar [1988]

On the anniversary of the start of Bad Movie Night, we decided to do a rewatch of Creating Rem Lezar. In spite of having seen it twice before, we could barely remember it outside of how fun and insane it is. We especially didn't remember that the Twin Towers have a significant moment in this film and the inappropriateness of that on this day of all days did make us giggle because we're terrible and traumatized. Sarah tried to insist that Adam should be Rem Lezar for Halloween. He said no, but we'll see.

 Read the original review here.

Ninja Terminator [1986]

The plot of this one was utterly unable to be followed, but the film itself did provoke a lot of laughs. 

A three part golden statue that makes you invincible from the waist up is stolen by three ninjas in black. One is killed, has a sister named Machiko who works in a restaurant, and gets his piece taken back by the red ninjas who originally had it. One plays with fire. One has a mustache and is named Harry. They receive death threats in the form of a cute little smoke robot and later violent VHS tapes on a different little robot. The three people with the pieces fight at the end but each of them has an invincible part of themselves. There's a crew lead by a man in a terrible Party City wig trying to get the pieces. Some other guy named Jaguar is trying to investigate the killed guy's death and that whole subplot feels like it walked in from another movie and dominates at least half the run time. At no point do the plots intersect.

The dubbing on this movie is bad, the fighting results in boing-like sound effects, and there are a bunch of fun lines. The filming and editing is also bad with scenes that end too quickly, zooms-in to the space between two people, and blocking with both people sitting out of frame. If you want to know what's happening, this will frustrate you. If trying to follow the plot doesn't matter at all, you might actually love this one and rate it even higher than we did.

Spoon Rating: 5

The Pumaman [1980]

With the popularity of superhero films, we decided to get on board with the trend! I think we missed the boat though somehow?

Pumaman starts with a title card informing us that the Aztecs believed in a puma god and that god did, in fact, deliver a pumaman to the world . . . with aliens. Gods apparently weren't enough. That pumaman begot a son, our current pumaman, who has no idea of his celestial origins. Some latex wearing "archeologists" discover a gold Aztec mask and the evil one uses it to control the girl one. She crosses paths with pumaman and we get to experience their painful flirting. Pumaman at one point jumps out of a window to avoid an attacker and lands on his feet. Turns out the attacker was actually there to find the pumaman and help him. Do not question why pumaman is white and his helper appears to actually be of native descent, which would make more sense for pumaman if he's related to an Aztec god (but he's actually an alien? I don't know). Pumaman is given a belt that allows him to fly (you know, a thing pumas can do) and then has to try to take down the evil guy who wants to control the world with oil. He can also portal jump and stop his heart to appear dead, other common puma behaviors. His helper gets taken by the bad men and actually destroys the mind controlling mask, making it pretty easy to take down the evil man from there. The film ends with the aliens being called and pumaman basically announcing that he and the girl are going to screw to make the next pumaman. 

This was a tough one. The first half of the movie had a lot of really funny moments including bad special effects and incredibly strange lines. It does start to drag a bit in the second half though after pumaman has realized his mission. For that reason, this film is on the cusp. Watch it if you want, it won't really waste your time, but if it doesn't sound like your thing, skipping it is okay too. If you're really unsure, there's apparently an MST3K episode about it, which might soften the blow.

Oh, and there's no Aztec puma god; just a jaguar one. Why could he not be jaguar man? It would make equally as much sense.

Spoon Rating: 4.5

Verotika [2019]

 "I don't like Danzig. He gives me the impression of someone who will say he doesn't care what people think of him but deeply wants to be taken seriously." - Adam

This is a weird one for a lot of reasons. First of all, it's written, directed, and scored by Glenn Danzig of Misfits fame and for being a solo artist who also had a song better covered by Johnny Cash. Second of all, while it is definitely a high ranking bad movie, I would not recommend it to everyone. Sure, we have watched our fair share of bloody or horny movies, and make no mistake that this is both, but the film started out in a way that was so distressing we had to stop until Adam and Sarah put Jade to bed because she started screaming. Basically, to spoil the first two minutes, an Elvia knockoff gouges out the eyes of a screaming, chained-up girl with her acrylics, and it's actually quite realistic looking. I, who am most disturbed by ritualistic sacrifice and body horror, retreated into the couch a bit and wondered how I'd do with the rest of the film. Spoiler: that was just an intro scene, the gouger is our narrator to our trilogy of stories, and nothing is ever that realistic or disturbing again. In fact, the bad acting combined with incompetent directing, nonsensical script, and bad effects and sets, ultimately makes this one a pretty good time. I would just avoid it if you are really disturbed by gore and blood.

The first story in our trilogy, "The Albino Spider of Dajette," is by far the most unique and the one with the most plot. None of them are good, but this once had that going for it. A French girl with eyes instead of nipples sheds a nipple tear onto an albino spider who becomes an evil mime-spider-man who acts out her murderous dreams. He kills her roommate and then a random prostitute and then has sex with someone while Dajette sleeps in a porn theater where the projector is a box fan with a light behind it. Dajette, wracked with guilt, kills herself to prevent the spiderman from hurting anyone else and then he gets shot up by cops. They comment on her eye-nipples but they never get explained.

The second story, "Change of Face," is about a serial killer stripper who has some minor facial scars so she goes around killing women by cutting off their face skin. Most of the segment is strip club scenes with no plot but this segment has the best side character in the form of a cop who talks like Christian Bale's Batman and who is either taking his role very seriously or camping it up on purpose. Six months later she's just working in a different club but still hasn't been caught.

The last story and by far the worst is "Drukija Countess of Blood" and if the title didn't give it away, it's just an Elizabeth Bathory story with even more nudity than usual. Most of it is just the Countess playing in blood like an excited toddler.

So let's count all the ways this film actually made us laugh hysterically. The acting is completely toothless, with the exception of the cop in the second one, and this seems to be because the cast is made up of dead-eyed porn stars and strippers with lip filler. We don't know this for sure but if you look at some of the actors' names, you'll see where we got this idea. The directing is full of zoom-ins to nothing followed by fades-to-black and, of course, gratuitous male gaze. There's tons of padding (the script of the last one was probably two pages long at most). The costumes get worse as it goes on, probably as a result of all the budget getting spent on the eye gouging and fancy bathtub. In general, the whole thing is an exercise in aesthetic over substance, and it's a bad aesthetic. Danzig is a 13-year-old boy who never grew out of his serial killer fascination phase and now we all can see his kinks on full display.

Spoon Rating: 6*

*Again, not for the especially squeamish, but you may be fine if you just look away at the first scene?

Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam (The Man Who Saved The World) [1982]

This movie is not really known by its real name, but it is instead often referred to as "Turkish Star Wars." It's not that the film is particularly like Star Wars in any way outside of being a science fiction movie. The nickname comes from the fact that it uses a ton of footage from Star Wars to provide galaxy scenes and battles to the movie. And that's not all. It excessively uses the theme from Indiana Jones during fight scenes. I don't know enough about copyright law to comment but I would imagine that the Turkish film industry of the 80s wouldn't have much of an impact on Western media. 

So if it's not actually a direct ripoff, what's it actually about? The film gives a massive information dump right in the beginning that is a little hard to follow but here's what we got: Earth has exploded into smaller rocks, aliens don't have brains and want human brains because they have superior willpower, and humanity's fate is in the hands of a martial artist and a misogynist. From there the film involves the two characters getting captured over and over and fighting off the aliens in completely absurd ways. The absolute best moment is when one of them rips off a red, fuzzy aliens arms and beats him with them. Eventually the misogynist friend dies and the other guy goes on a hilarious killing rampage. That's most of the film really. There's some religious stuff in there about Islam being proof of humanity's power and Jesus building a seven layer underground bunker to protect people, but I couldn't tell you how that fits into anything.

While a bit slow at first, this film is a winner. The fight scenes and effects are absurd, the dialogue is hilarious, and the liberal thievery just adds to the whimsy. It's one of the best we've seen in a while and well worth your time.

Spoon Rating: 8

SPECIAL: White Fang [2018]

This one was another mistake watch. Sarah recommended it after she went over a patient's house and saw them watching it and was baffled by the bad animation. In truth, the animation for the humans specifically is very unappealing and too harsh but the animation for the scenery is actually really nice. The actual plot is fine, although none of us has read the book so we can't judge the accuracy there. Overall, it's a completely inoffensive film so we can't in any way call it bad. Hilariously though, when we started watching it there was about a five second delay between the dialogue and visuals, but it turned out to be an easily fixable mistake. 

Star Rating: 2.5/5

2025 - The World Enslaved By A Virus [2021]

The pandemic really changed a lot. It had a profound effect on people's mental health, it is probably tied to the current inflation issues, kids are educationally behind. There's a lot of bad that came from it. But you know what didn't come from it? A global communist state that persecutes Christians. But it could, right? This movie bravely posits that theory with a very short timeline for it to come true. Only two years remaining for that particular dystopia. We better get to work.

The film follows a German guy and his sister who have been hiding out in a bunker after the current overhaul of the world has made them unsafe as Christians. They decide one day to stop hiding and start trying to spread the word by just spray painting fish everywhere. A former US marine finds them and joins their club. The crew is rounded out by "Holly and I'm here to help" a gothy hacker girl who is initially only on their side because she's all about freedom of choice but then gets converted and they gift her with a goth cross necklace. Meanwhile the German guy starts up a romance with a girl on the inside and there are a bunch of scenes of militarized cops talking about how they have to bring these people down. Really, there's just a lot of musical montages and not a lot in the way of forward moving plot. The whole thing has a frame narrative that makes it seem like the story is being told by the German guy to a cop who arrested him. The film ends with a women who is doubting her position in the government being told to kill him in the woods and the screen going to credits. I think we are supposed to assume she saved him.

This film definitely has some moments. The acting is really bad and while I think it would be easy tor blame that on the fact that a lot of the actors are German and speaking English, they aren't great in the German parts either. This movie was made by like twenty people all doing double duty and probably all from the same church. The premise itself is ridiculous and that leads to a lot of over-the-top moments but the film does drag quite a bit with its minimal plot.

Spoon Rating: 3.5

The Corpse Grinders [1971]

After having to tell Adam that we literally already watched Run Like Hell a month ago (yes, that's how unmemorable it was), we turned to this film, The Corpse Grinders, not a black metal band and really not very metal at all.

The plot is very simple: a cat food company is paying a gravedigger with a mentally ill wife and some really weird morticians as part of a scheme to get dead bodies that can be ground up for cat food. The gravedigger provides the bodies and the morticians embalm them with some kind of pork-flavored fluid to make them extra tasty. This cat food is causing cats everywhere to go crazy and murder their humans since they now know the joys of the manflesh. There's a doctor and nurse duo who figure this out and try to stop them. 

At only an hour and 15 minutes this movie is just the right length to not be too long and to not feel too long. It's not painful, it's just simplistic. Technically it's fairly competent and the acting is kind of bad in a somewhat funny but not overly hilarious way. It's not a bad experience, but it's not one I would insist on.

Spoon Rating: 3

They Saved Hitler's Brain [1968]

This film wasn't really the plan for the evening, but our actual plans were thwarted by the cruel fates. Let me tell you the tale. In a small neighborhood of a nearby small city there once dwelled a shop called Movie Town, a shop right out of the bygone era of the 1990s. I last went sometime around 2016 and was startled to find that it had a plentiful stock of used VHS tapes and a corner curtained off to conceal porn, both DVD and VHS. Not a Bluray to be found in this forgotten land. We got some really bad VHS movies there and were pretty darn certain it was a drug front. How else could it stay in business in the 2010s? Alas, it could not survive into the 2020s when so many more worthy businesses have failed and the spot is now vacant but with its handmade-looking sign still up and a printed out sign on the door saying that it is merely closed for renovations. I'll believe it when I see it. So instead of some bespoke masterpiece selected from this anachronistic shop, we picked this film from a 50 pack of horror movies because the title was funny. Trust me when I say my Movie Town diatribe is a better story than this one.

For the first half hour or so we were genuinely convinced we were watching the wrong film. The plot seemed to be about some kind of dangerous nerve gas and the kidnapping of a scientist who made an antidote for it. Eventually we get to the fact that Hitler's brain (whole head actually) was preserved and brought down to the Caribbean nation of Mandoras, feeding into that whole "Hitler's hiding somewhere in South America" conspiracy that was once popular. Some other scientist and his impressively stupid wife go there and get kidnapped by some Nazis, who want to nerve gas the whole island for some reason. It's wildly boring.

There were a few laughs to be had but it took a very long time to get there. The image of Hitler's head in a jar that is extremely Futurama? Fun. The dumb wife asking what happened after literally watching the man next to her get shot in a drive by? Delightful. The door opening to show the Nazis standing on an upper stair so their heads are cut off? Perfectly incompetent. But the rest of the film sucked. Maybe we should have watched Vampire Night Orgy instead. I blame Movie Town.

Spoon Rating: 2

The Octagon [1980]

This is a big moment. For a long time we have been working through a stack of movies that were acquired from the Book Barn so that we could assess their potential, and we have finally come to the last one. This Chuck Norris film may be the origin of the fighting stadium of the title name but unfortunately this movie didn't involve any folding chairs. Honestly, it barely involved any fighting. Or plot. It did have some really standout insane lines but at what cost?

The basic premise is that Chuck Norris at one point was trained as a ninja by his dad and alongside his brother. His brother got disowned and that brother went on to create a ninja mercenary training school while Chuck went on to live a normal life. The first thirty minutes of the movie are a series of seemingly unrelated scenes of ninja training at the school, Chuck going on a date who gets killed by ninjas later, a rich dude getting shot up, a younger rich lady asking Chuck to help her with her car, Chuck's friend fighting a sailor guy, etc. Somehow this all culminates in Chuck needing to fight his brother in the octagon at his training school. That's the last five minutes of the movie more or less and the journey to get there is long. At one point Adam and Sarah's daughter Jade leaned on the remote and fast forwarded a bit and we decided to just go with it.

The unfortunate thing is that this movie actually has some really hilarious lines. The screenwriter made some bold attempts at philosophical that do not work at all including the wonderful, "why are the peanuts always at the other end of the bar?" You could probably make a great two minute supercut. However, it's not actually worth it to subject yourself to the whole film just for the few bits.

Spoon Rating: 3

REWATCH: The Room [2003]

As is often something of an initiation for the uninformed, we decided that it was necessary to do a rewatch of the classic The Room as we had a guest tonight. Well versed in the sci-fi channel's attempts at film making but woefully inexperienced when it comes to the paragons of the genre, Scott came to movie night with skepticism but an open mind. It did take a while to try to convince him we weren't watching a porno and even then we weren't entirely successful. Fair. 

Every time we watch this film, it seems to take even longer because of how often we have to pause it. This time it was slightly less because of diverging conversation and more because of the arrival of Adam and Sarah's daughter, Jade, who really stole the show with an intermission performance of causing herself to throw up in a desperate effort to eat more bread and then slipping on her own vomit. 

Either way, this time the sub conversation did keep coming back to the idea that a polycule really would have solved all the issues of the film. And it would still fully support what seems to be one of the attempted themes: if everyone in the world loved each other, the world would be a better place. Tommy/Johnny should probably have just taken his own advice here and gotten in on the Mark/Lisa action. Denny would probably be down too.

Also, it was apparently decided that Kay is Adam and Sarah's Denny (or like, an actually platonic Mark).

Run Like Hell [1995]

The influence of The Road Warrior on bad movies cannot be overstated and this film is another one of those. However, interestingly, this film also borrows a bit from the third Mad Max movie Beyond Thunderdome and seems almost like it was predicting a bit of the future of franchise with a little bit of a Fury Road vibe. You know, if Fury Road was exploitative, had little world building, and was mostly just a martial arts movie.

In this dystopia all single women are imprisoned. Why? Unclear. It seems to have something to do with a lack of resources, but if overpopulation is the problem shouldn't you be more worried about married women? Either way, these women seem to be only given a thong and makeup while in prison aside from a few lucky ones who get bras and yes, obviously they get abused sometimes by Robert Z'Dar, the most famous person in this. One day four women escape and the film basically follows them wandering through the desert and shooting opponents. There's a couple they encounter with no real explanation. There's a ninja who helps them. There's some fight-to-the-death ring that briefly appears. They fight some android guys. Really it's unclear what the point of any of it is, but there sure is a large cast of people who mostly only get about five minutes of screen time. The film ends on a cliffhanger that Z'Dar is going to go after the escaped women, but we probably wouldn't watch a sequel even if there is one.

This film was okay. The plot was pretty boring, but there were a lot of solid acting moments and general silliness. Adam suggested that Stella Speed from Roller Blade Seven should show up and save them and honestly if the film had even more RBS vibes it would have been a lot better.

Spoon Rating: 3.5

Chain Reaction [1996]

This movie was so boring, oh my god. So boring we can't even give it a spoon rating. It's getting a star rating instead and it's like one star out of five. It's referred to as a "science fiction action thriller" and it's none of these things. It's just Keanu Reeves and Rachel Weisz running around for almost two hours. There's some science that could help the environment. Some people want the people to have it and some don't. They get blamed for trying to leak it. Cue lots of running. 

Don't bother.

Spoon Rating: 1

Future War [1997]

Have you ever through that combining The Terminator with Jurassic Park starring Jean-Claude Van Damme would be the best movie ever? Someone did and the result is Future War. They couldn't actually afford Van Damme but they did manage to get a knockoff Van Damme to be our protagonist and an actual Robert Z'Dar to play a cyborg.

The movie stars in medias res with basically no clear context for what is actually going on except that everyone is wearing a lot of plaid so it's definitely the 90s or possibly just rural Canada. We get a bit of a vague voiceover from the token female character and then we get screen text that confusingly tells us that cyborgs from another planet have gone back in time to get dinosaurs and also to enslave humans. One human slave has managed to get to earth, as well as some dinosaurs and cyborgs, and he's our hero. He encounters a nun who's a former prostitute and drug dealer who's having a crisis of faith. The rest of the film is really just them and a few others fighting dinos and cyborgs. 

The film is overall not the worst. The dinosaurs look hilarious and a lot of the props do too. One guy uses a camera made out of a painted cardboard box. The acting is pretty terrible, and there were a few times when reactions or movements were so weird that we had to watch them again. The movie also isn't too long at only an hour and 20 minutes. It's not worth your time, but it wasn't too painful.

Spoon Rating: 3

If you want to talk pain, after the film we decided to do a taste test of different "healthy" Oreo knockoffs.

 

To save you some time:

• The Leos and Highkey were the best with ratings of 12/15 but for different reasons. The Leos were most consistent but the Highkey had the best cream and dunkability.
• The Catalina Crunch were okay at 11/15.
• The Protifit were pretty bad at 8/15 but they had a distinct coffee taste that might appeal to some.
• The Smart Cookies weren't even finished by some of us and tasted like a worse version of the Protifit with a 5/15.
• And the Complete Cremes were absolutely unpalatable with a 3/15. They were torture.
• Our control group of Oreos were obviously a 15/15, but they are objectively not good for you.
  

Alien Factor [1978]

This was one of those films that would have gotten a good score if the score was only base don the last twenty minutes of the film. It's not overwhelmingly boring, helped by its mercifully short run time of an hour and 17 minutes, but a lot of the film involved people aimlessly walking through the works while the world's most grating synth played ambiguous sounds in the background.

A spaceship lands that just looks like a fallen piece of some kind of factory building and we get three aliens that we called "armor boi," "meat boi," and "fur boi." Armor Boi is the least gross looking but is killed halfway through. What do they want? Who knows? But one of them does manage to make a bunch of people in town look like mummies. At the end we find out one of them (Meat Boi, I think) was actually wearing a human suit the whole film and then he goes back to his planet or something.

The main appeal of this film is the costumes, which are pretty darn fun. There's also a scene where a girl goes randomly into the woods with gasoline to kill the aliens but when one shows up the guy she bumped into just throws the can instead of actually dosing the alien. That was funny. Mostly this movie just made me wonder why so many writer-directors make sci-fi movies with no real script. Adam hypothesized: "It's because they don't know anyone who can do martial arts." Maybe he's right.

Spoon Rating: 2.5

Heartburn [1986]

This movie was selected mostly based on the horror of the idea of Jack Nicholson in a romantic comedy and with Meryl Streep of all people. There are a bunch of other famous people in this movie too like Catherine O'Hara, Jeff Daniels, and Stockard Channing. So how's the film? Honestly, this is the most weirdly bland film. It feels like it has almost no tension, no climax, and no real theme (unless the "Itsy Bitsy Spider" song at the end was a hint). 

The plot is this: couple meets at a wedding, has a date and sex, gets married in what is a second marriage for both of them, they buy a crappy house, she gets pregnant and gives birth, she gets pregnant again, he cheats on her, she leaves him, her wedding ring gets stolen in a stick-up, they get back together, they break up again. Roll credits. That's it.

Maybe the world's most boring script, needed the famous names. Either way, we only laughed at the absurdity of this film, particularly the sudden rolling of credits and the idea that anyone would be immediately into Jack Nicholson.

Spoon Rating: 2

Above The Law [1988]

This Seagel movie has been sitting on the shelf forever because it was purchased as part of a double feature with Hard to Kill, a Val Kilmer movie that Adam maybe owns just out of some weird loyalty to Val Kilmer. I'm going to tell you right now: don't waste your time. 

The plot is honestly hard to follow for all of us, including Sarah, and that was partially due to bad writing and partially due to bad sound. Basically Seagal is trying to stop a drug ring and an assassination of a senator or something. He's married to Sharon Stone who both survives the movie but also only has two lines and he's partners with Pam Grier and you can't convince me that it's a platonic relationship given all the weird things they say. So much of the film involves Seagal doing to a location for some reason with little information gained. The only good part of the film is when he hits someone with a car and continues drives through a wall, causing the dummy to then fall off the front of the car to the ground below. The rest is just boring.

Spoon Rating: 1

The Divine Enforcer [1992]

While Kay was away on Spring Break, Adam, Sarah, and Erik watched and enjoyed The Divine Enforcer, a Christian Batman movie. Apparently it was worth the time.

Spoon Rating: 7

Fight Of Fury [2020]

This post is far too late, but this film was aces. This film is a vanity project for a Nepalese martial artist named Shuny Bee. It's shot in his own studio, it's full of bad ADR and acting in general, shots are reused, there's an uncomfortable relationship between Shuny and a much younger woman who he saves from human trafficking. Some other special features include a dead wife subplot (even though initially it seemed she may have just left him with their son but left her daughter with him so he could train her to fight or something), a bad guy named Brutal and his crew of Eastern European assistants who have both trafficked prostitutes and trafficked(?) MMA fighter women, and the fact that the film ends on a cliffhanger after Shuny a.k.a. Brandon defeats the sub-boss. Unfortunately because I saw this so long ago, the specifics have faded from memory but it was excellent and will be watched again.

Spoon Rating: 9

Death Machines [1976]

Unable to resist a bad martial arts movie, Adam offered up this one for the night and it's kind of hard to place it. 

First of all, this movie kind of lacks a central character, or at least it does until a bit too far into the movie. It may be tempting to say the film is based around the "death machines" a trio of three men who are supposed to be great hitmen and never speak, but they don't take up much screen time aside from when the white one has a fight in a religious diner for no reason. The "death machines" are under the control of a man with a giant beard who is only in the very beginning and sort of directed by a different guy and a woman with a terrible wig who seems to be struggling with English. Whenever we are in the woman's house, the audio violence of the soundtrack is real. The machines are given an assignment and some killing happens. Then they take out a martial arts instructor and his whole class with one survivor who kind of become the POV character although we're already halfway through the movie. He doesn't actually do anything aside from be sad and date his nurse. This film is so hard to parse. 

Aside from the vaguely nonsense plot, the acting is bad, the soundtrack is absurd, and the fight scenes can get comical. We got a good amount of laughs from all this, but the plot did start to really drag towards the end. At least we had baby Jade to amuse us during the boring parts.

Spoon Rating: 3.5

Hollow Man II [2006]

I have not seen the original Hollow Man but apparently it doesn't matter. This movie was clearly made as a quick cash grab that only required Christian Slater to be on set for one day. 

Basically, he's invisible and out for revenge against the doctor who did this to him, but we don't even really learn the backstory until more than halfway through the film. We spent the whole first half not really sure why anything was happening at all. The lead is Peter Facinelli a.k.a. not Tom Cruise a.k.a. the doctor dad from Twilight. Both his character and the doctor character are incredibly dumb and make consistently stupid decisions throughout the film while having the barest amount of romantic tension. They do manage against the odds to take down ghost!Slater but with our lead having to become invisible in the process. It feels sort of like a sequel set up but that clearly wasn't going to happen. In the end, we got a few laughs from the invisible prank-like behavior but it was a lot of groaning.

Spoon Rating: 2.5

In Gramps' Shoes [2014]

From the director of The Unexpected Bar Mitzvah, we have this complete narcissism-fest. Written and starring (but only co-directed) by Donald James Parker, a Christian who wants to really spread his anti-LGBT, anti-Semitic, and many other anti themed branded of Christianity, tells a story about a family with the best grandfather ever (him, obviously). 

The film starts with a woman called her estranged father and asking for money because even though she lives in a very clean, bland middle class house, she's apparently in deep trouble. Gramps moves into the house and bonds quickly with the 13 (but definitely played by at least a 16) year old daughter. However, the 16-year-old son hates him, especially after he beats him and his friends in a race and tells him to get a job. Gramps starts bringing them to church and teaching them about the evils of Harry Potter and oh, god this movie is so boring for so much of it. It's shot so poorly and paced so slowly that you can space out for a while and not miss anything. But then you black back in during the last twenty minutes or so and stuff gets weird. The daughter's ex-husband shows up drunk and Gramps beats him up, getting shot and dying in the process like the good martyr he is. The family all talks about him and the son wins a track meet and gets the good Christian girl love interest to go to prom with him. End of Gramps' running shoes.

This movie would have been a lot more tolerable if it wasn't nearly two hours. It had a few laughs, but it isn't quite as worth your time as the other things we've watched from him.

Spoon Rating: 3

Monkey Shines: An Experiment In Fear [1988]

This is a George Romero movie. Yes, that George Romero. Not everything he did was good, but this movie definitely had an interesting progression from "normal film that's neither boring nor interesting" to "why is this happening."

After two butt shots before the minute mark, our protagonist gets hit by a semi (something that was literally called by Adam) and becomes quadriplegic. His girlfriend leaves him for his doctor, a weirdly young Stanley Tucci, and he now has to live with an annoying nurse and her bird. After a suicide attempt, our protag's weird friend who is injecting monkeys with human brain shavings contacts a woman he knows who trains monkeys to help people like our protag. The friend donates the monkey he's experimenting on, Ella, to the cause. At first things are great. Ella is good at her job and the two get along while our protag is also developing a romance with Ella's trainer. Then Ella kills the nurse's bird after the bird attacks our protag. Suddenly Ella and our protag are psychically linked for some reason and Ella is now killing people he doesn't like including his ex and Tucci, his mom, and eventually just anyone in his life. The protag ends up killing her by basically biting her and whipping her around. Because disability in movies is often shitty, the film ends with the protag fully recovered and dating the monkey trainer as if he couldn't have a fulfilling life without a full recovery.

We can't really recommend this movie because it's almost two hours and doesn't really start to get good until the halfway point but the acting from midpoint on is peak. The main actor is relatively inoffensive in calm scenes but once he's supposed to get vengeful and kind of possessed by the monkey, his acting becomes insane. The deaths are comical too, particularly Ella's. Actually Ella may be the best actor in the whole film. Good for her.

Spoon Rating: 3

Cellular [2004]

It is entirely possible that everyone had already seen this. I had definitely seen this in my freshman year of college with my friend Alex. Sarah started thinking she had seen it about halfway through. By the end, Adam wasn't entirely sure that he hadn't see it either. Anyway, it's not bad. It's not good really, but it's pretty functional as an action film that won't make you think.

Kim Basinger is a science teacher in a house that a teacher definitely can't afford who gets kidnapped. She hot wires a landline and manages to call Chris Evans who then goes on a crime spree in an effort to help her. He is unable to prevent the kidnapping of her son and husband, but he does get his hands on the thing the kidnappers are after: a video of them robbing and killing some drug dealers. They're cops. But because this is a movie William H. Macy is a good cop who helps Chris Evans take down those bad cops instead of keeping quiet after he finds out what his coworkers did. ACAB.

As I said before, it's not bad but it's nothing special. It's got a really long third act and a very silly end credit sequence involving people looking at their phones. Adam was mad that Jessica Biel was only in it for a few minutes, but otherwise we were mostly just fine with it.

Spoon Rating: 2/10
Star Rating: 2/5

Grizzly II: Revenge [1983]

There is definitely more of a story to this movie, but I guess I just don't know how to find it. Here's what we do know: this is a sequel to Grizzly, theoretically, that was never fully put together but someone saved it after realizing that the opening scene of dumb teens getting murdered by a bear features unknowns George Clooney, Laura Dern, and Charlie Sheen. I wonder what ever happened to them. In more substantial roles we also have Nurse Ratchett, Gimli son of Gloin, and a cameo by Wormtail. And if you think the actor situation here is odd, let me tell you that it's really in line with the overall oddness of this movie. 

This movie is only an hour and 15 minutes and is clearly pieced together in a lot of places. It follows three stories: that of some poachers who killed a baby bear and pissed off the mother and are out to get her; that of a park ranger, bear expert, and John Rhys-Davies (a French Canadian hunter with possible indigenous roots) trying to stop the bear; and that of Louise Fletcher trying to host a rock festival in a national park (it makes no sense; just go with it). There's also a subplot with the park ranger's daughter getting banged by some musician or something. The film cuts between these three plots and none of them do much. Almost everyone dies at the end including the bear who gets electrocuted by the music equipment. 

What's interesting about this film is the hack job it became. There's some truly egregious ADR, some clearly modern scenes spliced in to try to lengthen the movie or add continuity, and the acting, including the bear, is not good. Although the tiring concert scenes towards the end are mostly boring, this film does have a lot to offer.

Spoon Rating: 5.5

King Of The Lost World [2005]

We haven't watched a ton of Asylum films, but we've dabbled. Unfortunately, we didn't know this was one until the start at which point we all groaned a bit. They are usually utterly devoid of sense in a frustrating way but can occasionally provide a poorly CGIed laugh moment. I guess. Mostly this one was just frustrating.

The plot is supposed to be loosely based of Conan Doyle's The Lost World but they threw a giant ape in there to try to capitalized on the fact that Jackson's King Kong had just come out. The plot follows a couple survivors of a plane crash on a seemingly deserted island who have absolutely no idea how to live. Right away one is killed by a giant spider and by killed I mean instantly wrapped up in web like Frodo in Return of the King but when they rip it open he has already been reduced to a skeleton (with an eyeball? okay). The island also has giant scorpions, which it's worth noting are less dangerous than small scorpions, and one stabs a guy backwards. The ape appears twice and is very blurry. The crew is then captured by some other survivors who went feral after like two days and they use a nuclear weapon to destroy the ape somehow not destroying the whole island. The film ends with one guy and two girls from the original crew still miraculously alive and not radiated to death but also still completely stuck on the island with no way out or plan. I guess the scriptwriter gave up.

This film gave us about two laughs from the CGI but it's really not worth your time. Instead we fantasized about a fighting match between all the women of the King Kong films. Fay Wray has no chance, Naomi Watts would be the best fighter, but Jessica Lange would fight dirty and try to gouge your eyes out.

Spoon Rating: 2

REWATCH: How To Get Revenge [1989] & Shorts

We had a simple night of learning how to get revenge and watching through some of Adam's bad movie shorts playlist that's mostly commercials.You can find his playlist here.

The Snowman [2017]

 This film was an odd one. It's based off a very popular book by Norwegian author Jo Nesbo, directed by the Swedish guy who did Let The Right One In, and is starring a bunch of famous people including Michael Fassbender, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and a post-throat cancer Val Kilmer. Especially after the popularity of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, this seems like it was set up to be successful. So what went wrong?

The plot of this film is honestly kind of hard to parse. Each scene of the film basically drops you into some kind of action with very little to add texture to what's happening and for the first hour, we weren't completely sure about the timeline of events or who was significant to who. By the end, some plots had seemingly been totally dropped. Apparently 10% of the film never even got shot due to filming schedules so that's clearly a factor. That being said, we also figured out who the murderer was an hour in with no struggle in spite of the fact that we barely knew what was going on. It went like this:
Adam: So, the murderer is killing women who don't necessarily know who their children's fathers are, but he is also killing women who are pregnant by someone and maybe seeking an abortion. The only people who might know about the pregnancy are their boyfriends or...
Sarah: Doctors. The murderer has to be a doctor. It's the only way the murderer could have all the information to attack these women specifically.
Kay: It's the mom's boyfriend. 
Adam: Isn't he a plastic surgeon?
Kay: Shared office.
Sarah: Yeah, they mentioned that information is accessible to all doctors in the same office.
It's a major failure for your movie to be both incoherent and obvious. And, as you may also be thinking from reading our breakdown, this murderer's motivation makes no sense. Why isn't he killing deadbeat dads? They try to explain this in the first scene when we see a boy finding out his dad is his asshole tutor and then his mom kills herself by driving her car onto the ice and letting herself sink. Sure. Makes sense. 

So was there any fun here? A little. The murderer's calling card is to build a snowman at the scene of the crime and while they were probably supposed to be scary, they were kind of cute and the juxtaposition of the snowmen with the scary music is delightful. There was also some amusement to be had with the son's acting, which was honestly really bad, especially compared with all the seasoned actors in this. We also tried not to think too much about how the main detective's name is Harry Hole (pronounced very differently in Norwegian) and everyone in Norway is British. The book seems like it's probably a decent read, but this is adaption hell.

Spoon Rating: 2

I Believe In Santa [2022]

This movie was coconuts. It was mentioned to me by my friend Caroline who heard about it through her own means and asked if I knew about it being a bad movie person. All the information she gave beforehand amounted to, "It's a romantic comedy movie about a guy who genuinely believes that Santa is real." She also mentioned an article about the 22 most unhinged things in the film that I also recommend reading but only after you've experienced the film for yourself. And you should. Because it must be seen to be believed.

Our main character is Lisa, a crazy-eyed, Rachel Hollis knockoff, who writes about holidays or something for some online publisher and has an eight-year-old daughter and sir-not-appearing-in-this-film ex. After writing an article toting July 4th as "the best holiday, god bless America" she meets our other main, Tom, at a fair. Tom, wearing too many vests and looking like a 20-years-older, knockoff Ben Platt, is apparently the perfect man in spite of that fact that he really doesn't feel straight even when juxtaposed with his actually gay friend, Assan. However, the red flags appear when Lisa goes to his apartment for Christmas to find it decorated to the nines, creepy automation Santa included. Lisa hates Christmas because of honestly dumb childhood trauma reasons that she reveals at the start of act three so this isn't good. Either way, she decides to go with it and has a lot of eye-bugging performances of Christmas activities, which he has scheduled every single day. Then the other shoe drops: he genuinely believes in Santa. This is made even weirder in that this is dropped during a dinner party with their best friends and everyone particularly felt for Lisa's friend, Sharon, who really hopes he's kidding. But he triples down on this. Instead of losing all attraction to him and breaking up with him, Sharon does suggest Lisa stay with him for the story, which honestly I get. Somehow though, this turns into Lisa just accepting this eccentricity and deciding the answer to to meet him halfway, which really just means giving in. It ends in a ski lodge proposal and a "I asked mall Santa for you two to get married" from the daughter. 

The overall premise of this movie is obviously the strangest thing. We immediately wondered if Santa is just an allegory for God, and it feels like that could be the case. However, the movie also really clearly showcases all the reasons one shouldn't believe in god with seemingly no awareness. Also, as Adam pointed out, if you actually believed these things about Santa, wouldn't he just become your god? There's also the detail of "god bless America" in the beginning, and this other strange moment where Lisa and Assan hang out and Assan mentions that he's Muslim and draws some kind of parallel between his friend's insane beliefs and racism. By the way, this movie was written by the (white) guy playing Tom and the woman playing Lisa is his wife in real life, and he has written other rom-coms. 

Aside from that, this movie is full of other awkward, strangely shot, and strangely acted moments. We got almost as many laughs as we got slack-jawed moments. It's definitely worth a watch at Christmas. Or hell, any time really. Santa is an omniscient presence after all, and it's best we all bow down before his altar.

Spoon Rating: 5