Sgt. Pepper's Only Hearts Club Band [1978]

With no other source to turn to while Adam's laptop is in the shop, we turned to The Bad Movie Bible and pulled out this film that a lot of people apparently didn't even realize existed. It is an absolute marvel in cinema in that it somehow manages to have no plot, no themes, no characterization, and no dialogue. I don't even know how to explain this movie for that reason. The best explanation I could get was from looking up how this movie came to be. Apparently the producer had acquired the rights to 29 Beatles songs, gave them to a guy who has never written a screenplay before and he tried to arrange them into an order that could produce a story. In theory. This movie's cast is also stacked with music stars who had really high hopes only to later heavily regret their choices. The titular band consists of Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees. There are cameos by Alice Cooper, Aerosmith, and Earth, Wind, and Fire. But still, but still, it is almost impossible to tell you what is happening. I will try, but I expect to fail.

In a town called Heartland that is good and pure, there was an original Sgt. Pepper band starting during WWI and continuing on to be the town's pride and joy. It ended in 1958 but has now been resurrected twenty years later with a totally new crew, and they're a rock band now. The original band leader's brother loves money and gets them a record contract in LA and while they're gone an evil man with dementia and sex robots named Mustard fills the town with sleaze and steals the original band's instruments, distributing them to various lowlifes. The band is alerted of this by their leader's girlfriend named Strawberry Fields, and they return to Heartland to get the instruments back. They do but Strawberry gets kidnapped and dies by falling off Aerosmith's set design. After her funeral Peter Frampton wants to end it all but it saved by a magical weather vane that also resurrects Strawberry. They sing "Sgt. Pepper's (Reprise)" and it's finally over. 

Now that managed to sound almost coherent, but remember that there's no dialogue, just music sequences and some voiceover from George Burns. The film's reviews use the word whimsy a lot and I barely even dug into that aspect: shiny clothes, a hot air balloon, parades, the whimsy list is endless. But is it bad in a fun way? It certainly is a little. While we bemoaned the nearly two whole runtime and lack of a real story, we did get a few loud laughs from exaggerated facial acting, absolutely absurdity, and a well-used dummy. I can't fully recommend it, but it's definitely an experience.

Spoon Rating: 4

Mitchell [1975]

 This "action" movie was somehow not that deep but still kind of confusing. I'm not sure if it was because of the subpar audio quality or the film was just written in a way where you didn't really know what was going on until the scene was almost over.

Mitchell is a cop who kind of just sucks. He's supposed to be an anti-hero but he isn't likeable in any way, and he isn't really amazing at his job either. He tries to find out about a heroin shipment, has something to do with a guy who shot a supposed intruder in his house, and sleeps with a prostitute who is being paid to have sex with him by someone else and he never bothered to ask who. The Wikipedia page is even damning in how he referred to the final freeze frame as "intended to be humorous." Damn.

Mostly this film is just a time capsule of terrible 70s fashion with a few occasions for a laugh. This film even flopped on having a theme song. Halfway through the movie there's a song about Mitchell and even that's pretty lame. It's certainly nothing compared to the auditory brilliance of the themes to Black Ninja, Singham, and Petey Wheatstraw. Go watch one of those instead.

Spoon Rating: 3

Infinite [2021]

Ever wanted to watch a movie that's The Matrix meets The Old Guard but really terrible? No? Well, it does exists if you want it and it's called Infinite. This movie was discovered by Adam and Sarah when they went to a live production of a bad movie podcast Sarah follows. In spite of it having all the vibes of a big budget movie, no one seems to have heard of it, and with good reason.

This film is about a crew of people living who remember all their past lives. Some would like to destroy the world because their weariness at living so long and some want to help the world with all their skills that they have acquired from remembering everything. In spite of both these philosophies, the film is just an action movie with the two sides fighting specifically through Mark Wahlburg on the good guy side and a pretty unrecognizable Chiwetal Ejiofor on the bad guy side. Ejiofor's character has invented a device to destroy the world and Wahlburg has to find and destroy it. That's pretty much it. It is hiding in a very predictable place. Also, the film has no real stakes since they're all kind of immortal.

This film is okay. The premise is presented in the silliest way possible and there are some great moments of hammy acting or insanity, specifically when a motorcycle is driven off a cliff and onto the wing of a plane. Overall, it's probably more worth it if you have professional bad movie podcasters roasting it.

Spoon Rating: 3

The Day of The Triffids [1962]

We have a new occasional feature for this blog: Jade reviews. She is currently almost three, and as such, is in a similar place as grandma was later in her life when it came to thoughts on the weird stuff we watch. Jade doesn't always engage in the films, but this one definitely captured her attention for a while as it is genuinely scary to a three-year-old. To a bunch of people in their 30s, it was a delight.

This film follows two stories in a similar area. The main plot is about a Navy man waking up from eye surgery to find that most of the world has gone blind from a meteor shower the previous night. He teams up with a 12-year-old who also can see and they head off for France for some reason. They stay in a chateau that has become a refuge for the blind until a bunch of partiers crash it, and then they head off again with the owner of the chateau to Spain. While this is going on, the triffids are growing and attacking. Triffids are a type of plant that has been living on the planet for a while after arriving with a single meteor a while ago, but with the meteor shower they are now everywhere, getting taller than man, and learning how to walk. They spit poison and thirst for humans. The trio manage to escape them a bunch but in Spain they try to kill them with electrocution and then fire, but they don't succeed. In the B plot, a married marine biologist couple on a remote island are also fighting triffids and discover that the key to killing them is seawater, saving the planet. How they got there in the first place when they are in a lighthouse on a seemingly small remote island is beyond me.

This movie was a random shot from me as I was aware of it from the song "Science Fiction Double Feature" and that song mentions a lot of genuinely good films. This one was quality from the unintentional comedy view. Some of the line reads are insane, the monster costumes are so delightful, and it's an easy one to enjoy and make fun of. Now Adam wants to become an expert in evil plant movies, many of which we've already watched here including The Happening, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, the original Little Shop and now this.

Spoon Rating: 5

Jade's Review: Oh no! Plant! It's coming!

Cyber Seduction: His Secret Life [2005]

This is a Lifetime movie about a teen boy who gets addicted to online porn. The fact that it's a Lifetime movie, and therefore needs to be pretty clean, really colors the perception of this film in hilarious ways. For one, all the porn he looks at is pretty covered up. At most we maybe see a brief shot of someone in lingerie or a full body latex onesie, but a lot of it is girls in tank tops with bras peeking out. Additionally, they never mention masturbation and at one point only slightly imply it just by having him look at porn without his shirt on. It seems like maybe he wouldn't have such a porn issue if he wasn't edging himself constantly, but that's just a suggestion.

The film starts with Justin, a champion swimmer, just looking at extremely tame porn on his computer, some of which is weirdly of a girl in his high school named Monica. Apparently she's a senior and just does this? It's a bit confusing. Justin has a girlfriend named Amy who loves Jesus and therefore won't let him sex her. At one point his mom catches him looking at porn at 1AM and tells his dad that he needs to have a talk with him about it. With no specific intent to this conversation specified, the conversation is vague and basically amounts to "sex isn't love but everyone looks at porn so whatever." We were similarly confused by the issue. Of course though, his porn consummation expands. He starts looking up porn on his girlfriend's PDA and emailing it to himself, he shows porn to his little brother, and at one point alienates a potential cool friend by showing him latex porn, which makes the kid call him a freak instead of doing the normal teen thing and going, "Yo, weird" and moving on. His mom is pretty ignorant of most of this outside of the little brother thing so she starts putting parental controls on the computer before disconnecting the internet entirely. Justin will not be stopped however and he steals his parent's credit cards to pay for both internet and porn. His girlfriend checks her PDA's search history and dumps him. Eventually he hits up Monica for some free sex but can't go through with it. Unfortunately Monica is insane so she beats herself up and claims it was Justin so a bunch of her high school fanboys beat him up. The film ends with a symbolic baptism as Justin jumps into a pool and decides to start a new life.

This film is mostly funny for the reasons I said in the beginning, the fundamental issue of Lifetime trying to make a movie on this topic, but there are also a couple over-the-top acting moments or insane zooms as well. 

To take the movie seriously for a second, the movie's thesis really hinges on a slippery slope argument rather than actually interrogating the ethics of pornography. There could have been an interesting film here about if there's a way to consume porn ethically given the way the industry works or whether there might be genuine concerns if someone is consuming a lot of porn that is specifically violent or genuinely aberrant like bestiality. But no. If you want something more like that Shame is a great movie about sex addiction and Pleasure is a great movie about the porn industry. What this film is really warning against isn't porn. It's
* Staying up so late that it starts to affect your performance at school and sports.
* Using your girlfriend's tech for things she wouldn't want you to use it for.
* Showing scandalous things to your younger sibling who isn't as careful as you.
* Not correctly reading a social situation before you decide to show your new friend weird stuff.
* Stealing
* Getting involved with crazies.
* Apparently, not actually masturbating so you can clear your mind of all the dirty thoughts and be a productive member of society.

The problem isn't the porn; it's the teenage lack of impulse control.

Spoon Rating: 4

Glitter [2001]

Getting our hands on this movie was a process. In this age of digital media not always being preserved if it's not profitable, this movie was clearly deemed "not worth the effort to host and/or charge for." We had no choice but to take to the high seas and wait over a month for the film to come through. But download it did, and it was pretty worth the wait.

Billie Frank a.k.a. Mariah Carey, in a black and white flashback, is put in a group home after her alcoholic singer mother accidentally burns down their house with a lit cigarette. The two friends she makes there go on to form a dance crew with her and they are all discovered at a club and hired as backups for a singer who sucks played by Padma Lakshmi. The producer, played by Terrence Howard, discovered that Billie can sing really well and pulls a Singin' In The Rain, using her voice instead, which both singers are weirdly cool with. After a performance, a DJ named Dice realizes it's Billie singing and decides he's going to make her a star. He offers $100,000 to buy out her contract but never pays it. Over the next hour or so they fall in love and move in together while we have Billie recording songs but no full album, shooting a video that gets awkward, and getting criticized for showing too much skin by Dice who drinks and becomes more unhinged. She leaves him to go back to her friends who got left behind and records a song with Eric Benet who seemed like a potential romantic rival but surprisingly isn't. Before her big sold-out performance at Madison Square Garden, confusing since she still doesn't even have a full album, she breaks into Dice's house a leaves a little message for him. He is shot by Terrance Howard's character right after for not paying up, and Billie goes onstage right after learning of his death. On the drive home she opens a letter from Dice that says he found her mom and she's sober and living in Maryland so Billie just hauls herself there still in her performance dress and the film ends with her crying in her mom's arms. 

First of all, this movie's plot is insane. It's not over-the-top or anything, but we have a story that somehow has no real character arcs and no clear themes. The movie's timeline even feels like it takes place over just a few months. The movie seems to want us to root for Billie and Dice, but Dice kind of sucks. It wants us to feel happy that Billie found her mom at the end, but it's not like her journey feels as motivated by that as it should. Sure, her mom was a singer, but Dice seems to want to make her famous with her being completely indifferent. It feels like Billie was written as blandly as possible to not ruin any idea about Carey and maybe also so her acting would be perfectly fine and unchallenging. 

Aside from the plot, the editing and costumes are jarring. The film speeds up and slows down all the time, and the cinematography is crap. The first ten minutes are in black and white because we have to know it's the past. The movie takes place in the 80s, but occasionally the costumes are straight out of the late 90s/early 2000s. Billie one time wears low-rise flare jeans and a tank top with a rhinestone message on the front like every girl in my middle school. Also, seemingly to justify the title, Billie always has a random streak of glitter somewhere on her body in all her performances or official outings. This is never explained or even commented on. 

Then there are the side characters. There are two producers early on who have distinct creep vibes but they turn out to be barely in the film (kind of thankfully because we were all fearing a Showgirls moment if you know what I mean). The best bad character though is the music video director who is both kind of racist and very misogynistic in the most unsubtle way. We could have had more of his nonsense.

Overall, yeah, it sparkled for all the right reasons.

Spoon Rating: 6

Devil Story [1986]

This post is late, but I don't know if we could have coherently Devil Story a week ago. Somewhere in rural France or Florida, same thing really, a couple's car breaks down and they have to stay in a opulent palace. They are warned about the madness around and the girl experiences it herself, wandering around outside in a see-though nightgown and rain boats. There's a witch and her disfigured Nazi son who want to raise their dead daughter/sister. Meanwhile a guy who lives in the palace spends the whole night trying to kill a horse that he believes is that devil's horse. He uses thousands of shells in pursuit of nothing. The nightgown-rainboot girl falls into a grave at one point, and a mummy is risen that chooses the raised dead girl as a mate. There's also some kind of shipwreck that might be haunted. If this recap feels kind of disjointed, imagine watching it.

Actually don't imagine watching it. Go watch it. It was honestly really funny, and pretty short too. We got a ton of laughs and wut moments.

Spoon Rating: 7

Rounders [1998]

This film came as a recommendation from my coworker who has good taste in movies and whose girlfriend is a professional dealer at a nearby casino. Normally, something has to go fundamentally wrong to have a film fall into the bad movie category when you have a cast like this. It's basically a who's who of the late 90s: Matt Damon, Edward Norton, Malkovich, Turturro, Bond Girl Famke Janssen. But as we well know, a good cast cannot save a bad movie: only market it. Hell, in this case it was a slight contributing factor. Basically, this film boils down to two sides: the baffling and the hilarious. 

To start with the baffling, the basic plot of this movie is that Damon is a law student and underground poker player who is totally not addicted to the game and has sworn off it after losing a bunch of money to sketchy Russian, Malkovich (put a pin in that). He goes to pick up his high school friend, Worm, played by Norton, from prison to find that he is severely in debt from his own poker playing. Damon agrees to get back into the game to help his friend, which we are supposed to see as noble. The movie absolutely frames every choice Damon makes as righteous even though the fact that he genuinely should seek help is obvious to anyone who has ever known any kind of addict. But see, he was just helping his friend! But see, he doesn't take advantage when his friend cheats! Pay no attention to how his law education is tanking and his rich girlfriend has left him. It's fine. Of course, he eventually beats the Russian at the end, pays off the debts and leaves for Vegas because why cure an addiction when you can monetize it? Oh yeah, and the film dabbles in neo-noir aesthetics with monologuing from Damon and smoky, yellow cinematography normally reserved for racist depictions of South America. 

Now for the hilarious. This movie has two absolutely incredible characters: Damon's law professor and Malkovich the Russian. The law professor was a sneak hit because after Damon helps him win a game against his colleagues, the guy gives a monologue in a bar about how he's the family failure because he became a law professor instead of a rabbi. The moral of the story boils down to "do what feels right to you," an outright encouragement of Damon's gambling habit. Later on his doubles down on his message by lending Damon $10,000 of the $15,000 he needs. Insane.

The other winning character is Malkovich's, a Russian gambler and club owner nicknamed KGB. His accent is the most delightfully strange thing and his mannerisms are an endlessly source of fun. He has a quirk of divination by Oreo cookie that we all started adopting as we happened to have Oreos for dessert tonight. The glorious fate of it all. The one downside is that he is only briefly in the beginning and then wraps us up with about 10 perfect minutes at the end. He should have been in more of it.

In spite of the topic of this movie and its two hour run time, it somehow felt like it had no stakes. At one point Damon and Norton get beat up for cheating, but there are no clear threats from lenders and relatively few consequences given the money they are dealing with. A question we often ask on movie night: who was the film for exactly? As far as we can tell, people who will see anything with a cast like this. And us, Oreo psychics that we are.

Spoon Rating: 4

Xanadu [1980]

This movie musical is often referenced but seemingly seldom remembered. I actually completely confused it for the musical Starlight Express, but it turns out the only similarity really is roller skating. No, this is the one with music by the Electric Light Orchestra starring Olivia Newton-John and Gene Kelley. 

So what's it about? The razor thin plot is about a painter who meets a muse (a literal Greek muse but named Kira and not connected to any art in particular) and a rich guy who owned a club in the 40s who also knew the muse back then when she was a singer in his band. The three of them decide to open a new club called Xanadu after the incorrectly named capital of China (it should be Xangdu, pronounced Shangdu). That's the whole film. 

There are songs and dance sequences, but they have absolutely no purpose. To explain, as a musical theater person, every song in a musical should either A.) move the plot forward or B.) provide and expression of emotions that a character is feeling to better understand them. Because this movie has almost no plot and no character development either, the songs are just songs that feel like they were written entirely independent of the film. The songs weren't horrible or anything, but they were pretty unmemorable outside of the main theme and that's only because they say "Xanadu" 100 times.

Then there's the direction, which is also weirdly bad. Halfway through the film we questioned if this was originally a stage show since the shots were so static it felt like we were in a proscenium theater. Turns out, no. The director just had no idea how to shoot dance sequences in a film. A stage version did apparently run on Broadway in 2007 and from my quick glances, that show had considerably more plot than this film.

The mythology also makes no sense. Kira comes alive from a random mural of the muses near the beach the main character hangs out by? She worked with Gene Kelley before but he somehow both does and doesn't remember her when he meets her again 35 years later? She's not supposed to fall in love, but she does with the bland artist even though neither of them seemingly have any reason to fall in love and know nothing about each other?

If I had to stretch to say something nice about the film it definitely went all out with costumes and sets, even though those sets really felt lifted from a stage show and we never got a good look at them due to the crappy direction. The roller skating thing could have been interesting but it was mostly just that some people roller skated sometimes. There was no further logic beyond that. 

Spoon Rating: 2

Birds Of Prey [1930]

After trying to find the well known Glitter and being unsuccessful in finding one that is in English and doesn't have the music cut out, we ended up on a ChatGPT list that lead us to this old one. In spite of the bad sound quality and high pitched British accents, we managed to mostly follow this weird murder and cover up story. A former cop is killed at his fancy mansion party while everyone else is at a flower show by two guys who he had originally got thrown in jail. They are very smug about how good their coverup is although their whole thing gets exposed by the girl and her fiancee on the poster. The real draw of the film is the weird line reads of which there are enough to keep you from being too bored. We wouldn't recommend it, but it wasn't too bad.

Spoon Rating: 3

Trolland [2016]

Trolland a.k.a. Trollz is an Asylum picture so we knew we were getting into a cheap and speedy knockoff territory. What we did not expect was that the animation would fall somewhere on the spectrum of Foodfight and Rapsittie Kids. Playstation 1.5, if you will. It is ugly and it is utterly hilarious. 

The plot is completely secondary to the visuals, but I will explain anyway. The story takes place at a summer camp where the groundskeeper Olaf is obsessed with catching trolls, which he believes roam the grounds. Well, they do and they are basically entirely motivated by doing pranks on humans. Our main troll, whose name I don't remember but he's voiced by Ja Rule, has a sister (voiced by T-Boz) who is determined to be the top prankster. Ja Rule doesn't think pranking is okay and ends up becoming friends with awkward human boy Hayden, who ending bullied by some kids who will soon fall down the Alt-Right pipeline. Boy and Troll team up to stop T-Boz from pranking too hard, and we get a kind of "we aren't so different" moral. Olaf decides not to capture anyone but he will continue his cryptozoologist dreams by going after Bigfoot. 

I can't convey how hilarious it is to watch this movie. The lip flaps are random, clothes do through character's bodies sometimes, no one can actually touch the grass. It's hard to believe this was made in 2016, it's so terrible to look at. The troll skin has the texture and shine of gushers. All the campers look like emo kids because they have variations on the same hair. Sarah said it looks like everyone has CP. It's an endless source of amusement. And it's not too long at only an hour and 18 minutes. I'm not trolling you; it's worth it.

Spoon Rating: 6

Moonfall [2022]

It's been a while! With me being away for most of the summer, there haven't been any movie nights but we're back. This one is a suggestion given to Adam and Sarah by some people they met at a live God Awful Movies show. Within five minutes Adam said, "Wait. This isn't a Roland Emmerich movie, is it?" and he was exactly right. According to Adam, "Roland Emmerich has just been remaking Independence Day for years." While this wasn't quite the same, it certainly felt similar. The beats of every Emmerich movie are the same, but this one managed to gradually increase in stupidity as the film went on through it's two hour (yikes) run time.

The film starts with Patrick Wilson, Halle Berry, and someone else in space when the third guy gets killed by a mysterious electronic-seeming entity. Wilson is blamed and fired, but many years later they get caught up in an issue when the moon's orbit is changing dramatically. The discovery was made by Nick Frost, a conspiracy theorist. After a lot of nonsense, the three of them end up going to the moon to try to blow up the problem only to make the discovery that the moon is full of hyper advanced technology left behind by a super intelligent race of ancient humans. They all got wiped out when the AI that ran their peaceful society decided to attack them, and those are the entities they are fighting against. While all this is going on there is a stunningly useless side plot about Wilson and Berry's families trying to survive among the extreme weather changes, but it sucks because we have no emotional investment in any of them. In the end, Frost sacrifices himself because he doesn't have kids or whatever, and a hologram of his mother tells him "you're part of the moon now" with some kind of implication that there might be a sequel. Doubt it.

This movie gets funnier as it goes on, particularly if you don't know where it's going. The plot twists are comically dumb and the whole thing looks terrible. Adam said it looks like Grand Theft Auto 7 with the green screens that encompass all the settings. Some of the line reads are also so inexplicable or just weird lines like I mentioned above. Overall, we wish it had been shorter (that side plot should have been cut) but it was a fun time.

Spoon Rating: 5

The Apple [1980]

The Rocky Horror Picture show was a pretty influential movie, but not really as a movie or a musical. It was influential in how it kind of gave a space for weirdos and queers. It's not like people were rushing out to make dupes of it. But apparently someone did. And it's a rough ride.

This musical started being written in 1975, the same year RHPS came out and it was apparently originally in Hebrew. It would be easy to claim lost in translation when you think about how terrible the song lyrics are, but that's probably not the whole story. The plot is so thin I can explain it in one sentence: an evil record executive who runs a company called BIM that is slowly taking over the world signs a woman from a folk duo while her partner tries to get her back. In between there are songs that are almost entirely performances or character description songs without advancing the plot. The universe is supposed to be like 1984, but it's just generically dystopian with the terms of the world never defined outside of the fact that everyone has to wear a holographic triangle BIM sticker or get fined. Oh, and everyone is dressed like it's a particularly tacky drag show from the 80s. The costumes and sets were clearly where most of the ten million dollar budget went.

So what's with the title? Well, the whole film has a very on-the-nose Bible allegory going on. There's a whole sequence where the executive is dressed as the devil and the main character is given a giant apple that she is told to eat by one of the two main minions. This idea retreats for a while but then the film ends with God coming down from his Rolls Royce in the sky and rapturing a bunch of people: a literal Deus Ex Machina. 

 Is it worth it? We were kind of on the fence. It only started to feel long towards the end as we spent the first half trying to figure out what the heck was going on, and there's a good about of what. We couldn't decide. It's up to you.

Spoon Rating: 4

D War [2007]

D War aka Dragon Wars is a movie that doesn't quite know what it wants to be. It's part fantasy, part action, part martial arts, part urban fantasy, part Lord of the Rings inspired, and all mess. 

The film stars with a news reporter finding something significant to him that causes him to flashback to a discovery in an antique shop in his childhood. The guy owning the shop flashes back to Korea in 1507 to try to explain the film's lore. After over 20 minutes of explanation, we still weren't totally sure what was going on but here's what we got: every 500 years a girl is born with a birthmark tattoo that indicates that she will need to be fed to a dragon on her 20th birthday. If the bad dragon gets her, it destroys the world. If the good dragon gets her, he saves it. In modern LA this girl is Sarah, a 19-year-old who somehow can drink in bars and can't emote to save her life. The reporter finds her and tries to help her as the dragons attack. Around half the run time is dragon attacks with an evil army of creatures and seemingly immortal guys trying to get Sarah. They eventually do and take her to some kind of CGI nightmare to sacrifice her but the good guys win and the good dragons gets her spirit . . . which he apparently can just return to her after. She's fine. The stakes were even lower than we thought.

This film was pretty amusing, particularly with the lame fight scenes and very cheap-looking but probably expensive effects. We've seen better, but we haven't seen many movies with this good a scene of a guy getting hit by a car.

Spoon Rating: 4

Saturday's Warrior [1989]

This choice came about from my current semi-fixation on Mormon culture and the knowledge that this musical is a formative piece of media for Mormon millennials and probably a bit older. The title I still can't explain, it's probably something a nevermo like me isn't meant to know, but it still has a lot of Mormon content followable for heathens like us.

The film starts in the preexistence, a concept that Adam, the philosopher and religion minor, needs to know more about. A couple in the preexistence talk about how they are going to be in love on earth and promise to find each other. We also get two future missionaries destined to be companions who Sarah and I swear were the basis for Elder Price and Elder Cunningham from Book of Mormon, and a family of eight who are all yet to be born. The eldest are two twins who decided grabbing each other's thighs in a good signal and the boy twin will become are primary main character. The youngest of the family, a girl, begs the oldest brother to not forget her existence. This will be important later.

Generally the film has two or three intersecting plots. Jimmy, the eldest boy is having a crisis of faith because all his cool bad kid friends think that having a bunch of children is irresponsible and that abortion and safe sex are good. The leader of the bad kids looks like a young Rob McElheney and makes the hammiest faces and sings too quietly. Jimmy's younger sister, the girl from the couple in the beginning, says goodbye to her missionary boyfriend, discount Elder Price aka Wally, and then over the two years he's on his mission decides that maybe she doesn't want to marry him actually. Jimmy gets mad at his parents for deciding to have another kid (literally the mom says she needs to in order to film a void, which like, girl go to therapy) and during his birthday his mom has a miscarriage and Jimmy runs off to the beach with the bad kids. He ends up chatting on a bench with an artist, the guy from the couple in the beginning so his sister's future husband, and decides to return home after his twin sister has died. Artist guy ends up getting converted to Mormonism on that same bench by the Elders and they bring him back to Idaho with them. Younger sister sees Artist in the airport and they remember each other from preexistence and Elder Price is done for. He and his mission buddy decide to be roommates at BYU. 

This movie has a couple laughs for sure, but it's mostly just a not great musical. I didn't mention the songs because they are generally really unmemorable. It's filmed on a sound stage, but I'm not going to knock it for that (although should the church have more money to throw in here). The plot is insane mainly for the whole discussion about having kids. That really feels like the main thesis here. Also while the immediate conversion just feels like typical religious movie fantasy, the preexistence couple is an absolutely wild take on the romance genre that's somehow even more damaging than most films. Like you will never be truly happy until you meet the person you were predestined to be with. Yikes. I'm sure that lead to a lot of 20-year-olds getting married.

Spoon Rating: 4

Project Grizzly [1996]

Sarah brought us this delightful film, the rare bad documentary. The premise itself really sells the film: a man obsessed with bears is trying to make a bear proof suit. It looks like something from a 1950s horror movie on a shoestring budget and the beginning of the film is mostly testing its durability in increasingly silly ways. The man himself, Troy Hubertise, is obviously unhinged and will often go on long rants about who knows what. He calls the bear he originally encountered Old Man and talks a lot about how bears are just like people, you know, with claws. 

The direction of the film is also pretty great in its over-the-top coolness. You kind of wonder if the director actually thinks he's making Troy look good or if he's just doing what Troy would find cool and the effect is almost sarcastic.

The first downside of the film however is the run time, which is only an hour and 15 minutes, but feels longer. How long can you really talk about a bear suit? How long can you endure this man's fantastical rants that are a bit too incoherent to be fun? The other, larger disadvantage is that he is never actually attacked by a bear while in the suit. It feels like false advertising.

 Overall, it's pretty worth it, especially the first 20 minutes or so.

Spoon Rating: 5

REWATCH: The Happening [2008]

It's been a while. First, I went to Egypt. Then I came back and we were so tired between my flight and Adam and Sarah's having two young children that we just decided to put it off for another week. But hey, we're back with a bang. 

We hadn't rewatched this one since 2018, and oh boy does it still deliver like Dominos. The script is bonkers from its premise to its unnatural dialogue, the shots are often held too long, the music does nothing to actually create a serious or suspenseful tone, and the cast is weirdly stacked with competent actors (including Alan Ruck and Jeremy Strong of Succession fame in side roles, which was very exciting for me as I'm rewatching it for the third time, back off) but none of them can do anything with the material. Mark E. Mark just furrows his brow a bunch and sounds super insincere, and it's great. It's easy to joke about while also being organically funny on its own. Highly recommend.

Spoon Rating: 9

We followed it up with an encore of Cars per request of two-year-old Jade. I had never seen it before and it's good! Just thought I'd mention.

Silk 2 [1989]

We've really had a string of stinkers for a while. This one, Silk 2, is barely worth writing about. It's a sequel to an even more boring police-in-Hawaii B movie. Basically, an art thief replaces some famous Japanese scrolls that are about to go on display at an art museum in Hawaii with fakes so he can sell the real ones on the black market. Silk is a cop who is on a mission to uncover this in between weird banter with her soon-to-die coworker, a fully nude shower scene, and super blurry sex with an art nerd who spends most of the film in the most 80s button up you've ever seen. That's it. It's only an hour and 15 minutes and it felt longer.

Spoon Rating: 2

Demons At The Door [2004]

This movie was hell, both literally and figuratively. It starts in Unnamed Islamic Nation with some archeologists (presumably) and a "terrorist" who is American before some military guys bust in and save them. One of them dramatically tears off his shirt and needs to get a new one. At this point, we thought the movie may have potential.

Apparently this thing the archeologists  were investigating was actually a door to hell and a bunch of demons get released. The next hour is just fighting demons coming out of drains who swear a lot while Nickelodeon slime pours everywhere and Insane Clown Posse music plays. Eventually we started to think the movie might actually be an attempt at comedy rather than gross-out horror, in the vein of Evil Dead, but it absolutely does not succeed. It gets stupider and less funny as it goes on. At the end our main shirt-ripper goes to hell and discovers that Satan is a little dog. Funny and clever. 

Do not waste your time.

Spoon Rating: 2

Kiss Meets The Phantom Of The Park [1978]

In order to cope with this Scooby Doo film meant for kids ages 10-13, we spend a good lot of the run time talking about better rock bands. It's not hard. While Kiss is unquestionably iconic, that is a title that comes from their look and their theatricality. Divorced from that, their music is quaint and unimpressive. It feels like rock meant for preteens before they get into heavier stuff like Black Sabbath or Led Zeppelin. Their "danger" is solely pretense and really they look like escapees from a queer BDSM club, a comic con, a furry con, and a Japanese print turned into a porno respectively. Even the name Kiss sounds more like a K-pop girl group than a rock band. When they played "Rock And Roll All Nite" Sarah realized that this was a Kiss song and she never realized. The point I'm making here is that any flack Kiss might have gotten for this schlocky cash grab film, probably should have been thrown at them earlier. They are not a serious band.

The plot has to do with an evil automaton/cyborg maker at an amusement park. A pretty girl loses her fiance who has been kidnapped by the evil scientist and Kiss are the only ones who help her. It takes 45 minutes or so before this plot even really starts though. Apparently Kiss all have magic powers that are loosely tied to their "things" (Simmons breaths fire for real, Stanley uses his star eye to spy, etc.). They have talismans that hold their powers and also their ability to make mediocre music. They get kidnapped eventually. They escape. We get a lot of concert footage and a scene of them all wearing wizard cloaks by a pool. Kiss make all the other actors look like Oscar winners. The effects are bad even for the time and the whole thing looks like it was shot on the worst cameras. 

As someone who wasn't alive in the 70s, I do have to ask if this kind of product was profitable. Kiss were big, but comparable to what I ask? Either way, it's hard to imagine even diehard fans defending this movie unless they are below the age of ten when they saw it. My favs could never, but also my favs would never.

Spoon Rating: 2

Wee Sing In The Big Rock Candy Mountain [1991]

Today we dove into Sarah's childhood again with this candy-colored acid trip. There's not much of a plot but there's a lot of public domain songs and a morale. Jade seemed to like it at least.

Our main kid is playing with her two friends but after they can't agree what to play, she decides to let them go off without her while she stays home and hallucinates for an hour with her two giant sentient teddy bears. They go down her slide into the rock candy mountain land that also has a Rasta ragdoll lion(?), a giant bird who speaks in idioms, and his My Little Pony translator. They hear from some mice about Bunny Fou Fou whacking them on the head, which will eventually become a thing. They sing a bunch of songs, watch a fly and bee puppet get married, eat lunch, look at clouds, and tell a lot of really bad jokes. Eventually Bunny Fou Fou is punished for assault with polka dots and crinkled ears. It turns out, he didn't want to play the games the mice did and they didn't want to play his games so he turned to violence. This is the lesson for our main who learns that sometimes you gotta do what you don't want to if you don't want to be left alone with your imagination. She returns to reality and consent to playing soccer with her neighbors.

This film wasn't funny per se, but it was engagingly weird.

Spoon Rating: 3

Cade: the tortured crossing [2023]

I didn't make a mistake with the capitalization in the title; that's just how it's written in the film. On the poster it doesn't even have the colon. 

This new film by Neil Breen is something of a sequel to 2019's Twisted Pair. I say something of a sequel because while it definitely features the twins - good Cade and bad Cale - it is a completely different story in every other way. Aesthetically, it is also quite different because while its predecessor took full advantage of free shooting locations like a local college and empty houses, this film is 100% CGI.  Every single scene has a CGI background with some real props to try to integrate the person into the scene. While we couldn't identify every single location, Cade is clearly seen getting hit by an Amsterdam tram in front of Centraal Station in the beginning, his castle home looks a lot like something you might see in the German or Eastern European countryside, and Adam wondered if the skyscraper footage came from somewhere in China. The "best" CGI is actually of Cade fighting a white tiger and the person who did the graphics for that got a shout out by name in the credits. The fight isn't significant and apparently they are actually friends and the tiger is really a busty woman dressed for a Ren Faire, but it's a memorable scene (with no point).

So the plot. Cade is a rich benefactor for a mental hospital but he makes a point of mentioning many times that he has never actually visited there. On an outing with some of the patients and two doctors, their SUV explodes or something and Cade appears to put them up in his giant castle. When they get back to the hospital we get more detail about how the hospital isn't really a hospital but part of a human trafficking and gene experiment organization with some evil corporate figureheads. Basically, ninjas kidnap people on the street (often the same people over and over because there are only so many actors in the world) and they are brought to the dingy hospital, which is clearly a crumbling church CGI, where the evil doctor experiments on them. The person really behind the crimes is Cale, who is running the experiments because his alien chip mentioned in the previous film doesn't work because the aliens rejected him and he is trying to find a work around. 

After a lot of repeating scenes, Cade starts to save the day. He trains the "patients" in fighting for justice with poor kicks and punches and dates the blonde doctor who has a change of heart about her job. Cale eventually comes to him with his face breaking down and begs for forgiveness and death so Cade summons a sword to kill him. I guess there won't be a third film? At least we got a completely random dance sequence of the "patients."

This film was pretty solid but it's not quite at the level of Fateful Findings (his best film) or Twisted Pair. I think the genuine effort to make the CGI work brings down the comedy a bit from the last film, and honestly, not letting him have use of CGI like in his early films would probably be to his benefit. 

Spoon Rating: 7

High Voltage [1997]

All 90s action movies are roughly the same, but you have to respect the director of this film for their clear appreciation for John Woo movies without the execution. A team of three guys and a girl rob a bank but it turns out the bank is run by the Vietnamese mafia and the bank manager (played by Shannon Lee, Daughter of Bruce) is kind of a lackey of the mafia leader. She has some sexual tension with the lead robber so he promises to get her out, steal money, and kill him eventually. There are a lot of random side people, like the guy from Cobra Kai and his girlfriend, some dude in a bar bathroom with a glory hole, etc. but they are mostly just more punching bags for the final battle. At one point the token girl in the gang's boyfriend gets shot and killed so they hold a priest at gunpoint to marry her to the corpse. It's wild. Our final showdown takes place at the lead robber's Sicilian uncle's hotel. Shirts are ripped. Rooms are destroyed. The bad guys are defeated by the other bad guys. Equilibrium achieved.

Overall this movie is almost worth it, but it drags a bit. We got some really bad acting and reaction shots and other weird directing so if you have a higher tolerance for low budget 90s action, this might be worth your time.

Spoon Rating: 4

How To Be A Teenage Ninja [1990] & How Can I Tell If I'm Really In Love? [1986]

Today we had two short films. They're both on YouTube though so you can check them out there.

First we had How To Be A Teenage Ninja, an instructional guide on some basic martial arts moves. Some kids are being chased by bullies so they hide in a cave. There a ninja man (or spirit, it's a bit unclear), instructs them in martial arts until they are ready to be released back outside to scare off the bullies. You are clearly meant to do the moves and exercises with the kids who are all standing way too close to each other so they're all in the frame. They manage to go from white belts to yellow belts to green belts to red belts in 25 minutes. Overall, there were a few chuckles, but it's mostly an exercise video.

Spoon Rating: 3

The second film was a 50 minute hodgepodge of teens, including Jason Bateman and Ted Danson of all people, talking about what they think love is. No clear conclusions are made. It's chaotically edited with no clear organization, consensus, or definitions, and plenty of weird images just stuck onto scenes like someone just learned video editing software. It's somewhat anti-sex and very heteronormative and stereotypical, which is kind of funny, but mostly it is way too long. That being said, we did get a good amount of laughs from the unhinged editing and some of the comments the kids made.

Spoon Rating: 5

Good Burger [1997]

After a few weeks off due to illness and family stuff, we came back with a blast from my childhood. One day Adam and I were discussing movies from when we were kids and how they sometimes made good bad movie night picks, and I remembered how at one point my brother and I watched Good Burger over and over for two days straight before we had to return it to the video store and I never saw it again. So Adam whipped up some good (impossible) burgers with good patatas bravas instead of our usual BMN soup and we started the evening with some of the All That sketches that inspired the film. Much to our surprise and pleasure, they weren't unwatchable. In fact, some of them were genuinely funny. Good news for good burgers.

The film has a pretty simple premise stuffed with wacky hijinks. Kel plays Ed, the character we know from the sketches, and Kenan plays our everyman, Dexter, who thoroughly messes up by borrowing his mom's car while she's away and crashing into his teacher's, Sinbad's, car after driving without a license. In order to pay for the damage, he has to get a summer job, starting at the pretentious new Mondo Burger and then getting a job at the titular Good Burger when he couldn't hack it. He somewhat begrudgingly becomes friends with Ed, hits on Monique (one of the other employees), and drives the Burgermobile, which is still more dignified than the Wienermobile. Things change for Good Burger though when Dexter tries Ed's special sauce and they start putting it on the burgers, making them real competition for Mondo Burger and their space suit uniforms. From there, it's wild moment after wild moment. Dexter takes advantage of Ed's ignorance to get 80% of his sauce bonus! They make a delivery to Shaq! Unfunny Lori Beth Denberg cameo! Mondo Burger sends Carmen Electra to seduce Ed into revealing the recipe and it fails! Monique discovers that Dexter is exploiting Ed for money and tells him to leave! Ed buys Dexter a thoughtful gift showing that Dexter really is an ass! They get thrown in a mental hospital with Abe Vigoda (the fry cook who longs for death), George Clinton, and the girl from Freaks and Geeks in her first film role! MENTAL HOSPITAL DANCE SEQUENCE. Did I mention the Good Burger manager is Dan Schneider?! Mondo Burger is putting dangerous chemicals in their burgers to make them huge! Ed saves the day! Play the Less Than Jake punk ska version of "I'm A Dude"!

Honestly, this is a completely watchable film. I don't know if kids nowadays would find it as fun as my brother and I did when we were little, but as nostalgic millennial adults we all got some genuine laughs and weren't bored.

Spoon Rating: None.

Star Rating: 3/5

Yor, The Hunter From The Future [1983]

For baby Connor's first movie night (you know, before he has any personality and is just a potato that eats, sleeps, and craps), we ended up watching this film made as part of that swords-and-sandals craze. Yor is apparently in the future but it looks like the past and also Cappadocia, Turkey. He meets some other people who are immediately enchanted by him because he's blond and fights. One woman falls for him and is quickly threatened by the idea of him meeting another blonde lady and leaving her. He does. She tries to kill her. She dies unrelatedly at the hands of some more barbarian types. The film is ultimately pretty boring outside of some dinosaur fights, where the dinos look like 90s Disney ride effects. Then in the last twenty minutes or so it turns out that it definitely is the future and a high tech society that's totally not ripping off Star Wars wants them for breeding or something? It's lame. The Overload dies. We amused ourselves with pictures of Glenn Danzig buying kitty litter.

Spoon Rating: 3

Where Did I Come From? [1985], Be Cool About Fire Safety [1996], & Instant Adoring Boyfriend [2002]

We got a triple feature of shorts tonight from all different decades and with all different target audiences, none of which are us necessarily but it's fun to speculate a little bit on who exactly they are for and how effective their rhetoric is.

First up we have "Where Did I Come From?" a video about how babies are made, particularly appropriate since Sarah is going to be induced tomorrow. This video is obviously meant to answer that question, but we all questioned what age exactly is this video meant for. Obviously, Jade at two years old is too young, but what makes this video so curious is that it really gets into detail about sex. It talks about anatomy and the baby growing obviously, but it really goes into some specifics about sex. Weirder than that is that it says the reason people aren't having sex all the time is because it's tiring? That's it? Not, you know, because it can make a baby and that's a big responsibility? Or any other reasons? Also, when they show the mother and father's genitals in a tub, there's a duck just staring them both right in the groin and it's hilarious. The science is, as expected, a bit questionable even though they were clearly going for straightforward and accurate.

Spoon Rating: 5

This next one caused me to have a little PTSD from the second the jingle played. Made in 1996, this fire safety series was peak for our childhoods and I vividly remember shortened versions of this video playing on television in between kid's shows on Nickelodeon. The messaging is accurate and not bad, but the jingle is incredibly ear wormy (I remember it after nearly 30 years) and the video itself is really cringy. At the time it probably read as out-of-touch attempts from older people to appeal to kids with rapping about fire safety, but now it's a perfect 90s time capsule in the clothes, sets, and editing. They really did love their fisheye lens. They also  emulate the styles of hip-hop artists of the time and the Beastie Boys fairly accurately but in an uncanny kind of way. And there's a talking smoke detector who's just awful to look at. It's not really funny, but it's at least kind of interesting . . . unless you had to hear it on a daily basis as a kid. The jingle lives rent free in my head, but god, I wish it paid.

Spoon Rating: 3

The final feature was the absolute best: "Instant Adoring Boyfriend." Those TikTok teens making date POV videos wish they were this passive aggressive! A man of dubious accent talks to the camera as if you are his girlfriend and he is utterly obsessed with you, saying all the things some woman apparently wants to hear. Sometimes he just lifts weights or reads gossip rags near you, but mostly he just says a bunch of bull about how beautiful and perfect you are. He has no hobbies outside of you, is living off of millions of investments, cancels plans with his friends for you, feels you chocolate cake (which he sloppily puts whipped cream on, messing up your floors), irons your denim skirt (why?), and says he'll drive you home from the club at 3AM with KFC in tow. At the end, he proposes. He is going to take out a life insurance policy on you and then kill you. He is talking to a corpse just off screen. This man has escaped from somewhere, either an institution or a tech lab, and I'm not sure which one. It's hilarious. When it was over, we discussed whether this was meant to earnestly be a fantasy fulfilling product or a gag gift. Sarah and I firmly rested on gag gift because there's a point where all his fawning becomes just a bit too self aware. Adam falls a bit more on the side of earnestness. Either way, not a dream boyfriend but definitely a dream bad movie short.

Spoon Rating: 8

Clash In The College [2011]

This movie attempts the amazing feat of making a very political movie with absolutely no stance, climax, or resolution all within the framing of the story being a love triangle between a guy, his professor/landlord who he's sleeping with, and a girl at his college who he is ideologically opposed to. What is this movie trying to say? As far as we can tell the thesis is: people disagree on stuff at colleges. Wow. Nailed it.

The movie starts with a few different plots. We have a guy just arriving at the airport and looking for a place to stay near the college who then ends up getting a spare room in his professor's house (and yes, ending up sleeping with her; messy). We see a blonde woman go to a doctor who waxes poetic about Marie Curie and women in STEM. We see another girl talk to a conservative guy at a bus stop, and then leave, apparently not needing the bus. Then we get a man who has apparently never seen snow and who no one can understand even though his English is not hard to understand even with his accent. We wondered if this guy was meant to be an alien for a good long time and we were just being told he was unintelligible even though he's not. Turns out no. This man is the director, and this is maybe meant to be a commentary on immigrants. Also, he's very old and in college, which is totally fine, but the movie is framed like we are supposed to believe he is the same age as his 19-year-old classmates. Conservative guy has conservative meetings with the other guys, and starts dating bus stop girl who's a centrist but kind of annoyed that he won't have premarital sex. Eventually the professor-screwer starts dating the blonde woman who went to the doctor and we have a love triangle with no real resolution. Also, he gets really conservative from hanging out with conservative guy and she gets more liberal by talking to a liberal girl. This could be a conflict, but mostly it's about the love triangle. A lot of political talking points of 2007/2008 are brought up signifying nothing. 

This film is quite funny but a bit too long. The sets are all hotel rooms or the children's section of the library, you can see the shadow of the cameraman a bunch, the audio is horrendous, the acting is flat, and the story doesn't arc at all. The problem is, it's two hours long. It's definitely fun for the first hour and 15 minutes but then it starts to really drag. Definitely good for one watch, but maybe not a repeat.

Spoon Rating: 6

Lycan Colony [2006]

We were going to watch a movie by the maker of Things, but we couldn't find it for free so instead we switched to this one: Lycan Colony. It was a perfectly good switch!

The film is kind of weird to follow but we have a family with an alcoholic surgeon dad, a not-Jennifer Coolidge mom, and a teen son. The teen son is tempted into a graveyard by a neighbor girl who bites him and her starts werewolving (but his costume looks a bit more like a puppy). The dad attends AA meetings that people drink at. Later in a bar we encounter siblings on the hunt for their missing hunter dad and we discover that the bartender is an evil werewolf cannibal. It turns out, this town is full of werewolves and the AA meetings are actually about abstaining from eating people. One of the wolves helps the family adjust to their puppy!son and then takes the sister to meet a witch whose magic is distributed through her tongue. We have a final battle of witch versus bartender and somehow the brother of the siblings gets resurrected or something. End on a happy werewolf community.

This film is hilarious. There is liberal use of all the worst special effects: a protected tattoo, green screen, cheap transitions, sped up or slowed down footage, weird use of coloring (the redwoods are just a red filter!) everything. The acting is really bad: stilted or overly dramatic or strangely accented. The camerawork is often inexplicable with freezes and zooms that are clearly meant to heighten drama but feel like punchlines. This film is so solid; you have to give it a watch. Two paws up.

Spoon Rating: 7