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