The Hugga Bunch [1985] & others

We started our evening with a truly confusing film. This movie, in spite of the cover, is not animated. It is actually a tale of a friendless 7-year-old who is scared at the prospect of her grandmother being forced to move out of their house and into a nursing home. One day while playing with her stuffed animals, a horrible "cute" creature falls out of her mirror and talks to her about the joys of hugging. She enters the mirror realm with the goals of finding a way to youthify her grandma so she won't have to leave. This requires an adventure to a castle to get a fruit but the castle is owned by the hammiest iteration of the evil queen from Snow White. They take some of her magic youth fruit but on return to our world, she drops it all and it disappears. Turns out the whole adventure was useless. All she needed to do to keep grandma around was to yell at her older brother to show some appreciation for their grandma. He cries and begs her to stay so she does. Problem solved; movie unnecessary. 

Turns out the whole film was just a cynical attempt at selling toys, like a lot of children's media of the 80s. Either way, this film was delightfully bad. The acting was bad from everyone but especially our lead child and the evil queen who leaves no scenery unchewed. The puppets are terrifying. The hugging thing gets really awkward a lot of the time. The message is muddled. And the kids were pretty committed to watching it actually. Everyone wins.

Spoon Rating: 5 

Afterwards we watched two absolutely wack AI videos - "Harry Potter by Balenciaga" and "Top 5 Steven Hawking AI Videos" - to see if this is a valid route for comedy and they both made us laugh hysterically so this might be a rabbit hole for the future. 

Then we watched as much of the "101 Things to Love About Geissler's" commercial series that we could find, a bunch of short, fairly poor quality videos for a local grocery store. Adam is convinced there is lore there, and we tried to find it. The one of the Sweet Dee dance was particularly good.