We're Your Parents [2025]

In our exploration of vertical media, we decided to try a completely different genre: horror. This film is very short at only about a half hour but it took us nearly an hour just to find the version of this film showing all the parts in the correct order. It was ultimately kind of a waste of time because while we got a few laughs, it really wasn't worth the effort.

A girl returns home for Thanksgiving with her parents who are acting weird. They give her cranberry sauce that seems to drug her and when she wakes up they are still acting weird. She pieces together that there is something going on in the basement, and the reveal is that her real parents are tied up there with their eyes sewn shut and the stand-ins are evil clones who wanted to use her DNA to make a new baby. That is the level of explanation we get. It's kind of Coraline but lazier. The girl's dads die and she defeats the evil mom. The end.

We probably would have been better off with A Boyfriend For The Homophobic Alpha or Cry Your Eyes Out On My Tomb or something.

Spoon Rating: 4 

Riki-Oh: The Legend Of Ricky [1991]

This post is late. We watched this film on Monday, September 21st but I forgot to write a post. Thankfully, while I forgot the specifics, this movie is impossible to forget on a broad level. This film is apparently part of the "splatter" genre, something we did not know or expect going in and it lives up to that title.

The film takes place in a capitalist hellscape version of China where prisons have been privatized. For some reason, this means that they are just violent as hell. People routinely lose body parts or just get completed vivisected for being part of the wrong gang. Our hero, Ricky, is in for manslaughter after killing the mafia boss responsible for his girlfriend's death and no one likes him so he just martial arts his way through them but he has the special gift of super strength which basically means he explodes people with his fists. He fights gang members, minor bosses, and finally the warden who morphs into a big monster at the end but it doesn't help. Probably the most insane death in the whole film involves a guy committing seppuku in shame after losing to Ricky but decides in the process to try to strangle him with his intestine. That's the kind of movie this is.

Being that we do live in a capitalist hellscape heavily privatized prison system here in the USA, I can say that the most unrealistic thing about this film was that all the horrific violence was allowed without a way to monetize it. Crazy murders for no reason is unrealistic, but crazy murders for profit? Absolutely likely. We're only about ten years away from Chain Gang All-Stars.

Spoon Rating: 6*

*It's got a lot of funny moments but it is so deeply unpleasant to watch that much gore that I don't recommend watching it more than once unless you're into that kind of thing.