The Incubus [2010]

If you happen to prowl the same corners of YouTube as me, this movie should look familiar as the topic of the most recent Jenny Nicholson video, who also gave us Beastly. I watched just enough of the video to determine that it would be worth a watch, and the clear Twilight ripoff nature was an obvious win. Add in the context that the lead actress is also the writer and only 19, that a bunch of the cast are just real life friends of hers, and that she and the lead villain are actually responsible for some of the music in the film, and this movie has passion project written all over it. Shayne Leighton is an auteur film maker. 

The plot surrounds the romance between a college student living with her abusive preacher uncle who killed both her parents and in incubus who just rocked into town with his coven of Hot Topic accessory corner soul suckers. Do we get lore of these creatures? Only barely in small drips of information throughout the whole film so it never totally makes sense. Their powers are random and immense including super speed, teleporting, controlling fire, divination, force fields, etc. Is there a linear plot outside of the romance? Mainly just that abusive uncle is abusive until he gets locked away and The Incubus' creator is into him and jealous of the lead. There are a bunch of side characters with incubus-adjacent side plots to pad out the run time. The lead's two human friends hang out with the two side incubi until one is accidentally killed. The bully, who is really on par with all the vertical drama bullies we've been seeing, has so much of her energy depleted that she dies in a car accident. The catch with all this is that the incubi want to spend time around humans because it's sweeter to drain the energy of humans they have some kind of bond with. However, hanging out with the humans makes them feel emotions again, which is intoxicating, so they simultaneously want to drain them more but also don't because it will kill them. The draining seems to be uncontrollable except when the plot needs it to not happen. The film ends with everyone in town killed exact the lead who almost dies until her love interest resurrects her as a soul sucker herself right at the end. Cue the Evanescence-esque credit song.

In addition to the thin plot, this film also has some wonderful confusion built into how scenes are often ended with the main character passing out and awakening in a totally different situation with no explanation, scenes that seem to be a continuation of a previous moment but everyone is in different clothes, and day and night seeming to be arbitrary. The film did start with the main character musing about the nature of time so maybe this was on purpose? We can only hope. The acting is also that perfect combination of "go girl give us nothing" and "You are tearing me apart Lisa!" with very few actors in between. The over-the-top uncle and the annoying friend who looks like Billy Joe Armstrong are really here to leave no piece of scenery unchewed. It's a good nostalgic time.

Unrelated but when I got in my car after watching this "Drive" by Incubus was playing on the radio. This film is blessed. 

Spoon Rating: 5.5 

White Men Can't Dance [2012]

It took the longest time to figure out what this movie was actually about and the tone it was going for and even then, it wasn't exactly consistent. Either way, this is a passion project with the same guy writing, directing, and starring in the film and you can see what he likes in the script: breakdancing, younger women, character comedy, and family. Let me explain.

In the beginning we are introduced to Pete, a guy who has a pretty good life with his parents, much younger wife, and daughter who can't act. We get some wacky hijinks that made us wonder if the film was going to be silly and Who Killed Roger Rabbit-esque but that was mostly just the beginning. Things turn quickly when his workaholic father dies of kidney stones, two heart attacks, and abdominal bleeding all at once and Pete decides to off-road his SUV by a river and cry. His wife then gets bad news: their daughter needs a kidney operation that will cost $120,00 out of pocket and they need $50,000 to make up the total. In spite of owning a house, they don't know how they will pay for this and instead of talking about it, Pete decides to enter a breakdancing competition to win $40,000 and borrow the other $10,000 from his friends. Pete also has an idea of his stolen at work and he gets fired by the idea thief. He also doesn't discuss this with his wife, but he does break into his office in annoying disguises, eventually resulting in his rehiring. After all his disappearances to practice his dancing, his wife starts to think he's having an affair. At no point does this man ever come clean about what he's doing and there's no backstory to explain why he wouldn't tell her. It's agonizing. The last half hour is just breakdancing where we are treated to the fact that Pete can dance, but he can't dance nearly on the level of the young guys he's up against. He loses the competition but the winner gives him the prize money because he heard about the guy's daughter. Right after, the wife gets a call saying they got approved for a grant to pay for the surgery, reveling that while Pete was trying to win a breakdancing competition at 55, his wife was putting in the work to actually pay for the surgery. Men will do anything but go to therapy and talk to their wives. I guess white men really can't dance.

Overall, it was pretty good but at times just baffling more than funny. We ended the night watching videos of the Australian breakdancer at the 2024 Olympics getting absolutely smoked by her younger competitors, which really felt like the film in short honestly. Highly recommend.

Spoon Rating: 4 

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

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

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?

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

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

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

Standing Ovation [2010]

There needs to be a name for the genre of films that seem like Disney Channel Original movies but aren't. Popstar was the last movie we saw like this and, honestly, this kind of movie is actually a win, far more than actual DCOM since those actually have some standards. This time we have Standing Ovation, a movie that combines the inappropriateness of Popstar with the absolutely nonsense of something like Deadly Lessons. It was a ride.

On paper, this film is pretty basic. It's about a quintet of preteens call The Ovations who are trying to win a singing competition against their rivals, The Wiggies, a quintet of high school seniors or something who look 23 and are all the adopted daughters (or sugar babies?) of a rich wig manufacturer. There's also an annoying "little sister" character who is no one's sister but is trying to join both groups and her voice is like nails on a chalkboard. The main girl of The Ovations, Brittany, is struggling with trying to keep her Irish grandfather from gambling away what little money they have while her songwriter brother is off giving his songs away to The Wiggies. Brittany meets a girl named Joey who definitely has mafia connections and agrees to be her manager. She's also 12 by the way. Joey has her own mission to get revenge on the man who robbed her family, leading to her father's early death. Again. she is 12. I honestly hesitate to say much more about the plot because part of what makes this movie so off the wall is how many times it genuinely surprises you, often with Joey. It's kind of like if Step Up was combined with a bad neo-noir. It's also a musical and while the dancing is fine and the production of the music is pretty okay generic pop, the lyrics of some of these songs are just pathetic or curious. The boy groups sings a song about how Beyonce, Britney, Rhianna, and Whitney all want them in their dreams but they're saving themselves for you, girl. Oh, and the wigs are bad but The Wiggies all wear pretty cute 50s throwback clothes to make up for it.

This movie genuinely shocked us with a lot of moments while still having the most predictable last 15 minutes ever. Adam might have hit the nail on the head with the assessment that the movie feels a bit like it was written to have adult characters initially but then they changed it to kids for marketing purposes. Or the writer is secretly a bit inappropriately fascinated by little girls, if you get what I'm saying. But hey, the writing is bad (fat jokes and gross out humor: why), the camera work is occasionally hilarious, and it's full of cringe or WTF. I wouldn't really want to watch it again myself, but I definitely would to watch someone else's reaction. Give it a go.

Spoon Rating: 6

Temptation: Confessions of A Marriage Counselor [2013]

We realized we have never watched a Tyler Perry movie at bad movie night and because we really wanted to avoid his comedies for fear that they might be painful, we decided to go for a drama: Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor. There are times when a movie is divisive enough that we can’t really decide if it’s worth watching or not. That’s the function of the 4.5 spoon rating and this movie was definitely one of those. Kay and Sarah came down on the side that this one is worth it and Adam and Erik came down on the side that it’s not quite there. If you like campy and preachy cheating movies, you’ll probably like this one.  

The film has a really silly frame narrative of a marriage counselor telling the story of her “sister”, Judith, who got married to her childhood sweetheart, Brice. She wanted to be a marriage counselor but could only get a job at an upscale matchmaking company while her husband became a pharmacy tech at a mom and pop pharmacy with the mom from The Nanny and Brandy. In spite of this, they’re apparently broke? One day Judith meets a rich investor, Harley, who is almost comically forward with her even after finding out she’s married. Because we needed to give Brice a bad quality, he has forgotten her birthday for the last two years. It’s obvious that Harley is gunning for Judith and she keeps looking at him with this mixed aroused-disgusted face. Kim Kardashian then gives her a less virtuous makeover before she goes on a business trip with Harley. On his private plane he makes his move and she VERY clearly says no many times. Then he tells her to stop pretending and that she put up enough of a fight and things proceed. That’s not consent and is an obvious predictor of how Harley will continue to treat her! When she gets home, her super religious mom is there for a visit and realizes that she is under the devil’s influence. Judith starts just openly cheating for a while, and Brice even drags her out of the sin den that is Harley’s house but then things end between them. Judith and Harley fight a bunch and he hits her. Brice bonds with Brandy but she says something like, “We both know we’re not attracted to each other” and then later tells him she has HIV. Guess where she got it? Brice saves Judith again. We return to the outer frame where we realize Judith is living solo and kind of sad with HIV as her punishment while Brice has gotten remarried and has a kid as a reward.    

This movie has a good amount of unintentional comedy, mostly in the super unsexy sex talk, culminating in a tackle through glass, but the dissenters said that it wasn’t quite funny enough or that it had too much down time. Chose for yourself!   

Spoon Rating: 4.5

Shark Exorcist [2015]

This movie was utterly inexplicable. I'm not totally sure where to start with this. Obviously the title is wonderful but we've watched a lot of angry fish movies that were ultimately disappointing. This was not one of them probably because the budget didn't allow for anything even remotely competent to happen. Instead you get a bunch of blonde girls in bathing suits who all are dressed and styled like it's 2003 but they have smartphones, one single CGI shark scene that they use multiple times, and a discount nun and priest outfit with a bonus Party City pirate knife. That knife is the only prop in the film, but there's some fake blood and a bit too much green vomit for most people's taste. The whole thing was shot on location in mostly a state park in Tennessee (although they went to Nashville to shoot one scene at the Parthenon). There was clearly very little budget left for editing, sound editing, other CGI, or really anything that could make the film look like anything other than a series of vaguely connected home movies.

As for the plot, we are supposed to believe that:
1. An evil murdering nun kills someone and throws them into a lake as a sacrifice to a "water spirit."
2. This causes a shark (IN A LAKE) to be possessed by a demon with the capacity to possess a person who could then bring them bait in the form of other people.
3. A blonde girl gets possessed by the shark, which makes her really into baths, seafood, and vaguely hitting on girls who might be good shark bait (one of whom seemed to have a developmental delay and it was uncomfortable).
4. A priest is enlisted to help with this demonic shark possession, which results in him sacrificing himself so the shark possess him. He then immediately bites the blonde's ombre friend.
5. In the film's only other CGI shot, ombre friend lures another blonde friend into the water to get eaten by the shark while standing on the dock.
Also, after the credits, there's a series of shots of a girl we've never seen before walking around what appears to be an aquarium gift shop, lovingly petting and cradling the shark plushies. Then she stares intently at a fish tank. This goes on for like seven minutes, and while it was probably the most incomprehensible of the filler scenes, it sure as hell wasn't the only one. I still don't know what was up with the witches in the graveyard, but it was nice to see some characters who didn't dress and style themselves like discount Nicole Ritchies.

Is all that okay with you? It should be. This movie is excellent.

Spoon Rating: 6.5

Forty Days And Nights [2012]

Not to be confused with the rape movie pretending to be a romantic sex comedy, Forty Days and Forty Nights. This movie is about a rainstorm of literally Biblical proportions. We have Sarah's mother, Kelly, to thank for this one as she found it because it was free on Roku and she immediately thought, "Oh, this is a Monday night movie." And she was definitely right.

This movie is a complete winner from a special effects and set design perspective. They are absolutely atrocious, and its hilarious. From the very beginning we get a title card telling us we are in the Sahara when we are very obviously in California. No one even bothered to look up the differences between the very orange Sahara and a somewhat vegetation-covered California desert. Amazing. The desert then gets flooded with special effects that amount to a rain machine and a bunch of close-up shots of a beach. This continues the whole film. Sarah was in shock for a solid three minutes over a lab storage scene where samples were all being kept in plastic water bottles. The boots interior was all plastic and it had a hole that made it look like the boat was made of aluminum foil. The acting was great too. Everyone was wooden except the lead actress who still sometimes reacted to things in an unrealistic way and had the unfortunate experience of having to shoot some of her scenes in a see-through wet tank top without a bra (although she apparently found a bra in the woods because she was suddenly wearing one in the next scene).

I guess I could talk about the plot, but I don't really have to. There's a big world destroying rain storm. The military freaks out about it. They try to save bees. One guy gets kicked off the ark for telling his girlfriend about it. Ultimately everyone is okay and so are their families even though a bunch of people did die before the rain just stopped. Just watch it for the aesthetics. It's enough. Trust me.

Spoon Rating: 6

Skull Forest [2012]

We had our potato and cheese soup with a side of Len Kabasinski, the director of Fist of the Vampire coming back to our screens with Skull Forest. This is a film that gave us genuine headaches through its incredibly liberal and poor use of shaky cam and Dutch angles and was also yet another "Most Dangerous Game" rip off. Overall, not bad.

The film follows mostly four women who are hard to tell apart since three are blonde and two look like sisters and none have names. We called them The Mom, The Businesswoman, The Slut, and The Cop. Of course, we foresaw that The Mom was going to survive according to horror movie rules. On the flip side of this game we have a cast of characters who were introduced at a gala with stock music playing. We couldn't really remember most of them outside the racist stereotype native girl and the Russian sambo fighter. One of them was also the director. After a series of wacky murders, we get down to just The Mom, who at one point had to crawl naked out of a grave, and the director. The film ends right as she whacks him in the head with a shovel. 

It's a simple film and short at just an hour and 15 minutes, but it was pretty good. Laughs were had.

Spoon Rating: 5.5

A Talking Cat!?! [2013]

It's been a while since we've seen something decent so we decided to rewatch A Talking Cat!?!. Read the original review here.

Jurassic Attack [2012]

Or maybe it's called Attack of the Dinosaurs? The box said one thing and the menu said another. It doesn't matter. 

This movie is presumably the brainchild of a bunch of guys who liked Jurassic Park, Predator, and the Halo games and it really shows. It's got a cliché plot of a bunch of US soldiers (many with non-US accents) going into the Amazon to rescue a scientist from one of the locals who's trying to stop? get? a bioweapon. They find dinosaurs on the way back as well as a lost scientist who has been living among them for five years and is in full on delusional Grizzly Man mode. It's pretty mercifully short at under an hour and a half but a lot of the scenes just featuring the characters are boring with dialogue not weird or poorly acted enough to be interesting (although we did invent a gay subplot based on the weird tension between the main hero and main villain). The real prize is the dinosaurs which are rendered in horribly cheap CGI and an absolute delight every time. The only other curiosity about the film is how abruptly it ends, but it's not really funny so much as just mildly surprising.

I can't recommend this film just for the CGI though. It's a pass for sure. Interestingly though, for the next 18 weeks unless something else comes up or we do a rewatch as a palette cleanser, we are going to be working through DVDs that Adam and Sarah have just had for years that we haven't gotten to yet. We rolled a D20 for this one so we'll just have to see what we get next week. 

Spoon Rating: 3

REWATCH: Fateful Findings [2013]

Nothing can ever truly top this in terms of Neil Breen's work. It nearly fills the entire Neil Bringo card.

Just go see it.

After you can read my original review.

The Fighting Preacher [2019]

It's been a bit since we had a bad Christian movie and honestly, it's been a very long time since we dabbled in something specifically Mormon. This particular film dealt with the true story of Willard Bean, the former 1905 middleweight boxing champion of the world, who moves to Palmyra, New York to take care of Joseph Smith's old farm and to try to get the Hill Cumorah property for the church (the location Smith supposedly found the golden plates if you're familiar with the myth). Strangely enough, that short summary really does cover the majority of the film. He and his wife move there, they are refused services for being Mormons, their kids are treated badly, and they endure. After six years, Willard decides to try to curry favor with the town by . . . beating them up in a boxing ring? Yeah, it doesn't work. Then after another stretch of time, they try being actively nice to everyone. This works and they convert a whole bunch of people. The end. 

This movie had some funny moments. There's a scene that was actually meant to be funny and succeeded when Willard's wife mentions something happening in seven months and then we get a "1/2 mile later" title card before Willard turns to her in shock and says, "You're pregnant?!" There are a lot of moments of people being mean that are so over-the-top you have to laugh. Also, Kay had fun giving a running commentary about the accuracy of the costumes because she loves the 1910s and is always mad no one does it right ("That man has a fedora! Did he time travel twenty years into the future?!"). Overall, it's not really worth your time but it wasn't painful either.

Spoon Rating: 3

Who Killed Captain Alex? [2010]

This is a movie that we have had on our list for a while. We maybe actually did try watching it at one point but the quality was so poor that it simply wasn't worth it. Thankfully, you can know just rent it for yourself. This movie, toted as Uganda's first action movie, is kind of a bad movie legend. Overall, it's got a lot of the bad movie staples but what makes it truly unique is the presence of a VJ, a video jockey, who is doing a running commentary throughout. It's very Mystery Science Theater 3000 if the guys commenting were also occasionally acting as hype men for the movie you're already watching (or the country or some other film made there).

The plot of the movie is pretty simple. A military guy named Captain Alex is tasked with bringing down a crime group called Tiger Mafia. The brother of the Tiger Mafia leader gets kidnapped and he flips out. Thankfully for him, he has a spy lady who is fooling around with Captain Alex and can get info about his plans. However, one night when the spy woman left the tent, Captain Alex got killed. No one in Tiger Mafia claimed to do it, but also no one is sure who among the soldiers could be a betrayer. Captain Alex's brother, a martial artist, comes in to find the culprit and ends up becoming friends with the Tiger Mafia leader's wife who he tried to have killed. Somehow the solution to all of this involves bombing Kampala as a distraction. A distraction for what? Who knows? Also, we never find out who killed Captain Alex. Apparently you need to watch the sequel.

This movie is worth your time but only once. It reportedly had a budget of $85 which probably went into buying some cameo shirts, wooden guns, and some blood splatter and helicopter CGI effects. There's a lot of silly in the action and a little bit of silly in the VJ. The best scene was probably when the mafia wife was relating the story of her relationship and said something like, "It started out great" and we got a quick cut to her tied up and getting yelled at by him. Not sure if that was intentional comedy but we laughed a lot.

Spoon Rating: 5.5

October Kiss [2015]

The thing about Hallmark movies is that they are never especially bad in the fun way, but they are never bad in the painful way. Hallmark movies are easy viewing: safe but unremarkable. That is definitely true of our film for tonight, October Kiss. While most people seem to want to fall in love at Christmas time specifically, this sole film is there for the surely notable crossover of Hallmark movie watchers and people who are so into Halloween that they really want their love story to center around it. And while we did have some fears, this movie did not shy away from its Halloween setting. We got a decorating scene, a slow dance to "Spooky," and the titular kiss happens when our mains are dressed as a mermaid and knight respectively. 

The plot centers around the hilariously named Poppy Summerall who clearly fell into this film after her summer Hallmark romance grew cold. Poppy is a 30-something who has managed to not nail down anything resembling a career or financial stability because she is incapable of committing to anything. In the opening montage we see her poorly teaching yoga and having an older student cover for her, quitting a job at a pizza place after her manager hits on her, and then walking away from a date two minutes in when the guy observes that she'd fit in his mom's wedding dress. She lives with her sister, the sister's two kids, and the sister's theoretical husband who never appears. Poppy shows herself to be good with the kids so her sister gets her a nanny gig for a "hot" widowed dad with the intention of making it a set-up as well as trying to get her hands on some damn rent money from her sister (in theory). After a rough first day on the job, she makes a deal with hot dad that she will stay at the job until Halloween. Obviously, she slowly wins over the kids with the fact that she acts like a child herself while hot dad goes on dates with a coworker of his who seems genuinely nice. The whole movie we were waiting for the coworker to turn into a bitch to justify hot dad going for Poppy instead, but she never does. Instead it just seems like the coworker is an allegory for hot dad's neglectful workaholic tendencies while Poppy represents quality family time. In the end, hot dad balks on an important business meeting to spend Halloween with his kids and mack on Poppy, the 30-something child. Reasonable coworker takes a job in Tokyo since she realizes he will never love her. We think she should have her own Hallmark movie about finding love in Japan, but there's no way Hallmark would be progressive enough to have an Asian man as a love interest in anything.

Overall, we got a few laughs but most of our amusement came from mockery. There was one scene we all genuinely liked where Poppy has the kids dress in business attire and give a performance review of their dad's fathering when he comes home from work. I'd respect the hell out of my kids if they did that. We also played Hallmark Bingo using this card. We didn't win, but we made our own after combining elements of that one with some of our own thoughts.

Spoon Rating: 3.5

Legend of Zelda: Wand of Gamelon/Faces Of Evil Cutscenes [1993] & Dark Dungeons [2014]

This Monday was a nerdy and kind of unusual evening. We started off with a YouTube video per recommendation of Erik of a supercut of all the scenes from two early 90s Zelda games. Even without context, they were surprisingly funny with their super low budget animation and often tonally strange voice acting.

It was a decent use of 20 minutes.

Spoon Rating: 5

Afterwards we watched a movie that we are honestly having a hard time critiquing because it wasn't bad but also, on some level it was. We just can't parse the level. 

Dark Dungeons is a short film about the evils of role playing games as based on a Jack Chick comic of the same name. Clearly the Chick track was very anti-RPG and supposedly the plot and major points of it are taken directly from the comic, like the fact that a girl commits suicide because her character died. However, the film was made by people who saw the comedy in the comic and played into it intentionally. The campiness (and the heavy sapphic undertones) were very deliberate even if the original comic was meant to be serious. 

Did we laugh? Of course. We laughed a lot. We were especially struck by a scene of the girls asking their DM if they could ascend to the next level to gain more power and asking what the level was. The DM replied epically and maniacally, "LARP!" Oh, also they do real magic and raised up Cthulhu. As you do when you play D&D or whatever.

It would be hard not to recommend it, but we can't really recommend it as a bad movie. We all agreed that we would love to see a version of the movie made by believers who think the Chick comic is accurate and then maybe that would be a true bad movie. For now, if this sounds like fun to you, watch it.