Vertical Limit [2000]

[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]

Hold on everybody because we've got a real cliffhanger!

I'm not even sorry.

The movie starts with Chris O'Donnell (who you may remember from the George Clooney superhero movie whose name we fear to speak) and Robin Tunney, the actress who played the main character in "The Craft", letting their father die in a rock climbing accident. It's sad though. Well, more funny. But it's not murder.

Fast forward many years and Tunney's character has become a famous mountain climber and has to lead a millionaire up K2 as part of a peculiar marketing stunt. Unfortunately for her, this millionaire sticks his middle finger at fate and decides to go ahead with the climb in spite of the weather and the two of them plus another even more skilled climber end up buried in a snow cave. O'Donnell gathers together a bunch of climbers at the base camp including two annoying Australian brothers, a Pakistani guy whose brother died instead of falling in the ice cave, a random attractive girl who is obviously going to hook up with O'Donnell, and an old guy whose wife died on the mountain. Their plan? They're going to save them with nitroglycerin! NOTHING COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG.

Spoiler: Things do. But in spite of finding out someone is a murderer, a case of edema, many scenes of cliffhanging, and enough explosions to make Michael Bay giddy, things could be way worse.

Quotes: [O'Donnell's character explaining the danger] "It's not just gonna be snow.  There's gonna be ice and rock . . ."

(In other news, the sky is blue.)

Johnny Mnemonic [1995]

[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]

I'm pretty sure without contest that this movie had the best cast of any movie we've watched at Bad Movie Night. It features, in no particular order:

• Dolph Lundgren: the most interesting man alive
• Dina Meyer: that girl from "Starship Troopers" who was way cooler and more interesting than Denise Richards
• Takeshi Kitano: the Japanese film industry's jack of all trades
• Henry Rollins: the punk rocker, motivation speaker, and all around awesome human
• Ice-T: the only real successful rapper turned actor
• Udo Kier: the German Christopher Walken

Oh. And Keanu Reeves in the lead. Crap. I think we can assume that particular casting occurred to make sure the audience knew that it was a bad movie and not the greatest movie ever.

Reeves plays John Smith, a guy who offers up his brain space for secret files distributed by resistance groups in a dystropian cyberpunk 2021. He mostly monotones about his love of expensive things and grits his teeth a lot while things are done to his head. When transporting files from China to the Free City of Newark (I know), his brain is filed beyond capacity because the writers don't know how computer storage works and he needs to get it out or die. He ends up traveling around with an out-of-work bodyguard, Meyer, and visiting her scientist friend, Spider played by Rollins, who goes on a rant about technology destroying the world that we suspect Rollins wrote himself. Spider tells him that the files in his head contain the cure to the disease that's killing everyone and from there it's mostly running from the Yakuza boss', Kitano, hired hitman, a religious Scandinavian giant with a crucifix dagger (and a crucifixation, if you will) played by Lundgren. A resistance group leader, Ice-T, decides to help John with some tech built by Spider that involves sharing brains with a dolphin or something and the cure is unlocked and all the bad guys die. Humanity is saved!

This movie is a definite rewatch, which is to say bad movie gold.

Quotes:

"Have you got parents and stuff?"

"I WANT TO GET ONLINE. I NEED A COMPUTER." - Reeves playing every teenager

"I WANT ROOM SERVICE! I want a club sandwich. I want a cold Mexican beer. I want a ten thousand dollar a night hooker. . . and i want my shirts laundered like they do at the Imperial Hotel."

"Johnny, the dolphin can take you to the data."

"We're going out with a blast so get your VCRs ready!"

Ice-T: "Where's Spider?"

Meyer: "He's dead."

[Ice-T looks at a flaming pile of rubble nearby]

Meyer: "No. Not in there. Earlier."

Adam's Grandma's Review: "Lots of explosions."

Raging Sharks [2005]

[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]

In honor of the fact that two of the members of the BMN crew happen to be involved in the hospital with the best shark attack floor in the area, let there be MORE SHARK MOVIES! I'm not sure why shark movies are so common for bad movies but Nu Images, the company who did this one (not the Asylum), cites this movie as its six shark movie (one of its previous ones being "Shark Attack 3" starring the wonderful John Barrowman). 

This movie is a lot like one of our previous films, "Deep Blue Sea", but with the addition of aliens who sent down orange crystals that turn the sharks into killers and way less production value. The 'action' takes place mostly on an underwater research base stupidly located in the Bermuda Triangle and run by a man with 90s hair curtains. When he leaves the base to talk about the crazy sharks that are attacking anyone who leaves the base, not Steven Segal from the government says he wants to inspect the place for violations. Meanwhile, Hair Curtains' wife, not Amanda Seyfried (played by Vanessa Angel, which is not a porn star name), tries to keep the base together by repeatedly sending people outside to their doom and being sad when they die. Eventually not Steven Segal gets on the base and goes on a killing spree of the people on it and all the stock footage of sharks attacking is pretty much forgotten. Throw in some operatic stock music, actors who cannot convey outrage to save their lives, a man falling from a plane and bouncing on the water's surface like a klutzy Jesus, and a crew member whose accent encompasses every country in the Anglosphere. The movie appears to go back to its home planet in the end but if you think there's going to be some explanation for why or how any of this occurred, I direct your attention to more ambiguous stock footage.

Best Line: "You have two choices . . . and one of them's wrong!"

Adam's Grandma's Review: "I liked it. It was good."

The Baby-Sitters Club [1995]

[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]

"Kristy, this brilliant idea might actually be brilliant!" - Jessie 

Nope.

Who needs plot when you can have no less than five subplots? This is a question "The Baby-Sitters Club" strives to answer. For those who never read the books, it's about seven girls of standard archetypes who babysit and go through 13-year-old problems. Tomboy Kristy's deadbeat dad comes back into her life and she decides to hide it from everyone like she's having an affair (which they all weirdly assume and have no issue with her dating a guy in his 40s), Artsy Claudia needs to retake a science test or fail, Shopaholic Stacy is trying to hook up with a 17-year-old Swedish guy and keep her diabetes a secret from him, Hippie Dawn is trying to avoid some possibly insane suitor, and the whole club is trying to run a summer day camp for the kids they sit for without it being taken down by Mary Ann and Dawn's neighbor who understandably hates loud children or by Bitchy Cokie Mason, some chick who hates the club for no reason and is constantly hitting on Prim Mary Ann's boyfriend, Southern Logan. Got all that? Good. Everything works out in the positive in the end expect Kristy's dad up and leaves and doesn't come back, the only thing that defies audience expectations. On that I leave you with some word association. Sperm pancakes. A 16+ club in New York City. 90s fashion.  "Let's Get Busy." A toilet-papered greenhouse. "WHEN DID YOU EAT A MUFFIN, STACEY?!". A boy flapping around like a bird in some kind of mating ritual. A rap about the circulatory system. Poor accounting skills. And screaming children. Oh, so many screaming children.

Adam's Grandma's Review: "It was good for a while. I started to get sleepy towards the end."

Vampire Dog [2012]

[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]

We almost watched "The Babysitter's Club" yesterday but once this movie was thrown into the mix it was a unanimous vote on title alone. And what a deceptive title it is.

"Vampire Dog" isn't really about a vampire dog. There's an immortal talking dog who is mildly irritated by the sun (in spite of the fact that he goes in it constantly), can hypnotize people, and eats nothing but red jelly but that's the closest you get. The movie is actually about the new kid in school who's bullied by the popular girls, who unironically say things like, "OMG LOL," because . . . his mom is the new music teacher. Yep, apparently it doesn't take much to set off an antagonist these days. And there's some bigger narrative about how the school, Lugosi Middle School, har har, needs to win a battle of the bands in order to save the music program. The other, probably lesser, narrative is about how the kid has inherited this dog from his Romanian grandfather that is a 'vampire dog' and he has to bring him to school every day to feed him the blood of his classmates red jelly from the cafeteria. There's this evil cosmetic lady with fabulous clothes and wild hand gestures and her gay assistant who want to capture the dog so they can . . . harness his power to make anti-aging cream? I don't know. They mostly run into walls and get out-smarted by 12-year-olds. In the end the kid takes the place of the drummer in the battle of the bands and leads the school to victory, thus making him cool and getting him the girl, and the evil adults . . . get arrested or something. Also, the kid's science nerd love interest realizes that the dog's inability to go in the sun that we never see is actually just a mild allergy and they fix that. Woot for easily won victories.

In the credits there were a ton of messages for Canadian film companies and places who funded the film which caused Adam to exclaim, "In a last effort this movie tried to blame everything on Canada."  We all know it takes individuals, multiples ones, to make a movie. Even a bad one. Especially a bad one.

WTF Line: "Jelly shortage? What's next? The apocalypse?"

Adam's Grandma's Review: "Good for kids."

Ace Ventura Jr.: Pet Detective [2009]

[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]

"Ace Ventura Jr.: Pet Detective" (the way the logo is written made me think it was "Ace Ventura: Pet Detective Jr." but I guess I was wrong) is the straight to video third installment of the "Ace Ventura" series that no one asked for or wanted. Most curiously, we managed to watch this movie because Adam had borrowed it from one of his friends. This means a human over the age of 18 purchased this movie with actual valid currency. Bad idea.

Ace Jr., apparently the offspring of Jim Carey's Ace, tasks himself with finding the lost pets of his classmates and is forcibly tasked with finding the school's lost mascot. Of course, all this gets pushed aside when someone kidnaps an obviously robotic panda and his zookeeper mother gets blamed for it with no more evidence than a few footprints in her place of business. Ace's grandfather comes to take care of him and ties his lineage to the likes of Charles Darwin and Jacques Cousteau. Right. Then Ace forms a team with a shoved-in-the-locker nerd and the girl he likes and annoying shenanigans ensue. There's also a tie-in to the organization that protects ugly animals, plenty of recycled lines from the previous movies, and a rich kid who we thought could potentially be a grown woman in drag. Also, even though the movie took place is 2009, it really genuinely seemed like it was made in the 90s. People did the "loser" sign, the nerd was the kind that movies nowadays know better to stay away from portraying, none of the kids had a cellphone but they did have a boombox, and even little things like the haircuts and occasionally the clothes seemed weirdly dated. It made us want to watch "Brink." "Brink" was a great movie and I will hear nothing to the contrary.

Summarizing Line: "That was a dumb idea."

Best Line:

"We recieved this anonymous tip."

"From who?"

". . . Anonymous."

WTF Line: "I haven't been treated this badly since I got sick in a country with socialized medicine."

[Note: This line was spoken by Ace Jr. and it came out of absolutely no where. And speaking as someone who has actually gotten sick in a country with socialized medicine and went to a walk-in clinic I can say that the level of care is literally the same as with privatized medicine in America]

Miami Connection [1987]

[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]

Bad martial arts movies are kind of a dime a dozen. But what about a movie about black-belt, crime-fighting, orphan college students who are also in a band?

"Miami Connection" is a curiously named film as it mainly takes place in Orlando where our five protagonists go to school at the University of Central Florida even though they are all at least in their 30s. These five guys have a bond held together by their black belts in taekwondo, their status as roommates and band members of Dragon Sound, and their mutual lack of parents. Generally the movie follows the guys trying to fight a group they simply call "Ninjas" who are involved in some cocaine ring but in between lengthy fight scenes we get full-length Dragon Sound songs that sound like the themes to children's television programs with titles like "Friends" and "Against The Ninja." The action is broken up somewhat by a subplot about how one of the orphans has found evidence that his father is alive which he explains in one of the best crying scenes ever and a subplot about the one girl in the band who is friends with one of the guys in spite of being the sister of a Ninja. The brother's response to this is so dramatic ("FRIENDS?!") you would think he might be happier to know they were just having sex.

Perhaps one of the most curious things about this film actually comes at the very end of the movie when the audience is treated to white words on a black screen that read, "Only through the elimination of violence can we achieve world peace," a really out-of-place sentiment considering that the entire film is about a bunch of guys fighting and even killing the members of a drug empire.

This is friendship.

Quotes:
(transcribed from Y.K. Kim's dialogue): "I just got the job from Asian. Don't bottle us."
"He's in that club every night with his darn gang selling their stupid cocaine."

Adam's Grandma's Review: "It was good. It had a little bit of everything."

Enjoy the sweet sounds of Dragon Sound: