REWATCH: Black Ninja [2003]

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

Because Kay had run off to Chicago for Memorial Day weekend, it was time for another rewatch. This one didn't get a full review the first time around so here it goes.

By day Malik Ali (played by Clayton Prince, the writer and director, who according to the behind the scenes feature seems to think he's famous for being on "The Cosby Show" twice) is a rhyming lawyer who insults his clients to win cases and is really good at "getting people off." By night he is the Black Ninja, a masked vigilante trying to fix the injustices that he performs in his day job who uses really old computers in his secret lair basement. Ali has the required tragic backstory of his once happy family being murdered by an assassin named the Red Ninja and he flashbacks about them a lot in scenes that are shot like a slow ballad R&B video from the early 90s. Why is his persona a takeoff of the persona of the man who killed his family? A trip to Japan. His main mission is to ultimately get revenge on the Red Ninja while also protecting a therapist he starts a relationship with. She gets kidnapped by a mafia boss who's constantly getting massaged by girls in bikinis. Black Ninja paralyzes him while he's farting on the toilet in a scene that I think was supposed to be funny. Then he rescues her from the Red Ninja and the world falls apart from the lack of vigilante justice in the city now that his mission is complete. I'm guessing.

This movie is often talked about among the Bad Movie Night crew as a movie that should be studied in film classes for how much it's a technical failure. Just some of the faults include:

• Poorly timed Adam West's "Batman" sound effects.
• Video quality from the 70s which one could claim was an homage to blaxploitation films but really just looks cheap. 
• Over lit during day scenes and under lit during night scenes.
• Atrocious sound editing.
• Casio keyboard background music.
• The three-peat shot which should only be used for straight up comedy.
• Also, not a technical failure but the clothes and linens are terrible.

The best thing about the movie is still the funky theme song but hilariously enough there is actually another "Black Ninja" specific song: A rap song during a scene of Black Ninja working out. It doesn't really hold a candle to the original theme though. Go watch the trailer to hear it.

Quotes:
"We the jury find Pookie Jenkins aka The Weasel aka Dr. Love not guilty."
"I miss having someone to talk to. And I miss having someone talk to me."

Adam's Grandma's Review: "Just as good as it was."
She's not wrong.

SPECIAL: Laser Mission [1989]

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

Two Mondays ago we didn't have a movie night but the Friday before that we watched a movie that was certainly bad enough to qualify. Because Adam and Kay watched "Rapid Fire" the previous Friday upon realizing that Kay had only seen two out of the four Brandon Lee movies that exist (those two being "The Crow" and her favorite 90s action movie "Showdown In Little Tokyo"), we decided to complete the list and watch Brandon Lee's very first movie that neither of them had seen: "Laser Mission."

This movie is just incompetent. The plot was completely impossible to discern even by Sarah who had joined in the viewing. Brandon Lee plays some sort of secret agent for America who is trying to steal a laser or prevent one from being made or something. He teams up with a love interest who is also trained to fight or related to someone important and they have a fade-to-black love. There's plenty of dumb humor and completely unrealistic gun fire and I don't actually remember seeing any lasers in the movie at all but I think we all started trying to fall asleep about halfway through. Thirty minutes in Kay and Sarah insisted that we should turn it off and save it for a Monday but Adam insisted that we finish it at that moment. Action happens. The end. Brandon Lee didn't even take his shirt off or do any elaborate fight choreography so no one's movie going needs were met.

The absolute weirdest thing about this movie was that it was impossible to tell where it took place. In the beginning it seemed like it was in Cuba and all the characters seemed to have generic Hispanic accents. Then suddenly a ton of Russians appear. Then we seemed to be in the desert where there were a ton of different accents. Then they said something about Zambia, implying they were in Africa (which the movie cover seems to support). We still don't know for sure.

On the Indeterminate location:
Kay: "This is just like Star Wars."
Adam: "Or Mad Max."
Kay: "Or the beginning of Lawrence of Arabia."
Adam: "Or the middle of Lawrence of Arabia."

The Devil's Advocate [1997]

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

Full disclosure: this movie isn't bad per se. It is bad-ish but at the same time it's not bad in the same way that most things we watch are bad. It's competently made and the plot isn't exactly terrible and there are some real actors in it like Charlize Theron and Al Pacino. It's just so darn silly. And I think in some ways we are still recovering from the boredom we suffered at the hands of "Holy Terror" and "Howard The Duck" and were hankering for something that we knew would be more amusing than painful. Adam and Kay had both seen it before so there was definite comfort in knowing what to expect.

Magically animated wood craving Keanu Reeves plays Florida lawyer Kevin Lomax with a disappearing accent, no morals, a super religious mom, and a healthy relationship with his wife Mary Ann. One day he gets an offer from a New York lawyer to come pick a jury since his total ruthlessness really gets around. Soon he's working at a fancy New York law firm under an eccentric named John Milton, not to be confused with the poet who wrote a fairly sympathetic portrayal of the devil in "Paradise Lost". In this soulless environment known as NYC, Mary Ann starts to lose her mind and see demons in her new friends eventually leading to her committing suicide in a mental hospital after saying Milton demonically raped her. Reeves tries desperately to emote as he starts to realize he may not be as unfeeling as he seems while becoming more suspicious of Milton. Turns out, Milton is the devil and also Kevin's father and what he wants more than anything is for Kevin and another lawyer at the firm who is his half-sister to bang and bring about the anti-christ. There's also a triple homicide case going on in the background and Jeffery Jones gets demonically murdered but really everyone's just waiting for Al Pacino to admit that he's Satan. The spoiler exists before you even watch the film.

In a similar fashion as "Dungeons & Dragons" and "After Earth" there is an amusing dichotomy between the two lead actors where one is chewing all the scenery and the other can barely move their face muscles. It's hard to tell whether Reeves or Pacino provides more comedy. The whole thing is so over-the-top ridiculous that it's honestly really worth a watch if that's the kind of thing you want.

Quotes:
"Where does he sleep?"
"Who said he sleeps?"
"Where does he fuck?"
"EVERYWHERE!"

(Mary Ann is yelling)
Kevin: "Stop. Reset."

"What about love?"
"Overrated! Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate."

Also at one point Kevin shares the secret to his success: a hole in the men's bathroom . . . through which he can hear deliberations.

Have some dramatic Pacino faces:

"AHH!"

"AHHHHH!!"

"AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!"

"I'm okay."

 And a goofy Keanu:

Dr. Giggles [1992]

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

There's a certain level of hesitation that goes into deciding to watch a recommendation from someone outside of our group, mainly because not everyone seems to get what we mean when we say "bad movie watching club." Bad is a subjective concept really but there is undeniably a trend with what we watch. However, when Kay's boss recommended "Dr. Giggles" we had to watch it. The title and description were more than enough evidence that it could be a winner.

Dr. Giggles is not a real doctor but the psychopathic son of a doctor. He spent his childhood slicing open his teddy bears and laughing a lot when his mom died from a heart issue. Now middle-aged, he breaks out of the asylum he's been put in and goes after various teens who think it's fun to break into his weirdly overlit house before fixating on 90s television actors, Holly Marie Combs (you saw her as Piper in "Charmed") and her boyfriend Glenn Quinn (you saw him on "Roseanne" as Mark or "Angel" as Doyle). Piper (forgot the character name; who cares) has a heart condition but is afraid of surgery because her mom died in surgery so she spends her evening drinking wine and looking at scrapbooks like a sad divorcee. Soon she has another heart problem: Mark made out with a skank who deep throats saxaphones while she was at home crying into her Pinot! After Dr. Giggles kills the required amount of first name only side characters with tricked out medical instruments and terrible puns as well as stabbing Piper's dad, he hunts her down in order to "fix" her and drags her to his evil hospital with minor character corpses in the waiting room. A rookie cop, who's two-days-from-retirement partner has been killed by Giggles, comes to save her and fights Giggles to the death which is really difficult because Giggles is too kinky to torture and mostly just gives his odd high-pitched tee-hee in response to pain. Mark helps an extremely drugged-up Piper escape from the hospital before it blows up and apparenly the cheating thing is forgotten. The movie ends with an EKG display speeding up and "Bad Case Of Lovin' You" by Moon Martin because of course.

"Dr. Giggles" is your typical bad horror movie, too gory and cheesy to be either scary or funny. There's almost no pun left untouched with the expection of the fact that laughing gas is somehow never used. I guess that's too much of dentist thing.

Quote: "When you wake up you'll have a change of heart."

Holy Terror [2002]

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

Most films we watch are able to meet the bare minimum of having the title relate to the movie somehow. "The Room" mostly takes place in a single room. "Samurai Cop" was about a cop who knew some martial arts. But then we have "Troll 2" which was about . . . goblins. This film is called "Holy Terror" and bills itself as being about a killer nun but after seeing it, well, they are really stretching that explanation.

"Holy Terror" is really a film about a pretty boring seven person swinger house party made by a guy who might have gone to Catholic school but likely did not go to film school. A nun gets possessed or killed or something and then haunts a house that is then rented out to a young couple who refuse to wear shirts with sleeves. From there, 90% of the movie is lingering shots of boobs and the various couples who come over for a party partnering up with other people while dancing. At one point the main girl takes a long shower in blood and it takes her a disturbingly long time to notice (this was likely done to justify the film cover above and include more boob).The remainder of the film consists of about 9% Ouija board use and 1% actual killing. And I should point out that this movie is only 54 minutes long but manages to have a Behind The Scenes reel that clocks in at a hour and 15 minutes. Ultimately everyone dies except the realtor and the one girl at the party he decided was worthy of saving and they take off for Mexico.

This movie was cheap and lazy. There's nothing resembling a plot (compare to "Crazy Fat Ethel 2"), the music was clearly made by someone's buddy with a synthesizer who just decided to rip off Metallica and the "Phantom of the Opera" theme, and the living room where a lot of the so-called action takes place has three futons. THREE. My suspension of disbelief is just shattered.

Curious Credit: Evil Monks 1 & 2 as themselves. 

Adam's Grandma's Review: (as provided by Keith) "Glad I missed it."

Replicant [2001]

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



Some facts: This is the fifth Van Damme movie that we've watched for Bad Movie Night and, according to Wikipedia, it is one of four movies in which he plays a duel role. The others include "Double Impact", "Maximum Risk", and "The Order". At some point the people in charge of creating more things for Van Damme to do (I assume there is a team that handles this and only this; same with Steven Segal) decided that one Van Damme was simply not enough and that what the people really want and need is at least two Van Dammes per film.

Van Damme #1 is a serial killer who seems to seek out young mothers so he can kill them and set their houses on fire. The protagonist is a cop, hours from retirement, who managed not to catch him again after three years of trying and enters his retirement relatively unfased. Then he starts getting threats from the serial killer and a shady government agency decides to fix everything by cloning the serial killer and giving Van Damme #2, who is inexplicably psychically connected to the killer, to the protagonist as a crime sniffing pet. Van Damme #2 is basically a human Lassie combined with a parrot and a lot of the humor comes from him trying to navigate the world around him. The protagonist is particularly unhelpful to Van Lassie and frequently treats him as he would like to treat Van Killer. After numerous shenanighans involving Van Damme on Van Damme violence and Van Lassie trying to solicate a prostitute with no idea how, there is a lengthy final showdown in which Van Lassie's loyalty to his master is proven stronger than his loyalty to his "brother" and he dies heroically while Van Killer dies in a fire of irony. Or does he?

All in all, it's your typical Van Damme movie: silly (although this time often intentionally) and full of dragging fight scenes. What is crazy about this film is that the budget for it was $17 million and most of that probably went into destroying property. Was it worth it to see Van Damme staring dumbly into the camera for over an hour? You decide (but the answer is yes).

Quotes:
"Hi." (offers hand) "Wendy Wyckham."
(repeating) "Calm the fuck down."

Sometimes the clone repeats lines from his human training video - "I am sitting. I am walking."- and it seems like Van Damme is reading the script.

"I beat the shit out of him. Honest mistake."

(last lines said wistfully) "He likes rain."

Adam's Grandma's Review: "It was good."

Howard The Duck [1986]

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

More than half of the movies we watch at Bad Movie Night have not been seen before by any of the members which certainly poses a level of risk and a variance in the quality of the films we watch. Mostly everything we can be sure will be bad on the basis of notoriety or just a plot description (and occasionally on the DVD cover) but what we can't be sure of is whether the level of bad will change thoughout the film in unexpected ways and that is always a dubious delight.

And here we find ourselves at "Howard The Duck", a bad movie classic we have been putting off for no particular reason other than we've had movies we wanted to watch more. At first the premise is pretty straightforwardly bad: an anthrpomorphic duck from a universe exactly like ours but with ducks as the dominent species is transported to our world and found by a startlingly open-minded 80s girl named Bodacious Beverly who is in a rock band named Cherry Bomb which they unfortunatley did not cover in the film. In spite of the fact that Howard is a jerk who doesn't appreciate her hospitality and seems weirdly unconcerned with finding a way home, she falls in love with him and again we must watch scenes that would make anyone who is not a furry cover their eyes (see also: WolfCop). At the point when they have met up with awkward scientist Tim Robbins and real scientist Jeffery Jones to try to send Howard back home, we realize with creeping horror that the movie is only half way done and wonder how much more of this duck out of water premise we can handle. Thankfully for us(?), they turn the crazy up to eleven when the experiment goes wrong and Jeff Jones gets possessed by an extraterrestrial demon who wants to take over the world. Bodacious Beverly gets kidnapped by demon!JeffJones to be used as a vessel for another demon and Howard and TimRob chase them in a personal helicopter thing for what feels like four hours before the saving-the-day thing finally happens. The movie ends with Howard being forced to stay on Earth and becoming the new manager of Cherry Bomb. No one finds this weird.

I think the only reasons this movie made money were because people are fans of the comic and because George Lucas funded it and he does all he can to not let you forget it with tons of shameless advertising for Lucas films throughout. In terms of the technical aspects of the film, it blatantly ripped off other famous directors including Kubrick and Scorsce with references to "2001" and "Taxi Driver". We think they were trying to be clever but the sheer amount of pathetic puns in the movie makes us doubt that clever is something the movie's creators are capable of.

Quotes:
Everything said by the waitress at the Cajun Sushi restaurant. She was the best character in the movie by far.

"I bite your face. You're a dead man, Ginger!" (N.B.: The man's name was Ginger. I don't think he was a ginger.)

"Where's my baseball cap?"
"Shut up."
"Fascist!"

Adam's Grandma's Review: "Zzzzzz."