Every Young Man's Battle [2003]

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

This movie was based off an apparently award-winning(!?) book that is a guide for young men to avoid masturbation and pornography, truely some of the worst of the sins. The full title of the book is actually "Every Young Man's Battle: Strategies for Victory in the Real World of Sexual Temptation" and while none of us heathens have read this good Christian book, the film did come with a bunch of study guides that ask questions about the movie and ask that you refer to Bible verses to further your understanding. About halfway through the brief, hour-long film, Adam paused it to go get his Bible, for learning purposes of course, and passed Kay a book saying, "This one's for you, Kay." It was the Satanic Bible. After that he also got his copies of the teachings of Buddha for Keith and a book on Wicca for Sarah as well as the Jewish Tanakh, the Koran, and the Book of Mormon. Perhaps we were overly prepared for a movie on the evils of wanking but we're thorough like that.

The movie is a bit difficult to explain structurally. It started with a weird metaphor about how the battle against the hypersexualized modern world is just like the Battle of Gettysburg, espoused by a man standing at Gettysburg. Then there was an overarching plot about a kid whose friend gives him the URL of a porn site and then invites him over to his house for . . . group porn watching? We think. Either that or he was coming onto him. And either way, that's totally unrealistic. Group porn watching among men is only really acceptable if it's so gross you have to show people or if you're in the military, as Adam can attest. Intercut with this semi-coherent plot are testimonies from guys who gave up porn and couldn't be happier as seen on their websites like xxxchurch.com (yes, it's real and not what you're hoping), guys whose lives fell apart entirely because of porn addition (homelessness! prostitution! drugs!), a bunch of Christian rockers talking about the inspiration for the music they wrote for this movie (spoiler: it's Jesus), and an extended football metaphor that we all just made sex jokes about. They also talked about the importance of "starving the sumo" which apparently just means "deflating your sex drive by avoiding sexual materials."

All in all, this was a decent descent into the early 2000s PSA aesthetic but a poor excuse for a movie. The study guides were a silly little addition full of repetative questions, gendered nonsense, and references to Bible verses that we had fun shouting out the answers to. Our answers were mostly, "Masturbate." In conclusion, Sarah, who is a registered nurse, wants you to know that there are many medical benefits of masturbation. Perhaps the people who promote things like this should realize that starving the sumo might just make the sumo so hungry that it will eat absolutely anything. 

BMN Quotes:
[while reading hatemail on xxxchurch.com]
Adam: "Faith cleansing asshole? Like a holy water enema?"
Kay: "I used to play bass for Holy Water Enema."

[while reading the study guides]
Kay: "Making a covenent with your eyes? A bukake covenent?"
Adam: I used to play bass for Bukake Covenent."

Spoon Rating: 6

Things [1989]

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

This is a big one. We have been waiting to get our hands on this for years, probably even longer than we waited to see "Saving Christmas." This movie has a cult around it with its fans calling themselves "Things-ites" (I feel like there should be something more smooth than that but okay) and a reputation as one of the worst movies of all time. For us, it had some of the worst picture and sound quality since something like "Guru, The Mad Monk" or "Crazy Fat Ethel 2" and had a plot that was virtually impossible for anyone, even Sarah, to follow. The dialogue makes Neil Breen look like Shakespeare. It doesn't even feel like a planned movie so much as something a bunch of drunk Canadian rednecks decided to do on the fly because they happpened to have a camcorder. It also has the curious addition of porn star Amber Lyn in it as a newscaster who occasionally reports on what it happening in the movie and hands-down the best actor in the film.

The plot, as we have come to understand it, is about a guy who can't concieve a child with his wife so he asks for assistance from the evil doctor next door to make it happen. We are only really able to gain this information from poorly constructed conversation, a symbolic dream where the guy asks for a baby from a naked woman wearing a ram head mask, and a seemingly out of place scene of a guy torturing people in his basement (clearly where the bulk of the film budget went). All this happens pretty early in the film and then the next hour involves the guy's brother and his brother's friend coming over to raid his fridge. They find a tape recorder in the fridge that gives them infomation about this previous nonsense and then one of them puts his coat in the fridge because he's too hot. Yes, it's the kind of movie where this kind of illogical stuff just happens. Eventually the guy's bedbound wife starts screaming and bleeding and a thing bursts out of her chest like in "Alien." It turns out this thing is one of the THINGS which look like lawn spiders someone got at an iParty around Halloween. The rest of the movie is them wandering around the house in the dark, fighting the things. Occasionally someone will seemingly die and then come back later. In the end, the guy's brother is the only one left and he JUST LEAVES THE HOUSE. We were so angry.

This movie steals from and references enough good horror movies, including "Evil Dead" and George Romero's work, that it seems like the creators may have had an idea of what they were going for although nothing worked. This movie has poor picture quality, poor sound quality, poor dialogue, poor acting, poor special effects, a poor plot, a poor set, poor costuming, poor hairstyles (the 80s!), and just poverty of sense. Please experience things.

Quotes:
"Next time you come with me, you're staying home."

"You never told me you were a kindergarten artist."
"No one told me you were an asshole. I had to find out for myself."

"My niece did that before we tortured and ate her." [We still genuinely do not know if this was supposed to be a joke or if it was a reveal that all the characters are actually psychopaths.]

"They ate Susan! They ate her to the skull!"

And of course:

 

Spoon Rating: 9

Ilsa, She Wolf Of The SS [1975]

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

Let me disappoint you immediately as we have all been disappointed: there are no lady werewolves in this movie. I'm not saying that we picked this movie heavily on the possibility of there being werewolf Nazis but I will say that when Adam was reading out the titles of potential movies this was the first one mentioned and we all screamed, "Yes!" This probably has something to do with the fact that all of us have seen Grindhouse and were probably thinking of Rob Zombie's movie trailer for his fake movie, "Werewolf Women of the SS." Instead of a werewolf Nazi movie we got a Nazi torture porn film mixed with a softcore porn and if those tastes don't sound like they go together, it's probably because they really shouldn't. 

This film opens on sex between Ilsa, the Uberfrau leader of a special medical experiment camp, and one of the prisoners who she castrates right after as part of some theory that "inferior" races have inferior junk. Then the camp gets a new shipment of ladies who Ilsa questions and looks at naked before subjecting them to things like boiling, disease, and sterilization by a phallic vibrator wrapped in an electric coil. Also, nipple clamps were always a part of this for some reason. One of the girls is really good at not reacting to pain so she gets even more done to her as part of an experiment Ilsa is running to prove that women can be valuable in combat roles. A bit later a shipment of men come in sporting the red triangle of political prisoners. One of them is a blonde American who was born in Germany and of course he becomes Ilsa new toy. What she doesn't realize is, he's capable of holding off an orgasm indefinitely and this ability (which she then tests by watching him in a threeway with two other female guards) makes her something of a willing slave to him. Meanwhile, American guy and his Italian friend team up with the girls at the camp to plan an escape. Ilsa does more horrible stuff, invites over her commanding officer who she has a dinner with where they can watch a woman get slowly hanged, pees on said commanding officer at his request, and we went outside to play with sparklers as a distraction from the horribleness. At the climax (*rimshot*) of the film, American guy ties Ilsa to the bed and the escape plan goes into action. They manage to overtake the guards but their plans are foiled when German soldiers arrive to gun everyone down to destroy evidence of the camp's horrors. Pain girl stumbles into Ilsa's room to try to kill her but dies from her injuries before she succeeds and the job is finished by a German soldier cleaning house. American guy and the girl he likes, Rosette, are the only ones who make it out.

This movie was mostly unpleasant. We got a couple laughs from facial expressions and the fact that occasionally Ilsa and the lady Nazis would have their shirts halfway unbuttoned for a scene for no reason whatsoever (Adam said that this seemed like a Mel Brooks joke but it was totally serious). If you really want to watch some Nazisplotation, try "The Night Porter," although that's actually a decent movie. Maybe just cross your fingers that Rob Zombie actually makes his Nazi werewolf movie.

This movie summed up in one picture.

Löffel rating: 2

Gorgo [1961]

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

Have you ever thought to yourself that there really aren't enough "Godzilla" rip-offs in the world even with Japan making a new one pretty much every year since the 50s? Well, I've got a film for you then! It's a British production but trust me when I say that this does not make it any better than the numerous American faliures to adapt this same monster movie format. Can we, as a people, just stop? I mean, let Japan keep doing it over and over because they invented it but there is no reason to have this many prehistoric-dinosaurish-animal-attacks-city movies. The movie this week was selected by Paul, our special guest, and Keith had already seen it but he had been a child at the time and couldn't really remember it. We ended our evening by showing each other the weirdest music videos we know of which were more exciting than this film.

While fishing off the coast of Ireland, a bunch of dudes in a ship stumble upon a mysterious being in the water. They go to a tiny island nearby where they encounter a very questionable "scientist" and his orphened child slave who aggressively doesn't think they should try to catch the monster. They do and sell it into the circus in London where they name it Gorgo (I guess they didn't really consider that there's an "n" at the end of the Greek mythical being), parade it around the streets, and put it in a pit in the ground at Battersea Park so they can sell tickets to see it. The orphaned Irish child stowed away on the fishermen's ship and constantly looks sadly at Gorgo in confinement but doesn't ever actually mess things up even though we really thought he was going to. Everything is going okayish aside from the moral questions, until a scientist discovers that Gorgo is actually a small child and not a fully grown adult and that mommy is coming to collect. The end result is the destruction of London landmarks like Tower Bridge, Big Ben, and the entire West End because we built these models and Goddammit we're going to use them. People die. Beasts go home. Irish child still curiously homeless.

This movie was pretty generic overall. We had a couple laughs and actually found the special effects to be pretty good compared to a lot of the films we watch, but it wasn't strange or interesting enough to warrant much attention.

Quote:

"All hands on net!"

Spoon Rating: 3

Paul's Review:

"My emotions:

"

I Am Here.... Now [2009]

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

Now that we have watched Neil Breen's first three movies we can say with confidence that he really does grow as an artist over time. He doesn't get better necessarily but his stories develop more coherency which makes it easier to focus on the delightful aspects of them like the bad acting and dialogue without getting bogged down in the frustration of wondering what is going on. This movie, "I Am Here.... Now" is more watchable than last week's "Double Down" but did not provide nearly as much joy as "Fateful Findings." We can only that "Pass Thru" which is coming out this year will be a solid 10 on our Spoon Rating scale. Also, I just want to point out that he uses what seems to be the exact same picture of himself on every one of his movie posters. Brilliant.

The movie starts with Neil Breen and his dead eyes being beamed down to Earth as some sort of alien mecha Jesus (who can transform into a Neanderthal/alien thing) into a remote part of the Nevada desert where there are six doll heads on the ground, some skulls, and six crosses. He is dissatisfied with how the humans are treating each other and the planet (which he made, I guess) so he hypnotizes a couple drinking beers in the desert and steals the guy's clothes so he can go into Vegas as a normal guy. In some unlinear side story, two sisters get laid off from their jobs at natural energy companies because greedy corporate types don't care about the planet and they decide to become hookers. One has a kid and doesn't go through with it and is rewarded by being given a man to date who was once an old guy in a wheelchair but Breesus made him young again. The other sister . . . has sex with Breesus, I guess. Also, all the women in the movie with more than three lines are wearing the same button up tank top in different colors. The girls get kind of mixed up with trying to hook the evil corrupt politicians and businessmen who hang out with more traditional low lifes but in the end Breesus crucifies them on the crosses we saw in the desert. He looks into his glass table centerpiece and decides to give the humans one more chance before he destroys the world for good. In the slowest moving credits in movie history, his character is listed as "The Being."

This movie had all the traditional Breenness but had the special award of probably being a coherent story if the editing hadn't been so atrocious. The best scene is when a guy gets shot and one of the sisters screams three times at seeing his corpse in the most unfeeling and brief way possible.

Spoon Rating: 7

Double Down [2005]

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

After the glory of "Fateful Findings," we decided to give Neil Breen's first movie "Double Down" a try and it was actually really rough compared to the joy of "Fateful Findings." The bulk of the movie involves Neil Breen wandering around the Nevada desert, eating enough tuna to give him mercury poisoning, having visions of his dead girlfriend who keeps asking him to "stop time" and whose bones he carries with him in a body bag, and watching an old man die as he gives him a rock that he tries to use to cure a girl's brain cancer (it doesn't work). Over all this footage, a lot of which is repeated multiple times or stock footage, you get a voiceover of Breen explaining how awesome his character is and how he is being recritted by the government for hacking missions. I'm not entirely sure this film had a conclusion.

Honestly, there's not much more I could say since this movie was so disjointed so instead here's a list of things Neil Breen likes based on the two movies we've seen by him:

• people's feet
• showing his butt
• rocks with special powers
• repeating footage
• abusing broken laptops
• free locations
• falling for a girl in elementry school and loving her still as an adult (there is some poor lady who knew Neil Breen when he was seven who wants him to stop calling her)
• government conspiracies
• being the good guy computer hacker who saves the world from corruption
• tragic death scenes that he can overact in
• magical realism (although he doesn't know how it works)
• shots that seem cool but make no logical sense
• ambiguous dialogue
• Sleeping on your stomach
• weird credits ("Location - Neil Breen", "Hair & Makeup - None", "Lighting - None")
• pretending he's David Lynch and that his movies are really deep

Quotes:

"It kills immediately on contact. He'll be dead in five minutes."

Spoon Rating: 5

Fateful Findings [2013]

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

Guys, this one is very important. For long we have wandered through the vast wasteland of bad movies in hopes of a new savior who can help elevate the art and provide us with hours of delicious schedefreude. Tommy Wiseau is busy trying to fund a pointless television show that is almost as painful as it is funny, Ed Wood is dead, and James Nguyen . . . apparently made a "Birdemic" sequel but no one seems to be talking about it so, whatever. Maybe another week. This week we are talking about the new name in bad movies: Neil Breen, a man who sort of looks like a Hobbit crossed with a melting Alan Rickman mask who you definitely don't want to introduce to your kids. Not only did Neil Breen direct, produce, write, edit, and star in "Fateful Findings"; he also did the casting, production design, sound editing, and makeup. It is a doozy.

In a flashback, a girl and a boy find a mushroom in the woods that transforms into a fancy box with a black rock inside that they take with them. The girl moves away and the boy is presently an author, struggling to write his second book while dealing with depression (I think?) and his Polish wife's pill-popping addiction. Neil Breen, the man, gets hit by a car but survives because of the black rock that seems to have magic powers that call on a crappy wind effect. Out of nowhere at home with his wife he says that he hasn't been researching his novel but has been "hacking into national and international databases" on his six computers that he often abuses. He also dreams a lot about being in a room covered in black garbage bags and about a giant mystical book. Meanwhile, Breen's alcoholic best friend is sorta accidentally killed by his wife who frames it as a suicide. That subplot is dropped. The best friend's underage daughter tries to seduce Breen for no discernible reason. That subplot is dropped. Breen meets the girl from his past and they have an affair right before his wife ODs. This means relatively little. You start to wonder how so many things can be happening when there isn't really a plot. Breen has a green-screen press conference where he talks about his hacking discoveries that are apparently in the rock (the rock was a thumb drive?) and a bunch of CEOs kill themselves. You wonder how if that was the whole point, why did the movie talk so little about it? You want to watch more Neil Breen movies.

While the plot may not show it, this movie is a masterpiece of terrible movies. About halfway through the film, I noticed that if you start imagining that you are actually watching a David Lynch movie in the vein of "Rabbits" or "Inland Empire", the movie actually gets better until something happens to remind you that this man is definitely not David Lynch. You get the impression that Neil Breen read a book on acting and one on directing and managed to walk away with concepts but not understanding and application. For example, Breen sees two therapists in the film: one who is a pill pusher who doesn't do much and who always sits at the other end of a seriously long table and the other who is very in tune with him whose office is essentially a broom closet. Breen clearly understood that one can show emotional distance in a film with physical distance and emotional closeness with physical closeness but never actually considered how bonkers this would actually look on screen if done wrong. He also is aware that when acting you can sometimes show anger not just with a raised voice but also by throwing things. So he does this no less than four times in the movie, often over very little. This is what makes his level of incompetency so glorious to watch. Another unique trait is that not only do certain scenes repeat but there is the definite sense that he shot the same scenes multiple times and put every take into the movie regardless of coherency.The regular bad movie issues are all present too: dialogue that doesn't sound human, monotone acting, incomprehensible plot (Sarah was practically crying by the end of it), one set used over and over, blatant disregard for basic medical science, everyone made up to look like wax figures, excessive shots of people's feet, really slow moving scenes for no reason, bad special effects, you name it.

I do want to specifically give a shout out to the actress who played the stepdaughter though. She was fantastic. She seemed to be high throughout the entire movie (and I mean the actress seemed high, not the character) and she had one of the most beautiful moments of the film. After her "seduction" of Breen, he sits her down to have a talk about how she can't do this and then she looks directly into the camera like she's on "The Office" as if to say to the audience, "Can you believe this shit?" Then she seems to forget her line and just nods at him for an awkward few seconds. I have never felt more connected to an actor.

You can be damn sure there will be more Neil Breen films coming up.

The credits listed a lot of companies like "NNN Productions" or "Eats N Eats Food Services" and then they ended with this message. How cute. He tried to be humble.

Quotes: 
[a sample of the kind of dialogue this movie has]
"I want you to try this new wine."
"I would love to try your new wine."

[while awkwardly holding his friend's dead body; with monotone exasperation]

"I can't believe you committed suicide. I can't believe you committed suicide. How could you have committed suicide? How? I can't help you out of this one, Jim."

Spoon Rating: 9.

Grandma's Rating: "It was pretty good."