[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]
The "be careful what you wish for" plot is a classic that has been done to death. The only way to really use that premise at this point is to have a new spin on it and maybe something to say. And in a way this movie does have a new spin. It plays with a couple new concepts including what if the main character were horrible and stupid? What if the consequences were totally arbitrary and didn't have some significant connection to the wishes? And what if the ending was totally unexpectedly hilarious? Sure, maybe they aren't good concepts, but they sure are new.
You remember when you were a teenager and had to suffer the embarrassment of your dumpster driving father looking for stuff to hoard outside your high school? Remember having the popular kids almost hit you with a car and then throw a soda all over your art? No? Yeah, me neither. Nothing about the main character's life resembles real teenage life and the dialogue was clearly written by middle aged men. The main's father gives her an interesting Chinese box he found in a trash can, which she conveniently wishes upon. Every wish she makes is superficial and foolish and leads to someone in her limited circle dying randomly with no correlation between wish and consequence. She wishes for money and popularity and even when she starts to notice how everyone around her is dying, she keeps wishing. She finds out through a classmate's cousin who can read ancient Chinese that after seven wishes, the blood price will be hers and that many people have died from using the box. Still she cracks under pressure and on wish six she wishes that her mother who commited suicide when she was young was still alive. Of course, this kills her dad. She makes one final wish to go back to the day she got the box and just as she was giving it to her classmate who's crushing on her and telling him to bury it, she gets hit by a car. It is hilarious.
Overall, this movie is worth a watch. There are a lot of laughs to be had with the bad dialogue, poor plotting, and "Final Destination"-style deaths.
Quotes:
"You're a selfish bowl of bitch sauce."
"She's a slut for wontons."
Spoon Rating: 6
Last Monday we did a rewatch of the M. Night Shyamalan classic "The Happening." You can read the original review here.
Spoon Rating: 9
Okay, the news title is a bit of a lie. Although there kind of is news. "Black Christmas" is not a blaxsplotation movie like Adam thought but actually a really decent pre-"Halloween" slasher movie that was the first to use the "the call is coming from inside the house" plot twist. We haven't made the mistake of watching a good movie at bad movie night since "Inhuman Resources" so it was about time. We even checked to see if there is a blaxsplotation movie with the same title and there wasn't. There was a remake of "Black Christmas" in 2006 that is probably garbage though so maybe we will watch that at some point.
Oh well. Happy holidays!
[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]
Adam's sister Leah and future brother-in-law Matt were at Bad Movie Night and we were horrified to find that they had never seen "The Room." Obviously we had to fix this problem so we got a football and ordered a pizza that was half Canadian bacon and pineapple, half artichoke and pesto light on the cheese and gave them the best movie going experience ever.
You can read many other "The Room" related things by clicking on the "the room" tag below this post.
I'm completed serious about the pizza:
We were a house divided on opinions. Keith and Kay both thought the artichoke and pesto side was pretty good. Adam thought it was awful but liked the bacon and pineapple. Also, they wouldn't put the pesto on for us because it would mix with the tomato sauce on the other half so we had to put it on manually. This explains why in the movie they just have a plain cheese.
There was no scotchka involved.
[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]
Bad Movie Night went to the movies! It has been a while since we have gone to an actual theater to see a movie, but this time it wasn't a bad one. "The Disaster Artist" is a film based on the book written by Greg Sestero about the making of "The Room." I did a review of the book three years ago that you can read here. Like the book, the film was really worth your time, especially if you are a fan of "The Room."
The film centers around the friendship between two struggling actors: Greg Sestero, who is seen as young and with potential, and Tommy Wiseau, a man of indeterminate age, origin, and sanity level, and seemingly bottomless wealth. In their joint attempt at finding success in L.A., Tommy gets the idea to write, direct, and star in a film with Greg, which ends up being "The Room." The shooting of the film is fraught with issues from arguments between Tommy and the crew, to scheduling problems, to a lack of air conditioning that leads to one of the actresses passing out. All the while, Tommy and Greg's relationship is strained as Greg gets acting jobs and wants to move in with his girlfriend, which doesn't jive with the overly clingy Tommy. The film culminates in the premiere of the movie where the actors and crew are appalled to see how bad the film is. Soon shock turns to laughter which brightens the experience for everyone except Tommy, until Greg conveys to him that they really do love it, even if they don't love it in the way Tommy intended.
This film is a great example of a "good story, well told." Sometimes with films based off real events, it can be hard to tell the difference between a "good story" and a "good story, well told" and seemingly any story on "The Room" and Tommy Wiseau would be a decent watch because the real story is so compelling. What helps me to make this distinction is probably the fact that I know so much about the actual history from reading the book. Things were changed from Greg's original account, but each change was cleverly made in the name of making a more coherent film. For example, the acceptance of "The Room" as a delightful bad movie was not something that started at the premiere but something that happened gradually over time. Making this change for a visual medium creates more narrative coherency for an unfamiliar audience.
In addition to the script, the acting was startling. James Franco's Tommy impression is spot on and kind of outshines all the other amazing actors but everyone deserves props. As a special bonus at the end of the film, they showed scenes from "The Room" side by side with the actors from "The Disaster Artist" performing the same scenes and they were practically indistinguishable.
So go see it. If you are a fan of "The Room" or bad movies, it is a must. If you just like good movies, go watch it. But if you are unfamiliar with "The Room," do yourself a favor and watch the original masterpiece first.
[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]
This movie has a combo pack of things that will immediately make us laugh: terrible monster costume + terrible computer generated images. This movie is basically a blend of "Birdemic" and "Zaat" in terms of those features, but it also has that made-in-someone's-suburb-with-a-cheap-handheld quality that is verified at the end of the movie by a sea of credits featuring the same three names over and over again with the rest of the crew made up of people in the director's immediate family. Add in some bad lighting effects and some cultural ignorance and you have "Suburban Sasquatch," a movie whose title tells you everything you need to know about the quality.
The plot centers around a journalist trying to write a story about this sasquatch (who looks nothing like the movie cover; he's more a man in a gorilla suit that has genitalia??) that is terrorizing a town in Pennsylvania. He teams up with a "Native American warrior" girl whose destiny is to kill the sasquatch as her tribe has been keeping the 'squatch population under control for centuries. She lives in a tent in the woods and seems to be able to see through the eyes of a eagle because it's her spirit animal. The film spends a lot of time introducing random people to become victims. At one point squatchy tears a dog in two that is a stuffed animal that looks nothing like the original dog. There's a lot of utilization of fake limbs and CGI. There are CGI arrows, blood, birds (of "Birdemic" quality), and night time. Most of the movie is the two mains running through the woods, which is better than the victims who mostly just stay where they are and scream until they die. I can't remember the ending and the internet can't help me here either unless I want to watch a video about it. I'm gonna guess the squatchster is dead.
This one is worth your time.
Quotes:
"This game is going to get us killed and I don't know if I can live with that."
"This isn't your run-of-the-mill sasquatch."
Spoon Rating: 8
[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]
We're back with more Christian nonsense! We've watched Christian horror movies before but the ones we've seen have been more based on the idea that hell is the horror that you are trying to avoid. This film is instead a pretty blatant rip-off of "Paranormal Activity" but set during a church lock-in (basically a sleepover for religious kids) and using a porno mag found in a dumpster as the instigator of the demonic activity. Even that cover looks like a horror bootleg.
The film starts with an introduction from a pastor who says that a weird thing happened at a church lock-in and that they have pieced together footage from one kid's camera and the survelliance cameras. We get a warning that the following material is only meant to be seen by church elders. The story is told from the perspective of three 25-year-old high school seniors: Cameraman, Everyman, and Fratman. We see Fratman going to Everyman's house so excited about the lock-in because he thinks it will be the opportunity for Everyman to kiss his crush, Jessica. Everyman's parents overhear and give him an uncomfortable, long speech about not having sex. Then, on the way over to the church, the trio stops for some dumpster driving and find a pornographic magazine that they decide to bring with them. At the lock-in itself, the magazine ends up slipped into Jessica's bag and the pastor goes with the kids outside to burn the magazine. Soon after the magazine is destroyed, it appears again and the boys try to bury it at the bottom of a trashcan only to have the trashcan go flying across the room. Around here we get a random scene of a man confessing to the pastor that he has a porn addition before we return to our regularly scheduled haunting. From there, everyone disappears except our four mains who wander around the vacant church and lament their stupidity as doors are mysteriously unable to opened and there are random growls and light flickers and such. Jessica cries about how porn "ruined her family," Eventually everyone is lost except Cameraman who has a "power of Christ compels you" breakdown before he enters the main chapel to see everyone from the lock-in sitting there the next morning with no memory of the night before. Our last scene features Cameraman throwing away a ton of porn mags he had hiding in his closet..
The film was only okay. The concept was pretty funny and we did get some nice laughs at the melodrama stirred up by porn, but overall it was only about as much fun as "Paranormal Activity 2."
Spoon Rating : 3
