[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]
Back in the late nineties when most of us Bad Movie Nighters were in our late elementary school years, I remembered seeing television advertisements for this film on Nickelodeon or some other channel that primarily catered to kids. Even at ten I was skeptical of any movie or album you could order directly off the television and I found myself wondering, "who even does that?' The answer is Sarah's mom and Sarah used to watch this movie constantly as a kid and fall asleep to the soundtrack. After she discovered that Tim Rice wrote the music for "Lion King" and this, she remembered that it was a bizarre, trippy nightmare and decided we should all experience it. It's only an hour and fifteen minutes but it felt so much longer. Also, here we go with another entry thanks to Andrew "tory-voting" Lloyd "frog-face" Webber.
So the plot follows the Bible but if you're a heathen like me, you don't know what that is so I'll explain. Joseph is the favorite son of Jacob much to the chagrin of his eleven brothers who were not born of Jacob's favorite dead wife. Jacob gives Joseph a really tacky coat that drives the brothers to attempt fratricide and when that doesn't work they sell him into slavery. Joseph attains pretty high rank as a slave in Egypt but then gets sexually assaulted by his master's wife and thrown in jail. He managed to get out because he's really good at dream interpretation and uses it to win the Pharaoh's favor and become his right hand man. Joseph's brothers, now destitute without him, go to Egypt to beg for food and Joseph makes them grovel. He then plans to punish one for stealing a cup but forgives him and reveals his identity. Happily ever after.
This movie is an acid trip. First of all, it has a useless framing device about it being set as a school play in an elementary school with all the actors in the play also doubling as admin. The only purpose this seems to serve is to justify the existence of an ear splitting children's choir in some songs. The aesthetic of this film is basically a low budget kid's show during the scenes with Joseph's brothers and then Dr. Caligari's Tim Burton-esque gay nightmare while in Egypt. The original stage musical came out during the era of popular tribal musicals for adults like "Hair" and "Godspell" but that only explains so much. The music is all over the place involving songs in styles of western, cabaret, tango, Jamaican steel drum, Elvis rock, and more standard Broadway. Oh, and it's supposed to be FUNNY. It's sometimes funny but not in the right way.
Should you watch it is a bit of a debate. Sarah says yes. Adam says no. Kay says it's a fair candidate for watching. Keith was mostly ranting about the liberties taken with the original story. Decide on your own.
Adam's Review: "Proverbs, Chapter 4, Verse 15: Avoid it. Do not go to it. Turn away from it and pass on."
Spoon Rating: 4.5
[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]
This movie failed to deliver in a big way. The title(s) tells you to expect a revenge film but there is only even getting for the last 15 minutes of the film. So what does the other hour and fifteen minutes consist of? Utter nonsense and clear evidence of a vanity project.
John De Hart wrote, produced, and starred in this meandering adventure through the life of an ex-cop. Without Sarah around, the first twenty minutes or so were pretty hard to follow until we realized that we were overthinking it. Right in the beginning the main character and his eccentric friend, Huck Finney, (and yes the name is deliberate) are framed by their evil boss and fired. De Hart wrote in a bunch of self-indulgent moments including singing with a band at a really white trash bar, reciting a bit of Hamlet's most famous monologue (he really wants you to know he did the reading in 11th grade English class), and having many overly long sex scenes with the stripper he hired to play his girlfriend, one of which directly rips off "9 1/2 Weeks" and all of which are uncomfortably scored with jangly, overly sentimental folk love songs by De Hart. De Hart finds out his girlfriend was involved with a guy in a Satanic cult that sacrified a child, and this is put on the back burner while other stuff happens involving Huck Finney being high or something. His character was erratic without explanation. The girlfriend realizes that De Hart's boss who got him fired is the leader of the Satanic cult and then dies in a motorcycle accident perpetuated by the cult, I guess. It wasn't clear. De Hart gets revenge. In the last minute we find out the girlfriend is alive and technically there was no need to get even at all. We felt cheated.
Overall, this movie had some funny parts, usually because of the music, but a lot of it was boring.
Spoon Rating: 3
[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]
What is there to say about "Redeemer" expect that there were a lot of things that were unexpected about this film. We didn't expect it to be dubbed; it's actually a Chilaen film. We kind of expected it to be a religious film but it definitely wasn't. We kind of expected it to have a coherent backstory conveyed to the audience at a reasonable and clear time, but it didn't. We also were hoping that it would be fun, but it wasn't.
The film is about a guy who is a former hitman for cartels, now attempting to redeem himself after accidentally killing the son of a gang boss by . . . killing gangsters. He is very religious but in the fandom kind of way; he's very obsessed with his own concept of Christianity, which apparently allows him to kill. Before every killing spree he plays a game of Russian roulette and considers the fact that God did not let him die to be a sign that his murdering is okay. He also wears a scapula at all times to get into heaven and has a portable altar he brings with him. It is acknowledged by other characters that he is crazy. Most of the movie involves him going around killing with occasional flashbacks that allow you to piece together the backstory I explained in the first sentence. Towards the end he encounters the man whose son he killed and they have a showdown. It is basically the most stakesless fight because they are both horrible people, so how are we as the audience supposed to care who wins? There's also a side story with another crime boss who is obsessed with getting a cool nickname (in the film he is dubbed into something like Portuguese or maybe just Chilaen Spanish which sounds little like Spanish elsewhere but apparently he was originally American), and this goes no where.
I have nothing else. I don't think we laughed once during this film. It's too earnest.
Spoon Rating : 1
[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]
Let me make this one really easy for you: "Cool Cat Kids Superhero" (yes, that's the title; ignore what the DVD cover says) is basically just "Cool Cat Saves The Kids" with some additional self indulgent footage from Derek Savage, a few weird lines removed, a few worse lines added in, and Mama Cat's lines redubbed by Cynthia Rothrock. It's not actually worth it to watch this movie if you can get your hands on "Cool Cat Saves The Kids" but apparently that's a collector's item at this point.
Instead I'm going to talk about Derek Savage, the creator of Cool Cat. I think when we watched "Cool Cat Saves The Cats" we considered it to be a very, very flawed but earnest attempt at making a product for kids with a good message. Now that we have basically watched this movie three times, I think I'm getting cynical. Adam said that the new title for this movie was a result of Derek Savage hearing that kids only care about superheroes and he was trying to capitalize on that. This seems likely because it doesn't seem like Derek Savage cares that much about Cool Cat. On his website, three screenplays he wrote which all sound like movies we would watch at bad movie night (one revenge story, one Christian love story, and one male stripper story) are at the top with Cool Cat underneath next to "Gun Self-Defense For Ladies" and then a bunch of Cool Cat and Trolly The Trout books under that. Considering that Cool Cat is the only thing anyone seems to have consumed of his, you would think this would get a bigger highlight.
But here's what I think. Cool Cat serves two functions for Derek Savage:
1. It seemed like an easy money maker. Savage doesn't really want to make kids movies; it's not a specific passion for him. What he does want is to work in film, and because kid movies are easy to make and don't have to be particularly "good," he thought this might be a way to make some money and hopefully get some recognition for his other works, which he may have a stronger attachment to.
2. He's trying to justify owning a fursuit. Throughout the Cool Cat movies, there are scenes that are clearly designed to highlight things Derek Savage owns that he's proud of in the materialistic middle-aged man child way. There is discussion of his guitar signed by the members of Van Halen, a band no kid has heard of. We get to see his car a lot during a parade. And in "Cool Cat Kids Superhero" we get even more of this with an opening scene devoted to his motorcycles and a frankly uncomfortable series of shots of Derek Savage working out. Similarly, he displays clout with who is in the movie. He managed to get a Hollywood actress whose largest roles were a decade ago and a washed up television actor to appear and in this one he is able to cite Cynthia Rothrock on the cover of the DVD even though she just did a voice over. This movie is just a way for Derek Savage to toot his own horn and you cannot convince me that he didn't have that fursuit already before deciding to make these movies. It's just another thing he owns and happens to be a little less proud of so he found a way to use it that wasn't creepy.
If you want me to cite my speculations, I can't. There's very little about Derek Savage on the internet. The only thing IMDb adds to the conversation is the fact that he apparently used to be a Playgirl model. I literally have no idea if this is verifiable or added by Savage himself (although if you find picture evidence of this I DON'T WANT IT). It almost sounds like it was added by him because being a Playgirl model is exactly the kind of thing an out-of-touch guy would think is cool and implies that he was hot stuff to women at one point without realizing that the primary reader base of Playgirl has basically always been gay men.
So anyway, watch "Cool Cat Saves The Kids" instead if you can find it, and avoid Derek Savage if you ever encounter him in California.
[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]
It's been a little while since we watched a Disney Original Musical but we're all out of the really famous ones until we get the highly anticipated "Descendents 3" so in the mean time, we'll have to do with a film not successful enough to warrant a sequel: "Starstruck."
The film revolves around two sisters, Sara and Jessica, who go to California for vacation. Sara is the biggest fan of Christopher Wilde, a Bieber-a-like with even less talent, and Jessica couldn't care less about celebrity nonsense. Wilde ends up accidentally smacking Jessica in the head with a steel door outside an Under 21 club and is taken in by her obstinate attitude and her general apathy towards him. He lowkey kidnaps her and then sleeps in her garage (in his car named Cher because that's what heterosexual guys name their cars). All you need to know to explain this is that he's desperate to avoid the paparazzi at any cost because he's trying to get a film role. In spite of this rough night, they go on an adventure together when they run into each other at the beach and he destroys her grandmother's car so she gives him a dressing down about not understanding normal people. The whole thing follows a very expected romance plot that involves play fighting in water, Jessica shaming the paparazzi, and a reunion at a school dance. Occasionally we get a really bad song with all the autotune money can buy.
The film on the whole is pretty unremarkable unless you are trying to study the basics of three act structure screenwriting. There were a few funny moments, particularly the dancing of Sara's best friend at the school dance, but overall this was another movie to add to the list of "made funny by us because we're hilarious even though the movie wasn't."
Quote:
Jessica: Go away!
Sara: No . . . I live here.
Spoon Rating: 3
[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]
So Kay was on vacation for three weeks and two of those three weeks it was Good Movie Night instead of Bad Movie Night. Last week the movie was "Jurassic Attack: The Final Battle" or "Rise of the Dinosaurs" (the box and the DVD were in direct conflict) which got a spoon rating of five. The movie was purchased at the dollar store, and we had three other dollar store finds to pick from today. We settled on "The Hero of Color City," a kids movie that is a pretty clear rip-off of "Toy Story" influenced by the popular children's book "The Day The Crayons Quit" about how crayons and drawings come alive when a kid is asleep.
The premise is simple: two uncolored drawings of a king and bug go into a crayon box after hours to enter Color City and this somehow threatens the saturation of all the colors so they have to stop them or something. Literally the goal of the movie was explained by this annoying, mumbling crayon called Professor Heliotrope (although he was lavender) and we all managed to miss the point but not the stakes. The titular hero is Yellow, a very scared crayon who saves the day. The rest of the crew consists of Blue who's "cool", Green who's an organization freak, Red who's sassy, White who is sad about his lack of use, and Black who is monotone and lowkey emo (he's by far the funniest character). They all go on a really unexciting adventure that only lasts an hour and ten minutes and is padded with songs that do nothing for the story. There's really nothing more to explain except that there's this scene where they encounter a bunch of other unfinished drawings and color them in and there's something really horrifying about watching them pick each other up to color.
The best parts about the movie have nothing at all to do with the movie proper. When we first put in the DVD we were rivetted by the welcome screen where the uncolored king drawing keeps poking his head into the screen and groaning (because he doesn't have a mouth). We watched it for about ten minutes. After the movie, we watched cast interviews and they were wild. Christina Ricci played Yellow, and she is struggling to find something significant to say about this flimsy excuse for a movie while also waiting for her Ambien to kick in. Sean Austin played Bumblebee (literally the Bumblebee Tuna mascot because product placement) and he waxes poetic forever about who even knows what. Finally Craig Ferguson played the bug drawing and he basically jokes around the whole time, well aware of how poor the movie is but he's getting a paycheck damnit.
Keith's Review: Color me confused.
Spoon Rating: 4
[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]
Because we had guests (Adam's nieces and Sarah's friend, Christa) we had to ensure a solid viewing experience so we rewatched "Cool Cat Saves The Kids."
Read the original review here.
Spoon Rating: 8.5
Back in the late nineties when most of us Bad Movie Nighters were in our late elementary school years, I remembered seeing television advertisements for this film on Nickelodeon or some other channel that primarily catered to kids. Even at ten I was skeptical of any movie or album you could order directly off the television and I found myself wondering, "who even does that?' The answer is Sarah's mom and Sarah used to watch this movie constantly as a kid and fall asleep to the soundtrack. After she discovered that Tim Rice wrote the music for "Lion King" and this, she remembered that it was a bizarre, trippy nightmare and decided we should all experience it. It's only an hour and fifteen minutes but it felt so much longer. Also, here we go with another entry thanks to Andrew "tory-voting" Lloyd "frog-face" Webber.
