REWATCH: The Roller Blade Seven [1991]

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

Adam made the bold choice to purchase "The Roller Blade Seven" which came in a three pack with its two sequels: "Return Of The Roller Blade Seven" and "Hawk: Warrior Of The Wheelzone." Although none of us could remember it, my original write-up on the movie is actually really thorough so you can check it out here. 

One mystery that continues to remain unsolved is who are the roller blade seven? Hawk, the main character is one. The movie cover shows him with six women including the clown girl, pink leotard girl, a girl referred to as "spirit guide" and three others who may have been part of the evil S&M crew, but they are never established as a team or anything. I don't think they even all appear onscreen at the same time. Also, the pink leotard girl kills Hawk's mystery wife at the end so I don't imagine they're friends by that point. Why not just call it "The Wheelzone"?

This movie makes no sense.

I guess we can hope that the sequels might.

Tune in next week to find out. Oh, and skate or die.

Spoon Rating: 6

Twisted Pair [2018]

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

Neil Breen. Breesus. The Breenius. Oh, after his 2013 masterpiece "Fateful Findings" we really didn't think he could live up to the standard he created. His 2016 movie "Pass Thru" was definitely quality and worth a watch, but it was heavily a retrend of classic Breen moments without much new to add to the conversation. We were afraid that Breen might have exhausted his creative powers. We were wrong. His latest film "Twisted Pair" is a whole new level of Breen: more "special" effects, less coherency, even more wooden actors. If "Fateful Findings" is his "The Room" with small supernatural elements, "Twisted Pair" is his "Birdemic" in terms of effects and coherency. Adam paid $35 for this movie and it was worth every penny. On that note, the DVD was clearly lovingy crafted by Neil Breen himself with a generic label, a CD case, and no menu, just a single video file that's named "DVD Video." See the pictures we took below. It looks like a pirated DVD you would buy at a state fair in 2005 but it was officially purchased from his website.

So what is "Twisted Pair" even about? Great question. It took us more than halfway through the movie to be totally sure even though the first ten minutes or so are entirely Breen's voiceover on stock footage of a neon fantasy screensaver and twin boys playing in the ocean with their dog. It turns out that Neil is Caid and his twin Cale. Both brothers were abducted by what seems to be some kind of benevolent alien forces who rearranged their DNA so they would be the ultimate crime-stopping beings. The voiceover keeps saying they were turned into humanoids which shows that Breen doesn't actually know what a humanoid is. Not only is Breen a more-than-human figure again, but this time he gets to play twice the amount of roles. 

Unfortunately, Cale was rejected by the alien's agency, which caused him to go kind of rogue in his justice doing things like tying up evil corporate people in his basement and letting them die there. He is played by Neil Breen in a hoodie with a fake bread and moustache. Also Cale has a bad relationship with his drug addict wife and stabs a homeless man with fake rat pets.

Caid meanwhile is on a mission to stop an evil alien (?) named Kooze (the credits actually spelled it Cuzzx, which makes me angry). Kooze has moving cat figurines, a distorted fake voice, a giant goblet of obviously plastic diamonds, and a fairy who is obviously a stripper and seems to serve no real plot fuction. Most of the movie involves Caid talking to various people, one from his agency and some evil people including his wife (spoiler), and then blowing up the evil institutions with really fake explosions. 

In the end Caid kills his evil wife and realizes Cale is still alive. It ends with Caid seemingly back on the alien planet and talking to the ghost of his wife for some reason. There's a teaser for "Twisted Pair 2" and credits that last a full four minutes that are all Neil Breen under fake company names again.

I'm not sure if any of this makes sense but that's part of the charm. The movie is shot entirely at night and on the Nevada State College campus and in a house which might be Neil's or may be a house he's showing (remember he's actually a real estate agent). Aside from even more stock footage than usual, there is an insane amount of green screen and it is so fake every time. One of the first times it's really used is when Neil is cuddling an eagle and we almost passed out from laughing so hard. I literally can't convey every amazing thing about this film in one post, but it was so good I actually suspected that Neil might be becoming self aware. It seemed over the top even for him.

Anyway, if you can find a way to watch this, do. We'll be waiting in anticipation for the sequel.

Spoon Rating: 9

I didn't already have Neil Breen Bingo so here you go!

Beethoven's 5th [2003]

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

A while ago Adam had a theory for a bad movie night choosing technique: watch the fifth installment of a movie series without watching any of the prior four. Somehow the Beethoven movies came into this, probably because of the dog factor. If we're going to suffer through a movie, there may as well be an animal front and center.

The plot follows a little girl who gets kicked out of summer camp for refusing to poop in a hole in the ground and her big dog as they are sent to stay with her weird uncle for the rest of the summer. He lives in a town once known for mercury harvesting and everyone who lives there is mildly insane from the librarian obsessed with cat taxidermy to the man who scuba dives in the lake daily to prepare for global warming's inevitable reckoning to the lady who makes moonshine in the woods for the aliens. At no point do they address the obvious correlation between mercury and the weirdness of the town. One day Beethoven finds a large $10 bill with Jackson on it that turns out to be a rare bill, likely part of a stash hidden by a famous husband and wife bank robbing couple who supposedly drown in the lake in the 1920s. The girl, her uncle, and the neighbor boy try to get Beethoven to find the stash but they somehow always get thwarted. Eventually Beethoven is kidnapped by the mayor who wants to find the stash and get out of the town because he resents not being able to get a decent latte. The mains find him, Beethoven leads them to the money, and eventually everything works out with the money going to the town. Everything in between is a lot of fluff with strange townspeople, a slight subplot about the uncle being into the sherrif whose dad was a famous wrestler he idolized, and a lot of the girl getting accused of being an outsider. In the end, she and Beethoven go home with the town having accepted them. Probably because they made them rich.

The movie had a few somewhat funny bits, but it wasn't really worth the time. You'd be better off watching dog videos on YouTube for an hour and a half. As for Adam's theory, we are going to try executing it a few more times. We have a few "fifth installment" movies on the back burner but they will have to wait until we watch Neil Breen's latest and a rewatch of "Roller Blade Seven".

Spoon Rating: 3

Beastly [2011]

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

It's strange to think that the paranormal romance genre is basically dead at this point. Books, like all things, go through trends and young adult literature is no different from adult literature in this regard. It's unclear what the current young adult lit trend is (maybe diversity?) but before whatever is going on now there were twisted fairy tales, before that there was dystopia literature, and before that there were paranormal romances. Of course, a trend needs an origin and, as most of us can easily remember, for paranormal romance that was "Twilight." The idea of girls loving monsters, but like, hot ones, was all the rage. In fact, since this movie was based on a book that took from both paranormal romance and fairy tales, it's kind of ahead of its time. However, it's timeliness could never have saved it from it's utter lack of things that work about it. While it was marketed aggressively and stared Vanessa Hudgens at the peak of her career, nothing would have made this a hit, but it's a decent bad movie.

We are introduced to our "Beastly" protagonist, Kyle, with a working out montage and a way-too-on-the-nose song about being vain. He then gives a class president speech about how people should vote for him because he's good-looking and life be like that. In spite of having no redeeming qualities, he banters with Lindy, the Belle of the movie, at a party and then gets rightfully cursed by a witch (there's just a witch at this school; it's fine) to be ugly forever unless he can get someone to say they love him within the year. His uggo look is . . . well, it would fit in totally fine at a metal concert or in the body mod community. It's mostly a bunch of tree-like tattoos with some nasty looking ghashes, a few metal bits, and eyebrows that look like Arabic script. His image conscious father takes him out of school and isolates him in a mansion with his maid and a blind tutor, and he starts stalking Lindy at night. This results in him saving her from some drug dealers who go after her and her father. After her father kills one of them in the tussle, Kyle blackmails him to let Lindy stay with him for protection. Everything about this is questionable. But, of course, they bond and he gets nicer and they go to his lake house and then she has to go home because dad overdosed. At the last second before she goes on the school trip to Machu Pichu she says "I love you" and we are baffled to see that she is the dumbest person in existance because she really didn't know that Kyle is the same person as the tatted dude she fell in love with in spite of the fact that no one else made this mistake. They go to Machu Pichu together. I guess it doesn't matter that she's completely face blind and he's still mediocre at best as a person.

This movie is a solid watch. It is full of logic lapses, attempts at hip dialogue, telling instead of showing, music that sings the mood to you, and a premise that just doesn't fully work in the real world. The only way it won't deliver is if you are specifically here for monster loving, in which case you should probably watch "WolfCop" instead (except for the love of all things, don't watch "WolfCop"). Hey, it's a post "Shape Of Water" world and we as a society just weren't ready in 2011, I guess.

Spoon Rating: 6

Fist Of The Vampire [2007]

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

Let's talk about fame for a second. When a lot of people think about fame they think specifically about the biggest actors, musicians, etc. but they tend to forget that there are certain communities that have their own famous people and if you don't follow those communities, you won't know anything about the big figures in it. You could be someone who doesn't follow sports and walk by one of the most famous athletes in the world without knowing it. That being said, sports is a community people have heard of but there are even communities unheard of by most people. This is all to say that we watched an interview with the director of this movie where he talked about actors in this movie like they were famous and we weren't sure if he was completely delusional or if they really are famous, just in specific communities we are unfamiliar with. Of course, no one in this movie could act at all so who knows where these people might actually find their fame.

The curiously named "Fist Of The Vampire" is a movie intended to combine a bunch of things the director apparently likes: fight clubs, crime, vampires, metal music, and girl-on-girl scenes. A trio of vampires - nu metal, leather lesbian, and the one who looks most like a vampire and is actually the director using a pseudonym - run a fight club and also dabble in drugs. These concepts are really bizarre because vampires for the most part seem to not really need money. If they had some in the bank when they died, they probably have enough interest to be fine and they don't need to pay for things like food or healthcare. Either way, they are being watched by a DEA agent who enters the fight club as a fighter for reasons unclear and a cop; at the end they have a shoehorned in romance. Random murders and fights happen for most of the duration until the final battle. We find out that the DEA agent is a boy from the beginning of the movie who watched the vampires kill his parents.

This movie is fantastically poor quality but not so poor as to diminish the enjoyment of it. The sound is a little off. The green screen use is just the right kind of bad. The acting is uniformly bad but in unique ways (the DEA agent's boss has a particular over-enunciation tendency that makes his performance a joy). There's bad CGI gunfire and explosions but practical blood effects. The beginning of the movie is set in 1977, which is shown by added lines to the footage like it's abandoned film from the 30s. The movie is punctuated with a diverse music selection from knockoffs of Evanescence, Slipknot, surf rock, and other styles that saw popularity in the mid-2000s. All of this combines to make it a real adventure.

It's definitely worth a watch and was even enough for us to contemplate watching other movies by the director. Especially because in the interview with him, he made it sound like this movie was in improvement over the two that came before it. 

We want to know what worse is.

Spoon Rating: 6

Do Or Die [1991]

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

It's been a long while since we watched an Andy Sidaris movie. So long that I hadn't noticed his name was spelled wrong in the tag. So it goes. Andy is a connoisseur of a few things and it only really takes one movie to get an idea of what those things are. He is an auteur with an aesthetic defined by vague action plots, fast moving transportation machines, and lots of female nudity. We had started our dive into his work in 2013 with "Malibu Express" and "Hard Ticket To Hawaii" the first of which was disappointing but the latter was a gem of badness. It had seemed inevitable that we would make it back to him eventually since Adam bought a 12 pack of his movies but what specifically brought our focus to his work was the intersection of Adam having this 12 pack and a book his brother-in-law bought him about bad movies espousing the quality of "Do or Die." Alright then.

"Do Or Die" follows two "government agents" on a journey around the US from Hawaii to Vegas to Louisiana as they are hunted down by pairs as part of a "Most Dangerous Game" knockoff run by Pat Morita. In Vegas at a model aircraft convention they pick up two other cops or agents or something to assist them, one who is banging the dark-haired girl and the other who is Erik Estrada and is clearly going to hook up with the blonde girl. In Louisiana they acquire two more couples who include a girl who sings French chanson/country mashups in assless chaps, the guy she's banging, a woman with giant fake boobs, and the guy she's banging. This movie had a sex scene for every couple including a hint of one with Pat Morita and a girl young enough to be his daughter. After defeating five of the six teams sent to kill them, the blonde girl finally realizes that Pat Morita's goons had put a tracker on her watch, which was how they kept finding her. They battle the final team, two guys proficient in martial arts, and trick them with dummies in a makeshift shed that they blow up. It ends on a bit of a cliffhanger as Pat Morita's daughter/girlfriend puts a tracker on him and the four couples somewhat vow revenge against him. As far as we can tell, there isn't a sequel.

This movie has so many marks of an Andy movie: absurdly long scenes of girls getting dressed, cool looking but impractical guns, explosions, a lack of establishing locations, characters barely speaking except to dictate the plot, just everything you want. At this point, we can make Andy Sidaris bingo. While this movie wasn't particularly exemplary over say "Hard Ticket To Hawaii" and we don't feel like we need to watch it again, the repeated amusement we get from his movies means that it is worth watching at least one Sidaris movie of whichever title you pick, if not more. And we've got nine more to choose from.

Quote: "Speak to me, you son of a bitch." (how I'm answering the phone from now on)

Spoon Rating: 6

Spice World [1997]

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

It's a spice world and we all just live in it. Not sure why Adam dug this one up but it took a few weeks for us to get to it because people kept being absent from Monday movie night and we needed everyone there to enjoy this piece of 90s esoterica. Kay and Sarah had a good basis of knowledge to explain the significance of the Spice Girls in their time and to explain both the real names and "spice" names of all the members*. Adam had the generic 90s concepts as a basis. Keith was befuddled. And yet, none of us could really make sense of this movie. This movie didn't have a plot. It didn't even have subplots. Things just happened for a feature run time and then it was over.

The film follows the Spice Girls in what is purported to be their regular lives as a lead up to a concert at Royal Albert Hall that is going to be a live broadcast. They travel in circles around London in a Union Jack bus that's bigger on the inside and designed with five sections to specifically reflect their manufactured personalities. For the reference those are:
- Scary (Mel B): She yells, I guess. She also dresses in a lot of animal print and even if the other four have managed to dress in a way that doesn't specifically reflect the era, she always looks as 90s as possible with the highest of platform shoes. I think her personality is that she's rebellious and takes no crap.
- Baby (Emma): Her part of the bus is like a play room and she always has either a stuffed animal in her hand or a lollipop in her mouth. She wears a lot of baby doll dresses and is possibly the youngest of the four. The weirdest moment is when she names all her stuffed animals for a man in a tiny bathing suit as an explanation for why there'd be no room for him in her bed.
- Ginger (Geri): She has red hair. That's the point of the name. Or maybe it's because she's spicy. Interesting since it's the only spice. She's the one who's always saying, "Girl power" and the movie frames her as the one who knows things, reads a lot, and engages in discussion with random men about feminism.
- Posh (Victoria): She's the fashionista one although she mostly just wears black and heels, which is admirable. If Baby is the immaturely stupid one, Posh is the adult stupid one. She doesn't do much aside from drive the bus in the final act and stand very straight.
- Sporty (Mel C): As her name would indicate, she is the sporty one. She wears athletic wear 95% of the time, spends a lot of time on an exercise bike, and occasionally will be holding a random sport ball. She's snarky and also seems to be the only one who has a range of more than half an octave.
The Girls meet aliens, have a photography montage, go to dance camp, stay at a National Trust property for a night, have two young fans join them on the bus before they go steal a boat and ride (and accidentally swim) the Thames, perform a concert in Milan, take their pregnant friend to a nightclub, help that friend give birth, and finally perform at Royal Albert. In the background their tour manager wears monochrome suits and freaks out a lot while taking orders from his boss, Roger-Moore-always-holding-a-small-animal. There's also a photographer following them who is trying to find dirt on them for some Daily Mail knockoff and Alan Cumming trying to make a documentary or something about the Spice Girls but he can never get very close to them. And some people trying to pitch a Spice Girls movie which somehow turns into narrativing the movie as it's happening and culminates in fourth wall breaking during the credits. Oh, and Meatloaf is their driver.

This movie is fascinating in a way but not fun to watch. Keith said it's like "A Hard Day's Night" and that seems likely that was the vibe they were going for. The only real enjoyment you might get from this is if you are a Spice Girls fan. Otherwise there's a lot of what, but very little of it is funny. There were however, two jokes that land and one that kind of lands. One is a visual joke of all the girls walking by in army fatigues only to have Posh bring up the rear in a camo dress and heels. The other is when Ginger tells the pregnant friend to keep her legs closed and Scary comments, "She should have done that nine months ago." The one that kind of lands is when an effect of the tour bus going over Tower Bridge is cut with an obvious model of the bridge and a Matchbox bus. There. Now you know the best parts. Unless you're a fan or a 90s completionist, you can skip this one.

*In the US they had three platinum and three gold hits; eight platinum, one gold in the UK.

Spoon Rating: 1