October Kiss [2015]

The thing about Hallmark movies is that they are never especially bad in the fun way, but they are never bad in the painful way. Hallmark movies are easy viewing: safe but unremarkable. That is definitely true of our film for tonight, October Kiss. While most people seem to want to fall in love at Christmas time specifically, this sole film is there for the surely notable crossover of Hallmark movie watchers and people who are so into Halloween that they really want their love story to center around it. And while we did have some fears, this movie did not shy away from its Halloween setting. We got a decorating scene, a slow dance to "Spooky," and the titular kiss happens when our mains are dressed as a mermaid and knight respectively. 

The plot centers around the hilariously named Poppy Summerall who clearly fell into this film after her summer Hallmark romance grew cold. Poppy is a 30-something who has managed to not nail down anything resembling a career or financial stability because she is incapable of committing to anything. In the opening montage we see her poorly teaching yoga and having an older student cover for her, quitting a job at a pizza place after her manager hits on her, and then walking away from a date two minutes in when the guy observes that she'd fit in his mom's wedding dress. She lives with her sister, the sister's two kids, and the sister's theoretical husband who never appears. Poppy shows herself to be good with the kids so her sister gets her a nanny gig for a "hot" widowed dad with the intention of making it a set-up as well as trying to get her hands on some damn rent money from her sister (in theory). After a rough first day on the job, she makes a deal with hot dad that she will stay at the job until Halloween. Obviously, she slowly wins over the kids with the fact that she acts like a child herself while hot dad goes on dates with a coworker of his who seems genuinely nice. The whole movie we were waiting for the coworker to turn into a bitch to justify hot dad going for Poppy instead, but she never does. Instead it just seems like the coworker is an allegory for hot dad's neglectful workaholic tendencies while Poppy represents quality family time. In the end, hot dad balks on an important business meeting to spend Halloween with his kids and mack on Poppy, the 30-something child. Reasonable coworker takes a job in Tokyo since she realizes he will never love her. We think she should have her own Hallmark movie about finding love in Japan, but there's no way Hallmark would be progressive enough to have an Asian man as a love interest in anything.

Overall, we got a few laughs but most of our amusement came from mockery. There was one scene we all genuinely liked where Poppy has the kids dress in business attire and give a performance review of their dad's fathering when he comes home from work. I'd respect the hell out of my kids if they did that. We also played Hallmark Bingo using this card. We didn't win, but we made our own after combining elements of that one with some of our own thoughts.

Spoon Rating: 3.5

Legend of Zelda: Wand of Gamelon/Faces Of Evil Cutscenes [1993] & Dark Dungeons [2014]

This Monday was a nerdy and kind of unusual evening. We started off with a YouTube video per recommendation of Erik of a supercut of all the scenes from two early 90s Zelda games. Even without context, they were surprisingly funny with their super low budget animation and often tonally strange voice acting.

It was a decent use of 20 minutes.

Spoon Rating: 5

Afterwards we watched a movie that we are honestly having a hard time critiquing because it wasn't bad but also, on some level it was. We just can't parse the level. 

Dark Dungeons is a short film about the evils of role playing games as based on a Jack Chick comic of the same name. Clearly the Chick track was very anti-RPG and supposedly the plot and major points of it are taken directly from the comic, like the fact that a girl commits suicide because her character died. However, the film was made by people who saw the comedy in the comic and played into it intentionally. The campiness (and the heavy sapphic undertones) were very deliberate even if the original comic was meant to be serious. 

Did we laugh? Of course. We laughed a lot. We were especially struck by a scene of the girls asking their DM if they could ascend to the next level to gain more power and asking what the level was. The DM replied epically and maniacally, "LARP!" Oh, also they do real magic and raised up Cthulhu. As you do when you play D&D or whatever.

It would be hard not to recommend it, but we can't really recommend it as a bad movie. We all agreed that we would love to see a version of the movie made by believers who think the Chick comic is accurate and then maybe that would be a true bad movie. For now, if this sounds like fun to you, watch it.

Friend Request [2016]

We decided to watch Friend Request on the recommendation of Kay's friend, Alex. Kay ran the idea past her students and while most of them agreed that it was bad, some thought it was funny bad and some just said it was regular bad. Overall, we were similarly on the fence.

The movie follows a college student who gets a friend request from the weird girl named Marina, who has no Facebook friends at all but posts a lot of gothic art. Marina quickly reveals herself to be a creepy stalker so she gets unfriended and then goes on a posthumous killing spree of all the main girl's friends after she committed suicide. There's a whole folklore tie in about how Marina is some kind of witch who is using a black mirror (the laptop, you get it?) to hide her soul in, which does kind of tie into a witch's scrying mirror but there isn't any actually lore to back up the possession thing. She also controls bees for some reason and uses them to kill. The film ends with Marina possessing the main girl, who now stalks around in a hoodie, looking for people to friend request.

This film had some good laughs in the bad acting, weird lines ("Unfriend that dead bitch!"), and confusing editing, but we aren't sure if we'd recommend it. The strangest things about it were really that it was directed by a Verhoven (no relation to Paul) and that the whole thing had a saturation that made it look kind of cheap. If bad horror sounds like your jam, go for it.

Spoon Rating: 4.5

The 420 Awards [2021] & The Magical Adventures of Quasimodo [1996]

We started the evening with the third annual "420 Awards," Derek Savage's increasingly sad attempt to have an award show. Since the first one was really the best because of the terrible performers he got to attend, every subsequent one has been a real waste because of the pandemic. This year he had two comedians who were both just horrendous and offensive, some tall man he called Ms. Pres, a twenty-something kid with a genuinely good announcer voice, and a guy in a blunt costume. The nominees were seemingly the same as last year because Derek Savage has no idea what's popular or when things are released, but what made this one unusual was that he didn't give himself an award for once. We all released that we should have gotten high for the event, and Sarah lamented being pregnant and therefore unable to get high right now.

It would be easy to claim this was a complete waste of time, but it actually wasn't for one very specific reason. In the middle of the show Derek Savage's latest fursona, Dirty Dog, interrupts the show because he's the bad guy counterpart to Cool Cat. He does some gymnastics to an amazingly terrible song about himself and then drops that you can see more of him in Savage's latest film Cool Cat Fights Coronavirus. Adam stopped the video, googled the film, and immediately added it to cart while solemnly murmuring, "oh no. oh no." So look for a post on that in the future.

Spoon Rating: 2.5

After, we decided to continue our Hunchbackening with a free animated series on Amazon called The Magical Adventures of Quasimodo. This show is inexplicable. The whole time we found ourselves just questioning why this thing was ever made. It obviously doesn't follow the book or even the Disney movie because it's a series. 

In the first episode Quasi meets Esmerelda and her brother (?!), Francois, who is maybe a stand-in for Pierre Gringoire. They end up going to a costume party to try to stop Frollo (who straight up looks like Nosferatu) from KILLING THE KING. What even is the goal here?! To quote Adam, "Unless he's got some Cromwell plan here, I don't think he knows how monarchies work." Frollo even dressed like an executioner. There's also a guy at Notre Dame who isn't the Bishop but is just some guy named Denis who is nice to Quasi. And Frollo has a dog he abuses. And Esmerelda's grandma makes some comment about being a gypsy that implies it's a choice and not a marginalized ethic group. And the animation is terrible, obviously, to the point where we were thinking maybe the reason Quasi is ostracized has more to do with the fact that he's got a pretty normal face compared to most of the characters. And the acting is bad, although admittedly the guy voicing Frollo does sound like the guy from the Disney film. 

All in all, it was a weird experiment but we decided it wasn't worth continuing.

Spoon Rating: 3

Fight To Win [1987]

When Adam found out there's a Leo Fong directed movie staring Cynthia Rothrock, we knew we would have to add it to our list. Fight To Win is honestly a really curious film for a couple reasons. The fact that Rothrock is given such a prominent place in the advertising is weird from the perspective that she doesn't come into the film until something like 30 minutes into an hour and twenty minute movie was definitely the most disappointing part. Interestingly, there's also a cameo from Bill "Superfoot" Wallace, a legendary martial artist who only has one good foot and who once kicked Adam during a seminar (apparently he kicked everyone as part of the seminar and yes, it hurt).

The film starts with some background on a martial arts competition for three statues of Chinese deities. Twenty years later, this really cocky young martial artist is approached by an Australian guy in a parking lot who challenges him to a fighting competition and he accepts for some reason. Minutes later, his instructor has a heart attack and is unable to train him. For a while, our main character just sits by his bedside, not training at all, and he loses the competition. A rematch is planned and his instructor tells him he's going to send him a new instructor to help: Cynthia Rothrock. Cue all the sexist jokes until she kicks him in the face (and even then they don't really stop throughout the whole movie). She trains him. At one point they go out to dinner and we see his deplorable table manners and that he has absolutely no game. They have to fight random guys in parking lots just so there's a reason to see them fight. Finally it's time for the competition but they realize that the Australian (who's also Rothrock's ex) had no interest in playing fair. He just wanted to collect all the statues, so he pulls out guns on them. In the last twenty minutes of the movie, it becomes something of a break-in film with a lot of pretending-to-be-gay to distract, a deus ex machina guy on a motorcycle, and the instructor who had a heart attack showing up out of nowhere. The main character learns nothing, but they win.

This movie is very borderline. There were some great bad line reads, sloppy edits, a guy hired solely to impersonate Eddie Murphy, and more boom mic than you could ever dream of. However, the plot was pretty boring until it gets weird more than halfway through. Overall, we decided that if Leo Fong's direction or Cynthia Rothrock's presence or just bad martial arts movies in general are amusing to you, this is a good one to add. Otherwise, maybe don't bother.

Spoon Rating: 4.5

REWATCH: The Room [2003]

In honor of the nine year anniversary of Bad Movie Night, we decided to rewatch The Room for the first time in about four years. It took us about three hours to watch just because we kept pausing it to have deviating conversations or to explore the artistry. Some highlights include: stopping to tell the story about how Kay's mom called her a homewrecker when she wasn't doing anything, an in depth analysis of each character's utility to the story, Erik and Kay randomly talking about D&D, Sarah making more quesadillas, a passionate defense of Mark's cluelessness when Lisa is hitting on him since we are actually all exactly that stupid ourselves, Adam pointing out which lines specifically have become a fundamental part of his lexicon and his waxing poetic about how much he enjoys the character of Claudette, and many more.

We ended the evening by watching a serious of bad porno openers on YouTube because, honestly, they aren't too dissimilar to The Room.

Spoon Rating: 10

Pagan Invasion Volume 2: Invasion of the Godmen [1991] & Pagan Invasion Volume 3: Meditation, Pathway to Deception [1991]

 We decided to do a double feature of 45 minute episodes of "Pagan Invasion." We had done the first episode as part of an anti-Halloween special and thought that it wasn't especially great, but the comments on these two seemed promising enough for us to give them a chance as well.

Volume 2, in spite of the incredible title, is not about some race of Godmen, but just about various yogis, many of whom started cults or got in trouble with the law for something. Because this is Christian propaganda, they are trying to convince the audience that these few men are 1.) all equally evil and 2.) proof that Hinduism itself is evil. Volume 3 was almost a continuation of the previous idea but with a specific focus on how meditation is actually evil and should be avoided if you want to live a good Christian life. It was an interesting sort of time capsule when you consider that meditation is completely nonreligious and promoted by just about every mental health care professional in the West. Being that Adam has a minor in religion, Sarah is a yoga practitioner, and Kay has at least seen "Wild, Wild Country," we were unconvinced by either of these narratives. 

Both episodes were genuinely interesting, but we didn't really laugh much. The only thing that really got us was when one of the interviews said, "the evils of meditation and stress management" as if either of those things is bad.

Spoon Rating: 2; 2.5