Serial Mom [1994]

It didn't take us long to figure out what we were getting into with this movie. While we all settled in for a bad movie, we were quickly treated to a title card that told us we were about to watch a John Waters movie and we immediately realized our mistake. John Waters doesn't make bad movies. He makes camp, black comedy, weird films, but definitely not bad movies unless you simply don't get him. Either way, we decided to settle in for a good night.

The plot follows Kathleen Turner as a neurotic housewife who goes on a murdering spree for often the most minor of offenses. She starts by just phone harassing a neighbor for cutting her off in a parking lot, then progresses to murdering her son's math teacher for his criticism of her parenting, offing her daughter's ex, killing a couple for interrupting her husband's weekend, and a few others. She is caught and brought to trial where she manages to get herself free on many technicalities, only to then murder a juror for wearing white shoes after Labor Day. 

It's not a bad movie at all. It's at least three stars out of five on a regular rating. Not my favorite John Waters (that's Cry Baby) but definitely a good time. 

REWATCH: Samurai Cop [1991]

Last Monday we rewatched the legendary Samurai Cop.

Read my original review here. 

They Feed [2005]

After two weeks of unremarkable films, we were starting to get a little worried. we've got a stack to get through still and a lot of them don't look promising. This one was immediately mysterious. Who is They? I think we could all guess what they're feeding on at least. We all decided to place beats on the They. Adam and Sarah guessed vampires, Kay guessed zombies, and Erik changed his initial vampire vote to ants pretty quickly. When we saw the DVD menu, we thought vampires was correct, but Erik was actually the closest.

As you can see from the girl on the left, this is very much a mid-2000s movie. The music consisted of two bands the director probably knew, one trying to be Tool and the other trying to be some generic rock band of the era. After an opening of people dying in the woods, we get our main crew. We have pink scarf girl over there who is an over-the-top annoyance, following her more reasonable boyfriend into the woods. They meet up with a couple who are either siblings or platonic friends, and a couple where the guy is a douche who's blackmailing his reasonable girlfriend because he knows she slept with the boss for a job. Quickly the assholes have sex and the reasonables flirt while third wheel guy gets killed by . . . worms. They're consistently wiggling (probably from bad CGI) and have langolier teeth and I love them. We tried very hard to figure out why these people are in the woods and it seems they are out here looking for a crashed plane they never find. Only far later do we get the information that a bunch of them are scientists. Slowly, the worms track down the rest of them leaving the reasonable couple for last. At the presumed climax, the worm chase seen gets intercut with a park ranger wandering around to gentle music and it is the biggest example of delayed gratification ever. The end of the film is actually quite strange. We are taken to a new year's party their (presumable) boss is hosting when he finds out they all died and seems to imply that he planned it. Then, the one girl who was not coupled emerges from a hole in the ground: half girl, half worm. A worm mermaid. Freeze frame.

Overall, this movie is worth a watch. It can drag a bit during the relationship drama stuff but the worms themselves are so good, and there are a lot of beautiful examples of lazy film making. If you had given us a camera in 2005, we probably could have made something at least on this level. 

Spoon Rating: 5

Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation [2004]

Again we did a dice roll (well, Jade did but since she's a month old we just put the D20 in her hand and waited for it to drop) and this time we got Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation. I barely even want to talk about this movie. Sarah ditched to work on her doctoral thesis and when she came in a little later and asked how it was the review was, "It's so bad that we're talking over it and Adam doesn't care." 

We already expected this movie to lack the satire of the original and just get turned into a dumb military movie but after some completely incomprehensible fighting, the movie just follows a bunch of soldiers stuck in a building with some infected by the bugs. It's very horny in a very boring way as everyone slowly gets infected. The pregnant soldier escapes while the big damn hero stays behind and becomes the highlight of recruiting videos. The movie pays vague lip service to the original with some rando saying that the woman's baby will be good for the grinder, but otherwise, this movie doesn't even try to have any meaning. It's just a bad The Thing. 

Don't bother. Just go rewatch the original.

Spoon Rating: 2

Jurassic Attack [2012]

Or maybe it's called Attack of the Dinosaurs? The box said one thing and the menu said another. It doesn't matter. 

This movie is presumably the brainchild of a bunch of guys who liked Jurassic Park, Predator, and the Halo games and it really shows. It's got a cliché plot of a bunch of US soldiers (many with non-US accents) going into the Amazon to rescue a scientist from one of the locals who's trying to stop? get? a bioweapon. They find dinosaurs on the way back as well as a lost scientist who has been living among them for five years and is in full on delusional Grizzly Man mode. It's pretty mercifully short at under an hour and a half but a lot of the scenes just featuring the characters are boring with dialogue not weird or poorly acted enough to be interesting (although we did invent a gay subplot based on the weird tension between the main hero and main villain). The real prize is the dinosaurs which are rendered in horribly cheap CGI and an absolute delight every time. The only other curiosity about the film is how abruptly it ends, but it's not really funny so much as just mildly surprising.

I can't recommend this film just for the CGI though. It's a pass for sure. Interestingly though, for the next 18 weeks unless something else comes up or we do a rewatch as a palette cleanser, we are going to be working through DVDs that Adam and Sarah have just had for years that we haven't gotten to yet. We rolled a D20 for this one so we'll just have to see what we get next week. 

Spoon Rating: 3

REWATCH: Fateful Findings [2013]

Nothing can ever truly top this in terms of Neil Breen's work. It nearly fills the entire Neil Bringo card.

Just go see it.

After you can read my original review.

SPECIAL: Live Freaky! Die Freaky! [2006]

Today was a very important bad movie night for a lot of reasons. The biggest and most obvious reason is because it was the inaugural night for our newest member, Jade, Adam and Sarah's daughter who was just born last Wednesday. At one point in the middle of a sex scene in the film Adam turned to us all and said with a small amount of shame, "This is her first movie." What else would you expect really? On a lesser note, it's a return to bad movie night after a few weeks off due to things like Kay getting covid, Erik having covid scares, and Sarah being just too damn pregnant. Finally, this night is important because we dusted off a personal classic to show Erik and for the rest to experience after a very long time.

"Live Freaky! Die Freaky!" isn't really a bad movie, but it's very hard to call it good. It's weird. Mostly just that. Adam and Kay credit "Blue Velvet" with being the start of our interest in both art house and bad movies because although it's a good movie, it sent us down the path of just "weird movies," which often fall starkly on one end of the line of good and bad. In her freshman year of college, Kay watched our film tonight for the first time after one of her friends mentioned hearing about a movie Davey Havok of AFI was in and they decided to just Netflix it (back when Netflix was a mail service) out of curiosity. They were horrified, amused, watched all the special features to try to make sense of it, and kept singing the songs a few days later. It ended up becoming something inflicted on others to get a laugh and, of course, Adam was one of those people. Even after having not rewatched it in years, one of us quotes it at least once a month.

"Live Freaky! Die Freaky!" is a stop-motioned animated musical about Charlie Manson and the Manson family voiced by famous punk rock stars. Even with that description, I swear it's even weirder than you think. It's a black comedy and a satire to the most extreme degree and has more offensive lines and pornographic clay sex than you would ever want. It's art in the worst way and a landmark event in one's life where you can divide your life smoothly into the before watching and after watching times. When you start it up, there's literally a screen that says, "You have bad taste."

There's not much more I can say about it except that if you think you can handle it, I urge you to watch it. Here are just a few (of many) memorable lines:

• "Now listen to Hex as he will be doing the majority of the killing because that is a man's job. You can have the girly jobs like painting the walls with blood and, if time permits, make some sandwiches!"
• "THE SON OF THE SON OF GOD."
• "Make sure to do something witchy."
• "This neighborhood looks positively middle class. Look at those messes... If you drove me to the valley, I'll stab you to death and rip your baby out of your stomach and fuck it."
• "Yay! I'm fucking a girl! I'm straight now!"
• "I'm snorting for two now."
• "You reek of menopause."
• "Oh, the indignity of being killed by a commoner!"