Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainville [2007]

We're down to rolling a d12 to decide on our movie, and the dice really didn't like Kay since they picked the one movie she least wanted to see, Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainville. In addition to Kay not liking serial killer things and fixating on the very inaccurate 50s costuming, Erik was prepared with the facts and ready to debunk every misstep in the retelling of Ed Gein's life. This still didn't make the movie watchable.

The movie seemed to have absolutely no concept of plot or pacing. Ed goes around killing people until he is found. He isn't really the main character since the film actually focuses on a cop whose girlfriend ends up being one of the abducted. They are insanely boring. The only interesting part of the whole thing is in the very beginning when Ed is digging up bodies with a friend who, after apparently doing this multiple times, finally questions the morality of what they are doing so Ed kills him and ties him to his truck like Achilles did to Hector (in spite of him having a flatbed truck?). We mourned his loss. 

Visually this movie is frustrating. The whole thing has this washed-out look that's like dirty faux black and white without being fully black and white. There are some gross scenes, as expected, but something about the utter lack of realism in the visuals kind of helps from anything being too traumatizing. And, of course, as a movie set in the 50s, the clothes are mostly wrong, the hair of both the men and women is entirely wrong (although one woman curiously has good 40s hair), and the makeup is basically modern. 

Do not bother. This movie cost Adam and Sarah $4, and they were robbed. With so many losers, soon we'll be switching over to watching some episodes of bad TV including the fever dream known as Cop Rock. It will get better.

Spoon Rating: 2

Turbulence 3: Heavy Metal [2001]

We rolled a critical fail on the dice role and on the movie as our film for today was Turbulence 3: Heavy Metal. Adam had seen the first Turbulence film and basically predicted that whatever the plot was it was going to end with a random person having to land the plane.

The basic premise is that a Marilyn Manson-esque rocker named Slade Kraven is going to be performing his last show on a modified plane with 40 fans in attendance. We are introduced to a bunch of random characters including a normie-ish fan who wants to be a journalist and her horny friend, a woman investigating a hacker of the cameras on the plane, the guys in air traffic control, the pilots, the flight attendants, a reporter of the concert who's a jerk and her cameraman, and, of course, the band. The show starts and Kraven quickly turns from shock rocker into literal murderer when he kills the copilot and seemingly holds the reporter hostage. The hacker and investigator learn that Kraven is actually someone else who disguised himself as the rock star in an effort to get publicity for his Satanic cult. He, the reporter jerk, and the pilot are actually all part of the cult and they have plans to crash the plane into a church in Kansas as part of some doomsday ritual. The real Kraven ends up escaping from the storage unit and gets in contact with the hacker who helps guide him in what's going on. He fights the imposter, sees the pilot kill himself, and then gets the guidance from the hacker to successfully land the plane and save the day. Hacker and investigator hook up. The normie girl gets report on the events with the help of the cameraman. Kraven is a hero. 

For its kind of wild plot, this movie is pretty boring. So much of it is just people on the phone with each other, and it feels like forever for the plot pieces to come together. The most interesting part really was trying to actually categorize the band's music (the menu song sounds like Godsmack, the first song they play sounds like Smashing Pumpkins, and the whole song performed sounds like Marilyn Manson; none of it is the "death metal" it claims to be).

Spoon Rating: 2

Time Cop [1994]

The dice determined that we would be experiencing the final of the three "double Van Damme" movies tonight, which also happened to be a favorite of Adam's when he was a kid. Van Damme plays a cop who tries to stop time crimes after time travel is invented. Of course, it is immediately used to make money to fund a political campaign. This being a Van Damme movie, he also has a wife who he has sex with and then she immediately dies, clearly setting up a future motivation to save her life. 

In general, the movie was kind of strange to follow. The plot wasn't specifically complicated, but, ironically, the pacing of the movie was really off. It was kind of hard to tell where we were in the film and every major plot point seemed to either happen way too early or way too late. Perhaps that's the real joke here: bad timing. Overall, it was just a bland Van Damme film, without anything specific to note about it. It certainly was missing some of the weird lines of other movies of his. The two main highlights involved some body horror CGI that was very mid-90s, but otherwise it's pretty forgettable.

Spoon Rating: 2

High Impact Hand Safety & The Prince of Egypt [1998]

We had a series of shorts this evening. First, we started off with a new classic: High Impact Hand Safety. This 18 minute safety training video is the funniest gore movie we've seen in a minute. The film is a safety training video that is 90% recreation of brutal factory accidents with the same scream and a lot of prosthetics.  Just when you think they are done, there are more. You start to get almost frustrated at how stupid people are the more you watch them clean machines without shutting them down first. Still we all picked favorites afterwards. As a companion piece, we also watched a German parody YouTube video called "Forklift Operator Klaus" that is very similar but intentionally over the top. You'll get laughs from both.

Spoon Rating: 9

After that, we decided to do another Dingo Pictures, this one being The Prince of Egypt. It was extremely minimal on the details of the story, which Erik's Catholic upbringing and Adam's religion minor were annoyed by. The thing with Dingo Pictures is that there's definitely a sweet spot of how many you can watch before they get pretty repetitive and we are probably past that point. Most Dingo Pictures are good, but they are all good for the same general reasons. This one is mostly notable for having some really solid smash cuts. The first was of Moses calmly saying, "I'm going crazy" before we get a wide shot of him sitting in front of the burning bush and that's our intro to God, who looks like Ron Pearlman. The other solid one involved the Egyptian armies first chasing with high energy music and then just a bunch of soldiers walking casually with no music at all.

Spoon Rating: 5*

*May be higher or lower based on how many Dingos you've already seen.

We also watched some commercials by Jim "The Hammer" Shapiro. Well, worth looking into if you've got two minutes.

Exit Wounds [2001]

The dice decided that we would have to deal with another Steven Seagal and a rapper movie although this one was a lot more convoluted than the last one. Seagal is a loose canon cop who doesn't play by the rules and gets sent to anger management for a hot second where he meets Tom Arnold. Meanwhile, DMX is a drug dealer except he's actually a dot com millionaire who is only pretending to be a drug dealer to try to expose some crooked Detroit cops (and get his brother out of jail, it seems?). The film also has Michael Jai White who Adam was very excited to see fight Seagal as they are two martial artists only to have them sword fight instead. The film seems to set up a potential love interest with the police commissioner but then she unceremoniously dies in a car crash two-thirds of the way through with no romantic set up anyway. This movie has some writing issues. It was at times completely incomprehensible. We got a few laughs with some good dummy work and weird directing, but this movie was far more painful than fun. 

Spoon Rating: 2

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.