Chuck E. Cheese In The Galaxy 5000 [1999]

Since we just had Halloween (where we watched the original Hellraiser instead of a bad movie), we couldn't think of anything scarier than this: Chuck E. Cheese In The Galaxy 5000. Although obviously this was made for children, it has such a strange vibe it's hard to think of what parents would actually decide on this film to show their kids. Also strange is that apparently Chuck and his buddies (Helen the chicken and love interest, the Texan dog Jasper, the purple alien Mr. Munch, and Pasquale the Italian stereotype) are all in a band, which would clearly make for a better story than this.

The plot is that Pasquale introduces a kid named Charlie to the crew because he needs $50,000 to help his aunt and uncle replace their tractor. Farming is actually a motif in this movie for some reason (was the franchise established by a farmer?). The crew decides to enter into a race on another planet to win the prize money. Sure. Sounds easy. There they meet two very queer German bodybuilders and a stereotypical blonde who is into Chuck. Helen tries to make Chuck jealous using the gays who then lock her up after explaining their evil plan to win the race with zoom gas, designed by a mad scientist named Dr. Zoom. Apparently it makes you go fast but think slow so it's probably a drug allegory. Team Cheese ends up winning the race after Chuck gets some training from Pasquale in disguise as a Scottish stereotype. There are a lot of bad songs. Blonde goes off with the bodybuilders, which means she has no gaydar and is presumably into three ways. Dance party!

This movie was actually pretty fun to watch. It's stupid enough to make fun of easily and doesn't really drag at a swift one hour timestamp. 

Spoon Rating: 5

Slaughter High [1986]

 Let's cut to the chase with this one: this movie sucked. Thankfully next week since it's Halloween, we will be treating ourselves to a good movie instead.

The film is about a bunch of popular kids torturing a really dumb nerd who ends up dropping nitric acid on himself while the chem lab is on fire. They return to the school for a high school reunion, but it was just a ploy to get them in one place so the nerd can kill them. They mostly die in stupid and not funny ways but there's a great mud sound effect at one point. The final victim is the girl who pretended she was going to have sex with him to lure him into the girl's locker room. She fails at throwing a stick at him and he gets her too. Then all the kids come back as zombies but surprise, it was all a dream the nerd had while in the hospital. The film ends with the nerd killing his doctor or something with a satisfied smile, but none of us understood why. It was lame.

Also, all the actors sounded like they were doing accents but from where we'll never know.

Spoon Rating: 2

Night Of The Lepus [1972]

In what was clearly an effort to try to horror-ify as many nonthreatening things as possible, we get tonight's film, Night of the Lepus. If you don't know what a lepus is, they tell you twice within the first five minutes that it's the Latin name for rabbits. 

Apparently there is a situation with too rabbits in Arizona so they decide to transgender the rabbits with some hormones to keep them from being as fertile (instead of calling it open rabbit season in a place where everyone seems to own a shotgun anyway). The scientist injecting the rabbits even admits that he's not sure what the results will be so that bodes well for the experiment. Then his stupid daughter decides to switch up a control and experimental group rabbit because one was her favorite. They let her keep it and she immediately loses it in the wild. From there we get exponentially-increasing-in-size rabbits that are out for blood. They are more determined to just make everything bloody and occasionally dismember than they are to eat, but we mostly just get a lot of slow motion shots of them running through unconvincing miniature sets. At one point we do get a man in a suit, but it was pretty briefly lived. The movie does start to drag, but at least they never stop being cute and they never look menacing no matter how many under the snout shots and growling noises they try. The humans eventually set up an elaborate plan to electrocute them all on some trains tracks that works.

This movie is good for a few laughs from it's pretty poor effects but ultimately it feels like a 50s horror film in the way it drags and the way in lacks any irony. Camp would have really improved the movie in this case for inexplicably, they tried to ground it somewhat in reality. A giant, fluffy murderous reality.

Spoon Rating: 3

Temptation: Confessions of A Marriage Counselor [2013]

We realized we have never watched a Tyler Perry movie at bad movie night and because we really wanted to avoid his comedies for fear that they might be painful, we decided to go for a drama: Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor. There are times when a movie is divisive enough that we can’t really decide if it’s worth watching or not. That’s the function of the 4.5 spoon rating and this movie was definitely one of those. Kay and Sarah came down on the side that this one is worth it and Adam and Erik came down on the side that it’s not quite there. If you like campy and preachy cheating movies, you’ll probably like this one.  

The film has a really silly frame narrative of a marriage counselor telling the story of her “sister”, Judith, who got married to her childhood sweetheart, Brice. She wanted to be a marriage counselor but could only get a job at an upscale matchmaking company while her husband became a pharmacy tech at a mom and pop pharmacy with the mom from The Nanny and Brandy. In spite of this, they’re apparently broke? One day Judith meets a rich investor, Harley, who is almost comically forward with her even after finding out she’s married. Because we needed to give Brice a bad quality, he has forgotten her birthday for the last two years. It’s obvious that Harley is gunning for Judith and she keeps looking at him with this mixed aroused-disgusted face. Kim Kardashian then gives her a less virtuous makeover before she goes on a business trip with Harley. On his private plane he makes his move and she VERY clearly says no many times. Then he tells her to stop pretending and that she put up enough of a fight and things proceed. That’s not consent and is an obvious predictor of how Harley will continue to treat her! When she gets home, her super religious mom is there for a visit and realizes that she is under the devil’s influence. Judith starts just openly cheating for a while, and Brice even drags her out of the sin den that is Harley’s house but then things end between them. Judith and Harley fight a bunch and he hits her. Brice bonds with Brandy but she says something like, “We both know we’re not attracted to each other” and then later tells him she has HIV. Guess where she got it? Brice saves Judith again. We return to the outer frame where we realize Judith is living solo and kind of sad with HIV as her punishment while Brice has gotten remarried and has a kid as a reward.    

This movie has a good amount of unintentional comedy, mostly in the super unsexy sex talk, culminating in a tackle through glass, but the dissenters said that it wasn’t quite funny enough or that it had too much down time. Chose for yourself!   

Spoon Rating: 4.5

REWATCH: Petey Wheatstraw: The Devil's Son-In-Law [1977]

Read the original review here.

S. Darko [2009]

This film is just rude. It is an unauthorized sequel to the cult classic Donnie Darko, with no one from the original involved except for the lead actress who played the little sister in the film. This film wants so badly to be like the original with its subtle blue tint to its use of the rabbit figure to the time travel paths and theory, but it just makes no sense. 

It's a fanfic written by someone who didn't really get the original but wanted to use the general ideas and aesthetic. I don't often describe movies we watch on bad movie night as pretentious, but this definitely is. It is trying for the occasionally iconic dialogue of the original but mostly the dialogue sounds like a bunch of people speaking their intrusive thoughts. Plotwise, we have two instances of people going back in time to save someone and it ultimately ends with no real difference to the status quo except that a missing child who was found in one timeline never is. Oops. I don't have much to say about the plot but that's because the plot doesn't really happen. Donnie's sister and her annoying friend have their car break down on a road trip and hang out in a town full of creepy men and Jesus freaks (sometimes both in one person). That's all. Elizabeth Berkley is here for a post-Showgirls role. We like to imagine this is where Nomi Malone eventually ended up: in Utah and in love with Jesus.

Cinematically the film frequently looks more like a music video than a movie and the editing employs a lot of speed up or slowed down shots for no real reason. We get some moments that seem like they're trying to be symbolism, but the film lacks the depth to really say much of anything.

The one nice thing I can say about the movie is that the score is pretty good. All the songs with lyrics sound a bit like discounted versions of Echo & The Bunnymen or INXS songs but what can you do?

Don't waste your time with this film no matter how many copies you find at Goodwill.

Spoon Rating: 2

REWATCH: Girls Just Wanna Have Fun [1985]

We have a bad movie first here people: an accidental rewatch.

We rolled a d10 and got this one from our Book Barn stack not realizing that we actually watched it back in 2014. I only just now realized it because when I entered the title into the tag section, I realized we already have a tag for the movie. 

Were the signs there? Only sort of. Sarah realized very quickly that she had seen it before but being that we were all born in the 80s, we assumed it was some kind of childhood memory thing like Kay's love of Teen Witch and Adam's affinity for Mother Goose's Rock n Rhyme. Later on when Shannon Doherty's character said the line, ""You think I'm punk?! That's not as cool as new wave but it's better than preteen!" I felt extremely strong deja vu. I basically wrote it off as having seen a clip of it somewhere.

So, oops? I'll just link to my original review because frankly I'm hilarious and don't want to try to write a new one.  

Have a bunch of pictures of Helen's Hunt cranium accessories. 

Spoon Rating: 2*
*It's a low spoon rating because we honestly laughed at a lot of the actual jokes. It wasn't a bad film. Maybe like 2.5/5 stars but obviously pretty forgettable.