The Garbage Pail Kids Movie [1987]

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

Sometimes we simply fear that which we do not understand. This is both a theme of this movie and our collective attitude in relation to this movie. This one seems to be a classic of bad movies, one that appears on every list and seems pretty universally disliked. No one talks about "Garbage Pail Kids" like they talk about "The Room" or "Birdemic." This one is supposed to be bad-bad and we have been fittingly dreading it. However, on watching it, most of us actually thought it was more silly and amusingly bad than painful bad with the notable exception of Sarah who vehemently hated it, dropped a lot of F-bombs at Adam while blaming him for inflicting it on her, and tried actively to fall asleep many times. We are a crew divided.

A kid who looks about 13 but regularly gets beaten up by 20-something year old bikers works in an antique shop that seems to be run by a time travelling wizard (this is only a theory divised by Kay and Sarah because he never actually defines himself). For whatever reason, this man has a garbage pail full of ugly, gross large-headed children that, though magically sealed, can apparently be easily opened. Kid knocks over pail. GPKs enter the world and mainly just do low level mischief like going into places like "The Toughest Bar In The World" while looking for others like them. In truth the GPKs, while obviously the most bonkers part of the movie, are mostly the B-plot. In the A-Plot, Kid is trying to impress this girl named Tangerine who designs really horrifying 80s clothes that she mostly sells to strippers out of her car. The GPKs help out by making him an outfit so shiny that she is blinded into believing she could profit from this and he promises to make her more clothes using the GPKs as willing slave labor. They steal from the "Non-Union Sweat Shop", make a bunch of stuff for her in spite of the fact that she's a jerk to them, and she pretends they're her designs while the GPKs are carted off to the "State Home For The Ugly." The Kid and the Wizard free everyone in the Ugly Home and then the GPK crash Tangerine's fashion show by vomiting, farting, and peeing all over everyone and everything there. This is high class content.

There's a lot to enjoy in this movie in terms of ridiculousness if you have a soul as dead as ours (expecting Sarah). The GPKs are just awfully made with mouths that don't move correctly and voices that are like death rattles. There's one that looks like a baby in a straight jacket that creepily says, "mama" at everything who will haunt your nightmares. There's one with zits who sounds like he's constantly mid-yawn. They sing a fantastically terrible song called "We Can Do Anything By Working With Each Other" that we will be singing for eternity. There's rampant product placement when the movie is already just capitalizing on the fad of Garbage Pail Kid cards. And, of course, revolves around about clothing from the 80s, the worst decade of clothing in history. The whole movie is one big eyesore that you can't look away from because you want to understand why.

Listen and join the cult:

Quote: "My kinda guys . . . psychos!"

Spoon Rating: 5

Adam's Grandma's Review: *a dismissive hand gesture*

Simon Sez [1999]

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

A fairly recently proposed improvement to the Bad Movie Night selections rules, of which at this moment there are technically none aside from having a general idea that it might be bad, is "no comedies." This isn't because we hate fun (only Adam hates fun) but because so often the movies that we watch that are advertised as being comedies are more painful than funny. Some of the must awful things we've had to sit through like "Christmas Vacation 2" and "Bucky Larson" were movies that were trying to be funny and were really bad at it. Alternatively, you also sometimes get comedies that are too self-awarely ridiculous like "WolfCop." What we want are movies that are funny because of a lack of self-awareness. This movie may not be as painful as the other ones mentioned but it does hold the distinction of having one of the most painfully unfunny people on the planet in it: Dane Cook.

The plot of this movie, which is kind of unnecessarily convoluted, was summed up in one sentence on Wikipedia as, "Interpol agent Simon goes on a mission in France to save a kidnapped girl and defeat an arms dealer." There. That's all you need to know. Most of the plot is rushed and nonsensical and the rest of the movie is padded out with weirdly long comedy bits by either Dane Cook, who mostly does impressions, or two friars whose devotion is definitely questionable or with long action sequences that almost always have visible wires. There are a couple gloriously bad bits of CGI, one where Dennis Rodman and Dane Cook are in a car with a parachute and one where Dennis Rodman is being a cool guy who doesn't look at the really fake fire behind him. There's also a scene where Rodman and the required female character fight each other naked and then she hits a button and they are suddenly in a rave bedroom listening to 90s pulse while getting their swerve on. Oh, and the villain is ambiguously-accented Grade A ham. That's all. You're better off focusing on the lovely setting than anything having to do with the plot or characters. Have some pictures:

I totally believe they're there.

Dennis Rodman's face speaks for the audience.

Dane Cook's dinosaur impression. Painful.

Sure. That's a fire.

Odd Credit: "Cleaning Lady - Fatty"

Spoon Rating: 1

Adam's Grandma's Review: "There were certain parts I liked."

Jupiter Ascending [2015]

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

Oh, the Wachowskis: always high concept and wildly inconsistent. On the one hand they are responsible for "The Matrix" and the screenplay for "V For Vendetta", on the other hand they gave us "Speed Racer" and the "Matrix" sequels. Let's just say this one tends towards the latter films. As with the directors, the main and supporting cast of this movie is full of actors who have proven that they can do better including Mila Kunis, Sean Bean, Eddie Redmayne, Douglas Booth, Tuppance Middleton, Maria Doyle Kennedy, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw. Also, Channing Tatum is in this. And a cameo by Terry Gilliam. Now that I have given you plenty of ways to avoid this movie, let's try to make sense of this. For a moment there was genuine concern that we had found a movie that would take down Sarah, our plot decoder, but although this was clearly one of her toughest challenges, she endured and was able to give us the plot about halfway through the movie because this movie made the curious decision to have nonsense happen and explain it way after the fact.

Jupiter Jones, Kunis, is a cleaning lady with consistently perfect eyeshadow who one day witnesses some aliens trying to harvest one of her employers. The same aliens try to harvest her during an egg donation but she is saved by a half dog/half human who used to have wings, Tatum. Long fight scenes ensue with shoddy explanation by Tatum and Sean Bean in which we find out that Tatum is some sort of former military tool who is to protect her and she's also a queen of something because bees don't sting her. If this doesn't make sense, it's okay. We find out the universe is actually divided up among three immortal siblings, raspy ham Balem, overly optimistic Kalique, and lazy Titus, who harvest people on their planets to remain forever young. Jupiter has the same genetic sequence as their dead mom, the queen, which means technically that she owns the universe because to them genes imply reincarnation. Kalique invites her over to hang out, Titus tries to marry her to get her fortune, and Balem blackmails her. Many, many, many fight scenes ensue as well as a romance between Jupiter and Dog Boy. Good guys win over Balem (I don't know about the other two; were they setting up for a potential sequel?), Jupiter becomes owner of the universe which essentially means nothing, and she hooks up with Dog Boy who got his wings back (ask Sarah why and what this means). 

This movie is apparently a guilty pleasure for some people and its actually pretty easy to see how. It's got the space opera thing and the costumes and sets (that aren't egregiously bad CGI) are actually very impressive and interesting. The problem is, the plot is poorly delivered and poorly constructed and those fight scenes are just so long and so low-stakes you can't even slightly care. I almost think you could keep this same general verse and make a completely different movie in it that would actually be good but we only have this one and WE ONLY NEED THIS ONE, WACHOWSKIS.

BMN Quotes:
Kay: Whenever I look at Channing Tatum I am reminded that we are all just meat concealed in bags of flesh. We are all just sentient meat.
Adam: I used to play bass for Sentient Meat.

Keith: What did that guy [Eddie Redmayne] win an Oscar for?
Kay: For playing Stephen Hawking.
Keith: In "The Theory Of Everything"? But . . . he was really good in that!

Quotes:
"I have more in common with a dog than you."
"I love dogs."

"Is there any part of you that wants to bite me?"

And Eddie Redmayne's entire performance.

Spoon Rating: 4 [This is our new rating system for how unintentionally funny a movie is with 0 being not unintentionally funny at all and 10 being a film like "The Room."]

Adam's Grandma's Review: *silence*

REWATCH: Johnny Mnemonic [1995]

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

I did a full review of this movie in June 2014 when we first watched it that can be read here. It's still great although one wonders how awkward it would be for Dolph Lundgren if they had named the heroin addict hacker dolphin Dolph. 

Speaking Of Mr. Lundgren, we ended the evening by watching a video of him singing Elvis, playing drums, and breaking boards and you should too. End all your evenings this way.

(New) Quote:
"You are fucked up severe."

Adam's Grandma's Review: "Good."

REWATCH: Deadly Prey [1986]

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

On Monday we decided to give a rewatch to a very old favorite, that blatant synthesis of "The Most Dangerous Game" and "First Blood" known as "Deadly Prey." As with the last time I wrote about this movie, there isn't much to say about it aside from the fact that it's gloriously crazy.

In a remote location near Los Angeles, there's a mercenary training camp where the potential mercenaries hunt guys they kidnapped off the street because realism. One day they make a mistake by kidnapping a mulleted guy off the street who . . . used to train with them? I don't know. He knows the guy running the joint, the non-corporate Big Bad. They strip him down to his booty shorts and do a loving slow pan up his oily body before letting him loose and find that he's too good at not being killed. The rest of the movie is mainly just everyone saying, "We've got to kill this guy" which was the entire goal from the beginning anyway. At one point his father-in-law shows up to take out some guys including the corporate guy behind it but he dies. The main character escapes to his own house but returns when he finds that they've kidnapped and raped his wife. Then he teams up with an old friend and they kill everyone except the Big Bad who gets put into the game himself. It ends on the main character's looped scream and the credits roll to an incongruously chill 80s slow jam called "Never Say Die."

This movie may not sound like much but it's in the execution where the weirdness comes. There are tons of lines that sound like all the mercenaries are crushing on the main character, strange reads, weirdly short range gernades, and a scene where instead of having an explosion, it sloppily cuts to an inserted explosion shot that was clearly shot at a different location and time. Oh, and the main characters cuts off a guy's arm and beats him with it. You really don't want to miss that.

Quotes:
"You're supposed to be the best at what you do. Do it better."

"Friend or enemy?
"I'm a friend!"
"You're a liar."

Gayest Lines:

"This guy looks like fun."

"Let's hope he lasts more than ten minutes."

"I'd give anything to have 20 men just like him."

"I want you . . . dead."

Saving Christmas [2014]

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

By no hyperbole, this movie is probably the most highly anticipated movie that we have ever watched. We have been looking for a way to watch it since last December after hearing such glowing facts like that it has a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, that it's a crazy religious movie that a lot of religious people didn't like, and that it stars one of the leaders of the totally illogical Christianity nonsense squad, TV's Kirk Cameron. And it did not disappoint. In fact, it's a new Christmas tradition.

I know I can't cover every ounce of bonkers this movie has to offer but I'm going to try to hit up the major points. The film starts with Kirk chilling in the most Christmas room to ever Christmas and talking about everything in the room that he loves especially the hot chocolate which he talks about a lot throughout the film. We wonder with mild horror if the whole movie is going to be him talking at us from an armchair but we are soon treated to one of three intro screens that tells us the movie has been funded by Liberty University, of course, and then we find ourselves following a very slow Games of Thrones character while Cameron waxes poetic on the nature of stories.

 Needs more Christmas, honestly.

 What is this contraption?

 HOLY HOT CHOCOLATE.

Get me seven more of these.

Now we're at a Christmas party thrown by Cameron's sister (but not his real sister) and the so-called plot can really begin. See, Cameron's brother-in-law, hilariously named Christian, hates Christmas so much that he sees it through rave-vision, but not for the reasons godless heathens hate Christmas (rampant consumerism, bad music, etc.). He hates Christmas because it's full of pagan traditions and doesn't nearly have enough Jesus. So he hides in his car and Cameron joins him to tell him why he's all wrong and that actually all the pagan stuff is Christian stuff. It's a hoot.

"Where's the Jesus?"

"Oh, jeepers. He makes a lot of good points. What do I do?"

"Oh, I know! Lie!"

First he butchers the nativity story and talks a lot about the swaddling cloth. He mostly just says swaddling cloth a lot. Then he draws the Christmas tree back to Genesis because, you know, God made trees and also the solstice so you're totally honoring the Jesus with your pagan symbol, duh. He also literally draws a connection between the tree and the cross by saying that Jesus' crucifixion is just Adam symbolically returning the fruit he ate from the tree in the garden of Eden (we all had assumed when Cameron said that Adam needed to give back the fruit that Adam was supposed to return his poo to God). And what about Santa Claus? Santa Claus is not Jesus, Kirk! But you know who he is? A bar-fighting metalhead, GoT extra named Saint Nicholas who pummels heathens to dub-step and then gives toys to kids.

Santa needs his weekly protection money.

"I heard you had some of that sweet Ghanaese hot chocolate."

Finally, Kirk Cameron's brother-in-law realizes Christmas IS THE BOMB and literally penguin belly slides into the presents while his wife watches dubiously. Then, in what can only be the logical conclusion after being subjected to so many sanitized hip-hop versions of Christmas music (or as Adam calls it, "Santa-tized"), we have a bunch of white people try to dance to a hip-hop "Angels We Have Heard On High" which has the line, "put your wings in the air" in it.

 Kirk Cameron is the devil on our shoulder.

 "I feel something coming on!"

 "Perhaps it's time for some white guy dancing?"

 I think Kirk is controling him with his damn magic.

 "OMG PRESENTS!"

X-TREME CHRISTMAS

In the epilogue of slow motion eating, Cameron justifies materialism and again brings up the nature of stories but now it makes more sense when he really insists that we need to create our own meanings for things. Kirk Cameron wants you to lie because history is not Christian enough.

"Buy things!"

For this viewing party we were joined by Adam's sister and Keith's daughter, Leah, and her fiance, Matt. They assimilated quite well into our crew for the night and I think we all learned a lot about the value of bullshitting. So happy birthday to Adam and Grandma who were both born on December 21st which also happens to be Yule, that pagan holiday that Cameron has stolen all the traditions from. Happy Yule to all (except Kirk Cameron) and to all a good night!

Quotes:
"You're wrong."
"About what?"
"Everything you just said."
". . . I said a lot."

"I saw it on Fox News so I know it's true."

"This Christmas I'm gonna give you something you've been wanting for a long time."
"What is it, Big Papa?"

"Sure, don't max out your credit cards or use presents to buy friends, but remember this is a celebration of the eternal god taking on a MATERIAL body so it is right that our holiday is marked with material things."

Adam's Grandma's Review: "It was good."

Adam's Review: "This is the whitest Christmas ever."

Kirk Cameron: He's basically God himself.

Santa's Slay [2005]

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

After wondering for a bit which movie we should inflict upon everyone tonight and encountering some pretty tempting offers including some kind of crazy religious movie about going to hell, former Bad Movie Nighter Randy chimed in via text with a more seasonably appropriate option that makes us wonder about the important things in life. Like: why are there so many Christmas movies with wrestlers playing Santa?

Set in a town called Hell (an actual place in Arizona but this is obviously Canada even with the American flags everywhere), Santa comes down the chimney of a rich person's house and massacres a bunch of pretty recognizable actors who have nothing better to do including Fran Drescher and Chris Kattan. Then we cut to our protoganist: romantically inept teenager Nicholas who just wants his kooky grandfather to stop messing with inventions and celebrate Christmas like everyone else. When he finally asks his grandfather why he's so reluctant to celebrate, Grandpa pulls out an ancient Norse tome that reveals that Santa is actually Satan's son and literal counterpart to Jesus and that he has only been nice for the past 1000 years because he lost a curling match to a mysterious old man. Now Santa's out to make up for lost time, killing strip club patrons and setting the place on fire, stabbing the deli owner with his own menorah, killing a bunch of cops at the police station, and then running over Nicholas' grandfather with his sleigh, pulled by an angry buffalo. Santa has a showdown with Nicholas and his girlfriend at the high school's ice rank where Grandpa comes back from the dead to reveal he was an angel who turned human for love and was the mysterious old man who beat Santa at curling 1000 years prior. They compete, Santa loses, and his sleigh is shot down by Nicholas' girlfriend's redneck father. Santa lives and goes home to return eventually in 3005.

This movie was silly but, as with many things we watch, not really in the right ways. There were a lot of puns, a lot of obvious sound stages, a lot of comical deaths that make you feel totally numb, and a lot of really unfunny, obvious jokes (one of the cops is named "Cock" for instance). If you want a murdering Santa you are better off just watching that episode of "Futurama".

Quotes:
[while in a town called Hell] "What in Hell do we have here?"

[while in a kosher deli] "Something here just isn't kosher."

"He's scary yet educational."

Adam's Grandma's Review: "It was good. I liked it."