[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]
It has been mentioned before that the majority of the Bad Movie Night crew consists of millenials: born in the late 80s, once 90s kids, and now sad 20-somethings. As such, we are amused by anything that is a movie time capsule of the 90s; anything that was completely topical when it was made but is now a hilarious product of its time. Enter "The Skateboard Kid," a movie whose title alone places it right where we were expecting. I took so many notes on this movie that I decided to just make some of them into a 90s Bingo game rather than comment on every little silly 90s thing that happens in the film.
The plot of "Skateboard Kid" is exactly what you want from a 90s movie. A kid who likes to skateboard moves to a new town with his dad because his dad got a job running a really crappy television station. Skateboard Kid doesn't get along with the other skateboarders in town, particularly Eddie Vedder Wannabe Ponytail Guy who is the son of a crooked used car salesman. Ponytail breaks Skateboard Kid's skateboard and he ends up getting another one for free from a nice lady who runs a pawn shop who he helped fudge some bills for (and whose bill collector he made eat a goldfish; this doesn't make more sense in context). This skateboard belonged to a magican in the 70s and after he pimps it out with a motor and lights, lightning strikes and the board comes to life. Pawn Shop lady and her daughter come over for dinner and there is a clear love triangle between SK's dad, Pawn Shop lady, and crooked salesman who blackmail Pawn Shop lady into marrying him because she has a treasure map or something and she needs money to pay for her house and her daughter's heart surgery. Meanwhile Skateboard Kid is . . . trying to help by flying around on the skateboard and ripping off the silhouette on the moon scene from "ET." At one point the skateboard breaks so Skateboard Kid makes a sail out of his flannel shirt and rides his only friend's corpse to stop the wedding. Pawn Shop lady delivers a solid not joke ("I do . . . NOT!") and the treasure is found. Presumably SK's dad and Pawn Shop lady get married and everyone lives happily ever after but the last few minutes of our copy of the movie cut off so we can't be sure.
I can't for the life of me figure out who this movie is supposed to be for. The skateboarding seems like it should appeal to teens but the movie is completely for young kids. It's low budget, the acting is often bizarre, the special effects on the skateboard are nightmare-ish, and the plot is just so conventional and dry that we were really thankful for all the other things that kept us laughing. It wasn't very radical, tubular, or x-treme, but it was a better use of our time than a lot of the films we have seen lately.
Play some 90s Bingo!
Quote:
"If that kid gets anywhere near Maggie Mills, you're an organ donor!"
Spoon Rating: 6
Grandma's Review: "It was good."
[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]
It has been a little while since we watched "Foodfight!" but since Adam's nieces were over for the evening, it made sense to watch a kid's movie. Although, as previously stated, this is one of the worst kid's movies in existence. It's full of sexual innuedos, bizarre "Casablanca" references, animation that is barely as good as Playstation graphics in 1996, and villians that were terrifying enough to make Abby (age 11) and Madison (age 7) avert their eyes. Of course, to us the villains were the best part including Christopher Lloyd's deranged, cross-eyed Brand X salesman (Adam) and the Nazi-esque officier of Brand X's regime who really needs to be kinkshamed (Kay). Throughout the movie, the girls kept asking very reasonable questions like, "What's going on?" "Why are the good guy and the bad girl dancing while arguing?" and "Why did you make us watch this? This is worst than 'To Catch A Yeti'!" We'll make bad movie converts of them one day.
To read the original review of this movie that details all the terrible innuendos, click here.
Spoon Rating: 7.5
Adam's Grandma's Review: *no answer*
Abby's Review: "Two words for you: very bad. One word: disgusting."
Madison's Review: "Hated it."
[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]
Usually at Bad Movie Night we end up watching the lowest of the low budget films. Maybe there's a famous person in it but that person usually has another job as a martial artist or a rapper. If there is an actor of some renown, that actor is usually something of a punchline by the point in their career that they are staring in the film we're watching. The sets are usually poorly constructed and the costumes are cheap. The production itself is sometimes the product of one man's ego. And any kind of historical accuracy is out the window. "The Conquerer" distinguishes itself by being none of these things except for historically inaccurate. It's high budget, has a big name actor, and there was definitely money put into the production. It is the very embodiment of the worst things about old Hollywood. We really want to rename this movie, which is about Genghis Khan, as "White Men Squinting."
The plot of this film is really hard to follow. Sarah, resident plot follower, seemed to somewhat know what was going on but mostly it's just a lot of different tribes waring with each other. Early on in the movie, Genghis Khan, played horribly by John Wayne, a man whose appeal I genuinely don't understand, kidnaps the daughter of the Tartar king (or something) after ripping her dress off her body in one motion. Yes, it's that kind of film. If you think his rough and unquestionably rapey ways will eventually woo her into submission, you must have seen this kind of movie before. There's a lot of running around, meeting different important Asian characters played by white or HIspanic guys, totally superfluous dance scenes with scantily clad ladies, and a bunch of scrapes they must get out of. In the end, Khan is leader (or something) with the Tartar princess as his bride and his adopted brother shamefully leaves to go die for reasons none of us really understand.
This movie is a trainwreck. The acting is deadpan and the dialogue has this odd construction that sounds like it is supposed to be old-fashioned or possibly in translation but just doesn't work. The costumes are horrendously inconsistant to the point where we had no idea what the weather was like on any given soundstage and the lead actress just straight up wore whatever nice gowns were in the storage closet from the 1930s. And it was rapey. And non-Asian actors squinting. Anyone who idealizes old Hollywood without discrimination is nuts. One nice thing I can say though is that this movie had some of the finest horse acting any of us have seen in film. All we ever wanted were horse scenes so we could marvel at the only good actors really making their money in hay.
Spoon Rating: 3
Adam's Grandma's Review: *makes a zero motion with her hand*
[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]
We have been itching to watch another Cynthia Rothrock movie since the real glorious mess that was "Undefeatable." It only made sense that we would turn to one of the most famous of Rothrock's films and one of the earlier ones: "China O'Brien." While this movie wasn't quite the masterpiece that "Undefeatable" was, it was decent enough for us to consider watching "China O'Brien II" in the future so that's saying something. The most amazing thing about it was the abysmal sound effects. Aside from the fact that the sound effects were never synced properly, a lot of them were just wrong. Punches don't sound like punches. Kicks don't sound like kicks. And dropping a weight on the ground usually doesn't sound like a delicate plop but that didn't stop us from watching those wonderful two seconds over and over.
The plot of China O'Brien is pretty standard martial arts movie fare. China is a cop who also runs a martial arts studio and is then challenged to a fight one day by some gang members. In spite of her claims of a strict "no street fighting" policy, she immediately gives in and fights them anyway and accidentally kills a kid. Guilt-ridden, she quits her job and moves to her hometown which is not unlike the town in "Road House." Some gang runs the town and her dad, the sheriff, can't do anything. Regardless of his ultimate powerlessness in the face of the gang, they blow him up with a car bomb for good measure. Then they blow up another cop with a car bomb. Somehow, this doesn't put China entirely off cars but does encourage her to run for sheriff. In spite of the gangs trying not to make it happen (by stealing the ballot box from some high school students and killing O'Brien's housekeeper) she wins the election. She decides to fix things in the last twenty minutes of the film with her strangely accented (Australian but trying not to be?) ex-boyfriend and a Native American biker guy. They lock up the bad guys. Freeze frame. Sequel: coming soon.
Spoon Rating: 5
[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]
Yesterday we watched everyone's favorite black-belt, crime-fighting, orphan college students who are also in a band. We started off the evening with a half hour long PSA about the dangers of pornography and how once you become perverted, you can never be pure again. We learned all about the dangers of homosexuality and S&M and got to see many examples that you can look up later for further information.
I recommend that you read my previous review of "Miami Connection" here and definitely watch the video of the song "Friends" which gets sung by us every month or so. It's also worth noting that we ate really cheesy mac and cheese, chedder popcorn, and asiago crackers, making this the cheesist night ever. Also, here's the new fairweather set-up for watching the movies:
Spoon Rating: 9
Adam's Grandma's Review: "It was good!"
[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]
This movie night started with an argument between Sarah and Adam about whether or not we have watched this movie before. It turns out, we watched the trailer for this movie before but the movie Sarah was thinking of was actually, "Tammy And The T-Rex." The confusion is perfectly reasonable. Both movies came out in the mid-90s and involve a sentient dinosaur because apparently the mid-90s were all about the idea of talking dinosaurs. The movie was actually much more painful than "Tammy And The T-Rex" and the best part of the night was when we watched the voice actors of "Rick & Morty" reading the transcript from a really bizarre trial in Georgia. I highly recommend watching that here and avoiding this movie because it's really not worth your time.
Well, the Wikipedia summary of his movie is only one sentence long so I see no need to be excessive in my description, particularly since most of us checked out of this movie is the first five minutes. Think if "Howard The Duck" was set in "Batman & Robin" verse with a cutesy family movie soundtrack and was about a dinosaur, recently brought back into existence after many species died out, teaming up with a cop to solve a dinocide. Some bad guys did some stuff and there were fart jokes and freaky costumes and it was deeply unpleasent.
Whoopi Goldberg was surely under contract.
Spoon Rating: 1
[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]
This movie was based off an apparently award-winning(!?) book that is a guide for young men to avoid masturbation and pornography, truely some of the worst of the sins. The full title of the book is actually "Every Young Man's Battle: Strategies for Victory in the Real World of Sexual Temptation" and while none of us heathens have read this good Christian book, the film did come with a bunch of study guides that ask questions about the movie and ask that you refer to Bible verses to further your understanding. About halfway through the brief, hour-long film, Adam paused it to go get his Bible, for learning purposes of course, and passed Kay a book saying, "This one's for you, Kay." It was the Satanic Bible. After that he also got his copies of the teachings of Buddha for Keith and a book on Wicca for Sarah as well as the Jewish Tanakh, the Koran, and the Book of Mormon. Perhaps we were overly prepared for a movie on the evils of wanking but we're thorough like that.
The movie is a bit difficult to explain structurally. It started with a weird metaphor about how the battle against the hypersexualized modern world is just like the Battle of Gettysburg, espoused by a man standing at Gettysburg. Then there was an overarching plot about a kid whose friend gives him the URL of a porn site and then invites him over to his house for . . . group porn watching? We think. Either that or he was coming onto him. And either way, that's totally unrealistic. Group porn watching among men is only really acceptable if it's so gross you have to show people or if you're in the military, as Adam can attest. Intercut with this semi-coherent plot are testimonies from guys who gave up porn and couldn't be happier as seen on their websites like xxxchurch.com (yes, it's real and not what you're hoping), guys whose lives fell apart entirely because of porn addition (homelessness! prostitution! drugs!), a bunch of Christian rockers talking about the inspiration for the music they wrote for this movie (spoiler: it's Jesus), and an extended football metaphor that we all just made sex jokes about. They also talked about the importance of "starving the sumo" which apparently just means "deflating your sex drive by avoiding sexual materials."
All in all, this was a decent descent into the early 2000s PSA aesthetic but a poor excuse for a movie. The study guides were a silly little addition full of repetative questions, gendered nonsense, and references to Bible verses that we had fun shouting out the answers to. Our answers were mostly, "Masturbate." In conclusion, Sarah, who is a registered nurse, wants you to know that there are many medical benefits of masturbation. Perhaps the people who promote things like this should realize that starving the sumo might just make the sumo so hungry that it will eat absolutely anything.
BMN Quotes:
[while reading hatemail on xxxchurch.com]
Adam: "Faith cleansing asshole? Like a holy water enema?"
Kay: "I used to play bass for Holy Water Enema."
[while reading the study guides]
Kay: "Making a covenent with your eyes? A bukake covenent?"
Adam: I used to play bass for Bukake Covenent."
Spoon Rating: 6
It has been mentioned before that the majority of the Bad Movie Night crew consists of millenials: born in the late 80s, once 90s kids, and now sad 20-somethings. As such, we are amused by anything that is a movie time capsule of the 90s; anything that was completely topical when it was made but is now a hilarious product of its time. Enter "The Skateboard Kid," a movie whose title alone places it right where we were expecting. I took so many notes on this movie that I decided to just make some of them into a 90s Bingo game rather than comment on every little silly 90s thing that happens in the film. 
