Howling II: Your Sister Is A Werewolf [1985]

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

"Howling II? Do we need to see Howling I?"

"I think it's like Troll II."

"But this one is specifically good?"

"This one is infamous apparently."

Werewolf movies are rarer than vampire movies but this movie did manage to get their hands on a vampire in the form of Christopher Lee. He's an occult specialist who attends the funeral for some guy's sister and very cryptically tells him that his sister is a werewolf and gives him his card. The brother and a coworker of the dead girl go to his creepy house where he explains the plot: there's a werewolf girl who is going to visit a werewolf queen and we have to kill them all. They go to "Transylvania" where the werewolf queen, Stirba, is having black masses and orgies. Lee assembles his red shirt army, the brother and the coworker start boning, and there's a delightful festival in the small town of "full of wolves." Ultimately evil is defeated and Lee and Stirba burn together because apparently they're siblings. The title really doesn't lie. TWO sisters were werewolves.

What makes this movie a worthy watch is hard to capture in a plot summary. There are a lot of lines and acting moments that imply that second takes weren't really an element of this film. The special effects are horrifying to look at, but this is at least partially the result of the movie being made in the 80s. Still, the choice to put the actors in suits that just look like regular human hair grown out as opposed to fur suits gives the werewolf sex an especially unnerving quality. There's unnecessary nudity, plot points that are explained after the fact, and the same rock song played on at least seven occasions including at the very end while edited with scenes from the film (and specifically a shot of Stirba ripping off her clothes at least 18 times). The fact that all of this is juxtaposed with Christopher Lee's gravitas and actual acting ability, makes it even better.

Spoon Rating: 5.5

The Crow: Wicked Prayer [2005]

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

It's been a while. In the last few weeks Kay has been on a road trip around the American west (occasionally seeing bad movie landmarks like Guerrero Street in San Francisco where there's supposedly a hospital and the salt flats in Utah where Gerry killed Gerry), Sarah has been working every Monday night, and Grandma has been unable to attend. Therefore Bad Movie Night has been mostly Adam and Keith sitting around talking and occasionally watching good movies. But we're back and still trying to test Adam's theory about amusement being derived from the fifth installment of a series. "Twilight" 5 was fairly successful so we figured we'd try "The Crow: Wicked Prayer." We're all fans of the original "Crow" movie, which is neither good nor bad but highly enjoyable, but it was clearly a great premise and aesthetic for a future bad sequel. This movie also has the strangest cast since "Johnny Mnemonic" starring Edward Furlong, Tara Reid, David Boreanaz, Danny Trejo, and Dennis Hopper.

The plot is truthfully kind of confusing, and we didn't have Sarah to help us. Everyone wants some sort of revenge. There's a larger conflict between a Native reservation (of the Raven Aztec tribe, which is the fakest name) that wants to build a casino on their lands and mine workers who are having their mine shut down. But this is kind of just a backdrop for the story of Edward Furlong's character who is going to propose to his girlfriend, a tribe member, which is controversial for the tribe because he was sent to jail for inadvertantly killing a tribe member who had attacked his girlfriend. Regardless, they are both killed by this tiny Satan worshipping group named after the four horseman of the apocalypse (plus Tara Reid) as part of a ritual meant to bring about the devil in the body of the guy who calls himself Death. Per "Crow" tradition, Edward is brought back to life to get revenge on the Satan group who are going around getting revenge on other people they hate. It's kind of a mess but ultimately he gets his revenge and seems to meet up with his girilfriend in the afterlife.

This movie was pretty solid. Aside from the incoherent plot, it was very high on the overacting that becomes comedic rating. David Boreanaz gets incredibly silly after becoming the devil, Tara Reid is always comically out of place, and Danny Trejo never puts down a Bible throughout the film, but the real standout is, expectedly, Dennis Hopper who plays a pimp and the clergy who officiates the wedding between Boreanaz and Reid's characters. The movie is kind of worth watching just for that.

Spoon Rating: 5

The Adventures Of Chris Fable [2010]

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

I need you to look at the poster for this movie to understand why it was our choice for the night. That is a set up for a "Harry Potter" rip off based on the font or at minimum some for of "Lord of the Rings" influenced fantasy. We were wrong. Right in the beginning, with so much shaky cam we all felt like we needed some dramamine, it said that the plot was based off of John Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," which is a Christian allegory Everyman adventure from 1687. The basis lends itself pretty well to a dystopian story, which appears to be the setting, but overall it wasn't quite weird enough to be really worth the time.

Chris (changed from Christian) wanders into a church one day and meets Evangeline, a woman who introduces him to the concept of books and later teaches him how to read. There is one book in particular that is specal (guess which one). Evangeline finds out that Chris is estranged from his fisherman father and encourages him to leave the City of Destruction where they live to go to the Celestial City. Along the way he loses a friend named Duck to a swampy bog with a monster in it, meets up with a girl named Faith and later saves a girl named Hope, learns the art of the blade from a cowboy named Grant, fights off bugs that rival the "Birdemic" birds in quality, and hangs out in Satan's (Luc's) pleasure house before realizing it's all an illusion and fighting off his mech with his slingshot a la David and Goliath. In the end he gets pulled out of the water by a fishing net so we assume he achieved his goal of finding his father, but it's not really clear. The dad narrative was pretty superfluous. Why doesn't he just want to get to the Celestial City because the world is crap? They should have spent a bit more time fleshing out their universe instead of wandering around a national park.

Either way, it's not exciting enough to be an adventure, not bad enough to be especially funny, and only a mediocre adaption of the source material anyway. Allegory unclear: Luc's fun house seems fun. What is truth anyway?

Spoon Rating: 3

The Karate Dog [2005]

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

I mean, the title says it all, doesn't it? I don't even think I really need to write a review for this one. You can just let your imagination bring you to the world of "Karate Dog" and it will probably be better than actually watching the film.

Basically, Pat Morita has a talking dog he taught martial arts too, Morita gets killed by assassins, the dog is taken in by an idiot detective, the mystery of why Morita was killed is uncovered and has to do with a dog racing business run by Morita's former student Jon Voight, who uses an inability to remember his lines as some kind of vocal affect. Chevy Chase does the voice of the dog, and he wants you to know he's just here for a paycheck. There's a lot of really bad CGI of the dog fighting or even just standing on his hind legs (I guess the film didn't know that some dogs can be taught to do that). I think this movie was written in 20 minutes. The only really funny part was when they did a "Mission Impossible" parody that involved the dog putting an ID into a machine and a human hand covered in a fur sleeve emerged from the bottom of the screen.

That's it. Skip this one.

Spoon Rating: 2

REWATCH: The Amazing Bulk [2012]

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

We went way back to the beginning for this one. This film, "The Amazing Bulk," was the 18th movie we watched at movie night; when we first watched it, it was a new film. Although we have referenced it on occasion over the years, we have never rewatched it, probably because it was so many years ago that we usually found something more recent to rewatch first. 

But this movie is a triumph of bad CGI. Adam suspected that they were going for a "Sin City" kind of thing that just doesn't pan out when a lot of your sets are made in MS paint. Delightfully, whenever someone is sitting in a car, you can see the couch they are sitting on in the background as if it's meant to be the seat. At the end, there's an extended sequence of the Bulk running through the country and encountering every bizarre animal or thing they managed to acquire from the CGI team. Oh, and the running is hilarious, both of the Bulk himself and the humans. The acting is bad too but mostly not in the funny way, with the exception of these two cops who have seen many serious cop movies and want you to know that. The plot is of little consequence: it involves a scientist who looks like a member of a mediocre early 2000s rock band, injecting himself with a superhuman serum that turns him into the bulk. He ends up stopping a crazy German guy who wants to blow up the moon. That's about it. 

The thing to know about this movie is that it is fun and pretty short at only an hour and 15 minutes, but should you rewatch it, you should wait a while in between viewings. There's mostly only one joke (the bad CGI). It's a fantastic joke, but you need time for your brain to forget just how bad it was.

Spoon Rating: 7.5

Reefer Madness [1936] & A Witch's Spiritual Hoedown

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

We have been talking about watching this one for a while, but it kept getting pushed back for other things. Keith was the primary influence on watching this one, but Kay had seen the musical movie and wanted to see the original. 

The plot is basically that a bunch of people get high and experience effects that are nothing like pot and actually range from caffeine to cocaine and meth. There are three kids, Mary Lane and her brother Jimmy and Ralph, and they get involved in the reefer through Jack, a drug dealer who seems specifically interested in targeting kids. Jimmy takes what he thinks is a regular cigarette and it causes him to drive like a maniac and nearly kill an old man crossing the street. Curiously, none of the kids seem to realize they aren't smoking cigarettes in spite of the obvious difference in smell. During an altercation at Jack's pot den, Mary Lane gets shot and Ralph is framed. The actual murderer was Bill, a guy who just seems to live in Jack's house and it's not long before Bill also kills Jack. Blanche, Jack's girlfriend, is overcome with guilt and jumps out a window. Ralph is set free, and we are again warned about the dangers of the wacky tobaccy.

Overall, it was about as enjoyable as most propaganda films that we have watched. It was really lacking a voice-over, but it did have a fear-mongering school principal who can break the fourth wall. 

Spoon Rating: 5

After the film we had a brief musical interlude of the theme song of "Reefer Madness: The Musical" and then we watched a video on Occult Demon Cassette called "A Witch's Spiritual Hoedown." Unfortunately, the title was misleading and it wasn't about witches, or even hoedowns, at all. It was a video of a church service that lasted 22 minutes but had only three never-ending songs. There were a lot of mullets and a variety of white-worship dancing. We all got varying degrees of amusement from it, but agreed to never watch it again. 

Step Up: All In [2014]

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

Our original intentions were to watch the first Ugandan action movie "Who Killed Captain Alex" but we couldn't find the movie without a joke commentary, and while it was amusing, we wanted to appreciate it on its own and make our own jokes. Regrettably, this meant we also had to forsake our other movie we were going to watch "A Witch's Spiritual Hoedown" because the new movie we picked was almost two hours long. "Step Up: All In" is the fifth film in the franchise but appears to be a stand alone film nonetheless. Kay and Sarah had both seen the first "Step Up" with basically no memory of it outside of the fact that it was at least a little bit better than this mess.

This movie is mostly dancing, and that's the nicest thing one could say about the plot. A man with a very punchable face has his whole dance crew break up with him so he decides to get a new crew to audition for a show called "The Vortex" where the winners will get a three year Vegas show contract (what show has three year contracts!?). His crew consists of an engineer friend who very stupidly leaves his job and nearly ruins his relationship with his girlfriend in a shoehorned in plot point, a fashion shoot seamstress whose dance career ended previously with a broken knee, and a bunch of other people whose personalities are defined solely by their clothes and accents (Australian girl with queer vibe, Asian girl, twins, robot dancing guy, vaguely effeminate dance instructor guy, etc.). They make an unrealistically budgeted audition video and then go to Las Vegas for the show where they find themselves competing against The Mob, main character's old crew, and the Grim Knights, a crew they lost a dance battle to in a club early on in the movie. They have practice montages, but none of the montages seem to be of actual dances that they did later in the movie. It comes down to Grim Knights and LMNTRIX (our heroes) and they learn that the show is rigged in favor of the Knights. The Mob joins LMNTRIX to make a super crew and on the day of their final performance, main character gives a heartfelt speech beforehand to win over the audience. LMNTRIX wins in spite of the thing being rigged, which makes no sense, and all the characters with "I don't like you" tension make out.

This movie's script should not have been more than 20 pages. The plot is so thin, no characters seem to exist as people, and about 3/4 of the film is dance sequences. In that regard, if you like watching hip-hop dance routines, this movie's probably bogged down by plot. It definitely wasn't amusing enough to watch otherwise.

Spoon Rating: 2.5