They Feed [2005]

After two weeks of unremarkable films, we were starting to get a little worried. we've got a stack to get through still and a lot of them don't look promising. This one was immediately mysterious. Who is They? I think we could all guess what they're feeding on at least. We all decided to place beats on the They. Adam and Sarah guessed vampires, Kay guessed zombies, and Erik changed his initial vampire vote to ants pretty quickly. When we saw the DVD menu, we thought vampires was correct, but Erik was actually the closest.

As you can see from the girl on the left, this is very much a mid-2000s movie. The music consisted of two bands the director probably knew, one trying to be Tool and the other trying to be some generic rock band of the era. After an opening of people dying in the woods, we get our main crew. We have pink scarf girl over there who is an over-the-top annoyance, following her more reasonable boyfriend into the woods. They meet up with a couple who are either siblings or platonic friends, and a couple where the guy is a douche who's blackmailing his reasonable girlfriend because he knows she slept with the boss for a job. Quickly the assholes have sex and the reasonables flirt while third wheel guy gets killed by . . . worms. They're consistently wiggling (probably from bad CGI) and have langolier teeth and I love them. We tried very hard to figure out why these people are in the woods and it seems they are out here looking for a crashed plane they never find. Only far later do we get the information that a bunch of them are scientists. Slowly, the worms track down the rest of them leaving the reasonable couple for last. At the presumed climax, the worm chase seen gets intercut with a park ranger wandering around to gentle music and it is the biggest example of delayed gratification ever. The end of the film is actually quite strange. We are taken to a new year's party their (presumable) boss is hosting when he finds out they all died and seems to imply that he planned it. Then, the one girl who was not coupled emerges from a hole in the ground: half girl, half worm. A worm mermaid. Freeze frame.

Overall, this movie is worth a watch. It can drag a bit during the relationship drama stuff but the worms themselves are so good, and there are a lot of beautiful examples of lazy film making. If you had given us a camera in 2005, we probably could have made something at least on this level. 

Spoon Rating: 5

Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation [2004]

Again we did a dice roll (well, Jade did but since she's a month old we just put the D20 in her hand and waited for it to drop) and this time we got Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation. I barely even want to talk about this movie. Sarah ditched to work on her doctoral thesis and when she came in a little later and asked how it was the review was, "It's so bad that we're talking over it and Adam doesn't care." 

We already expected this movie to lack the satire of the original and just get turned into a dumb military movie but after some completely incomprehensible fighting, the movie just follows a bunch of soldiers stuck in a building with some infected by the bugs. It's very horny in a very boring way as everyone slowly gets infected. The pregnant soldier escapes while the big damn hero stays behind and becomes the highlight of recruiting videos. The movie pays vague lip service to the original with some rando saying that the woman's baby will be good for the grinder, but otherwise, this movie doesn't even try to have any meaning. It's just a bad The Thing. 

Don't bother. Just go rewatch the original.

Spoon Rating: 2

Jurassic Attack [2012]

Or maybe it's called Attack of the Dinosaurs? The box said one thing and the menu said another. It doesn't matter. 

This movie is presumably the brainchild of a bunch of guys who liked Jurassic Park, Predator, and the Halo games and it really shows. It's got a cliché plot of a bunch of US soldiers (many with non-US accents) going into the Amazon to rescue a scientist from one of the locals who's trying to stop? get? a bioweapon. They find dinosaurs on the way back as well as a lost scientist who has been living among them for five years and is in full on delusional Grizzly Man mode. It's pretty mercifully short at under an hour and a half but a lot of the scenes just featuring the characters are boring with dialogue not weird or poorly acted enough to be interesting (although we did invent a gay subplot based on the weird tension between the main hero and main villain). The real prize is the dinosaurs which are rendered in horribly cheap CGI and an absolute delight every time. The only other curiosity about the film is how abruptly it ends, but it's not really funny so much as just mildly surprising.

I can't recommend this film just for the CGI though. It's a pass for sure. Interestingly though, for the next 18 weeks unless something else comes up or we do a rewatch as a palette cleanser, we are going to be working through DVDs that Adam and Sarah have just had for years that we haven't gotten to yet. We rolled a D20 for this one so we'll just have to see what we get next week. 

Spoon Rating: 3

REWATCH: Fateful Findings [2013]

Nothing can ever truly top this in terms of Neil Breen's work. It nearly fills the entire Neil Bringo card.

Just go see it.

After you can read my original review.

SPECIAL: Live Freaky! Die Freaky! [2006]

Today was a very important bad movie night for a lot of reasons. The biggest and most obvious reason is because it was the inaugural night for our newest member, Jade, Adam and Sarah's daughter who was just born last Wednesday. At one point in the middle of a sex scene in the film Adam turned to us all and said with a small amount of shame, "This is her first movie." What else would you expect really? On a lesser note, it's a return to bad movie night after a few weeks off due to things like Kay getting covid, Erik having covid scares, and Sarah being just too damn pregnant. Finally, this night is important because we dusted off a personal classic to show Erik and for the rest to experience after a very long time.

"Live Freaky! Die Freaky!" isn't really a bad movie, but it's very hard to call it good. It's weird. Mostly just that. Adam and Kay credit "Blue Velvet" with being the start of our interest in both art house and bad movies because although it's a good movie, it sent us down the path of just "weird movies," which often fall starkly on one end of the line of good and bad. In her freshman year of college, Kay watched our film tonight for the first time after one of her friends mentioned hearing about a movie Davey Havok of AFI was in and they decided to just Netflix it (back when Netflix was a mail service) out of curiosity. They were horrified, amused, watched all the special features to try to make sense of it, and kept singing the songs a few days later. It ended up becoming something inflicted on others to get a laugh and, of course, Adam was one of those people. Even after having not rewatched it in years, one of us quotes it at least once a month.

"Live Freaky! Die Freaky!" is a stop-motioned animated musical about Charlie Manson and the Manson family voiced by famous punk rock stars. Even with that description, I swear it's even weirder than you think. It's a black comedy and a satire to the most extreme degree and has more offensive lines and pornographic clay sex than you would ever want. It's art in the worst way and a landmark event in one's life where you can divide your life smoothly into the before watching and after watching times. When you start it up, there's literally a screen that says, "You have bad taste."

There's not much more I can say about it except that if you think you can handle it, I urge you to watch it. Here are just a few (of many) memorable lines:

• "Now listen to Hex as he will be doing the majority of the killing because that is a man's job. You can have the girly jobs like painting the walls with blood and, if time permits, make some sandwiches!"
• "THE SON OF THE SON OF GOD."
• "Make sure to do something witchy."
• "This neighborhood looks positively middle class. Look at those messes... If you drove me to the valley, I'll stab you to death and rip your baby out of your stomach and fuck it."
• "Yay! I'm fucking a girl! I'm straight now!"
• "I'm snorting for two now."
• "You reek of menopause."
• "Oh, the indignity of being killed by a commoner!"

Rambu, The Intruder [1986]

As another entry into our canon of Indonesian rip-offs, we have The Intruder also known as Rambu. I'm not going to get into the specifics of the plot, mainly because the plot is specifically difficult to follow but trust me when I say its a pretty good one.

Rambu is a guy who didn't finish the police academy and so he mostly goes around beating up bad guys for fun while his girlfriend financially supports him. Then she gets killed (and raped; it's an Indonesian film after all) by some guys Rambu beat up. He quickly ends up in a new romance and she gets kidnapped and he saves her. Throughout the film there is this expectation that Rambu is supposed to get a job with a man called Mr. Andre. We have no idea what he does but it's unsurprising that he is in cohoots with the bad guy drug dealer, Mr. White. The film is set up basically for Rambu to get into fights with guys. 

This movie is pretty solid even though it's incomprehensible. There are a lot of completely random lines, acted poorly, some fighting with a bouncy ball, and overall basically nothing having to do with the Rambo movies it borrows from. Even the more common title, The Intruder, is confusing. Is Rambu the intruder as a white guy in a Pacific island nation? Is Mr. White the bad guy for the same reason but with crime? Who knows? Either way, its worth a watch.

Spoon Rating: 6

New York Ninja [2021; 1984]

In an effort to boost morale, we have had two weeks of solid choices. Last week Kay was not in attendance so there was a rewatch of Neil Breen's Pass Thru. This week is a new one for us and a recently discovered classic overall that has been gaining popularity in bad movie circles. The story behind this film's two release dates is pretty unique. The reels for the film were found even though the film wasn't finished and didn't have any sound. Luckily, the reel told a coherent story and most of the scenes show the actors clearly enough that dubbing wasn't actually difficult so a full film was pieced together in 2021. Initially we were a bit skeptical about how the voice acting might ham up the performances, but they honestly didn't go any further than the actors were already going. The movie also has an amazing surreal vibe to it because it was put together so recently. The film has insanely high definition for something so clearly shot in the 80s, and the music added, while definitely time period appropriate, still put Adam and Kay in the mindset of the soundtrack to Drive and instantly endeared all of us to it even though none of us are specific fans of the 80s.

So what's the plot of this new discovery? The film starts in a pretty standard martial arts film way. The main character (played by the director and writer; another sign of quality) finds out his wife is pregnant and she's immediately killed. In this version of New York, there is a problem with gangs kidnapping women and those gangs get their style tips from Mad Max side characters and A Clockwork Orange (jockstraps). We are briefly introduced to the leader of this crime ring, a man who wears steampunk welder sunglasses and makes excellent facial expressions. The main character decides to get revenge by dressing like a ninja in a pale yellow robe, and occasionally roller skates, and beating up bad guys. At one point he saves a child and adopts him. This is most of the first half of the film with this one notably bizarre scene where Sunglasses opens up a glowing box that seemingly melts his face and hands but he's into it. 

After a "Several Weeks Later" screen, we learn that this man has now been given the name The Plutonium Killer and he apparently can't look into the sun and maybe he needs that radiation to live or something? It's unclear both how he got this way and how his thing works at all. Our main character's character of the New York Ninja has since become a real sensation and people have t-shirts saying "I Love NY Ninja" on them. He can also now defy physics when he fights. Soon a detective lady is kidnapped by the gangs and our main character is on the case. He finds the lair where all the women are being kept and frees them. For reference, we never really learn what the kidnapping was for. We can assume sex slavery or something but we are never told. Ninja has a ridiculous fight with The Killer's driver, a man who somewhat resembles Elijah Wood with a rattail and black tie attire. Then the Killer does some sort of ritual(?) where he is able to take the face of this cameraman he captured to try to convince a reporter to go with him. Either way, he kidnaps the reporter and just drags her around with the Ninja chasing them until the end where the Ninja is able to save the day. Ninja is in the process of getting arrested when a bunch of child fans swarm him and he is able to escape. The film ends with the Ninja hugging the detective lady and breaking the hell out of the fourth wall with a wink and a point.

This film is wild. It's cliché is so many ways, but then it's completely off the wall in others. While the plot mostly makes sense, there are little details that throw you for a loop and are never explained, especially about our main villain. The face acting is over-the-top, the weapons are Party City, and honestly, we can all be grateful this film was saved. Disappointingly, while John Liu, our original director and lead actor, seems to still be alive at 77, I can't seem to find anything about his thoughts on the film. I'd like to think he'd feel his vision was maintained.

Spoon Rating: 8.5