REWATCH: How To Get Revenge [1989] & Shorts

We had a simple night of learning how to get revenge and watching through some of Adam's bad movie shorts playlist that's mostly commercials.You can find his playlist here.

The Snowman [2017]

 This film was an odd one. It's based off a very popular book by Norwegian author Jo Nesbo, directed by the Swedish guy who did Let The Right One In, and is starring a bunch of famous people including Michael Fassbender, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and a post-throat cancer Val Kilmer. Especially after the popularity of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, this seems like it was set up to be successful. So what went wrong?

The plot of this film is honestly kind of hard to parse. Each scene of the film basically drops you into some kind of action with very little to add texture to what's happening and for the first hour, we weren't completely sure about the timeline of events or who was significant to who. By the end, some plots had seemingly been totally dropped. Apparently 10% of the film never even got shot due to filming schedules so that's clearly a factor. That being said, we also figured out who the murderer was an hour in with no struggle in spite of the fact that we barely knew what was going on. It went like this:
Adam: So, the murderer is killing women who don't necessarily know who their children's fathers are, but he is also killing women who are pregnant by someone and maybe seeking an abortion. The only people who might know about the pregnancy are their boyfriends or...
Sarah: Doctors. The murderer has to be a doctor. It's the only way the murderer could have all the information to attack these women specifically.
Kay: It's the mom's boyfriend. 
Adam: Isn't he a plastic surgeon?
Kay: Shared office.
Sarah: Yeah, they mentioned that information is accessible to all doctors in the same office.
It's a major failure for your movie to be both incoherent and obvious. And, as you may also be thinking from reading our breakdown, this murderer's motivation makes no sense. Why isn't he killing deadbeat dads? They try to explain this in the first scene when we see a boy finding out his dad is his asshole tutor and then his mom kills herself by driving her car onto the ice and letting herself sink. Sure. Makes sense. 

So was there any fun here? A little. The murderer's calling card is to build a snowman at the scene of the crime and while they were probably supposed to be scary, they were kind of cute and the juxtaposition of the snowmen with the scary music is delightful. There was also some amusement to be had with the son's acting, which was honestly really bad, especially compared with all the seasoned actors in this. We also tried not to think too much about how the main detective's name is Harry Hole (pronounced very differently in Norwegian) and everyone in Norway is British. The book seems like it's probably a decent read, but this is adaption hell.

Spoon Rating: 2

I Believe In Santa [2022]

This movie was coconuts. It was mentioned to me by my friend Caroline who heard about it through her own means and asked if I knew about it being a bad movie person. All the information she gave beforehand amounted to, "It's a romantic comedy movie about a guy who genuinely believes that Santa is real." She also mentioned an article about the 22 most unhinged things in the film that I also recommend reading but only after you've experienced the film for yourself. And you should. Because it must be seen to be believed.

Our main character is Lisa, a crazy-eyed, Rachel Hollis knockoff, who writes about holidays or something for some online publisher and has an eight-year-old daughter and sir-not-appearing-in-this-film ex. After writing an article toting July 4th as "the best holiday, god bless America" she meets our other main, Tom, at a fair. Tom, wearing too many vests and looking like a 20-years-older, knockoff Ben Platt, is apparently the perfect man in spite of that fact that he really doesn't feel straight even when juxtaposed with his actually gay friend, Assan. However, the red flags appear when Lisa goes to his apartment for Christmas to find it decorated to the nines, creepy automation Santa included. Lisa hates Christmas because of honestly dumb childhood trauma reasons that she reveals at the start of act three so this isn't good. Either way, she decides to go with it and has a lot of eye-bugging performances of Christmas activities, which he has scheduled every single day. Then the other shoe drops: he genuinely believes in Santa. This is made even weirder in that this is dropped during a dinner party with their best friends and everyone particularly felt for Lisa's friend, Sharon, who really hopes he's kidding. But he triples down on this. Instead of losing all attraction to him and breaking up with him, Sharon does suggest Lisa stay with him for the story, which honestly I get. Somehow though, this turns into Lisa just accepting this eccentricity and deciding the answer to to meet him halfway, which really just means giving in. It ends in a ski lodge proposal and a "I asked mall Santa for you two to get married" from the daughter. 

The overall premise of this movie is obviously the strangest thing. We immediately wondered if Santa is just an allegory for God, and it feels like that could be the case. However, the movie also really clearly showcases all the reasons one shouldn't believe in god with seemingly no awareness. Also, as Adam pointed out, if you actually believed these things about Santa, wouldn't he just become your god? There's also the detail of "god bless America" in the beginning, and this other strange moment where Lisa and Assan hang out and Assan mentions that he's Muslim and draws some kind of parallel between his friend's insane beliefs and racism. By the way, this movie was written by the (white) guy playing Tom and the woman playing Lisa is his wife in real life, and he has written other rom-coms. 

Aside from that, this movie is full of other awkward, strangely shot, and strangely acted moments. We got almost as many laughs as we got slack-jawed moments. It's definitely worth a watch at Christmas. Or hell, any time really. Santa is an omniscient presence after all, and it's best we all bow down before his altar.

Spoon Rating: 5

Little Hercules In 3D [2009]

This film has been sitting on top of our "roll the dice" stack of films for a while. At one point, we actually got it but upon realizing it was actually in 3D, we decided to wait and get some glasses. They didn't help. Aside from all of us just hating 3D in general on a scale of "it's unnecessary" to "oh god, the headaches" the film could basically be watched entirely without the glasses, which really only serve to make it darker and off-color. And honestly, no gimmick was going to help this movie.

The film stars a kid who was actually known as Little Hercules back in the day for being a kid who started strength training very young. This kid, and no one else really, but especially this kid, can't act. There are some known people in this movie, particularly Hulk Hogan as Zeus, but the film seems to have been made on a budget of a few sticks of gum. The plot is that Hercules gets tricked into going down to Earth by Hera where he now has to go to school in Burbank and be normal. He makes friends with a kid known for bringing home strays, joins the track and field team, falls for the first girl he sees, and gets bullied by guys who look like college kids with "punk" styling. It's very boring. There's some sort of conflict with the king of Babylon where he and Zeus are enemies so the king becomes a couch at the school? Also, seemingly Babylonian mythology exists alongside Greek? Oh, and the school is shutting down. No explanation why but they imply that it's because they such at sports, which shows a really fundamental lack of understanding how schools work at all. Either way, Herc wins the meet and decides to become human like an idiotic 12-year-old would.

There are some laughs to be had with the bad acting, the bad camera work (and the zooms and freezes), and the pathetic attempts at 3D gimmicks but ultimately you could waste your time on much better mythology based movies.

Spoon Rating: 2

Boobah [2003] & From Hell It Came [1957]

 Last week we started with a nightmare of a children' show from Erik's younger sister's childhood called Boobah. The plot, as far as we could tell, was about these colorful, farting aliens who are trying to make sense of earth by creating little scenarios starring characters like Mr. Man, Mrs. Lady, Auntie, Grandmama, Brother, and Sister. In this installment, the humans played jump rope in wild rapture. The whole thing gave us Teletubbies vibes, which turned out to be dead on as the show was created by the same people who made Teletubbies. We were also baffled to learn that the show is meant to be an exercise show for toddlers and not just nightmare fuel for anyone over four. 

All in all, it was a wild experience that we recommend. Drugs might help (or they might induce a panic attack) but even without them we had a good time.

Spoon Rating: 6

After that, we watched a short, old horror film called From Hell It Came about a tribe in the Pacific islands burying a guy as a punishment for a crime only for him to come back as a tree monster. It was pretty boring at first, just following the white scientists there and one misogynist in particular who wants the female scientist to quit sciencing so she can be a good housewife, but once we got the tree monster and his rubbery costume, we were delighted. It wasn't really worth the wait, but at least we got something for our troubles.

Spoon Rating: 3

The National Tree [2009]

This movie was selected purely on the fact that the premise is so incredibly strange and, honestly, dumb that we decided it had to be watched. Here we have a bona fide Hallmark film about a "seventeen year old" kid who enters a contest to have his tree evaluated to be the new "national tree" after the old one was struck by lighting. What this means is that the tree his parents planted for him when he was born will be uprooted and replanted on the White House lawn. Why does this matter at all? Mostly for dead mom and father-son bonding reasons. 

The son, named Rock because a rock needed to be moved for this tree to be planted, is a vlogger on the most 2002 website possible where he's got a few international friends and an online girlfriend. After winning the contest, his curmudgeon dad decides they should take the tree himself, being really salty about the removal of the tree in general but never actually expressing his feelings to his son. They are traveling with a woman connected to a toy company sponsoring the move, who has an sir-not-appearing-in-this-film fiance and totally isn't going to be set up with the dad by the end of the film. On the cross country travel they encounter tens of people excited about the tree because I guess not much happens in those towns at all, the son maneuvers the tree through a fire, they meet up with grandma, and they meet up with the son's online girlfriend who stows away with the tree and nearly freezes to death. Once they finally make it to DC, they get the bad news: the tree is going to be cut and put in a stand, not planted. The son is ambivalent but the dad is shook by his callousness. The son has a turn around and cuffs himself to the tree, riling up the crowd, and the tree is planted.

This movie is pretty wild. The acting is funny, both from the clearly 25-year-old son trying to act childish and the dad who is just mad about everything. There are some strange camera moments to punctuate this. And again, the premise itself is so weird that it frequently becomes comical how important this tree is. Sarah asked a good question at one point: Who is this movie for? It's light on the romance and even light on the Christmas cheer and nationalism given the premise. It seems like the target audience might just be old people who want clean entertainment and who want to live in a simple time where a guy carting a tree across the US is actually worthwhile news. We wouldn't watch it again, but it was definitely worth the one time.

Spoon Rating: 5

Falling For Christmas [2022]

This post is late due to internet issues, but although this movie has been talked about a lot, there isn't really that much to say. This movie isn't even the one that comes up when you Google Image search Falling for Christmas because apparently another movie was made with that name in 2016. Sarah quickly identified the movie as a remake of Overboard, a movie no one else had seen, and it's also another of those movies that was made by Netflix but is for all intents and purposes a Hallmark movie. The main reason this movie is talked about is because it's being heralded as Lindsay Lohan's return to film.

The film is about a hotel heiress who gets amnesia after falling off a ski slope. She gets taken in by the widowed owner of a failing, rival ski lodge and learns how to do chores and fall in love. She gets her memory back and ends up moving in with the lodge owner and becoming a stepmom to his plucky daughter. That's functionally the whole film. There's a bit of a side story with her "comic relief" fiance who also got lost in the woods, and he seemingly has a happy ending too when he realizes that he's gay or bi but it's presented somewhat subtly because "Hallmark." I guess that's progress.

The film doesn't have many laugh moments. There are a lot of cliches, a random old guy who's the Santa stand-in, and very little reason for these two to fall in love. Mainly it's interesting to watch the uncanny valley of Lohan's face. After a lot of drugs and plastic surgery, she doesn't look quite how she should. She's only 36 and when her face isn't moving, she looks like a normal 36-year-old with some lip filler. The second she has an expression though, there's just something off about her. This isn't meant to be a criticism, clearly she's had a rough time, but the byproduct of this as an actor is really interesting since she has to make faces for her job. 

Overall, you probably shouldn't bother with this film; if you really like this kind of movie, there are funnier ones out there.

Spoon Rating: 2.5