2025 - The World Enslaved By A Virus [2021]

The pandemic really changed a lot. It had a profound effect on people's mental health, it is probably tied to the current inflation issues, kids are educationally behind. There's a lot of bad that came from it. But you know what didn't come from it? A global communist state that persecutes Christians. But it could, right? This movie bravely posits that theory with a very short timeline for it to come true. Only two years remaining for that particular dystopia. We better get to work.

The film follows a German guy and his sister who have been hiding out in a bunker after the current overhaul of the world has made them unsafe as Christians. They decide one day to stop hiding and start trying to spread the word by just spray painting fish everywhere. A former US marine finds them and joins their club. The crew is rounded out by "Holly and I'm here to help" a gothy hacker girl who is initially only on their side because she's all about freedom of choice but then gets converted and they gift her with a goth cross necklace. Meanwhile the German guy starts up a romance with a girl on the inside and there are a bunch of scenes of militarized cops talking about how they have to bring these people down. Really, there's just a lot of musical montages and not a lot in the way of forward moving plot. The whole thing has a frame narrative that makes it seem like the story is being told by the German guy to a cop who arrested him. The film ends with a women who is doubting her position in the government being told to kill him in the woods and the screen going to credits. I think we are supposed to assume she saved him.

This film definitely has some moments. The acting is really bad and while I think it would be easy tor blame that on the fact that a lot of the actors are German and speaking English, they aren't great in the German parts either. This movie was made by like twenty people all doing double duty and probably all from the same church. The premise itself is ridiculous and that leads to a lot of over-the-top moments but the film does drag quite a bit with its minimal plot.

Spoon Rating: 3.5

The Corpse Grinders [1971]

After having to tell Adam that we literally already watched Run Like Hell a month ago (yes, that's how unmemorable it was), we turned to this film, The Corpse Grinders, not a black metal band and really not very metal at all.

The plot is very simple: a cat food company is paying a gravedigger with a mentally ill wife and some really weird morticians as part of a scheme to get dead bodies that can be ground up for cat food. The gravedigger provides the bodies and the morticians embalm them with some kind of pork-flavored fluid to make them extra tasty. This cat food is causing cats everywhere to go crazy and murder their humans since they now know the joys of the manflesh. There's a doctor and nurse duo who figure this out and try to stop them. 

At only an hour and 15 minutes this movie is just the right length to not be too long and to not feel too long. It's not painful, it's just simplistic. Technically it's fairly competent and the acting is kind of bad in a somewhat funny but not overly hilarious way. It's not a bad experience, but it's not one I would insist on.

Spoon Rating: 3

They Saved Hitler's Brain [1968]

This film wasn't really the plan for the evening, but our actual plans were thwarted by the cruel fates. Let me tell you the tale. In a small neighborhood of a nearby small city there once dwelled a shop called Movie Town, a shop right out of the bygone era of the 1990s. I last went sometime around 2016 and was startled to find that it had a plentiful stock of used VHS tapes and a corner curtained off to conceal porn, both DVD and VHS. Not a Bluray to be found in this forgotten land. We got some really bad VHS movies there and were pretty darn certain it was a drug front. How else could it stay in business in the 2010s? Alas, it could not survive into the 2020s when so many more worthy businesses have failed and the spot is now vacant but with its handmade-looking sign still up and a printed out sign on the door saying that it is merely closed for renovations. I'll believe it when I see it. So instead of some bespoke masterpiece selected from this anachronistic shop, we picked this film from a 50 pack of horror movies because the title was funny. Trust me when I say my Movie Town diatribe is a better story than this one.

For the first half hour or so we were genuinely convinced we were watching the wrong film. The plot seemed to be about some kind of dangerous nerve gas and the kidnapping of a scientist who made an antidote for it. Eventually we get to the fact that Hitler's brain (whole head actually) was preserved and brought down to the Caribbean nation of Mandoras, feeding into that whole "Hitler's hiding somewhere in South America" conspiracy that was once popular. Some other scientist and his impressively stupid wife go there and get kidnapped by some Nazis, who want to nerve gas the whole island for some reason. It's wildly boring.

There were a few laughs to be had but it took a very long time to get there. The image of Hitler's head in a jar that is extremely Futurama? Fun. The dumb wife asking what happened after literally watching the man next to her get shot in a drive by? Delightful. The door opening to show the Nazis standing on an upper stair so their heads are cut off? Perfectly incompetent. But the rest of the film sucked. Maybe we should have watched Vampire Night Orgy instead. I blame Movie Town.

Spoon Rating: 2

The Octagon [1980]

This is a big moment. For a long time we have been working through a stack of movies that were acquired from the Book Barn so that we could assess their potential, and we have finally come to the last one. This Chuck Norris film may be the origin of the fighting stadium of the title name but unfortunately this movie didn't involve any folding chairs. Honestly, it barely involved any fighting. Or plot. It did have some really standout insane lines but at what cost?

The basic premise is that Chuck Norris at one point was trained as a ninja by his dad and alongside his brother. His brother got disowned and that brother went on to create a ninja mercenary training school while Chuck went on to live a normal life. The first thirty minutes of the movie are a series of seemingly unrelated scenes of ninja training at the school, Chuck going on a date who gets killed by ninjas later, a rich dude getting shot up, a younger rich lady asking Chuck to help her with her car, Chuck's friend fighting a sailor guy, etc. Somehow this all culminates in Chuck needing to fight his brother in the octagon at his training school. That's the last five minutes of the movie more or less and the journey to get there is long. At one point Adam and Sarah's daughter Jade leaned on the remote and fast forwarded a bit and we decided to just go with it.

The unfortunate thing is that this movie actually has some really hilarious lines. The screenwriter made some bold attempts at philosophical that do not work at all including the wonderful, "why are the peanuts always at the other end of the bar?" You could probably make a great two minute supercut. However, it's not actually worth it to subject yourself to the whole film just for the few bits.

Spoon Rating: 3

REWATCH: The Room [2003]

As is often something of an initiation for the uninformed, we decided that it was necessary to do a rewatch of the classic The Room as we had a guest tonight. Well versed in the sci-fi channel's attempts at film making but woefully inexperienced when it comes to the paragons of the genre, Scott came to movie night with skepticism but an open mind. It did take a while to try to convince him we weren't watching a porno and even then we weren't entirely successful. Fair. 

Every time we watch this film, it seems to take even longer because of how often we have to pause it. This time it was slightly less because of diverging conversation and more because of the arrival of Adam and Sarah's daughter, Jade, who really stole the show with an intermission performance of causing herself to throw up in a desperate effort to eat more bread and then slipping on her own vomit. 

Either way, this time the sub conversation did keep coming back to the idea that a polycule really would have solved all the issues of the film. And it would still fully support what seems to be one of the attempted themes: if everyone in the world loved each other, the world would be a better place. Tommy/Johnny should probably have just taken his own advice here and gotten in on the Mark/Lisa action. Denny would probably be down too.

Also, it was apparently decided that Kay is Adam and Sarah's Denny (or like, an actually platonic Mark).

Run Like Hell [1995]

The influence of The Road Warrior on bad movies cannot be overstated and this film is another one of those. However, interestingly, this film also borrows a bit from the third Mad Max movie Beyond Thunderdome and seems almost like it was predicting a bit of the future of franchise with a little bit of a Fury Road vibe. You know, if Fury Road was exploitative, had little world building, and was mostly just a martial arts movie.

In this dystopia all single women are imprisoned. Why? Unclear. It seems to have something to do with a lack of resources, but if overpopulation is the problem shouldn't you be more worried about married women? Either way, these women seem to be only given a thong and makeup while in prison aside from a few lucky ones who get bras and yes, obviously they get abused sometimes by Robert Z'Dar, the most famous person in this. One day four women escape and the film basically follows them wandering through the desert and shooting opponents. There's a couple they encounter with no real explanation. There's a ninja who helps them. There's some fight-to-the-death ring that briefly appears. They fight some android guys. Really it's unclear what the point of any of it is, but there sure is a large cast of people who mostly only get about five minutes of screen time. The film ends on a cliffhanger that Z'Dar is going to go after the escaped women, but we probably wouldn't watch a sequel even if there is one.

This film was okay. The plot was pretty boring, but there were a lot of solid acting moments and general silliness. Adam suggested that Stella Speed from Roller Blade Seven should show up and save them and honestly if the film had even more RBS vibes it would have been a lot better.

Spoon Rating: 3.5

Chain Reaction [1996]

This movie was so boring, oh my god. So boring we can't even give it a spoon rating. It's getting a star rating instead and it's like one star out of five. It's referred to as a "science fiction action thriller" and it's none of these things. It's just Keanu Reeves and Rachel Weisz running around for almost two hours. There's some science that could help the environment. Some people want the people to have it and some don't. They get blamed for trying to leak it. Cue lots of running. 

Don't bother.

Spoon Rating: 1