Jamie
There are a few films that will forever be linked in my mind with the beginning of BMT. Films that seem to come up every once in a while as an option but somehow never get picked. Always the BMTsmaid and never the BMT. The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas is one of those. It’s abundantly clear why that is. Viva Rock Vegas doesn’t feel like a BMT qualifying film. It feels like it should have been shuttled to video release. It has Stephen Baldwin as Barney. It is a prequel about Fred meeting Wilma. It sounds horrible. It’s also a kids movie so for large swaths of BMT history it would have essentially been barred (by what is basically the Dudley Do-Right Rule). Anyway, we’ve slowly been working through these classic BMT forever films. The Loft was one of them (what a joy). So was The Darkest Hour (the other one). One that still remains is Push from 2009… a movie no one remembered and yet I can never forget.
To recap, Fred and Barney are young. Betty and Wilma are young, too. Fun! Wilma is tired of her controlling rich mom and runs away to bedrock where she befriends Betty. Soon they are serving up food to the young, hungry bachelors Fred and Barney. Barney is into Wilma and Fred is into Betty (wha-wha-wha?) but after a date at the amusement park things are sorted how we expect (phew). After meeting Wilma’s disapproving mother and the man she wishes Wilma would marry, Chip, Fred chickens out of proposing. But Wilma’s dad is just happy Wilma is happy and gives her an expensive pearl necklace. Chip apologizes for being rude and invites them out to his casino in Rock Vegas. Fred sees it as an opportunity to gamble his way to a fortune Wilma could be proud of. Chip sees it as a way to get Fred to lose a bunch of money so he can get Wilma back and pay off the mob with her fortune. The plan works pretty much perfectly. The only thing Chip didn’t plan on was The Great Gazoo. Did I not mention him? He’s a green alien that follows Fred and Barney around and helps them (sort of). After Fred and Barney are framed for stealing the necklace from Wilma (and lose their gals in the process) Gazoo lets them in on Chip’s scheme. They escape and ultimately profess their love for their gals and Wilma is like “get out of here Chip,” and smooches Fred… hard. THE END.
Somehow Fred is the weak link of a film that features Stephen Baldwin. In fact I found almost all the casting to be totally confounding, which again speaks to the straight-to-video nature of this film. The only people coming out OK are Krakowski and somehow Alan Cumming as Gazoo and that’s only because that entire storyline appears to have time travelled from the future of Adult Swim and directly into this film. It’s so insane that I respect whoever had the keys to the car on this guy being like “fuck it, keep on doing whatever that is.” All that being said, I found this movie to be more weird than necessarily bad. It ended up being a B version of the first film rather than the Z version I was expecting. But boy, everyone seems to make the craziest plot choices when confronted with the tall order of making a live action Flintstones film.
Hot Take Clam Bake! Where’s Gazoo go? It’s the question that’s on everyone’s mind after watching the two Flintstones films back-to-back. Here he is helping foil the dastardly plot. Where was he later on when Fred was dealing with Cliff? You might be thinking “he’s an alien, he probably went home.” You’d be wrong. He ain’t no alien. Gazoo is a friend, first and foremost. That’s why I suspect foul play. So who killed Gazoo? I suspect Fred. Then again he’s always getting framed for crimes like this so it’s perhaps a Chip or Cliff type character we have yet to meet. Crag… is Crag a character from the show? Probably. Hot Take Temperature: Mick Jagged
Patrick?
Patrick
‘Ello everyone! *gif of me sliding down a dinosaur’s back, slipping off, and slamming face first directly into a huge pile of dinosaur shit* Let’s go!
Oh boy … I mean, the good, I think both of the lead women are quite good, especially Jane Krakowski who is like … it is a little overboard how attractive she is as Betty, but that isn’t here nor there (I insist, it is neither here nor there!). Stephen Baldwin is kind of okay as well, although it is very distracting to see Stephen Baldwin in a movie like this.
The bad is literally everything else. It all looks much worse, Fred is much worse, the story is all over the place, Gazoo is an insane addition to the storyline, and Rock Vegas is a shockingly small piece to the entire film. It is worse in every way, and in most cases it is much much worse.
The movie I think is just on the wrong side of sad and bad to be BMT. It is a lunatic film, that’s for sure. Gazoo is basically tacked onto a not-Flintstones story. But it is just too boring to work. Nothing super memorable about it in the end.
A long time ago I thought to myself: I wonder if I can figure out the colors featured on a poster in a consistent way. The answer was, in many ways, no. I am a little too perfectionist to allow some of the odd edge cases to survive in what would have been a huge uneditable blob of data. With AI though … well, with AI it is pretty difficult to generate a huge blob of data without spending a ton. But at least I can blame the AI when it gets shit wrong. I asked for the top three colors, the primary color, and two featured colors on the IMDb poster. The response was:
Primary Color: #23277C (Dark blue)
Featured Color: #EF4138 (Red)
Featured Color: #F58903 (Orange)
Kind of nails it. The blue is the sky, which is basically the background. The red is the car. And the orange is Dunes, Sands, the other hotel, and Fred’s shirt roughly. In a way the analysis is just like: this poster is ugly. Now, would I agree that this is a “blue” poster? No. I don’t think so. Unfortunately the AI mostly defaults to a majority rule and can’t emulate “Patrick’s Brain” level of intellect in determining that this poster is, in fact, multi-colored. Too bad.
I’m making up a Completely Ridiculous Side Character (Who?) for the Great Gazoo who is mainly in this movie for no reason whatsoever. Again a great Promotional Tie-In (What?) for a direct Burger King toy tie-in complete with Bronto King burger joint features in the movie. This is an A+ Fictional Setting as a Character (Where?) for Rock Vegas. This movie is genuinely bad and quite sad because both of the main actors just pale in comparison to the 1994 original, which is too bad.
Read all about long awaited sequels (maybe?) in the quiz. Cheerios,
The Sklogs
Bad Movie Twins 