Category: Recap

Rocky V Recap

Jamie

I have never seen Rocky V. When we first started BMT we would avoid watching films we had already seen. But then we’d also not love starting a series in the middle when we haven’t given the BMT treatment to the earlier films in the series. What a conundrum for the Rocky series and Rocky V in general. But now our priorities have been put straight and Rocky V can be brought into the fold. I can finally watch Rocky V. So what did I know about the film going into it? I know E from Entourage is in it. I know that Stallone’s son acted in it and that there’s like a street fight in it. I know what everyone hated it. I know that it came out the same year as The Godfather Part III, which everyone also hated. So I know that 1990 was the year that the dreams of males both young and old were shattered and everything they loved was killed by sequels. I also know that I kind of liked The Godfather Part III… so maybe I’ll like this.

To recap, immediately following the Drago fight, Rocky retires. Good thing, too, because he’s given a diagnosis of brain damage and is told that fighting again may seriously impair him. This would probably be OK, though, since he’s got his family and his son is doing great with everything that he can give him from his boxing winnings. That is until, uh oh! Paulie entrusts Rocky’s wealth to a scammer and they lose everything. Oh Paulie! The only way out of the hole is to fight and a promoter, George Washington Duke, is ready and willing to give him a big payday to fight his fighter, Union Cane. But with the diagnosis he ends up having to sell all his assets and move back to Philly. His son is dismayed to find himself thrust onto the hardscrabble streetz of Philly and begins to be victimized by some bullies. Rocky meanwhile reopens Mick’s Gym and soon catches the eye of Tommy Gunn, a raw boxer from Oklahoma. Rocky eventually takes him under his wing and soon Tommy is working his way through the lower ranks. Despite being neglected, Rocky’s son learns to fight and pushes back against the bullies, eventually falling into the wrong crowd himself. Tommy Gunn also feels a bit neglected as he toils away and falls under the influence of George Washington Duke. Tommy jumps ship for a shot at Union Cane and eventually wins the title. Rocky mends his relationship with his family, while Tommy struggles with the fact that no one respects him for ditching Rocky and not fighting a real champion for the title. Duke pushes Tommy to goad Rocky into a fight and he confronts Rocky at a local bar. Rocky tries to say no, but Tommy punches Paulie. Hey! Paulie may be a total piece of shit, but he’s Rocky’s total piece of shit! They go out in the streetz for a street fight and duke it out. They pummel each other for a while, Rocky seems brain damaged and all that, but eventually grits his way to a win. THE END.

Wow! This movie sucks! Just bad decision after bad decision. First, it’s embarrassing. Every five minutes you cringe. Just very uncool vibes going on in this film. It’s trying to be hip with the change to the soundtrack and streetz attitude, but it’s not. Second, it’s a kids movie. Obviously Stallone didn’t totally want to make a fifth film, but if he was making it he wanted to do this. Part of this was probably because he was a family man and he wanted to act with his son. It’s admirable, but contributes to the uncool, anti-Rocky vibes wafting off this film. Third, I could be OK with the general uncoolness… if the last fight wasn’t so horrible. What in the absolute world were they thinking with the street fight ending? No thank you. Anyway, in an incredible upset I have to say I actually thought Sage Stallone was not bad. Pretty good for a young actor taking on a very big role in a major blockbuster. As for Invisible Maniac, it’s a fun one. I was a little disappointed, but only because I had a high expectation from The Flop House podcast. I was promised a maniac jumping and smashing a head like a pumpkin. That is more implied than anything else. I did enjoy some of the other more risque scenes. Had to put on my glasses for those. Overall it was fun and a good example of the genre, but it had to contend with my own imagination, which is tough.

Hot Take Clam Bake! This entire film continues the dying dream as Rocky falls to the canvas during the fight with Drago. You think it’s a coincidence that Rocky’s son is easily at least five years older upon their return from Russia? Can’t you see that the whole brain damage storyline is his brain telling himself that it’s been damaged? Adrian goes and works in the same pet store as like fifteen years earlier. You think that pet store would still be open? In fact, every movie from here on out is just a continuation of the very long dying dream of his punch-addled brain. Hot Take Temperature: Street fighter turbo.

Patrick?

Patrick

‘Ello everyone! *Gif of me screaming You’re losing everyone! C’mon! during a street fight* Let’s go!

The Good? Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh. Huh. Well, I mean. Huh. Like. I guess I kind of dig the weird way in which Rocky just puts on his old outfit and goes back to the neighborhood and really doesn’t miss a beat in resuming his old poor-as-shit life. That is an interesting (and fairly understandable, given the lives of many heavyweights) trajectory for the character. Definitely led to more interesting stuff in the later films. I’ll give them that.

The Bad? Literally everything else. The bulk of the film is Rocky (genuinely) being a shit father. He straight up ignores his own son and adopts a fighter with daddy issues, and then is like “Duh. Yo, like, Rob, this was a problem for you? Like you didn’t like that?” You can’t really coast past the issues with the Tommy Gun actor, but the worst bit is the character of Duke does play right into the problematic racial overtones of most of the series (even though it is just literally making fun of Don King directly).

The BMT? I would have said no, except right at the end it totally redeems itself! The ending fight is “that’s a gif” galore. There are like a thousand gifs in it, mostly with zoom shots of Duke screaming things like “You lose, you’re finished!!!” It is the best thing in the universe.

Back to AI analysis. Lol, the query from the Rocky IV recap is not consistent. This is the issue with the current AI paradigm. I know there is a sense of learning how to use it properly. But someone I know said it is a programming language (I can see that, a higher level programming language) “except stochastic and a black box.” … Stochastic I can handle, stochastic is fine. A black box? That is a little more difficult to reason about. I can get it to return maybe a little consistently with larger images. And the nice thing is it does image batch pretty well. That’ll be my next thing I think, just working through that a bit. You do tend to have to force it to return json every time, and even though it is clearly understanding the image, it needs to be pretty high quality seemingly to make things less random. Go figure.

The Friend for Rocky V is natural as can be, another super strong bad dude: Invisible Maniac. Huh. Well, we heard of this film mostly through The Flophouse I believe, so I was always intrigued by it. Along with Head of the Family and Castle Freak, this one one of Stuart’s stalwart suggestions. Ultimately, I found the film to be a little too weird for my personal tastes, and as Jamie said it had a tough time living up to the impression I had of it. But I did understand the allure of seeing the titular invisible maniac stomp on the lead actress’s head near the end of the film. That is probably the only real redeeming feature of what seems to possibly be a soft-core pornographic film? C-, didn’t enjoy it, but can kind of see the appeal.

This is a great Setting as a Character (Where?) film for Philadelphia, in all its decrepit glory. And yeah, new category for Worst Ending (How?) for the ultimate fight being a ridiculous looking street fight outside of the garbage bar Paulie and Rock go to in the first film. This movie is BMT, but only because of that final fight.

Learn all about street fighting probably in the Quiz. Cheerios,

The Sklogs

Rocky IV Recap

Jamie

Rocky IV has come and gone as a BMT film over the year. Honestly, it’s annoying. I’m annoyed by it. The movie has always been, and always will be hilarious. So it’s hard for me to take seriously the idea that a film will ironically not qualify for BMT. Similar in many ways to Moonfall. It gets credit for having its tongue in its cheek? I don’t think so. Rocky IV doesn’t even have its tongue in its cheek. Its tongue is firmly planted at the bottom of its mouth and has no intention of moving. Anyway, it’s delightful that after RT curated a number of older reviews this film managed to claw its way to BMT glory. I can rest now *an ancient sigh is released from Jamie’s chest and he falls into a deep slumber*

To recap, Rocky is doing great. He’s the champ. He’s got a family he loves. His brother-in-law Paulie has a robot. What else does a man need? A challenge, right? Wrong. When the monstrous Drago emerges from behind the Iron Curtain and asks to fight Rocky in an exhibition, Rocky is like “pshawwwww.” Long retired Apollo Creed, on the other hand, sees an opportunity. Always the showman, he sets up the super patriotic exhibition and is promptly pummeled to death. Not ideal. Rocky is sad. Adrian is scared. She knows Rocky and Rocky will want to avenge his friend. She’s like “you can’t win!” because she just saw Drago smash Apollo in the face until he died. But has she met Rocky? He’s got a literal rock for a head and so he agrees to the fight and heads off to Siberia to train. Oh he spars. Oh he lifts. Oh he ditches his Russian handlers with his blazing fast speed. They aren’t going to fight for money or belts. They are fighting for pride… and because Drago shattered Apollo’s body with his fists and Rocky didn’t like that. After Adrian arrives to lend her begrudging support, the big fight in Russia is on. Rocky is pummeled pretty much like Apollo right from the jump. But unlike Apollo he doesn’t know when to quit and just keeps standing and letting Drago punch him a thousand times. He has him right where he wants him. Soon the tide turns and he cuts the Russian. If Drago can bleed then Drago can be beaten. In the end Rocky wins even though it was probably like 120-10 on the scorecards after Drago won every round 10-1. Even the Soviets are cheering for Rocky and he gets to return home a hero! THE END. 

I mean… I’m not going to sit here and say this movie is bad. It’s great. Really, really fun to watch. Do I think Sly Stallone knew exactly what he was doing when he made this? No, not really. I think he was making the movie he wanted to make and this is his vision of a film. Totally serious. If you watch the series back-to-back-to-back like I did you can see how the Rocky movies reflect Stallone’s life. It increasingly becomes about the challenges of fame as Stallone himself becomes more famous. Rocky IV is the transition point from “I kind of experienced this” Rocky/Stallone crossover to “I could end the Cold War” Rocky/Stallone. Insane stuff. There is a real visual and emotional flair that he still had, though, and it’s kind of thrilling to watch. Makes sense, too, that he basically stopped directing at this point. His 80’s style was on the way out and he only came back when he did another Rocky film, another Rambo film, and an Expendables film, which is essentially his attempt to bring his style back to the mainstream. It’s good, but like, also it’s really bad in the best possible ways.

Hot Take Clam Bake! I think it’s obvious that Rocky dies on punch 500 that he takes straight to the dome from Drago. As his limp body falls to the canvas he imagines coming back in the fight. Just bull rushing Drago, taking punch after punch directly to the face, without even flinching. The Russian gets cut? Not while Rocky is alive. In his dying dream, maybe. Drago was 100-0 going into the fight (I can’t remember if this is a real fact or comes from some non-canon source) and after the fight is 101-0 with probably 101 deaths on his hands. RIP Rocky. Hot Take Temperature: Smoking hot lady robot.

Patrick?

Patrick

‘Ello everyone! *Gif of me climbing a mountain in Siberia with a light windbreaker on and bankrupting myself in the process* Let’s go!

The Good? Uhhhhh, are you dumb? This movie is incredible. It is both ironically and unironically good. At one point Dolph Lundgren proclaims that Rocky’s body is like punching steel. There is an entire song montage that shows all three of the prior films. Rocky agrees to have a fight for no money in Russia on Christmas Day. “If he dies he dies.” “I must break you.” This movie is genuinely incredible and the fact that is qualifies is a travesty.

The Bad? I mean, fine, the fight is ludicrous looking. They deal haymaker after haymaker, land all of them, and remain standing. At one point they suggest Lundgren has the hardest punch in history and he’s shooting up steroids and pure science is running through his veins. This movie is endlessly ridiculous and should be ridiculed for it.

The BMT? I mean … is the movie good, or is it so bad it’s good? The world legitimately may never know. Do I love it ironically, or unironically? I don’t even know. It is an enigma.

Final one of these advert ones. I did indeed change up the query to explicitly tell it to only look for full page advertisements. I don’t know how consistent it is, but it did, in general, seem better, at least for Rocky IV. Pretty much nailed it:

Of course, yeah, Rocky IV is one of the big boys. But look at those others! A BMT and a … Disney film I guess. It stars Mary Steenburgen and Harry Dean Stanton of all people. Goddamn, it was playing everywhere. It was wide release, and this juuuust narrowly beat having three BMT films as advertisements on the same day. That would have been something else.

I’m going to name a special award called The Worst Person In the Universe, Why Are You Friends With This Person (Who?) to give to Paulie. I’m going to give a Product Placement (What?) for the Lamborghini Jalpa Rocky rides in during the music montage. Definite Setting as a Character (Where?) for Siberia. Secret Holiday Film (When?) for days in the fight taking place on Christmas Day. Another special award called I Must Avenge You Apollo (Why?) for the movie death that has to be avenged at all costs. And this movie is somehow both Good and BMT, but I’m going to lean BMT and accept that this film is technically a bad movie by movie making standards.

Learn all about punching probably in the Quiz. Cheerios,

The Sklogs

Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo Recap

Jamie

Alright, in the Breakin’ portion of the post, I let you know who Brion James was (oh, and Shabba Doo as well). Let’s get into Boogaloo Shrimp himself. Interestingly, his wikipedia page is under his birth name: Michael Chambers. Maybe Boogaloo Shrimp is too silly for a wikipedia page. We actually don’t have any more BMT films to target for him, even as a Friend. He was in a couple of non-qualifying films and then ended up playing a dancer in Dudley Do-Right. We’ve obviously seen Dudley Do-Right starring Academy Award Winner Brendan Fraser. In fact, it had a proper place in BMT Lore (BMTL). Back when we first started doing cycles one of the categories was Kids Films. This made sense. Most of those films are horrible. Unfortunately that was also its downfall. Dudley Do-Right was the straw that broke the camel’s back and we removed that category. Who knew we got some boogaloo there as well.

To recap, Special K is back, Jack! She has been killing it on the dance scene. But she’s so tired of just being one of the chorus line. She takes a break to reflect. During that break her richie rich father (who knew!) insists she finally go to Princeton. But she won’t. Dance is her life. Remembering her days with Ozone and Turbo she returns to find that they are also killing it. They are dancing up a storm at the local community center and the whole neighborhood sings and dances wherever they go. Dope. Meanwhile an eeeeevil land developer is eyeing the community center for a mall or whatever and starts to work the back channels to get it condemned. Kelly and the gang put up a fight and are given thirty days to come up with a boatload of cash. Cash that Kelly’s dad would give her if she went to Princeton. But dancing is her life! They try all kinds of things like car washes and stuff all while Turbo falls in love, Kelly gets an audition for a big show in Paris, and Ozone deals with a jealous ex-GF. This culminates in Turbo getting seriously injured falling down some stairs. Only through the power of dance is he healed and able to join the gang in stopping the bulldozers from knocking down the building. Using the media against the eeeevil land developer, he agrees to let them keep the center if they raise the money for renovations. They put on a big show and in the end Kelly’s father, finally understanding his daughter’s life, makes the final donation to save the say. THE END.

The first film was sweet and actually kind of good despite its faults. This is just pure distilled BMT silliness. The music scenes are nonsense, most notably the hospital scene, which I think is kinda famous for how ridiculous it is. The plot is so derivative that you could mistake it for being ironic. Kelly’s father and the eeevil land developer are caricatures to the point that they might as well have been cartoons or had a monocle or a cigar in their mouths. It is not at all surprising that this is a very notable bad movie and the first one is not. It is kind of everything we want to witness when we choose a BMT film, but few filmmakers are brave enough to deliver it too us. As for Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure, hoooo weeee, this brought back some memories. In my mind the boy in it is like Luke Skywalker’s age. From my perspective, as a five year old watching it, he was a big kid. He’s like 9 and the single most annoying character in film history. Literally even the teddy bear Ewoks are shaking their heads being like “get a load of this asshole” when he sticks his hand in a log and almost gets eaten and then complains when they save him. All that being said the effects were pretty great and the big monster alien scary and impressive. I liked it, but boy that kid was annoying.

Hot Take Clam Bake! Kelly takes that job in Paris… obviously. She just won the approval of her father for her dance career. No more annoying “you should go to Princeton” lectures. And let’s be real, Ozone has had two movies to make a real move on Kelly and she hasn’t really been super into it so far. She’s probably dreaming of that French dancer she’s about to meet who she’ll bring back to LA and he’ll be like “Haw haw. What is theees, how do you say, break-king? Baguette. Fromage. Grand Paris. Haw haw. I am French.” Ozone and Turbo will be like can he even dance? And she’ll be like he’s the best ballet dancer in the world. And then they’ll pop lock in front of him and he’ll stick up his nose at them and huffily storm off and then Kelly will be like “you guys embarrassed me!” and that’ll be the end of that. Hot Take Temperature: A hot day on the Seine.

Patrick?   

Patrick

‘Ello everyone! *Gif of me pop lockings, but then I pop lock up the wall and onto the ceiling and I’m dressed like Michael Jackson (again!)* Let’s go!

The Good? I mean, this movie takes the previous movie and cranks it up to 11. If you liked the last movie, this is just more of that but crazier with a rich v. poor story which is working overtime to make anything make sense. And often the pop locking has never looked better. And of course you cannot forget that the subtitle is the top subtitle ever in the history of film: Electric Boogaloo. It is now, effectively, a joke in itself concerning absurd sequel subtitles.

The Bad? Several moments in the film take the pop locking and bring it to the streetz. By which I mean, random people like mailmen and shit start to break dance in the street as our heroes pass by. Or Turbo commits a crime and then almost dies in a stair mishap and is later cured through the power of dance inside a hospital (where also the power of dance brings someone back to life). Moments like this make you wonder: is this some delusional fever dream we are watching? It is decidedly unreal and in that way, much like Icarus, strays too close to the sun and its delicate pop locking wings are melted.

The BMT? Hell yeah. This is one of the quintessential bad movie cult classics. The first film is arguably a good film. This film though goes too far and becomes bad, but also is supremely weird and entertaining. That is a BMT formula to a T.

I did continue my adventure in New York Times advertising. This time I gave it a slightly larger image and refined the prompt such that it was to look for large full page ads only. Even then it was a little discouraging to realize just how random it was. It was limiting itself to films it seemed after a bit, but whether a bunch of ads would count as “majority” or one large one was different run to run and it took long enough that majority rule rerunning would have been a little too annoying.

Supposedly it gets better it you do structured data, so plausibly an option would be for it to return json as {“timestamp”: timestamp, “percent_advert”: float} to try and force it to only report high probability timestamps … but I’m a little skeptical. The better path would probably be to give it an even bigger set of images, and then hope that that would give it enough clarity to fix the issue. Either that or try to restrict it to pages where 100% of the area is a single film advertisement and thus leave nothing up to chance. Regardless, this is one of the results I got:

There is a Breakin’ 2 advertisement on the page before the The River advertisement, and often the second page would be omitted on repeat runs.

Oh shit, you best belieb we watched The Great Ewok Adventure: The Caravan of Courage. The official title of this television movie depends on where you are looking. The Great Ewok Adventure seems like the most common. First, the son in this film is hilariously bad. So bad that it kind of almost ruins the movie. Second, the daughter character is literally a baby. She was around four years old when they filmed and you can tell, she seems to have trouble even getting through scenes sometimes. But, third, I love them little Ewoks! This movie does its job. By which I mean it sells toys to children and reminds everyone that Star Wars is a children’s property at its core. B, I liked watching this, it was a blast from the past. I will also say I watched Battle for Endor (in which the entire family is unceremoniously massacred), and that one was genuinely better, but that makes sense when you realize they traded up from the most annoying child actor in history to Wilford Brimley. That was just a little extra though, so I won’t give it a grade … but I guess a B+.

Once again, the film is a Setting as a Character (Where?) for Greater Los Angeles. A great MacGuffin (Why?) for the famous community center that needs to be saved. If ever you hear the phrase “to save a community center” used as a punchline as a joke, it is likely a play off of the storyline of Electric Boogaloo. And naturally Worst Twist (How?) for the eeeeevil industrialist and general rich person at the end of the film who has a Heart of Gold and now realizes just what a good community center means for a community. This movie is BMT and also kind of good to boot, but hey, I like pop locking more than most I imagine.

Read all about pop locking maybe in the Quiz. Cheerios,

The Sklogs

Breakin’ Recap

Jamie

I don’t have much of a relationship to the Breakin’ franchise, so let’s get into it with Shabba Doo. Most interesting fact? His wikipedia page is under Shabba Doo and not his actual name Adolfo Quinones. I guess it’s because it was his professional stage name as a dancer, but it was a bit unexpected. After that I’m just more interested in where I can get me some more Shabba Doo. It appears that we only have one more BMT left with Lambada and even that is a bit questionable. Seems to have a wide enough release, but a sparse official review count. After that his only “major” release was Steel Frontier starring Joe Lara and Brion James. Which reminds me, I was listening to a podcast the other day and one of the hosts said he always liked Brion James… I’ve never heard anyone say that. Brion James. Huh.

To recap, Kelly is a dancer trying to make it in LA. She’s working with the best (the best!), a choreographer named Franco, who very much wants to sleep with her. This is really upsetting to Kelly. While thinking over how to rebuff Franco, but not burn that bridge, her friend takes her to Venice Beach where she witnesses the future: break dancing. She’s invited to a club by the two best dancers, Ozone and Turbo. Once there she witnesses a dance-off, where Ozone and Turbo get torched by a rival dance team after they unveil their secret weapon: a girl. Gasp! But wait, Kelly’s a girl, isn’t she? And she dances too!. But can she learn to let it all go and feel the rhythm of breakin’? Let’s just say the answer is an emphatic YES and Special K is born. Kelly’s agent is a bit skeptical, but also really believes in Kelly. He likes her too, but keeps it strictly professional, unlike Franco. Kelly wants them to enroll in a competition where Franco will be the choreographer for the winners in a big showcase. Kelly’s agent agrees, but when they show up at the competition Franco is infuriated that his former student is there with this street trash and trash dancing and demands that they be kicked out. The group won’t have that! They just start dancing… hard. They dance so hard that the judges can’t stop from tapping their feet and soon are telling Franco to shove it. We end with the big showcase which obviously is the most amazing thing anyone has ever seen and changes dance forever. THE END (or is it? (Ha! No!))

There is something very wholesome and sweet about this film that can’t help but endear you to it. For one, it is shockingly not at all problematic, which was a pleasant surprise. Kelly doesn’t want to sleep with her teacher. The idea that he might not care about her dancing, but rather just about her body is upsetting. Franco is powerful in the world she wants to be in. She makes the hard choice to leave that world rather than compromise and in turn finds a friend, a potential love interest (although they take it slow), and an agent who respects her boundaries. The scene where the agent is like “it’s cool. I get the picture, but I believe in you” almost brought me to tears. Very sweet. For two, the dancing actually is a load of fun. So how much do I want to make fun of a couple amateur actors and the end dance scene being silly? Not too much. It’s a fun movie. Check it out.

Hot Take Temperature! They simply would not win. You think those judges would go against Franco (the Franco) just cause their toes were tapping a little bit? The rules were very clear: they had to do traditional dance. They would be choreographed by Franco. It ain’t happening. Once they dabbed the sweat off their foreheads and composed themselves, having let loose for a moment under the spell of breakin’, they would realize that it was just that. A spell. That these kids tricked them with some kind of voodoo dancing magic and would need to be taken care of. And taken care of they would be. Hot Take Temperature: Scorching hot dance moves.

Patrick?

Patrick

‘Ello everyone! *Gif of me pop locking in fools’ faces while Ice-T reads out a spoken word album in the background* Let’s go!

The Good? Everything? Well, not really, but the movie is highly entertaining, and a small scale demo of pop locking mastery. Now, I’m not really that into dancing, let alone break dancing. But there is something decent here where it seems like a genuine love letter to a new form of expression. Add in Christopher McDonald, Ice-T, and a very brief glimpse of Jean Claude Van Damme, and you have a real cult classic on your hands.

The Bad? The acting is dire. Like really dire. But what do you expect? You are taking two very good break dancers and asking them to act … the thing is that as much as the main character holds her own, you could maybe have gotten a slightly better actor in there. But beggars can’t be choosers.

The BMT? Hmmmmmmm, well, no, on a technicality. You see, the movie is good. Calm down everyone, this isn’t the end of the world … because we got a second one.

Now this is what I call uh … AI scraping? In reality only a tiny bit of this is using AI, but it is still pretty good. Naturally, it is in line with some of my prior ideas on the subject: it is decent at extracting structured data from unstructured data (e.g. descriptions / keywords from an image), and it seems like it can be borderline SOTA object recognition, OCR, or generalized PCA type stuff. For this I decided on a fun project that is in line with the second part of that.

A while ago I scraped all of the New York Times listing pages. To do that there was a somewhat annoying (although practically not very difficult) step of getting listing page numbers from the New York Times. I set up a whole system using PCA and my own eyeballs and a UI to do this and it worked well, outside of dev time (which I’m fine with, this is how I learn) it probably took me like 10 hours to get the listing pages, mostly watching Seinfeld in the background.

But with AI it is kind of possible to do this much more quickly. Step one: scrape all of the small pages from an issue, non-trivial, but I had done it before. Step two: chop these small pages into single pages and reassemble them with ffmpeg into a movie, one page per frame, one frame per second. Step three: using Gemini I uploaded the video and asked for timestamps for any full page advertisement. Step four: I parsed the output and then scraped the larger size (which is actually a pattern of blocks … this ain’t my first rodeo, remember?) pages. And then I reassembled it. Et voila. For May 4th, 1984, all of the “full page” advertisements from the New York Times:

I mean, pretty good. For Breakin’ 2 I think I’ll just look to refine the query a bit, and probably scrape slightly larger initial pages just to make it more possible the program can figure out which are movie advertisements maybe. Regardless, I’m pretty happy with that one.

I’m going to invent a category here, which is the Bizarro World Twins (Who?) for the three other break dancers who are also two men and a woman who the crew battle throughout the film. Setting as a Character (Where?) up the wazoo since they very obviously head right to Venice Beach for one of the break dancing demos. The excellent MacGuffin (Why?) of the big dance audition against the other antagonist, the eeeeeevil dance instructor / pervert. And Worst Twist (How?) for the obvious end that the judges are moving to the groovin’ for this new dance phenomenon. And as I said, this film is Good.

Read all about break dancing maybe in the Quiz. Cheerios,

The Sklogs

From the Hip Recap

Jamie

Let’s discuss the poster. Judd Nelson has a bone in his mouth and it says that “Getting to the top means working like a dog.” Actually there’s not much to discuss. That’s essentially all I have to say about it. It’s not 1980 anymore, From the Hip. Have some respect. Before watching, I was only vaguely aware of the movie and it was entirely poster based, so I presumed it was about some kind of dog lawyer. Not the case. Despite this disappointment and despite our past experiences with Blue City, Funky Fresh Horses has made me more intrigued by the Brat Pack adjacent projects, so we are diving right back into the Judd Nelson pool. And after this we still have a film called Relentless to complete our non-Brat Pack Judd Nelson trilogy. What a trilogy!

To recap, Judd Nelson is a HUMAN lawyer. He is tired of relentlessly trying to grind his way to the top so he concocts a plan to hide that a shitty trial is about to begin. His boss is miffed, but since he’s the only one who knows the case, he is allowed to try it. It should be an easy settlement, but his client, who is obviously guilty of assault, wants it stretched out to make the plaintiff squirm a little. Nelson obliges and creates a media frenzy over his theatrical antics. Everyone is loving it. Boy, this asshole is amazing! Through his antics he is actually able to sway the jury. His client is thrilled and the media is loving it. Turns out he was in leagues with the plaintiff’s lawyer to gin up all the media for their mutual benefit, so things need to be real hush hush or Judd’ll be in deep shit. These antics bring all kinds of big names to the firm and he is immediately rocketed to partner. The other lawyers at the firm hate him, so they give him a real stinker of a murder trial as his first case. He ends up defending John Hurt, who is a creepy professor who is almost certainly guilty of killing a prostitute with a hammer (fun!). Nelson is a bit perturbed by this, but not enough to stop him from putting on a show that seems to actually be swaying the jury. The ethics of it all starts to catch up with him and a breaking point is hit when Hurt basically confesses to Nelson all while refusing to take a Manslaughter plea deal. Nelson is torn, but ultimately risks disbarment by letting Hurt go on the witness stand. He uses Hurt’s ego against him to pull a confession out of him under oath. THE END.

Gotta love a courtroom comedy. This one has a little bit of a twist as well, since ultimately the lawyer is trying to sink his own client, and the whole film seems to be unusually accurate in how it talks about certain points of the law. Particularly the ethics of the final twist. It would seem that this likely didn’t start as a comedy. It was written by David E. Kelley and he used it as an in to get on the writing staff of L.A. Law. After that, it left his hands and I presume turned into a comedy. Definitely has that feel of a film that is a bit sure what it is about. Is it about a zany lawyer who looks like he’s a gimmick, but in fact knows his stuff? Or is it a story of the collision between ethics and ambition? This ends up not entirely working as either. I also found Nelson’s character to be one step too far past obnoxious and stopped buying that juries would be loving his antics enough to let obviously guilty people walk. I much preferred the parts of the film where he was seriously considering the shit he got himself into.

Hot Take Clam Bake! He didn’t have to risk disbarment. There is no way a creepy creepster who almost certainly killed a prostitute would have walked free just because the lawyer made the murder trial a whole barrel of laughs. Sure, I might feel some relief that the murder trial was a little less boring than expected, but I’d probably still say the obviously guilty person was guilty in the end. You know why? Because, and this is the hot take, I prefer the people I might potentially run into on the street or in a coffee shot to have NOT MURDERED A PROSTITUTE WITH A HAMMER. But maybe that’s just me and he really did need to risk disbarment. Hot Take Temperature: That cool feeling of a wet dog bone in your mouth.

Patrick? 

Patrick

‘Ello everyone! *Gif of me being all clever and being annoying to a judge, but you know … the media loves it, right?* Let’s go!

The Good? The movie is a lot more fun than it has any right to be. At the time Judd Nelson was pitching a perfect game. He was incredibly charismatic. Same goes for Elizabeth Perkins. And the story is a funny story, from a courtroom drama perspective, although the “media driven fame” doesn’t work as much now I think.

The Bad? This movie is very derivative of …And Justice For All. The lawyer defending a big pile of shit who is definitely guilty and then doing a whole twist ‘em up right at the last second to save his soul. Well, that isn’t exactly …And Justice For All, but it is close enough that I found it a little weird. That movie is much much much much better.

The BMT? This film is too good. It is genuinely kind of good. I liked it. I would even watch it again.

So Surf Nazis Must Die is a classic of the past which I watched partly when I was a kid when our brother briefly ran a bad movie night himself. The movie is much more interesting and much more weird than I expected. It is kind of a surreal take on Nazis … almost literal. But then all in California with a strange side story involving an old woman seeking vengeance. Some of the silly gore is fun, and there are flashes of brilliance, but overall it ends up not being as fun as I would hope. Straight average C I think.

Wowza, that was a saga. So here I was curious, the poster for From the Hip is odd, it has Judd Nelson with a dog bone in his mouth. Is there a dog in this film? Why the dog bone? But it mostly made me wonder: are there other posters with dog bones in them? Turns out … no, not really. As a matter of fact it is the only wide release film released since 1980 in which the IMDb poster appears to have a physical (non-cartoon) dog bone. That … is insane. But I guess I solved it. More importantly I think I figured out a way to submit batch images to Google Gemini, so hopefully I can do some of these analyses pretty quickly in the future.

A great Setting as a Character (Where?) for Boston, which is always fun to see, there aren’t enough Boston movies I think. The MacGuffin (Why?) of the whole thing is fame and fortune of course. And the Worst Twist (How?) in the way in which Judd Nelson manages to twist the bad guy up to incriminate himself. This movie is Good, I liked it, and it was interesting, but also you should just watch …And Justice For All.

Learn about lawyers I think in the Quiz. Cheerios,

The Sklogs

Dream a Little Dream Recap

Jamie

The whole backstory of Dream a Little Dream is tragic. Corey Feldman was trying to be a more serious actor. He wanted a role that would stretch his horizons a bit. But he also was deep in a Michael Jackson phase and wanted to push that as well. What does that mean? Given the fact that Michael Jackson was a singing, dancing and fashion icon, Feldman decided to go for the trifecta. He’s working on a single for the film, and within the film he gets to dress like MJ and dance his little heart out. So sure, he wants to do this very serious philosophical body swap movie with Academy Award winner Jason Robards, but he also wants the dance scene. The studio? Thrilled. Interestingly, if you read Feldman’s autobiography he seems to indicate that the inclusion of Corey Haim was more his agent/studio idea. Once Feldman was in didn’t they want to cash in on the Two Corey’s mania? Did it matter that Haim broke his leg just before filming? Nah, write it in. So what started as an attempt for Feldman to be taken more seriously became a Two Corey’s vehicle with MJ inspired dance sequences. As I said, tragic.

To recap, Coleman and Gena are an elderly married couple. Coleman has become obsessed with dreams and the idea that through dreams he will be able to spend eternity with his beloved. He is pursuing this through the power of meditation when suddenly Bobby, a local bad boy/slacker, collides with the girl he has a crush on, Lainie, who unfortunately dates one of his friends. This collision at the moment of meditative perfection results in a body swap, whereby Bobby and Lainie are stuck in the dream world while Gena and Coleman are now teenagers, gulp! Confusedly, they also are kinda mixed with their original selves so they are more like old people-teenager hybrids and only sort of know each other. Coleman wants to just wait it out, but then realizes he has to play into the role of Bobby or else risk his wife getting stuck forever in the dream world dooming them to be separated forever. Coleman ends up helping Bobby get better grades and improve his relationship with his parents. All this in pursuit of Lainie, who it eventually becomes clear must fall for Bobby in order to recreate the magic and swap all the bodies back. This culminates in a climactic scene where Bobby talks his friend out of murdering him (for real) and a different (and much more important) scene where Bobby dances like Michael Jackson and looks totally cool for sure. Having completed the mission Coleman realizes then that there is no replacement for the real thang and indeed they are able to switch back.. THE END.

I feel a little bad for Feldman. You can tell he was having some troubles here and he looks crazy. The idea that someone would want to take his career from acting to the general genre of “Michael Jackson impersonator” is insane. That’s not a genre of music/dancing/fashion. That’s just what MJ does. And yet MJ was so huge that this was a viable career move and he was hardly the biggest star to have tried it. All that being said, Feldman actually does have natural charisma. There’s a reason I remember liking his character the best in a number of notable films. This is all a wind up to say that this film is super duper weird. One of the weirdest major motion pictures I can think of. It’s like a deeply philosophical take on a body swap movie. Makes me think the writer-director said yes to all kinds of things involving Feldman simply because he wanted desperately to make this weird ass movie that otherwise probably wouldn’t have been made. Usually when something this weird is made you have to assume it’s based on a book (like Winter’s Tale or something). But this is a Mark Rocco original, babbby. As for Ghosts Can’t Do It, the only reason to watch this unpleasant catastrophe is to see the perfect example of an auteur film. A film that truly seems like you are looking into the deranged mind of its creator, like a Neil Breen film. The basic plot is about Bo Derek being married to an elderly rich guy who has awesome sex with her, but then dies and his ghost demands she find a hot young stud to kill so he can possess him and they can continue boning. And then they do just that. You OK, John Derek? Perfect pairing with Dream a Little Dream.

Hot Take Clam Bake! Are we sure (steady yourselves) Feldman couldn’t have been Michael J. Fox? Like if he hadn’t gone down the dark road he was on would we have seen him carry some big films and then transition to a career where he’s the star of Just Shoot Me! or something? You see him running around and acting and (god help me) dancing and there are actual moments where I had to take a step back and be like “this kid was a mess and still got up there and looks halfway like a star.” It makes me want to read more of his autobiography just to see how aware he was of what was happening as it crumbled and fell apart. I can tell you the Dream a Little Dream parts of the book are very engaging. Hot Take Temperature: A Michael Jackson dance move.

Patrick?

Patrick

‘Ello everyone! *Gif of me dressed as Michael Jackson lip synching a song and dancing around like an idiot* Let’s go!

The good? Uh … this movie is bonkers. Like, this movie is like you cracked the head of the writer open and just started watching. It is wild shit, and in a way I’m here for it, and the fact that it operates like a standard body swap almost makes it better. Some of the cast is also quite good, like they know what’s up and what they need to do … some of the cast.

The bad? Both Coreys. I don’t want to pile on them. I don’t want to come down hard on them. But Haim is just all over the place, limping around, and really very terrible in this. Feldman just looks like a lunatic. He’s a bit better from the acting perspective.

The BMT? In a way yes … it is really really weird. It is a really weird film. It is so weird. Is it so weird it could view for Hall of Fame … I think so. I it so weird. But it is also boring. It is such a tough decision. The movie is just so weird!

You best believe Ghosts Can’t Do It. I have no words. This is a truly bizarre film. John and Bo Derek were one of one terrible filmmakers. We’ve seen several of them so far, and they kind of just get worse and worse as you watch them. One time a critic I think said that John Derek was the worst filmmaker in history. Part of me wants to say that that is right. This film is very weird, Bo Derek comes across as very weird, and the mind of whomever wrote this movie seems very weird. D, part of me wants to be like A+, this is what BMT is all about, but the film is weird and off putting, so I’m slamming it. Slammed!

Obviously a big part of my AI journey here is trying to find uses for it in BMT. So far … mixed bag. There are odd bits where I’m like that’s interesting, but nothing so far is shaking the BMT foundations. One idea Jamie had was to look through Letterboxd reviews, and what better opportunity to look through structured returns. So I pulled 100 reviews off of Letterboxd, and then ran it through Gemini with the instruction to say whether the review indicated the person had “fun” watching the movie or not. It would return as a json blob which seems .. vaguely correct I suppose.

Anyways, to try it on this guy. Out of the 100 reviews the BMT Super Fun Factor (aka BMTSSF) was 41%. That is actually pretty good. If we want some references BMT classic Cobra was a 73%, BMT classic stinker Waiting for Forever is 14%. It is perfect? No, one in like five fails for no reason by giving back bad json. Spot checking shows it isn’t super clearly interpreting things well, possibly just random outside of very bad or very good reviews. But it is a pretty funny idea. Similar to pulling keywords out of posters, this is one thing where it is like … just fun enough that I might actually try scraping a full year to see if anything interesting falls out the other side.

Oh, and let’s see if we should get excited. What is From the Hip’s BMTSSF? 45%. So a little better than Dream a Little Dream. Surf Nazis Must Die is a 48%, which maybe points to it somewhat deserving its cult classic reputation.

Oh, definitely a Planchet (Who?) for Haim which is a bizarre character with an even more bizarre production story. Some solid Product Placement (What?) for the oreos you snack on as you talk to your kids about the accident he just got in. I mean, maybe the ultimate MacGuffin (Why?) y’all need to get back in your body, it’s a body swap film. And I’m going to do it, this is a BMT film, it is wild and crazy and weird.

Read about body swapping in the Quiz. Cheerios,

The Sklogs

Amityville 3-D Recap

Jamie

Franchise Man checking in! Amityville Horror? More like Amityville Snooze-a-thon. And I’m not saying that because most of the series is terrible, but more because where is the lore?! You had three dang movies to get your lore sorted and instead you mill about trying to decide what the deal with the house is. Every film seems different. Is it a possessed house? Is it a haunted house? Is the demon’s lair behind a fireplace, in a crawl space, or in a well? Does it look like an alien arm? Is it a pig with red eyes? It’s like an inverse Child’s Play, which just remade the same film three times. What is a Franchise Man supposed to do with this shit? Now this isn’t the first time this has happened. Friday the 13th really didn’t get settled till the third (also a 3D entry), but it at least got settled at that point with a serviceable entry. From there it was off and running. This? This is merde (excuse my French).

To recap, John and Melanie are journalists who expose con artists. The latest con they uncover involves the Amityville house. Having found that the whole thing was a ruse, John is convinced to purchase the house himself (what could go wrong?! It’s a steal!). Soon after the real estate agent is found dead in the house. John convinces himself things are fine. Totally fine. Just fine. I SAID IT’S FINE! Melanie is less convinced. Particularly after both she and John are nearly killed in freak accidents. After a terrifying night where she is tormented by the house while John is away, she digs deep into photographs she has taken of the house. Uh oh! Looks like one of them has a little alium looking thingy on it that definitely doesn’t look totally stupid and fake. She rushes to show John this not stupid and not fake looking thing and is killed in a horrific car accident. Later, John’s daughter is home alone and decides to play with a ouija board with some friends. Despite the warnings of the board she then goes out on their motorboat and drowns. John’s estranged wife becomes convinced that their daughter is still alive, but John is like… pretty sure. He saw the body and everything. No need to open the casket and risk the head flying out. To try to help his wife, John brings in a team of paranormal investigators who get a bit more than they bargained for. In the well in the basement a portal to hell opens up and demons and acid and all kinds of shit start flying out. John and a few others manage to escape before the whole house implodes and basically that’s kind of it. THE END (or is it? (Ehhhh… kind of)).

Ha! This is dog shit. Like really, really bad. A franchise killer. It’s not even that nothing works. Meg Ryan is good. It didn’t pull the punch on killing people and setting the stakes correctly. Some of the tension and effects here and there were alright. You just can’t get over how stupid the effects for the demon are. Unrecoverable. Not to mention the fact that in this version of the story the house has unlimited range. It’s fucking with people in Manhattan and stuff. Absurd. Candy Clark is also surprisingly very bad in this. You can point to the material for that, I guess. She just doesn’t seem to have the aptitude for a scream queen and never sells any of the stupid lines she has to say. It is too bad that this essentially relegated the series to direct-to-video schlock. Something I would have liked to have seen was a take on the story where the town is in on it. They basically cover up for the house to convince families to move in. Eventually it’s revealed that the town worships the demon in the basement and is feeding it families. You can have fun with this. It’s not against the rules. As for Joysticks, I watched part of this years ago while on the treadmill and found it quite unpleasant. That unpleasantness continued on a complete viewing. The characters are gross cartoons. That’s actually the fun of watching these movies. Like… how is it that Joysticks was made by a whole group of people who looked at it and thought, “Yeah, this is good. This is funny.” It’s interesting. Then once in a while you find a Ski School where the broken clock is right and they actually hit the right note.

Hot Take Clam Bake! I’m actually half convinced that the character of John actually bought the house in order to run his own con. That after years of uncovering cons he figured he knew enough to create an unbreakable con. It would in part explain why he appears totally oblivious to everyone freaking out around him. He thinks the con is working. He put this little alien in a photo and is like “looks great and not fake,” and sure his partner dies rushing to show it to him, but that means it worked, right? And sure he daughter dies in a freak accident while unsafely motoring around the water by his house, but it adds to the lore. Yeah, don’t worry honey, it’ll all be worth it when we get these paranormal investigators in here and they get a load of the crazy contraption I set up in the well in the base… oops! My contraption sucked the house into the ground and killed numerous people. Let’s just walk away and pretend this was all real. Hot Take Temperature: Fiery basement well.

Patrick?

Patrick

‘Ello everyone! *Gif of me popping out of a well, but I’m maybe a lizard person, or possibly a Sleestack … are there Sleestacks in Amityville?* Let’s go!

The Good? I kind of dug the very 80s B story of a guy being kind of a piece of shit to his family and buying a haunted house so that he can make the big bucks no matter who he hurts. Meg Ryan was, not surprisingly, quite good. Genuinely, it is no surprise she would end up being a star shortly after.

The Bad? Obviously the Sleestack at the end was absurd. And basically everything you could say is good in the film could also be construed as bad. Cheesy 80s sets, relatively bad 80s acting, silly 80s story.

The BMT? Yeah I think so, but mainly because of the absolute absurdity of it all. The bottomless well, the Sleestack, the hoax thing running throughout the film, how crazy he is for buying the haunted house to live in in the first place. It is just nuts enough to work.

Ah, another 80s T&A comedy, I’m sure this one is just as good as Meatballs III. This one is called Joysticks and is all about an arcade and making sure eeeeevil politicians / businessmen can’t shut them down. The movie is kind of funny, in a tongue-in-cheek way. Like, the whole business with the main super-cool guy who can’t play video games anymore because of a past trauma. And then he gets over it to win the big day. It is fun. But also the film is kind of weird and gross and makes me feel a little gross as well. So I think I’m going to bump it down to a standard B in the end.

For this installment of AI corner I did the same thing as above, except at the end I asked it to summarize it all as a single ten keyword list:

Horror, Amityville, Haunted House, Supernatural, Demons, 3D, Death, Investigation, Curse, Skepticism

It is actually a little weird. Initially it kept on cheating to add more keywords, e.g. giving back “Evil/Demon” which is just two keywords mashed together. When I asked it to restrict itself to a single word or phrase it conspicuously had “House” which is obviously supposed to be “Haunted House” but it was only outputting single word keywords. Finally I told it just not to use “/”. Even then it pluralized “Demons” which was singular in the other attempts, and “3D” lost its hyphen which maybe had to do with me insisting on not having a slash.

In the end isn’t this the main issue as AI as a summarizer? My vague and terrible prompt is “code”. It is not reproducible in the first place because these models tend to do a consensus with restricted and stochastic backing resources, but also even minor changes to the prompt changed the order and structure of the list wildly. So ultimately, to run an analysis the prompt must be included, but even then you have to just trust that outside of false positives (see the Red Scorpion analysis), there is still an issue with it just being very unknowably random.

Again, A+ Setting Alert (Where?) for Amityville, New York. And you know what? No worst twist here. I actually liked the twist in the end whereby the daughter just dies and is released. Oh the Skeestack? That was weird as fuck, but that doesn’t have much to do with the film. Beyond that that one moment I think takes this film from a normal run of the mill horror film, to a true blue 80s small time weirdo horror film, and I kind of dig it, BMT.

Read all about Sleestacks, probably, in the Quiz. Cheerios,

The Sklogs

Amityville II: The Possession Recap

Jamie

I’m going to put this right out there, I do not care for The Amityville Horror. The first half hour is fine and has some nice creepy stuff, but unlike Friday the 13th (which always knew what it was), this devolves over the course of 2 hours into a bunch of Stephen King/haunted house/exorcist retreads. Friday the 13th was giving people what they wanted in the slasher genre. Amityville doesn’t know what it’s serving up. Like is the house haunted? If you watched it you would be tempted to say yes. There appears to be a ghost in the house. But it’s not. It’s possessed by a demon… so the demon is pretending to be a ghost? And it just goes on and on and on like this for a full 2 hours. It’s bad. Just a bad movie that spawned a bunch of other bad movies I guess. 

To recap, in a prequel to the first film (I think, it’s never made totally clear), the Montelli family moves into our fateful house. The head of the household is played by Burt Young and is a total maniac (Burt Young? A maniac? I’m shocked). Everyone is terrified of him because he is a loose cannon. As the demonic presence in the house pulls pranks like a little stinker, Burt Young just goes about blaming and beating his children for it. His wife tries to get a Priest to intervene but Burt Young is like “you wanna piece of this Father?” When choosing who to possess, the house appears to take one look at Burt Young and is like “No thanks,” and inhabits the eldest son, Sonny, instead. Thinks then get crazy. And I mean, like, real crazy. I’m talking Sonny seducing his sister kind of crazy… it’s crazy. He further falls prey to the demon and when it demands that he kill his family he obliges. The next day he is arrested and the priest is convinced that Sonny needs an exorcism. He breaks Sonny out of jail and eventually is able to perform the exorcism at the house. Sonny is taken back into custody, but at least free of the demon, who, it’s implied, has transferred to the priest. THE END (or is it? (Ha!))

Yeah, so this is a good movie. In terms of the craziness of a demonic possession this is on par with The Exorcist where there were several moments where I was like “woah!” and got a bit of a queasy feeling. It did not pull punches and knew exactly what it was up to. From start to finish the family at the center of it is in an upsetting position. Even before the possession, which I think it meant to convey the idea that a place like Amityville draws people like that to it. They are vulnerable to possession because of the sadness and anger and then the demon corrupts the remaining aspects of their lives so love and happiness are blotted out. It really is an upsetting film with not even a glimmer of a happy ending. So I give it credit. Hard for me to remember another case where a poorly reviewed sequel is so clearly superior to the original in almost every way. Like head and shoulders better.

Hot Take Clam Bake! Are we sure that house is possessed before Burt Young gets there? I’m not saying Burt Young is a demon, but I’m also not not saying it. Probably some force was simply inhabiting the house and was like “Oh, cool. A new family is here. I sure do hope they are kind and take care of this home we will share.” And then it took one look at Burt Young and was like “uh oh… I mean… I do have the possibility of stopping this maniac.” From there things spiralled a little out of control. Like in the remake of Nightmare on Elm Street it turns out that the possessed house was just misunderstood the whole time. Perhaps the house was really the hero we never knew we needed. Awwwww. Hot Take Temperature: A glowy pit under the basement.

Patrick?  

Patrick

‘Ello everyone! *gif of me slowing getting covered in more and more flies, but unlike the movie it doesn’t seem to bother me which is somehow more scary* Let’s go!

The good? I always dig the look of older films like this because it feels like they were channeling a bit of the 60s and 70s directly into the 80s and trying to hold onto that small budget magic that existed at the time. I love Burt Young, even though this is full blown drunk Burt Young and he’s a monster in the film.

The bad? I could have done without the incest storyline. That was gross and dumb. I also didn’t think the movie read very well as a prequel. I legit did not remember it was a prequel until I started doing this recap even. The main issue is that the murderer in the first film was named DeFeo (who was a real person), but they obviously changed it for the second, but then was there a DeFeo? It is unclear.

The BMT? No, not really. The main issue if I’m being frank is that there are two films here, and the third one is weirder and wilder and much more fun. So it kind of nixes this as a BMT classic. Mostly it feels lazy, gross, and bad. So no, not very BMT.

I have an idea on how to maybe do keyword extraction in BMT, but there are a lot of tests I would like to run on it first. I figured and interesting bit though would be to look at multiple available sources:

Poster: Horror, Possession, Family, Fleeing, Nightmare, House, Evil, Amityville, Supernatural, Tragedy

Trailer: Horror, Supernatural, Possession, Haunted House, Amityville, Family, Paranormal, Demonic, Evil, Tragedy

Trailer (No Sound): Horror, Amityville, Possession, Haunted House, Paranormal, Family, Supernatural, Demonic, Thriller, 1980s

Wikipedia page: Possession, Horror, Familicide, Incest, Exorcism, Demonic, Violence, Abuse, Murder, Supernatural

IMDb Trivia: Incest, Nudity, Awkward, Horror, Sequel, Paranormal, Lawsuit, DeFeo, Replica, Debut

IMDb Reviews: Possession, Haunted House, Incest, Murder, Evil, Religion/Priest, Horror, Family, Violence, Prequel

The ones with actual text tended to identify specific plot points (incest being the big one), and the media was fairly mundane. Demonic, Supernatural, Possession, Haunted House, and Incest would be the five I would pick out as “intriguing and description”.

There is an A+ Setting Alert (Where?) for Amityville, New York, which seems to be somewhere in Long Island, although that’s where the real one is, they don’t get too specific in the movie. Worst Twist (How?) for the useless reveal that the priest is now possessed. That doesn’t come back at all in any of the first three films, so what is the point? This one is Bad, it is weird and gross and off-putting in general, and specifically is pretty boring with nothing to say ro add to the exorcism genre or the first film.

Read about haunted houses or something in the Quiz. Cheerios,

The Sklogs

Red Scorpion Recap

Jamie

Red Scorpion. Red. Scorpion. I got nothing. But Slow Bullet? I could talk about that for days. The history of Slow Bullet is a long one. Way back when, even before BMT, I got an iPod touch for Christmas. This was before a smart phone so it was the first thing that really opened me up to things like podcasts. Having some interest in bad movies I searched around and selected a few to try. How Did This Get Made? had just started, but the one that seemed really interesting was The Flop House which had started a few years before. I was immediately hooked and insisted that Patrick also try it. Now fifteen years later and we still listen to the podcast every week. I love The Flop House. In my obsession I found out that the hosts had published some essays on bad movies in a zine called I Love Bad Movies. Obviously I bought all of them. In the first issue Elliott Kalan has two essays. One was about Nukie, which we watched almost immediately, and the other was Slow Bullet, a movie he claimed was the worst of all time. Of course we would watch that as well, except… you couldn’t find it. It basically didn’t exist. That is until I randomly stumbled upon a VHS rip on the Internet Archive not long ago. And so here we go! Slow Bullet! Oh yeah… and Red Scorpion (a precursor to the future Bring a Friend Red Scorpion 2). 

To recap, Dolph Lundgren is the bad guy. Literally a Soviet soldier who is sent to the country of Mombaka in Africa to help quell an anti-Communist uprising. In order to do this they set up an undercover mission where he pretends to be a belligerent, disillusioned soldier sent to the brig for getting in a fight. He’s put into holding with the rebel leader and an American photojournalist who doesn’t trust Dolph one little bit. But by helping to stage an escape, Dolph gets them to take him to a rebel encampment. He attempts an assassination of the leader there, but given he’s a thousand feet tall and looks like a special forces soldier they anticipate this and stop him. When an attack by some kind of sentient supercopter (the real bad guy of the film) lands him back with his compatriots he is tortured for failing his mission. Now he really is disillusioned and really has to escape. In the desert he finds a Bushman who takes him to his village where he learns about the value of Capitalism… or maybe it’s the value of magical scorpions… or maybe just the value of being a good dude. I can’t remember. Now that he’s actually a good guy he rejoins the rebels and leads an attack on the Soviet forces. He hunts down his superior, destroys that supercopter and gets the girl (not really, this is a total bro movie for the bros). THE END.

Red Scorpion literally fell out of my brain the instant I watched it. Three interesting things about it (I won’t go so far as to say fun). One is the background that the makers of the film violated US law by filming in a South African controlled region in the age of Apartheid and stirred up quite a bit of controversy. So given we just did Soul Man for BMT, it looks like we’re doing great. Everything’s fine. IT’S FINE! Second is that this is an unexpected entry in the helicopter film genre. The helicopter is used like it’s a terminator sent from the future. That’s one of the few fun things in the film really. Most importantly, though, is M. Emmet Walsh has a scene where he kind of dances/shambles about. It made him look like a gremlin or something. It was wild and a bit disturbing. If you showed me that scene and asked me how old the man in it was I would have been like “uh, 80?” He was 53. It’s the only clear memory I retain from the film. I probably will never forget it. As for Slow Bullet, Elliott Kalan was correct. This really might be the worst movie ever made. I hate that I watched it.

Hot Take Clam Bake! Are we sure Red Scorpion didn’t hasten the dissolution of the Soviet Union? I mean, the film was released in April 1989. Moscow was really losing control by that point. I’m thinking maybe a few too many people got their hands on copies of Red Scorpion and started to get ideas. Wait, Dolph Lundgren was just trying to do right by Mother Russia! Now he’s getting tortured? Unacceptable. You know what else is unacceptable? Communism. Hot Take Temperature: The deserts of Mombaka. 

Patrick? 

Patrick

‘Ello everyone! *gif of me greasing up my body while looking in the mirror. I look impressed, but not too impressed, you know? I’m still humble I think* Let’s go!

The good? The only thing that is really truly good in this film is M. Emmet Walsh who is insane throughout and does a crazy dance in the middle which both me and Jamie clocked and were like “that’s a gif”.

The bad? Everything else. The movie is dull. Lundgren is truly terrible in the film. It is actually a little unclear if (1) he didn’t speak English well enough so the director decided on the strong silent character, (2) he literally didn’t speak Russian and sounded ridiculous when he did so the director decided on the strong silent character, or (3) the character was written as strong and silent. Regardless, he is greased up and speaks like 10 words, and it doesn’t work for me.

The BMT? Not much. Maybe once we do the sequel as a friend we’ll understand that this is one of those bridge franchises that is what BMT is all about. But for now I think despite the promise of insane 80s action, this one disappoints.

Oh boy, the friend this week was Slow Bullet. Uh … this isn’t a movie. This is like something I would make. But if I was a lunatic who thought I could make a movie. I’m sure Jamie went into the reason why we watched this film, but rest assured: we had to do this film someday. And now we have. F.

“Based solely on this poster, name 10 keywords which might describe events of themes of this film”: Action, Military, Helicopters, Desert, Rebellion, Control, Weaponry, Survival, Betrayal, Conflict. Of those, Helicopter and Desert are the most intriguing. I did decide to do quite a big job, specifically I took the 2769 films with the keyword Helicopter, and then I asked the LLM whether the poster has a helicopter in it. Of those, 529 of them it said the poster did have a helicopter (~19%). I then personally looked through them and found 101 which did not have a helicopter (~19%) and 428 which did indeed have a helicopter.

Now my eyes hurt, so I didn’t dig further, but that is a decently high false positive rate, high enough to annoy me, but also probably in line with a SOTA object recognition model and actually very good (you should see some of these helicopters it found, they are tiny!!). Anyways, I think I learned that the error rate is high enough that you kind of have to accept it or not use the data.

I did filter the original 529 down to 224 (~42%) based on whether a helicopter is mentioned in the wiki page. So from 2769 we are down to 224 (~8%) films which (maybe) have a helicopter in the poster and helicopter is mentioned in the wiki page. That is actually a workable tight set of films. The final stats my program then prints out based on that Letterboxd page is:

Total: 223; Potential Friend (>10K votes): 22; Already BMT: 18; Future BMT: 20; Total BMT: 36; Wide: 89

There are 159 films that fit all the criteria and have 3K+ votes on IMDb which is a solid threshold for a “real” film. Two funny bits. First, after McHale’s Navy there are four Chuck Norris films in a row in the to-be-watched section, Delta Force and it’s sequel, Invasion U.S.A., and Missing in Action. Second, looking at potential friends the two that pop out are Moon 44 and the amusingly named Biggles: An Adventure in Time. Could we do a whole helicopter cycle?! … no, there isn’t a romance (at least unless you expand to the keyword, then we got new Annie on the block).

A Fictional Country Alert (Where?) for Mombaka according to wikipedia. And fine, Worst Twist (How?) for Dolph Lundgren, after a betrayal, revealing he actually has a heart of pure gold. This movie is Bad, the main issue is Lundgren not being asked or being unable to do anything really, it makes the film pretty dull.

Learn about scorpions in the Quiz. Cheerios,

The Sklogs

Soul Man Recap

Jamie

I cannot believe this used to play on television… like I’ve seen Soul Man a whole bunch of times growing up. Even at the time it was controversial to the point where the actors in it have continued to give interviews over the years insisting that the script was very funny and sharp and playing on important issues of the times. Essentially insisting that it was a project you couldn’t pass up (even if in retrospect you think “why didn’t you run as fast and far away from this as possible?”). So how did Comedy Central then look at this already controversial film and be like hmmmmm, 3pm on Saturday maybe followed by Just One of the Guys? Pretty ironic actually. It basically became an example of what it was trying to satirize.

To recap, Mark Wilson is an asshole… sorry, that was rude. He’s a rich asshole. He’s primed to attend Harvard Law, but is dismayed when his parents decide not to pay for it. What is a rich asshole to do? Get a loan of course, but in a system built against rich white assholes he just can’t manage that. So he does what any asshole will do: take a bunch of tanning pills and scoop a scholarship meant for African Americans (but don’t worry, if he didn’t take it then the scholarship would have been wasted as he was the only applicant… not a single African American applicant… in LA… hooo weee). Off he goes to Harvard where he begins to learn the hard lessons about what it is to be Black in America. Eventually he is inspired by a fellow African American student in his class, Sarah, who is a single parent working hard to become a lawyer and give back to her community. When he finds out that Sarah actually would have gotten his scholarship if he hadn’t applied as if left unawarded it would have opened to a wider applicant pool, he starts to feel real bad. Eventually he admits what he has done and given all the lessons he’s learned he is given a second chance with strings attached. He gets a loan and asks Sarah for forgiveness, which she eventually grants. THE END.

I mean, wow. The biggest crime this film commits is the blackface. The second biggest crime is playing into stereotypes for laughs because they couldn’t navigate their own satire. But the third biggest crime is letting Mark off at the end with essentially a slap on the wrist. The kid needed some comeuppance. Something to at least be like “OK, he learned a real lesson here.” Having him stay at Harvard and get the girl in the end is insane. Anyway, can I see what the actors are saying when they insist that the script was good? Kind of. There is something interesting about the moment where Mark, deep in on his own crazy blackface scheme, talks about how cool it’s going to be to be Black. That is fairly pointed. It’s a moment in time when there was such a sharp divide between the impact of African American life on culture (the only interaction with African Americans that someone like Mark would have) and the reality of living in America as an African American. But you can’t have your cake and eat it too. You can’t set up a rich asshole pulling a blackface scheme in a film and then have him totally redeemed in the end. Messes the whole thing up. They were trying to walk a tightrope and basically missed the wire entirely with their first step. As for Meatballs IIIl: Summer Job. A+++. Highly recommend watching this on VHS. Me and Patrick were tickled by the sheer number of times someone goes flying off a dock. It’s like the stunt coordinator had only one thing he was licensed for. Throwing people off docks. Back in on the Meatballs franchise!

Hot Take Clam Bake! The end is a dream sequence. What we are experiencing at that moment is Mark getting expelled from school and everyone throwing rotten fruits and vegetables at him. The moment this happens he disassociates and we see what is happening in his mind. He imagines that in fact his professor understands. He gives him a second chance. He goes out and gets a loan at a high interest rate. Then when he sees Sarah again she is willing to take him back because a couple of racists are walking by, make a joke, and give him the opportunity to punch them out. Fantasy land, people. None of that happened. He’s a pariah and has to change his name. Hot Take Temperature: A hot stove you absolutely should not touch.

Patrick?

Patrick

‘Ello everyone! *gif of me walking all “cool” down the street, right before a group of children jump out and beat the shit out of me* Let’s go!

The Good? Nothing much, the film is super weird, and not only racist, but patronizing about it. Originally, I said that the film is probably a satire, but that is not right, at least if you take what the stars and producers say at face value. The comparison I would draw though is to Tootsie (which is described as a satire). Both seem to take their message seriously, which I suppose is the way you would hope such material was considered.

The Bad? The blackface? The racism? The fact that the main character has no consequences in the end? The fact that anyone liked him or talked to him after this? The racism? Oh I already said that. If you wanted to look at this more charitably the film is merely not funny. The funniest part is that partly the film doesn’t work because Howell has a friend. If he was a friendless, rich, asshole, his inability to empathize with black people beyond what he’s seen on television and in movies would perhaps be taken with as a bit of charming naivete. The fact that he has a white friend aiding and abetting his fraud though is rough. 

But the bizarre nature of the whole affair means it is a BMT film. We wouldn’t look to it as a Hall of Fame entry, but it does represent a weird sort of bad movie that could only exist in the mid-80s when cocaine was flowing like wine, and consequences were a thing to be scoffed at.

Ooooooooooo doggy, Meatballs III: Summer Job. This was a VHS special. Only available on VHS. So we busted out the CRT, hooked up my combination VHS/DVD player, and popped this on. This movie is hilariously janky. It is weird. And acting is horrible. But my god it is fun. “I want to get laaaaaaaaaaaaaid” is a line in the film. Patrick Dempsey is pushed off a dock. There is an angel pornstar, and an actor playing the devil which is legitimately not an actor. I can’t figure out who the person was. Anyways, A+, just a very funny and unique viewing experience, this is the thing that friends are made of.

I’m sticking with the trailer analysis today. First I asked if AIStudio could identify where the movie is set. It said Harvard was mentioned, and also Los Angeles, so “Given these details, it seems most likely that the movie is set in both Massachusetts and California.” Correct. I then asked it about product placement. It points out that at 00:20 there is a clear Fila Logo which is kind of amazing because it is upside down and partially obscured … intriguing. As for keywords, I couldn’t get it to ignore audio (which is where it really was getting all the keywords I think), so I tried it without any audio available: Comedy, Racism/Race, Law School, Spoof, C. Thomas Howell, Blackface, Controversy, 1980s, Satire, Prejudice.

Now … Controversy is interesting and seems to me like it might be using some outside sources for this assignment. I guess it could deduce that C. Thomas Howell + Blackface = Controversy, but it is hard to know. Law School is the most intriguing I guess, but again, would a human being recognize this video clip without sound as having to do with law school. Unclear. Similarly, asking about films with the keyword “law school” only 5 pop up, but at least two of them (Reversal of Fortune and Pelican Brief) it is very clear it is getting it from the tagline. Which, fair enough, but still, it is a little different than having an obvious “law school” film in a way. Legally Blonde (title?) and Paper Chase (law + an odd mention of “The Graduate” on the poster?) are also questionable. Honestly, they are all borderline in the end.

I think I’ll give a special BFF (Who?) for Arye Gross who plays the essential best friend who is in on the scheme all along and covers for the main character. Why not, let’s use the AI generated note of Product Placement (What?) for Fila, even though I’m sure there is a better beer one in the end. Definite Setting as a Character (Where?) for Cambridge, MA, you love to see it. A weirdo MacGuffin (Why?) for that always difficult to obtain Harvard Law Degree. And obviously a Worst Twist (How?) for the main character not only not going to prison for fraud, but also still being allowed to stay at Harvard. He was barely a good student! This movie is BMT, it was destined to BMT, and also is so BMT it manages to be a movie I’ll never watch again.

Read about … law? Blackface? Something in the Quiz. Cheerios,

The Sklogs