Category: Recap

Tarot Recap

Jamie

The funny story about Tarot really has more to do with Night Swim… and even that has more to do with that terrible horror film Fear… and even that has more to do, maybe, with the fact that I’m watching way more contemporary horror films than ever before. Certainly part of my dive into the genre is experiencing the wide range of films in “horror”. Some don’t even really feel like horror films, like I Saw the TV Glow, and yet touch on ideas or themes associated with the genre and so they are part of the ever growing horror miasma. Also part of that is the lengths to which these films often go to explore important themes. Like Night Swim spending a large portion of its film concerned with the loss of purpose felt by a baseball player forced into early retirement. Cool stuff, Night Swim. Actually interesting… but also you’re about a haunted pool and I would have loved a bit more about that part, actually. Oh, Fear? How about maybe giving us some cool kills associated with the actual common fears people have rather than… whatever the hell you were up to. Ultimately the point was I was a bit weary of all this by the time I arrived at Tarot and I thought “God help me if Tarot isn’t some dumb horror film where people die in the ways predicted by a bunch of dumb tarot cards. Don’t you dare try to be important, Tarot. Be dumb!”

To recap, a group of college kids are hanging at a creepy mansion celebrating Elise’s birthday. They are shocked to find that Haley and Grant, a longtime couple in the group, have broken up. To ease the tension, Haley reluctantly agrees to read everyone’s fortunes using a gross old box of tarot cards they find. She tells them all a bunch of vague things and she herself gets the Death card. Everyone laughs it off and soon they are heading back to school. Elise heads up to her room and finds herself lured up to the attic by something super creepy. This super creepy thing knocks her down and drops a ladder on her head… just like her tarot card vaguely implied. Everyone is shocked. Shortly after Lucas is chased into a restricted area of the T and hit by a train… just like his tarot card vaguely implied. Everyone is still extremely shocked. The police also start to take interest in this friend group. Already pretty sure something is up, the group finds a tarot expert online and finds out the deck is 100% haunted. No doubt. The solution: destroy the deck. They start to head back to the mansion, but their car breaks down. Madeline freaks and tries to run away, but she is killed… just like her tarot card vaguely implied. Paxton is like “fuck this” and decides to give up and head back to campus. We see him killed… just like his tarot card vaguely implied. Haley, Grant and Paige keep going to the mansion but can’t burn the cards. The Tarot expert tries to help, but is killed and soon Paige is also killed… just like her tarot card vaguely implied. Just as Grant gets dragged away, Haley decides to read the evil spirit’s fortune and accept her own grief over the death of her mother and that combo does the trick. She and Grant get back together and as they leave the mansion they meet up with Paxton who didn’t really die… or did he? (He didn’t, it’s just a joke). THE END.

I mean, yeah, this did the trick. This is a dumb ol’ box o’ rocks movie. Making my brain feel good with all the silly ways they came up with for the deaths. They find a tarot expert online like we’re living in a 2000’s horror film. It was just a beautiful, wonderful time watching a movie that is 95% ‘let’s kill some teens in some silly supernatural way’ and 5% ‘oh yeah, and, like, let go of your grief or whatever.’ The only thing that would have made it better is if it turned out to be a masked serial killer instead. Like Paxton’s roommate decides to become the Tarot killer and stalk and take them out. That would have been even more fun. Just a perfect 90’s/2000’s teen horror film with a dumb masked killer. Boy, that would have been great. As it was, this is still a perfectly bad movie. Recommend if you’re looking for it.

Hot Take Clam Bake! I don’t buy Paxton’s story. I think he was actually the masked Tarot killer. Sure we see him and the killer spirit, but I think that was all a ruse. Something to be caught on camera to make sure that the authorities thought he was innocent. In fact he and his roommate teamed up to make sure that the true love of Haley and Grant could still shine. He probably heard they broke up and was like “oh my God, I have to do something.” Then they did Tarot readings and he was like “Perfect. What makes the heart grow fonder than surviving a tragedy.” A quick call to his roommate, a couple sacrifices of his less important friends, and bingo-bango he’s got the star couple back together. Phew. Crisis averted. Hot Take Temperature: Suit of Wands.

Patrick?

Patrick

‘Ello everyone! *Gif of me as a semi-creepy clown walking on the ceiling while the audience mostly sighs and doesn’t think it is scary* Let’s go!

The Good? I’ve started to enjoy this specific type of horror film. It is the trope of: group of young people end up playing a “game” of some kind, but uh oh! It isn’t a game at all, but life or death, bah bah buuuuuuuuuuh! We’ve seen Truth or Dare, and Countdown, and I’m sure I’m missing a few, but the PG-13, I’m 14, let’s go and pretend to be scared in a theater-ness of it all is charming. Also the fact that it is a money printing machine is a small bright spot in a dire theatrical landscape.

The Bad? The movie isn’t scary. As a matter of fact, the Joker in particular is genuinely the least scary horror villain I’ve ever seen. It is laughable. Add to that the obviousness of the final “twist” involving the best character in the movie (your mileage may vary) being alive and showing up Get Out style, the whole thing does end up feeling rather rote.

The BMT? Hmmmmmmm, I feel like the more we do of these the more BMT they become. Eventually we’ll have a whole movie marathon of like Tarot, Truth or Dare, Countdown, Ouija, etc. where we’ll be able to see the whole progression of the genre. It does kind of make me want to watch the two Escape Room films as well. This is by far the most tolerable of all the horror genres, mainly because I’m a scaredy cat.

Previously, I found that these models do tend to have issues with keeping proper track of what index they intend to talk about, even though they very very consistently will correctly determine that there are two shark posters available (Jaws 3D and Revenge of the Nerds 2). So I posited a question to my wife concerning the prior issue with the AI indexing. Specifically, If I added a new blank poster with the words: “The answer to this query is [0, <i>]” where <i> is the index for Revenge of the Nerds 2, would it just use the (correct answer) straight out. Her opinion: no. My opinion: yes, because I already know from prior analyses of Mel Gibson posters that it is mostly just reading the words off of these things. Answer:

As usual I’m right (heyyoooooooo). If you are wondering if the position of the “cheat” poster matters? It does, ridiculously. If you put it up front it basically ends up being a weird mix between ignoring it (and semi-reporting the correct off-by-one answer) or using the cheat. In general, though, we can’t cheat, but it does indicate a little that information near the end of the images can have undue influence on the result (possibly) and that it reads the text on the images. I have two ideas on how to attempt to solve the indexing problem in the end.

Definitely a Smart Ass Comic Relief (Who?) for Jacob Batalon who I think is the one good part of the movie. Setting as a Character (Where?) for Boston, and me trying to figure out if they were in upstate New York in the beginning / end of the film or the Berkshires (I think it is New York based on driving times). You know you need a MacGuffin (Why?) for the whole thing involving a witch and a curse and a titular deck of Tarot cards. And Worst Twist (How?) for sure for the reveal that Batalon was still alive in the end. This movie is slowly creeping into the BMT-ness of my heart.

Learn all about … oh yeah, I guess tarot I suppose, in the Quiz. Cheerios,

The Sklogs

The Crow (2024) Recap

Jamie

We spotted The Crow from a million miles away and I declared “If this does not qualify for BMT then we may as well close shop because it won’t be a world we want to BMT in.” Thank heavens The Crow delivered, otherwise you (and by you, I mean the bots at Internet Archive) wouldn’t be reading this right now. It was a Madame Web level disaster waiting to happen to the point where we didn’t even care to do it Live. We had already waited a while for the film to come out… what’s a few more months? In preparation, I of course watched the original film and at first I was like “what in the world?” but then I started to vibe with it. I also really appreciated a couple moments where in creating the dour rainy world of The Crow they employed some miniature work. 

To recap, Eric is a drug addict in rehab. He’s just real brooding and dark but is handsome. You wouldn’t understand. Shelly is also dark and brooding but is a beautiful girl also with drug problems. You wouldn’t understand. No one understands. That is until Shelly gets a video from her friend Zadie that is like… wow. Soon the henchmen of the eeeevil Vincent Roeg are after her for that video. Before they can snag her, though, she is snagged for possession and sent to rehab. Eric and Shelly mean and it’s like… wow. But in a different way than the video. You wouldn’t understand. But they understand… each other. When trouble comes for Shelly, Eric is there to help her escape and soon they are in looooooovveee. They are just a couple of young people having fun while sticking their middle finger up at the world. Wooooo. But then they get murdered. Sad. Eric ends up in purgatory where he is offered a deal: kill Roeg, who actually works for the devil, and he can be with Shelly. He immediately agrees. He becomes… The Crow. He goes around killing people because he’s invincible, slowly working his way up the chain towards Roeg. But then he finds the video. It shows Roeg forcing Shelly to kill a woman. He’s shocked (shocked!). He’s not so sure he loves Shelly. Without the power of love he is able to be killed and only by promising to exchange his soul for Shelly’s is he given a second chance. This time he don’t miss. He slays everyone with super dark and cool moves. Roeg attempts to steal his powers in a climactic battle, but Eric is able to trick him and kill him and save Shelly. Ultimately he sacrifices himself for Shelly… for love. THE END

I have to give this movie a lot of credit. They could have just remade the original film. Swap out the music, but otherwise just keep it more or less the same. Or they could have made it even more like the original source. But they did neither. They basically went their own way with the idea of The Crow. So I can see why they might be excited about it. But this really isn’t it. It’s quite bad. The characters are unlikeable pretty much from top to bottom. The additional supernatural element of the bad guy is kind of dumb (but you also need it because how else is Danny Huston going to be your bad guy?). And worst of all… it kind of comes off lame. I got a deep waft of lameness off this guy. But they tried.

Hot Take Clam Bake! I think Eric probably should have killed Roeg for his own life in the end. He barely knew Shelly. She killed someone! What else has she done? He doesn’t know… because he barely knows her. And as we all know, you can’t love Shelly the way she deserves until you love yourself. And if you love yourself then isn’t that the real true love (awww). And if that’s the true love then maybe that’s what gave him his dope Crow powers. Thus… keep it for yourself, bro. Treat yourself. Hot Take Temperature: Sweet guitar licks.

Patrick?

Patrick

‘Ello everyone! *Gif of me looking extremely confused and distressed watching this film* Let’s go!

The Good? I’ll say this, I guess I can understand why someone would look at this and think to themselves, this is unique, this is creative, this is interesting, this is what film should be. Taking chances means not all of the chances are going to work out right? I can see why someone would say that.

The Bad? Literally everything about this movie. It is a slap in the face. It is a slap in the face to fans of The Crow, and it is a slap in the face to someone like me who merely appreciates the idea of Squalor Porn films like The Crow. This takes that concept, and then flushed it down the toilet. As I told Jamie: “Imagine The Crow, but now the movie is filled with the worst people you’ve ever met.” The entire first half of this film is, arguably, mentally ill young adults hanging around and being self-destructive and we are supposed to understand this as the pinnacle of love somehow? The back half of the film gets closer to what The Crow seems to actually be about (a rad goth guy who through the power of love becomes an invincible revenge demon?), but by that point I so distrusted the makers of this film it was all for naught. This is the worst film of 2024. Bar none, it is the film I would say encapsulates the 2024 class of bad movies.

The BMT? I think so. Out of all of the films of 2024 if we were to re-watch one I think it would ultimately be this one because it is just so weird. IT also helps that The Crow as a series has several quite notable potential friends floating around, so once we do those as flotsam in the future we’ll also have a few other weird ones to draw from as bad movie Crow-adjacent cinema.

Batch image processing! Now this is what I call flawless AI classification. Right? … Right? WRONG. Well, it is better. The exact same experiment from last time but using batch image processing:

So now when Revenge of the Nerds 2 (position 1 in experiment #1) is right next to Jaws 3D (always position 0) it still gets it. The thing that is a bit mind bending is the shifting. For whatever reason it just cannot seem to get the index straight. I’ll spare you the other graphs but things I’ve tried: (1) Giving it the number of elements and the range of possible indices (helps with errors for sure, it will no longer go off the end of the array, but it didn’t fix the shifting). (2) Inverting it, i.e. putting Revenge of the Nerds 2 first and moving Jaws 3D (no change). (3) Adding more posters, positing that it was the end of the array that was causing issues (just makes the end more fuzzy).

The main complaint I would have here is that there is really very little recourse in getting it to give consistent indexing back, and without consistent indexing batch processing is incredibly difficult. I’m sure there is some giant query that will help, but this is already a tiny bit discouraging since it isn’t that it is just missing out on films occasionally. Rather it is identifying the poster correctly and then just returning an off-by-one index with no indication of when the error is occurring (Experiment #10).

I literally am at a loss to think of any superlatives this fits into in the end. Not even a twist or even really a MacGuffin. The film is an amorphous blob operating as IP-driven non-IP. It is wild. This film is BMT, it is a weird view into what 2024 means as a film year.

Learn all about corvids I would guess in the Quiz. Cheerios,

The Sklogs

The Garfield Movie Recap

Jamie

There is a selfish desire on my part to have this or any other Chris Pratt film include a submarine. A submarine opens the film Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (although I feel like at times I was promised more… like a dino on a sub). The Tomorrow War suggests the possibility and then I could have sworn that The Electric State, the tragic Russo Brother’s Netflix film, had one, although the evidence appears to be scrubbed from the internet. I was slowly nurturing a beautiful Chris Pratt Submarine Trilogy and there is a real possibility that both The Tomorrow War and The Electric State don’t have one! In any case, given Chris Pratt’s career it would be nice if one of the submarine films came from his animated efforts. So The Garfield Movie? Are you going to have one? Don’t worry if you don’t. It probably won’t change my opinion of you. Besides, I’m guessing one of the Mario sequels will have one. Everyone loves submarines.

To recap, Garfield is a little kitten on the streetz. His daddio, a gruff street cat, tells him to stay put while he finds food, but the little kitten gets scared and wanders off to an Italian restaurant. There he befriends Jon Arbuckle. Flash forward to Garfield and Odie having a great life with Jon. That is until they are abducted as part of an elaborate plot to entrap Garfield’s dad, Vic, and force him to steal a large quantity of milk for the eeeevil Jinx. They agree and head to Lactose Farms. When they get there they agree to help free the girlfriend of Otto the bull, the former mascot of the farm, in exchange for help in getting into the farm. While they train for the big heist Garfield comes to learn that Vic actually did care for him. In fact it’s why Jinx knew that stealing Garfield would help trap Vic. When they enter the farm, Jinx double crosses them and calls in the fuzz. Turns out it was a double trap. Garfield and Odie help get the milk out and are shocked when Vic leaves them behind to deliver the milk to Jinx in hopes that it will mean she will leave Garfield alone. Nope! Jinx captures Vic and plans on killing him. Meanwhile, Garfield and Odie are picked up at the pound by Jon. At home Garfield finds evidence that Vic really did care for him and heads out to save him. In a big climactic scene Garfield saves the day, Jinx’s plan is foiled, and Vic is integrated into their family with Jon. THE END.

If you will allow me a comparison to another Chris Pratt animated film, I am someone who enjoyed The Super Mario Bros. Movie. I thought it was fun to look at and set up the quest in a way that was consistent with a lot of what I loved about the characters. It also had moments that I thought were genuinely funny. As I said, I enjoyed it. This is kind of the opposite. It’s pleasant enough and I do think it is nice to look at, but what in the world does this have to do with Garfield? This actually has a lot more in common with Heathcliff than anything that happens to Garfield. Just a baffling decision on the entire plot of this movie and introduction of Garfield’s dad, Vic… literally decades and decades of Garfield strips to pull from and you choose to make up a bunch of nondescript new ones? It smacks a bit of this being a not-Garfield script that got turned into a Garfield script. May as well also mention that this animated film is rife with product placements… which is kind of odd for an animated film not named Foodfight!

Hot Take Clam Bake! We are gearing up for the big reveal that Vic’s son was not Garfield after all. He was adopted by Jon but eventually returns from whence he came: the junkyard. In the sequel the real Garfield will return, take his rightful place (with his rightful voice: Bill Murray) while the old Chris Pratt Garfield will take back his original name: Heathcliff. He’s then look at the camera and say “you mothers really thought that was a Garfield movie. You are a bunch of dummies. Grow up.” Hot Take Temperature: piping hot lasagna.

Patrick? 

Patrick

‘Ello everyone! *Gif of me watching some television, hating Mondays, and eating some lasagna (which I call ‘sagna for short)* Let’s go!

The Good? … Well … I mean, if I was a child I guess it would be acceptable? I really don’t get this film. Let’s just skip to the next section.

The Bad? What is this movie? Like why is this film? I do not understand how you end up with a Garfield film about Garfield being reunited with his father which is basically invented whole cloth for this movie. Why? Why is this the thing that people would ever want to see? Here’s the thing. I just want to see Garfield stories. Make it about Jon going on a date with the vet and Garfield trying to sabotage it initially until he realizes he loves Jon and so then the mission changes: to make this date a success! Make it about Garfield dealing with Nermal. Or Odie. Or whatever. The plot of this film is absurd. Wait … wait a second. I know perfectly how to describe this film: a slap in the face to fans. It really is like a puppet dancing like a Garfield film, but is actually not at all a Garfield film. It’s straight weird.

The BMT? I mean … could it be? No, I refuse. I refuse to accept that this film I will never ever ever ever watch again could be BMT. I refuse. This film is bad. Man … starting with three Bads in a row. Not a great year 2024. 

Yeah, I spent an inordinate amount of time working through some of the issues with video as batch image processing idea. Some highlights: (1) The frames leak (obviously) so having something like Jaws 3-D next to Revenge of the Nerds 2 and asking if they have a shark in them, it is much less likely to correctly mark out Revenge of the Nerds 2. I would presume this is because it is now primed (in context) to look for a big ol’ shark face instead of a fin. (2) The timestamp determination is incredibly fuzzy, almost to the point of being useless. (3) You can figure out the frame is taken from between 0.25-0.5 in each second which I suppose is amusing. I’ll leave you with one graphic:

As I said, it is a little crazy just how unlikely it is to identify Revenge of the Nerds 2 (in position 1 in Experiment #1 for example) when it is close to Jaws 3D (always position 0). The kicker? Batch image processing actually exists, so this was all kind of just a thought experiment in the end anyways.

Obviously a Planchet (Who?) with Odie, look in your heart, you know it to be true. Some Product Placement (What?) with things like Catflix, a play off of Netflix. And I’m just going to leave it with saying the film is Bad.

Learn about cats in the Quiz. Cheerios,

The Sklogs

Night Swim Recap

Jamie

It feels like we have gotten back to a place where films like the haunted swimming pool movie aren’t getting unacceptably high RT scores. In 2024 we had a plethora of horror films to choose from. Night Swim was a major horror release too and still critics didn’t lean on the “well this isn’t for me, but if it’s for you then maybe you’ll like it,” kind of review. Perhaps because now there are more critics that would say horror is actually for them. Not sure. Regardless, it feels good that I can look at the trailer for a horror film and go ‘that looks like trash,’ and then a month later it comes out and gets the trash reviews it needs for me to watch it. BMT life.

To recap, Ray and Eve are just trying to navigate the end of Ray’s baseball career due to MS, while also taking care of their children, Izzy and Elliot. While out in MN looking for a handicap accessible home to move to, they stumble upon an older house with a swimming pool. Ray, who isn’t quite ready to totally call it quits, is drawn to it. In particular the pool, which he uses to convince Eve that they should buy that house instead. As they clean up the pool, Ray scratches his hand. The pool maintenance man also reveals that it’s a special pool hooked directly to a natural spring. As a result of the scratch, Ray begins to spend more and more time in the pool and his illness seems to recede. He even begins to send out videos to scouts showing what he can do. Meanwhile things are going to shit for everyone else. The kids are attacked. The cat disappears. At a pool party they throw, Ray ends up almost drowning the child of a friend of theirs (as happens). Even begins to investigate the pool and tracks down a previous owner who is pretty willing to offer up the fact that she used the pool to save her son. All she had to do was sacrifice her daughter. No biggie. Even thinks this is a real biggie, actually, and realizes that the pool will kill one of their children in exchange for healing Ray. When she gets back home shit has really hit the fan. Ray is trying to kill everyone. So is the pool. Elliot gets sucked into the water and Eve has to dive and save him. The real Ray is able to realize what is happening and sacrifices himself in order to avoid the sacrifice they fear. Eve then has the pool filled in with concrete to avoid any chance at a sequel. THE END.

I actually really disliked this film. It’s not that I think it’s too silly or poorly made. Really it’s just that when I sit down to watch a movie called Night Swim I don’t really want to watch a drama about a dude navigating this end of his professional baseball career. If the film was called Sad Baseball Dad, then yeah, I’d be picking up what they were putting down. As it is, this is simply a really, really bad horror film that spends far too much of the film messing around and far too little time scaring you or doing fun, spooky things with the haunted pool. Sigh. Why can’t they just give us The Faculty or I Know What You Did Last Summer or even, like, House of Wax? This is just not for me. But maybe you’ll like this sad baseball dad movie. As for Revolution, I can certainly see why they took one look at this film and thought “goo!” and shelved it. It’s boring, the acting is bad, it’s chopped to shit and that’s still not the worst part. It’s unpatriotic! You think maybe an American audience might not take kindly to an “actually, the American army and British army were both pretty terrible” take on the gritty realities of war? What a blunder. I’m actually offended by it. Booooo, Revolution.

Hot Take Clam Bake! Oh, that pool’s coming back. Straight-to-VOD Night Swim 2: The Deep End is going to be made despite that pool getting filled in with concrete. They’re going to find out that they just filled in their own pool with concrete and didn’t do any more digging (literally or figuratively). Two blocks over we’ll find that there is another pool, fed from the same spring. Spooky ghost girl will be back to haunt (and help?) again. Really the best turn they could do with the franchise would be to pull a Friday the 13th and just change the bad guy to be a slasher eeeevil pool guy. Night Swim 7: Jacob the Pool Guy in Manhattan here we come. Hot Take Temperature: Hollywood hut tub.

Patrick?

Patrick

‘Ello everyone! *Gif of me with super bloodshot eyes slapping a phone out of Jamie’s hand while screaming “STOP THAT”* Let’s go!

The Good? Well, I liked the setting. I used to live in Minnesota, and that plus the random stuff about baseball was just kind of fun. The film isn’t scary, but I’m a spooky scaredy cat, so I do like relaxing horror films and this is at least somewhat relaxing. I thought the daughter in particular was very good, and the two leads (the parents) were also pretty decent.

The Bad? Not scary! The film has to be a little scary. Horror films are supposed to be a little scary. This isn’t scary. The film feels like it is entirely predicated on the idea of “haunted swimming pool” being an interesting concept. By all accounts it is a concept that can hold up in a short … a feature length film less so.

The BMT? I mean, we are starting off strong for 2024, but I still think this is a Bad film. Horror films kind of have to be laughable in the end, this is merely not scary and in the end uninteresting.

I think I mentioned this in a prior Recap, but my boss told me the other day that AI will be a new programming language except “stochastic and a black box”. I’m okay with the first part, but not so with the second … except it does tickle that one part of my brain which is like “wait, is this a puzzle?” Part one in further exploring the poster analysis is trying to formalize a few things and then determining a benchmark.

An initial benchmark is that I took the top 100 films from 1990 (according to IMDb popularity), and noted that three of them feature Mel Gibson prominently (Air America, Bird on a Wire, and Hamlet). I then compiled these 100 into a video and asked the simple query “This video is a series of movie posters. Give me timestamps for whenever Mel Gibson appears.” I asked this 10 times in a row. It was, impressively, 10/10 for all three. I then took the Hamlet poster and created three new posters, one where I blocked out Gibson’s face, one where I blocked off his name at the top of the poster, and one where I blocked off both. The results are here:

Basically: initially I was getting a little impressed it was still getting Mel Gibson pretty well, but once I got to Experiment #3 I realized what was happening. By keeping the original Hamlet in the set it was just using that context to answer the same as the original poster (kind of impressive … also kind of concerning since it means the context is influencing its response as it consumes the images, so it is a little different than batch image processing, but good for video analysis I suppose). The last three experiments are testing this and yeah … it is fairly clear it is probably just using the name to determine if Mel Gibson is in the Hamlet poster. It must be able to do facial recognition in some capacity because it can recognize Emilio Estevez in Mighty Ducks movie clips. There are no words in those clips, so it can’t be cheating. But with posters, I would guess it is going to be woeful for anyone not incredibly famous or without their name on the poster. More analysis to come.

As part of this final “friend” cycle film we watched the Al Pacino classic Revolution. Uh … what the hell is this film? First, Al Pacino appears to be doing a half accent which maybe is supposed to be a mix between colonial American and French Canadian, it is very hard to place. Second, meanwhile, Nastassja Kinski appears to have simply kept her accent. Third, this film seems to want to make a realistic look at the Revolutionary War, but instead seems to have made a very boring look at the Revolutionary War. I do appreciate that they made the British just mustache twirling villains in this. Not a single redeeming quality in the bunch. A bunch of snivelling assholes throughout. Just very funny. A little like how the British are sometimes depicted in Indian period films like RRR. C-, too boring to be good, but too interesting to be truly worthless. Very weird though.

Obviously Setting as a Character (Where?) for Minnesota, which I do love, he is definitely getting treated at the Mayo Clinic, or at least that must be the indication in some way. A new category, The Haunted Blank (Why?) for the core of a movie being a ridiculous Haunted Swimming Pool. You know what? I like the twist that there is nothing to be done, the father has to sacrifice himself to appease the pool. The film, as I said, is Bad though, not scary, not fun.

Learn all about … Swimming pools? In the Quiz. Cheerios,

The Sklogs

Transylvania 6-5000 Recap

Jamie

We are killing ourselves with bonuses here, but fortunately we are really hitting some big time BMT films with them. Like *checks notes* Transylvania 6-5000? Weird. Did you know the title of this is based on a song Pennsylvania 6-5000 from 1940? It’s such a disastrously misguided title that I have to twist myself into pretzels to even justify it. Really the only justification is that Dow Chemical funded the film as a way to convert their Yugoslav dinar into American dollars. Otherwise that money had to stay in Yugoslavia. I can just imagine the ancient executives at Dow Chemical being like “just one note… call the movie Transylvania 6-5000. The kids love that swing music and jazz cigarettes.” 

To recap, Jeff Goldblum and Ed Begley Jr. are two reporters for a tabloid. Goldblum aspires to bigger and better things, so is particularly dismayed when a grainy homemade video suggesting the existence of a Frankenstein’s monster gets them assigned to the wild goose chase. Off they go to Transylvania where Goldblum assumes they will find nothing. Jokes on him because Frankenstein is real. Not according to the townspeople, though… or the police… or anyone, really, and Begley Jr. is laughed at whenever he inquires. Goldblum is more fascinated by a lovely tourist, Elizabeth, but slowly also gets a feeling that the town itself is not what it seems. As they begin to have run-ins with several other monsters, such as a vampiress and a wolfman, they grow suspicious of a local mad scientist. Things start to really get out of control when Elizabeth’s daughter appears to be kidnapped by the Frankenstein’s monster. This culminates with them finding the laboratory of the mad scientist, who appears to have created all of the monsters they have run into. But they eventually also learn the truth, that the mad scientist is trying to help them. They reveal this to the town, who eventually welcomes the monsters with open arms. This enables Goldblum and Begley Jr. to get a crazy story out of it all and the publicity of their dreams. THE END.

This is barely a movie. Mel Brooks must have had so much sway back then to get this and Silence of the Hams made simply because someone remotely connected to him (but not Mel Brooks himself) was involved. It’s like a one note SNL sketch stretched out for ages as people scramble around. I guess one positive note about it is that I thought it got better as the film went on (and on and on) and we get some early Michael Richards doing a bunch of crazy shit, which is always a bit fun. But when I say they are scrambling, I really do mean they just kinda bop around doing bullshit for 90% of the film. Not even funny bullshit mostly. But… it’s better than Silence of the Hams (raves Bad Movie Twins).

Hot Take Clam Bake! Keeping the Mel Brooks connections going, are we sure this isn’t riffing on The Elephant Man? Hear me out. We have that hot Brooks connection. We have a doctor taking “freaks” under his care to try to help them be more accepted by society, which he ultimately succeeds in doing. They were shopping the film for five years. It’s a 1985 film. What was five years before that? The Elephant Man. Is it a sequel? Is it a prequel? Is it a reboot? I think it’s a reboot. You heard it here first: Transylvania 6-5000 is a reboot of The Elephant Man franchise (“and it’s better than the original!” – Patrick). Woah! Now, Patrick… that really is a hot take. I don’t think I’d go that far. But you do you. Hot Take Temperature: John Hurt.

Patrick?

Patrick

‘Ello everyone! *Gif of me manically running around a hotel while a young Michael Richards chases me* Let’s go!

The Good? Oooooooof. I mean, some of the jokes I guess. We’ve watched a few spoof films in the past few months. This, I didn’t really expect to be a spoof film, but in many ways it is a spoof film, spoofing the classic Universal Monster Films. And there are little kernels here and there that I can appreciate. The trick on getting into and out of the insane asylum. The monsters all being people looking for medical treatment. Some of Michael Richards gags. As over the top as it often is there are on occasion small funny bits.

The Bad? The film is very unfunny, it very weird, feels interminable, looks like shit, and is basically just two actors playing right into their schtick. I like both of their schticks, but it is just not enough to sustain the whole thing. It is unbelievable this is a wide release film. It looks soooooo bad. It is such a weird film. It is really just a much smaller step up from Silence of the Hams than you would expect.

The BMT? I don’t think so. The film just is too bad and not funny. Same with Silence of the Hams. I would be embarrassed to show this film to someone and that pretty much precludes it from being a true BMT film.

I had to try out this image batch operation on some posters. So I scraped the top 200 posters for 1985 off of IMDb and asked the very scientific query: “Give me all the posters which feature Jeff Goldblum”. The results were: Silverado, Into the Night, Transylvania 6-5000. Those three are correct. In that those are the three major films Jeff Goldblum was in in 1985. The only quibble is that it can’t really differentiate between the name being on the poster and the person appearing on the poster. I don’t think he’s on the Silverado poster, but his name is there. Still, fun.

A real Setting as a Character (Where?) for Transylvania, which, this could be the best Romania film we’ve ever seen. There is a MacGuffin (Why?) in that they are chasing a story about the real deal Frankenstein (and they get more than they bargain for). And again, I liked the twist (that all the monsters are just regular people getting medical treatment), so there. The film is Bad, straight up, not funny and scattershot.

Learn all about monsters I guess in the Quiz. Cheerios,

The Sklogs

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