Category: Recap

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

Child’s Play 3 Recap

Jamie

Hi, it’s Franchise Man and Patrick has really got me thinking about trilogies lately and how you can get a sense of where something is going by looking at a set of three. Why? Well the first film (Child’s Play in this case) is the sensation. Sometimes unexpected. So the first entry can be a bit weird and might not even feel like a film in the series once you are at entry five or six. The second (Child’s Play 2 in this case) is often a retread. Uh oh! We have a hit. Let’s churn something out quick while we get our bearings. Maybe we’ll just make up some bullshit why the killer actually didn’t die and now he’s back to finish the job. That way we have time to try to parse out what it was that got everyone hot and bothered from the first film so we can really crush that under the weight of lore in later entries.The third, that’s where you really settle in on what the series is about. So here we have Child’s Play 3 which definitely *check notes* oh wait, did they still not know what they wanted to do with the series yet?

To recap, Chucky is back, Jack! And this time… he still wants to kill that same kid from the first film. Gotta get into that sweet bod, I guess. Although, why doesn’t he just go after a different kid? What’s that? That’s eventually what he does try to do later in the movie? So why does he bother going to the military school in the first place? You know what? Nevermind. Let’s keep going. After the events of the first two films, Andy is now off to military school. There he is told to stop believing in killer dolls cause that’s dumb. Unfortunately, the Good Guy factory is getting back up and running and oops! Looks like Chucky’s blood splashed into the vat of plastic. So Chucky’s back, Jack! He finds out where Andy is and mails himself there. Meanwhile, Andy has a new young pal, Ronald, a new best friend, Harold, a new love interest, Kristin, and Brett… who sucks. Ronald finds the Good Guy package and Chucky is like “wait, why don’t I possess this bozo instead… or really any ol’ kid. Shit.” He start to but is thrown in the garbage before he can. Chucky proceeds with all kinds of hijinks. And by hijinks I mean killing a ton of people but not Andy and not Ronald and also he doesn’t possess anyone. Just kills them. Ultimately, despite the plethora of tragedy around them, the school decides to move forward with the annual war games. Chucky replaces the blanks for one team with live ammunition and it is CRAZY. Chucky flees to a nearby carnival (naturally) where Andy is able to finally convince Ronald that Chucky is bad and together they defeat him (or did they? (They didn’t)). THE END.

Alright, so the opening scene of this movie where they reopen the Good Guy factory is amazing. If there is a question about a not very good film with an amazing opening scene, this is a fine answer. After that? I’m sorry, but this doesn’t make any sense. Why Chucky is even pursuing Andy anymore is a total mystery. Any ol’ boy will do and instead he gets mixed up with the only person who knows what he’s up to. Thank god the whole film is ridiculous and we were having some fun with it. Military school setting? Love it. Carnival climax? Yes, please. But yeah, I’m not going to be saying this is a hidden classic any time soon. As for Critters 3… welp, they certainly lost the budget on that entry. That being said, setting the whole thing in an apartment building is a good idea and the weirdness of the characters and the critters themselves works. So for what they were working with they did an admirable job.

Hot Take Clam Bake! I kinda think Andy and Kristin are going to make it. Sure, I didn’t even need to mention her in the recap since the whole love interest storyline (and many other storylines) are totally extraneous to the plot. And sure, they don’t know each other and all she knows is that he’s mixed up with a voodoo demon doll. And sure, she never shows up in any other entries in the series. But… I feel like the spark is real. Hot Take Temperature: Melted plastic.

Patrick?

Patrick

‘Ello everyone! *gif of me as a creepy doll cackling and flipping off a little kid* Let’s go!

The Good? I love watching franchises. And I do love how unabashedly weird these films are. The first is genuinely an interesting and fun genre flick. The voodoo twist (which is right in the beginning and rather amusing, especially since it almost certainly comes from a bizarre interest in voodoo at the time see: Predator 2) is kind of fun, and there is a nice plausibility to just how incredulous everyone is about Chucky being real. They definitely just think that the little kid is a psycho. The second film is much more nonsensical, in that they feel the need to dispatch with the mother and they just run it back with people, again, just not believing in Chucky (multiple people saw him last time …). The third is as nuts, so I guess that’s a positive.

The Bad? The third is starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel for ideas though. Military Academy? Running back the voodoo possession? Finale at the amusement park. It feels by the numbers, and boring to boot. I don’t really recall an interesting kill in the end. It is basically the issue with all late stage horror sequels.

The BMT? I don’t think this is notable enough to get there. It really needs to start getting wild, like Jason in Manhattan level, for the BMT juices to really start flowing. It is probably Bad.

We also watched Critters 3 as a friend. A young Leo, a completed trilogy, a creature feature in a decrepit apartment building. What more could you want? The film is genuinely quite fun, even though as usual films like this just have a lot of filler and often kind of look crappy. Leo is good though, and the film is one of the vaguely good horror-comedies of the time. Anyways, like it. I’ve liked all the Critters films I feel like. B+.

I went a little more sophisticated for the AI exploration this time. First, I uploaded the Child’s Play 3 trailer and asked for 10 keywords: Military School, Discipline, Training, Revenge, Possession, Violence, Horror, Stalking, Transference, Good Guys Doll. I’m going to guess that a lot of those are based on the audio, so I’ll check that on the next one I run. For now, obviously, “military school” is a fun one to look into. I do wish it would have picked up “theme park” since that is an unusual and unexpected feature of the trailer.

I fed the 47 films with the “military school” keyword into and 20 indicated that the poster suggests it is indeed set at a military academy. Taps is the only real one of note, and If… is a false positive, it takes place at a boarding school. That though is more of a problem with IMDb than anything else. There doesn’t seem to be a major omission from what I can see. If anything this all points to other avenues of attack. The theme park idea above would be evident from the trailer. The same could be said of Clifford. But it feels like we are years away from it being practical to feed in 50+ trailers (probably what? 4 hours of video, it would take weeks, or cost $5 which I’m still unwilling to pay for exploratory and useless work like this). But once that is possible it could get interesting.

Why not, a Product Placement (What?) for Playpen Magazine which features in the trailer. It loses its Setting cred here, we can presume they are still in Illinois, it is just not very obvious. The movie is very silly, but I think ultimately it is Bad like a lot of slashers are bad, boring with bad kills.

Learn all about dolls in the Quiz. Cheerios,

The Sklogs

Spawn Recap

Jamie

I distinctly remember Spawn coming out. The comic was big in the household, but I was kind of young to read it… besides I never really got into comic books to that extent. That being said, Spawn looked cool and it was something fun to watch while over at a sleepover. Just young enough that things like Judge Dredd and Spawn were really toeing the line of “oh shit, things are getting real,” when it came to what we were allowed to watch. So we watched this at a sleepover. We had a ball. I remember loving it. Just laughing and laughing at The Pest star John Leguizamo. In fact that probably also factored into why we watched this movie. We loved The Pest. Anyway, that wasn’t the memorable part. The memorable part was coming home and having our older brother ask what we watched and us saying we saw Spawn and loved it and he was actually like… upset that we would find Spawn and particularly Leguizamo’s character funny in any way. One of those moments where I thought “wait, do I love things that everyone agrees is bad?” But that couldn’t be… because then maybe The Pest would be bad. Gasp.

To recap, Al Simmons is a CIA operative who kinda sorta is aware that maybe he’s the baddie. More specifically he’s getting suspicious that his superior Jason Wynn might be a baddie. Sensing he might be losing Simmons, Wynn sets up a job during which he explodes Simmons and sends him to Hell. When in Hell, Simmons is recruited to fight for a demon and lead Armageddon (coolio) in exchange for seeing his wife again. This is a monkey paw situation, of course, as he returns to Earth five years later and totally burnt to a crisp. His wife is remarried to his best friend and he starts to wonder about that deal he made. An old man named Cogliostro turns out to be devil spawn as well, but tries to guide Simmons towards a different path. A path of justice. But the demon helper The Violator is also guiding Spawn towards completing his agreement. Simmons, now Spawn, decides to ambush Wynn and almost kills him. Ultimately The Violator conspires to get Wynn to attach a bioweapon to his heart as protection against another ambush. But the real plan is to get Spawn to kill him and start Armageddon. Added incentive is a plan to kill his family. Ultimately they clash and Spawn is able to extract the bioweapon and is sent to Hell as punishment. He does battle with demon hordes and eventually is able to defeat The Violator and send Wynn to jail. Seeing that his family is happy, Spawn decides to dedicate his life to justice. THE END. 

This is a very mixed movie. I actually think if they had perhaps chosen a bigger (and better, sorry Michael Jai White) star this might have worked enough to get middling reviews (i.e. not-BMT). And if they had followed through on doing at least some practical effects for Hell, then maybe it might have even risen further because they were really going for it in the film and by all accounts just ran out of time and money. Leguizamo is kind of amazing and there is some really striking practical effects for the monster he turns into. But the rest is real B-level, almost straight-to-video, action schlock. So it’s kind of hard to argue super strongly for the good. It’s fun though. I’m a bit surprised there hasn’t been more of a revisionist history on it. Even Martin Sheen, who is absolutely devouring every scene he is in, kinda fits today’s sensibilities of someone really going for it in a genre film. As for An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, stop being dumb The Razzies. This is just not big enough to require a roasting by anyone. Clearly hijacked by Eszterhas and he’s a weird dude. All that being said… Stallone is kind of funny in it. I love Stallone.

Hot Take Clam Bake! Spawn’s wife’s marriage to Cutting Edge ain’t lasting. She just got a look at Spawn. Sure he’s roasted and toasted, but he’s also cut and has a cape that won’t quit. Spawn is moping around being like “guess I gotta just fight for justice now and let my family be.” What?! No way. You no longer have a weird clown following you around. You no longer are an employee of Hell. You got your whole… uh, life, I guess… kinda… ahead of you. Find a steady job and I give it 8 months before she’s back in your arms/cape. Hot Take Temperature: Full body burn.

Patrick? 

Patrick

‘Ello everyone! *Gif of me dressed as a clown, popping my own head like a balloon, and then farting real loud* Let’s go!

The good? The film is generally kind of fun and silly and there really isn’t much else like it out there. For all the grief I remember Leguizamo getting at the time, he makes the film just light enough to be reasonable.

The bad? The film is probably too dark to appeal today. I don’t know what they would really do with Spawn today, the 90s was just a different time. Just look at The Crow, or Fight Club, or Se7en. The filmmaking and storytelling was just generally grunge and dark, or at least had the room to unironically accommodate it. I don’t feel like there is that space today. But that doesn’t make the film bad.

The bmt? Probably. For Leguizamo alone the film is interesting, and it is weird and borderline good, and I kind of generally dug it. It is very much like The Crow in that same way. No, not the new one … definitely not the new one. The original The Crow.

Jesus … An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn is basically not a film? I don’t really know what I expected, but this certainly wasn’t it. This really appears to be a film that some random people make on a lark, thought would be funny (it isn’t) and then mostly panicked when they realized they had made an unfunny, plotless, trash film. Then they pulled off the most obvious stunt possible (taking the director’s name off the film to get Alan Smithee in there for real), and seem to try and play it off as a joke. The film is painfully unfunny, and just generally boring. The only weird redeeming feature is the subplot with Coolio and Chuck D helping Eric Idle out. C, you have to watch it for bad movie cred, but it ain’t good.

I decided to ask the AI to generate ten keywords for me for the film. This is what it came up with: Antihero, Hellspawn, Darkness, Justice, Mask, Red cape, Costume, Supernatural, Revenge, Demonic Powers. I don’t mind all of those except maybe Darkness (I guess, but pretty vague), and Justice (which like Darkness is really just because those two words are in the tagline). The best is maybe Red Cape, or Hellspawn. So let’s get ten more film having to do with Hellspawn: 

Constantine (2005), End of Days (1999), Prince of Darkness (1987), The Prophecy (1995), Hellraiser (1987), Legion (2010), The Devil’s Advocate (1997), Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory (2011), Pumpkinhead (1988), Ghost Rider (2007)

I do think those qualify, although some are probably debatable (The Devil’s Advocate?) I suppose if I wanted something a little like this Ghost Rider is the closest. Antihero, Hellspawn, Justice, Mask (kind of), Costume (? Kind of), Supernatural, Revenge. It really ticks those boxes. You’d think the sequel would have done it. A little unforgivable that is thinks Paradise Lost has anything to do with this stuff though. Now, do I care about this stuff? Not really, mostly useless for what we do here at BMTHQ, but I certainly can see why someone without my vast computational resources would find this appealing.

The ultimate MacGuffin (Why?) of them all: revenge. And I honestly think that it is. There is some information about Spawn generally being in New York City, I honestly don’t remember if it was explicit in the film, but it is too unclear to bother. The film is BMT for Leguizamo’s performance alone.

Read about … clowns I suppose, in the Quiz. Cheerios,

The Sklogs

Major League: Back to the Minors Recap

Jamie

Major League: Back to the Minors has one specific BMT muscle it can flex and it better flex it because (hooooo doggy) that movie doesn’t have any other BMT leg to stand on. If you right now wanted to watch Major League: Back to the Minors you could. You would have to pay about $4 to stream it, but you could do that. We don’t like to do that at BMTHQ. Why not? Because we are brary bros and we support our local public library system. It’s a beautiful thing to engage in the community and receive the treasure that is a DVD and Blu-ray’s in the mail. It brings a tear to my eye. So could we do that with Major League: Back to the Minors? No. Not a single hard copy of the film exists in my library system or Patrick’s. It’s rare, but it does happen. Our local libraries looked at Major League: Back to the Minors, assessed its value to the community and said “nah.” Were we deterred? No! I sent out the brary bro signal to the heavens and got it from a different library system through a third brary bro. All this to say, you too can be a brary bro. Thanks Brary Bro Network (BBN)! 

To recap, uh… Dorn is back, Jack?! I guess our boy Dorn didn’t learn his lesson from briefly owning the Indians and now he owns the Twins. He brings in Gus Cantrell as the coach of their AAA team, The Buzz. Gus is an aging pitcher on his last legs, but he knows what it takes to make a team. He ain’t taking guff from anyone, even his star player. Tanaka is back. Pedro is back. Rube is back. Some other guys. The minor league team is naturally a mess, in part because they are a bunch of misfits (you don’t say) and in part because they don’t work together (you don’t double say). Gus has a rivalry with the Twins manager, Leonard Huff, and as his team shapes up he finds himself challenging the Twins to an exhibition. They end up playing the Twins strong and Huff decides to shut off the stadium lights rather than risk losing. Everyone kind of knows the Twins choked and so Huff calls up the Buzz’s star player, Billy Anderson. Gus insists he’s not ready, but ultimately Billy chooses to go. Gus is able to rally his team and when Billy is sent back down, Gus helps him become a better player. Gus ends up challenging Huff again. The bet? If the Twins win, Huff gets Gus’s salary. If the Buzz win, Gus becomes the Twins manager. Long story short the Buzz win (duh), but Gus is like “I’d rather coach in the minors and not make way more money and shit. Whatever.” THE END.

Woooooooooooooof. This is an anti-comedy. Were there jokes? I can’t remember. My brain refused to comprehend that this was a film that was worth ingesting. No wonder the library systems didn’t have copies of this film. It probably acts like a black hole and sucks up and destroys the films that surround it. This really feels like a film where jokes were written and then some baseball consultant came in and removed them in order to add more baseball details. There is so much discussion of baseball strategy and it’s soooo booorrrrring. This is the most useless film of all time. Who wanted this? Why was this released to theaters? The fact that this qualified for BMT puts our whole venture into question. We must forget this happened. Trash this one. Junk it.

Hot Take Clam Bake! I’m gonna go out on a limb and say Gus would take the Twins job. This was a dude trying to pull a “frozen ball” trick in Class A+. He was no where near playing seriously anymore and had no managing experience. The fact that he is called on to manage a AAA team is a miracle. The fact that his team pulls another miracle and beats the Twins should let him know that it’s A-OK to take the money and hightail it to the majors. Once he’s a Major League manager he is set. Huge mistake. HUGE. Hot Take Temperature: A Minnesota summer.

Patrick?

Patrick

‘Ello everyone! *gif of me sitting in Twins Stadium very confused as to why the team is playing a Minor League team and people give a shit about an exhibition game* Let’s go!

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOF

This film is rough.

Check out the Major League II recap to learn about the delight that is Major League.

Alright, where to even begin. I suppose I should start with the good. There isn’t much. I enjoyed seeing a young Walter Goggins. And I liked the dumb ways they decided to bring people back even though the main character is a totally different person and the team isn’t even in the same system as the other films so that doesn’t even make a lick of sense.

The bad. I mean, the movie makes no sense. We are talking about minor league baseball here. No one cares about this. The idea that a minor league team goes on a tear and people are all jazzed up about it is nuts.

Equally nutty is the fact that people in Minnesota seem to care about the Twins (heyyyyyyooooooooooo). But for real, the idea that a sports fanbase would hate their coach so much they would actively root for their own farm team in a meaningless exhibition and like cheer the coach on in a restaurant. I lived through the Bobby Valentine era of the Red Sox and you’d just check out.

So mainly the bad is that the film is just incredibly dumb and nonsensical. It is a very light watch, but not one I would repeat.

So no I don’t really think it is a very BMT film. The second is. This is just the death throws of a series trying to figure out if a trilogy is even possible.

I’m still going to throw a Setting as a Character (Where?) for Minnesota here, I have no idea why they changed the team up except probably so they could play the final game in the Metrodome. Again a Worst Twist (How?) for the totally out of nowhere result that the good guys win and the bad guys lose. The film is Bad.

I assume we’ll learn all about Minor League baseball in the Quiz. Cheerios,

The Sklogs

Major League II Recap

Jamie

I was just thinking the other day how infrequently I rewatch movies. If you look at films made from 2010 onwards I think I’ve only seen four or five more than once. This of course is totally different from the heyday of Comedy Central. I watched Major League and Major League II so many times that they legit melded into one three and a half hour movie in my head. Tanaka is in Major League as far as my brain is concerned. How did Jake both bunt to win the pennant and coach the ALCS? Parkman was the bad guy in both films, right? RIGHT?! This is just a byproduct of how we consume movies and how you can pretty much watch everything you want at the push of a button. Is that better? I can only assume so since if I grew up now I wouldn’t have watched Major League II a million times.

To recap, Wild Thang is back, Jack! What’s that? Wild Thing wasn’t really the main character of the first film? That’s true, but we need the young blood to take over as a romantic lead (wolf whistle, wolf whistle). It’s a new year and lucky for us viewers the team is back to their hilarious, hapless ways. Pedro is now a Buddhist. Willie Mays Hayes is an action star and wants to be a power hitter (not to mention having some botched plastic surgery that has left him looking like a totally different person). Wild Thing has a publicist GF that has him concerned about his bad boy image. Worst of all Jake Taylor is even older and being replaced by his nemesis Jack Parkman and a loveable dummy Rube. After the team is sold to former player Roger Dorn (ha!) they tell Jake he’s going to stay on as a coach. Things… they don’t go well. Parkman is almost immediately dugout poison and is traded for a Japanese player named Tanaka. Dorn, since it’s laughable he was able to buy a team in the first place, immediately has to sell it back to Rachel Phelps from the first movie. Again threatening to move the team (seriously?) the coach Lou has a heart attack and Jake has to take over. Things hit rock bottom with a big fight, which in turn sparks passion and a hot streak that takes them back to the postseason. Meanwhile Vaughn struggles with his uptight GF and a previously unmentioned ex-GF who liked his bad boy energy. In Game 7 of the ALCS, Vaughn is called out from the bullpen having regained his edge and smokes Parkman to win… presumably to lose in the World Series. THE END.

It’s amazing how many of the iconic Major League things I remember from my youth actually come from this, to be perfectly frank, much much worse sequel. So it has a lot of moments to remember, for sure. It just pales in comparison to the first film, which on rewatch is kind of perfect. It feels so authentic in its baseball team comedy kind of way. Rated R… is that for violence or nudity or anything? No. Not even the slightest. It’s simply because a bunch of ball players are talking like ball players. It’s kind of amazing. The second one just kind of sucks from the jump. Of course this is in part because they try to recapture the magic of the first film, but it feels like they ended up shrugging their shoulders. How do you take a team that just went to the ALCS and make it seem plausible they now suck again and might move? Any and every way possible. Doesn’t matter how hackneyed.They also made the movie PG! It’s insane. At one point Wild Thing (Wild Thing!) asks his ex-GF out to talk and they go on a pizza date. Are they 15? It’s a kids movie. It has no marbles.

Hot Take Clam Bake! While it may seem that I denigrated pizza right there by implying that I didn’t want a za date in my movie, that is wrong! I love pizza! In fact I’ll go a step further and say unequivocally that pizza… it’s good. I know, I know. Hot take. But it’s true. Bread. Tomato sauce, Cheese. A variety of toppings. Good. Tasty. I enjoy it. But also, wholesome. I enjoy eating za with my family on a Sunday night. If Rick Vaughn aka Wild Thing busted into my living room asking for some of that za I might be concerned. He’s a bad boy. He might punch me. He might eat all the za. He might, in fact, engage in a variety of not-very-PG behavior. Might be downright R-rated. You see where I’m going with this? Pizza: good. Pizza and Rick Vaughn aka Wild Thing: not good. Hot Take Temperature: A piping hot slice of za.

Patrick?

Patrick

‘Ello everyone! *gif of me walking out the door to BMTHQ while Wild Thing plays on blast and everyone cheers, I’m back baby!* Let’s go!

Here’s the thing … Major League is a very fun film, and an incredible cable film from the 90s. It played over 100 times on television and I’ve probably seen bits and pieces of the first a dozen times. It is fun and dumb and sure a bit racist but still fun. It just harkens back to a time when baseball was important you know?

The second one … well. Let’s start with the good. Berenger is fun. Uh, it is like one of those sequels which is just identical to the original. That was a very very 90s thing that is somewhat fun to revisit. That’s the good

The bad? Well, the film is somehow even more racist than the first! Specifically there is now a Japanese player which is hanging with Haysbert which is pretty startling to see in 2024. I actually wonder, is the character just a response to Japanese players entering the MLB? Or is it some knock-on effect of the general fear of the Japanese takeover that was still reverberating through Hollywood scripts or something? Who knows.

And then the entire thing is also inevitable, but with no tension since you know the eeeeeeeevil baseball player has to be defeated in the end.

Did I mention that Charlie Sheen’s character tries to go straight throughout the film much to his dirtbag fanbase’s chagrin. And he has an embarrassing apartment, a whole girlfriend character we’ve never met before, and a rehashed storyline whereby he wants to save his career by throwing changeups and shit.

The film is genuinely very bad … but in a pretty amusing way. Outside of the racism. That isn’t amusing.

In the end then yeah, I think this is a pretty entertainingly bad film. And it is nice that we are working through our baseball bad movies. Actually … I’m going to check that.

So yeah, I don’t really count the baseball keyword from IMDb (but like … I’m looking at you Hook). But even just looking at the wikipedia we have a few left. How Do You Know from 2010, in which someone gets cut from the Softball Olympic Team. The Scout, The Fan, Mr. Baseball, The Slugger’s Wife, Little Big League, Brewster’s Millions, Mr. Destiny, Taking Care of Business, Stealing Home, and The Final Season. Jesus, we have a lot of baseball films left.

There is an actual in-movie Product Placement (What?) for Right Guard that Charlie Sheen is in. Obviously, still a Setting as a Character (Where?) for the always hapless Cleveland, Ohio. And, sure a Worst Twist (How?) for the obvious result that the team unexpectedly makes the World Series in the end. This film is hilariously BMT IMO, just aggravatingly weird dumb.

Learn all about Celeveland and sports in the Quiz I assume. Cheerios,

The Sklogs

Borderlands Recap

Jamie

There is always the tenuous tightrope we walk as we pursue four appropriate BMT Lives in a year. We want bad movies that are clear BMT qualifiers (like Madame Web). But we also don’t want them to be so bad that they aren’t fun. We want fun bad movies (like Madame Web). But they also have to be big and bold. They gotta have stars (like Madame Web). They also gotta say something about film and where it’s going. It’s gotta have some cultural cache that we can really chew on (like Madame Web). And you gotta be able to meme it… well maybe that’s a soft requirement. But maybe being able to think fondly about the crazy sunglasses one character wears at the end of the film is a positive… theoretically of course (like Madame Web). Anyway, I’m hoping Borderlands fits the bill and isn’t another Keeping up with the Joneses (the what?) Exactly.

To recap, Lilith is recruited The Expendables style to find and return Atlas’ daughter Tina on the planet Pandora. Pandora is not only the planet where it’s been long rumored that a “Vault” exists that contains immense power (attracting hunters from all over), but is also Lilith’s home. Anyway she arrives on the planet and yada yada yada she finds a robot Claptrap programmed to follower her, Tiny Tina hiding out, and a couple other misfits, Krieg and Roland, who have decided to keep Tina safe and specifically away from Atlas (this is literally yada yada yada’d in the film, so don’t worry about it). Turns out she was genetically modified to be able to find the Vault and Atlas just wants her so that he can use her to find it. Thus begins the hunt. They find the woman who raised Lilith after her mother died, Dr. Tannis, and with her help they locate the keys needed to direct them to the vault. This involves a big ol’ battle through some maniacs and teleportation and similar very exciting things. At this point Lilith decides not to give Tina back to Atlas, but there is a classic misunderstanding and Tina and the rest go off without Lilith for the vault. Ultimately they find the vault, but it turns out that it was Lilith the whole time who was the key (what a twist!). A big battle ensues and Atlas demands that Lilith open the vault for him or he will kill Tina. She obeys, but using her vault powers as the Firehawk (ooo) they trap him in the vault. Now in her true form as the hero of Pandora, Lilith and her new family celebrate with the citizens of the plant. THE END.

You could separate this film into two pieces. The first half is basically junk they needed so that they didn’t start with a fifteen minute text crawl or voice over. It’s cobbled together from reshoots and montages. Me and Patrick looked at each other in disbelief at what we were witnessing because we had paid for a movie. What we were seeing resembled a wikipedia synopsis page more than a movie. The second half at least was a movie. A very predictable one, but something where a robot said jokes, crazy action sequences were shown, and a MacGuffin was pursued. So you have a complete zero for maybe ⅓ of a film and then a 4 for the other ⅔, which comes out to 8/3. That’s my rating. Anyway, I think the only other thing I want to specifically mention is I liked Jack Black’s robot character. He was funny (as opposed to Kevin Hart for some reason) and Cate Blanchett came off fine, but Jamie Lee Curtis was terrible in this. I can already feel this erasing from my brain.  

Hot Take Clam Bake! I think Lilith and Roland are going to make it in the long haul, everyone. What’s that? Roland and Lilith didn’t smooch at the end of the film? I just imagined it? Whaaaaaaaa? I mean, didn’t anyone else notice the sparks flying between Cate Blanchett and Kevin Hart? I was having flashbacks to watching Fifty Shades Darker in the theaters. Hooooo weeeeee. Hot Take Temperature: Firehawk.

Patrick?

Patrick

‘Ello everyone! *gif of me looking confused as a clip from earlier in the film is edited into a scene later in the film in a non-sensical manner* Let’s go!

The good? I mean, if you are looking for dumb fun the movie is something that is entertaining on, for example, an airplane. There are almost no stakes, everything is supremely predictable, and there is the perfect audience approved ratio of action to exposition.

The bad? Everything else. The beginning is almost completely incomprehensible. There is some stuff when Blanchett first arrives on Pandora which is very very clearly reshoots, specifically a strange voiceover sequence. In the sequence you see her talking to some Mad Max-esque children and I was like “what the hell is happening here”. Then twenty minutes later Blanchet frees a bunch of Mad Max-esque kids from a truck and they run off and it is like … oh, I see, they shot a whole bunch of stuff which really really didn’t work, and so they cut it all into a montage to just get Blanchet from her arrival on Pandora to the point where she meets Jack Black-bot. But they had to have an explanation for her getting the truck later on, so that was left in even though it is incredibly obvious bits of it was wildly out of order at that point.

I guess I’m saying you can see the seams of this movie. People are barely acting on the same stage. Apparently Jack Black did the voiceover for the robot like years ago. The reshoots were assuredly done with only Blanchet involved. If you power through that first thirty minutes though the end is kind of dumb fun with a few fun action set pieces.

The film though … I can’t see it as anything but lazy, and that is almost never fun. You need to be earnestly thinking you are making a good movie. Unfortunately the actors and director all probably knew the whole thing was a mess from the beginning and so nothing ends up being fun. It is mostly just sad and tragic.

If you want a highlight as to why AI analysis of movie data is somewhat amusing in the abstract, here is the quite unexpected interaction I had about the Borderlands poster. I asked it a simple question: how many characters from the Borderlands movie are featured on the poster. I fully expected it to either say 5 (because the robot doesn’t really look like a character in the poster, another character is sitting on it), or 6 (because there are six names at the top). But instead it said seven. The interaction went like this: “Name the 7 characters” Proceeds to name the six characters. “That’s only six” Oh sorry, there are seven names at the top of the poster. “There are only six names at the top of the poster” Oh sorry, it’s because there are seven characters in the image. “Who is the seventh?” A character called King who is in the video games and I don’t know if he’s in the movie, but he might be … The most normal of all AI interactions.

Anyways, Setting as a Character (Where?) for the alien planet of Pandora. Huuuuuuuge MacGuffin (Why?) for The Vault which contains something completely unknown but definitely awesome that everyone wants for sure. And Worst Twist (How?) for the realization that, shocker, it was Cate Blanchet all along who was the super secret key to everything. This movie was almost unwatchable, bland, and dumb looking, I think it is Bad.

Learn all about video games probably in the Quiz. Cheerios,

The Sklogs