Tag: Patrick: Bad

Around the World in 80 Days Recap

Patrick

‘Ello everyone. On my way back to the US, doing my own trip across the world, I watched Around the World in 80 Days. All I have to say about it is: poo de chien sur mon visage (as the throwaway character Monique would say. I say dog poo in my face, straight up). We were a twin house divided on this one (a little) let’s get into it:

  • The Bad –  Jules Verne’s spinning corpse could power a small city, this is possibly the worst adaptation of a book in history, it is offensive. Lord Kelvin’s portrayal offends me as a scientist and resident of Britain. Literally a comically diabolical villain, it is offensive. The movie is objectively racist at times. The way they treat British imperialist rule (as a source of comedy) is offensive.
  • The Worse – The movie itself offended me and upset me so much that it made me question my life and Bad Movie Thursday as a construct. I will never forgive this movie for that. I could barely watch Terminator Genysis on the plane after. But I persevered. I overcame.
  • The Worst – Jackie Chan’s presence as (almost definitely) the star of the movie is inexplicable. The sets are straight out of Epcot, they are insanely and bizarrely terrible. Steve Coogan’s performance is lazy and by the end it seems like he is just begging for the sweet release of death at every moment. The aforementioned Monique (an impressionistic artist from Paris) was pointless, a walking talking romantic plot point. Even the cameos (Arnold as a Turkish prince, Owen and Luke Wilson as the Wright Brothers in particular) should have been fun, but ended up being tragically unfunny. This movie was garbage.
  • The Good – Arnold looked like he had fun. Good for him.
  • The BMT – I say bad. An unpleasant, boring, surreal experience I never wish to relive.

I hate hate hated this movie. Jamie seemed to think the middle was just bonkers enough to make you think “wait, maybe this isn’t a terrible adaptation, maybe it is … bold?”. I disagree, this movie is garbage. There is nothing bold about this adaptation, it is just an aggressively dumb children’s version of the story. Something like an updated mock travelogue version of the story? That’s bold. This was offensive and stupid.

Jamie

Thanksgiving (more popularly known as TGivs) is the day we give thanks. Well I give thanks for my friends and family. I give thanks for the health and happiness of those I love. I give thanks for the opportunities that have been granted me. But I mostly give thanks for all the terrible movies that Hollywood provides to us each year. Oh you’re thinking of making Gods of Egypt? Why thank you. Super odd Warcraft video game adaptation? Thanks again! An inexplicable sequel to Snow White and the Huntsman that no one asked for!?!?! So many thanks to give Hollywood! And this is just looking forward to the first few months of 2016. Hollywood works hard for us and it’s long overdue to give them thanks. Back in 2004 the thanks would have gone a little something like this: “Wait, so you’re telling me that you’re making a big budget adaptation of a 130 year old property starring Jackie Chan and it’ll have a cameo by Arnold Schwarzenegger?! Uh, yah. Thank you, Hollywood!” And oh, how thankful we should have been.

Patrick’s assessment of my feelings on the film is spot on. The beginning and the end are so bad that it upset me. Everything with the Royal Society hurt me physically to watch. But the middle of the film was just so crazy insane that you couldn’t help but kinda give them some props for going so nuts with the adaptation. There is a scene where Jackie Chan is hanging from a rope attached to a hot air balloon and his pants get caught on a statue. A character says “Oh! That statue grabbed his trousers!” And we smash cut to the statue SMILING! The fucking statue was smiling. The only implication you can get is that the director truly wanted you to think that indeed, the statue grabbed and pulled off Jackie Chan’s trousers. And that’s when the film grabbed me by my trouser heart.

Alright, so for a little game this week I think I might Sklogify It. The sklogified version of this film would be called Around the World in 80 Sklogs and the entire conceit would be that me and Patrick would play every character in the film, plus have approximately 50 cameos that are totally tangential to the primary plot. Don’t worry, Patrick. I will play both the main character and his love interest. Although, that will not make the sex scene any less disturbing. “Why write in an unnecessary sex scene?!” you may ask. We’re trying to get the butts in the seats, aren’t we? Case closed.

Cheerios,

The Sklogs

September Dawn Recap

Jamie

September Dawn was just the worst. Imagine a 100 minute Gods and Generals that feels like an 8-hour Gods and Generals (so like… normal length). That’s September Dawn. The worst. No fun at all. Just the worst. Think of the worst thing.. now think of something worse than that. That’s September Dawn. I have nothing more to say. The acting was bad. The story was bad. The editing was really crazy. The flashbacks were ridic (you’ll see). Everything was weird as shit and I hated it.

When I don’t have much to say I can trust Patrick to pick up the slack. Welp, I didn’t want to do a MonoSklog for September Dawn (it deserves nothing!), but when there is an impassioned speech by a Mormon leader set to the tune of really, really, really bad practical effects you gotta do what you gotta do. [Mis Testiculos was a MonoSklog from the movie which we have chosen to leave out of the online content until further notice]. Why the odd name… if you watch the movie you’ll see. Those were some pretty fake testicles. Ugh. This movie.

Patrick

Hallo allemaal! September Dawn? More like September Yawn! Sitting in Schiphol Airport on my way back from Amsterdam watching literally the most boring movie I’ve ever seen. Now, real BMT scholars should be raising extreme objections at this moment. “Bullshit, Gods and Generals extended 4 hour 30 minute cut.” They’d be right, so long that some say I’m still watching it to this day. But for a normal movie made by not crazy people, this one was quite boring. Let’s get very very briefly into this.

  • Scene by scene recap of this movie: A wagon train gets to Utah, they stop, boy falls in love with girl, gets a horse, yada yada yada people die. The horse training was literally the most interesting part of this movie.
  • I repeat: the horse training was the more entertaining part of this movie.
  • The direction was indeed bonkers, thanks for the tip Leonard.
  • And that’s that. I would not recommend this movie to anyone. It is not fun to watch. It is so bad it goes all the way around and becomes bad again.
  • Quick Sequel, Prequel, Reboot: I’m thinking sequel, but really dig deep into the subsequent legal case that happened after the massacre. I’m thinking 24 hours long, just legal briefs being read out loud. More entertaining than this movie.

Alright, this looks like a pretty short one so I guess I’ll just wrap it up there. Psych! BMT:CSI:SVU (we’re the special victims) in your face. After this week’s movie we are moving into Bad Movie Thursday Emergency Razzie Preparation Mode (BMTERPM). So, since I’m doing all this analysis, why not try and figure out what makes the Razzies tick? Check out the full analysis here. But the takeaway, there does seem to at least be one major takeaway from looking at how the BMeTric and a Razzie Score correlate: you need BMTargets. The guys like Sandler, and Michael Bay, and Kirk Cameron to get the sweet sweet score. Something to think about as the Razzies approach.

At the time this was a long post (look at the size of that BMT:CSI:SVU!), but we got to be able to predict this stuff! Unfortunately there is little prenomination data available … maybe the head Razzie will send it to me….

Vaarwel,

The Sklogs

Critters 2: The Main Course Recap

 

Patrick

Bonjour tous le monde! Critters 2 more like Shitty Too! That’s right, I’m in grande Paris, and (sadly) I did watch Critters 2 in the bits and pieces of spare time I’ve had while killing it in the city of love. Lucky for you, this means this one will be short (yes, sadly, no BMT:CSI:SVU today). Let’s do it:

  • Let’s start with the first movie. So cheap. The shittiest of all shitty effects. Bad acting up and down (although the kid was actually rather decent). Essentially it is Leprechaun. A director who is either young or passionate about the horror genre getting his shot at making a feature length film. In this one it was actually impressive because this movie was probably made for like a thousand dollars. And the guy ended up being pretty famous (Bill and Ted, The Mighty Ducks, etc.). Anyways, the movie wasn’t the worst thing I’ve ever seen, plus I got a little Billy Zane time (which as you all should know, I’m always happy about).
  • The second one …. was kind of the epitome of why I hate horror-comedy. By taking nothing seriously it takes a movie that already has horrible acting and effects (because of budget), and adds in intentionally bad writing to the mix.
  • That being said: up until the end I didn’t actually mind watching the movie, it had entertaining bits. I do wish they hadn’t recast the sheriff. There were three major characters who returned from the first film, they got two (the aforementioned kid and his friend Charlie). Just cut the sheriff character, right? But that is a minor gripe.
  • A more major gripe: The first ending wasn’t bad. The issue is that there was a second one. Essentially the critters are being hunted by shapeshifting bountyhunters. And it turns out one of them secretly transformed into a critter in order to lead them to their ultimate destruction. I didn’t see it coming at all and I thought it was pretty clever. But then, after destroying them, the critters somehow form a giant critterball and roll around eating people they run over. Besides being dumb, it also managed to replace the kind of nice trick ending with the perfectly predictable one.
  • An impression of me watching the finale of the movie. “Oh Charlie is running away, I bet he’s going to get the spaceship.” “Oh there is a critterball, I bet Charlie is going to destroy it with the spaceship.” “Oh Charlie destroyed the critterball with the spaceship and ‘died’, I bet he ejected at the last minute and is totally alive”. All three easily predicted while only half paying attention to this movie.

I’ll leave it there and will close with this: Was it a good BMT? Nope. Low budget sequel to a low budget horror-comedy … 99 times out of 100 that’s bad news. But I didn’t mind watching the two films. Like Leprechaun there is a kind of cult mystique surrounding the film based on really loving the classic horror genre. I wouldn’t touch the direct-to-video sequels if you paid me though.

Jamie

Alright, so last week was Critters 2. I enjoyed the original Critters quite a bit. It was kind of like a more interesting and better made version of Leprechaun (also on the map for North Dakota) since it was an oddball horror with some comedy elements (albeit with a lot more Billy Zane). Also oddly reminded me a bit of The Thing in the sense that it was set up as a horror film but had some really hardcore SciFi elements to it. Something about the 70s and 80s where horror and SciFi mixed heavily (see: everything that Stephen King wrote). Critters 2? I’d rather not talk about it. Given that the first film was a modest success you would think that the film (at the very least) would look a bit better than the first one. Since the series was now a known quantity you need to step up your game and try to build a Mark Sanchize. Instead, they seemed to go the opposite direction. Now that they had a known quantity, they decided to wring every penny out of it till it was dead and they no longer had to deal with it (franchises are hard, no?). I’m not sure what else to say beyond that. I was surprised by how much worse than the first one it actually was as the film kept going it just kept on getting more and more embarrassing. The culmination was an ending that was so ridiculous and silly that I almost had to turn off the film.

I don’t remember if me and Patrick discussed the Critters-Leprechaun similarity in the past. If not, twins! I disagree about it not being a good BMT. I think this was an OK one. Not nearly the worst BMT we’ve ever had and comes with some interesting bad movie lore. I guarantee it’s better than both What Goes Up and this week’s September Dawn. That is quite the shit sandwich to be caught in. Also, how can you honestly say that you won’t be touching the direct-to-video sequels? This from a man who has watched all of the Leprechaun films.

Anyway, just going to have a quick game this week. Mostly it’s to highlight my least favorite part of Critters 2. It’s called WTF, mate? and it’s something that me and Patrick used to do way, way, way back before we even wrote an email. We used to ask each other what the WTF moment of the film was where you just couldn’t handle how bad the film was anymore. Not every film had one, but Critters 2 certainly did. While I would love to say that the ending was the WTF moment cause it was horrific, I have to go with this diner scene:

which is a travesty in a very Gremlins 2 on Key & Peele kind of way:

I have to admit though, that Critter’s new bald hairdo was indeed quite bitchin’.

Cheerios,

The Sklogs

What Goes Up Recap

What goes up, must come down. Spinning wheel got to go round. Woooo! Love that song and love this documentary about the making of the Blood Sweat & Tears classic

… what’s that? Did I watch the wrong movie? It’s the one starring Steve Coogan, Hilary Duff, and Josh Peck, right? Yeah… I just assumed all the bullshit in the film was an extended allegory for the literal blood, sweat, and tears that David Clayton-Thomas poured into the making of that song and struggles of leading a contemporary American jazz-rock ensemble. No? Huh. Well then I’m completely flabbergasted cause nothing in the film really meant anything and it was all super weird and unnecessary. It was actually pretty unpleasant to watch. The main character was a doucher whose whole life is a sham and the kids all had upsetting lives. In particular, Olivia Thirlby’s character who had a pretty rough incest/abortion storyline. That’s right, second week in a row with an incest storyline! Last week it was A Thousand Acres, and this week What Goes Up followed it right up… because that’s what everyone’s clamoring for in their film selections: incest.

Alright, well I’m glad they made this film for the sake of my precious, precious map, but also kinda wish we could have just pretended we had never seen Eight Crazy Nights (or as I like to call it, Eight Cray Cray Nights). Like, would any of you have really cared or knew that Patrick and I tricked you? No. But we would have known in our hearts, and much like Coogan in What Goes Up, the lie would have been necessary, but also soul-consuming.

Anywho, gonna keep my MonoSklog section brief this week. Loved, loved, loved Josh Peck’s MonoSklog in What Goes Up. I call it Mi Panegírico, and if you can catch it it is worth it. There is something about how Josh Peck says “But everyone says ‘No… You gotta fucking accept it.'” that really make that scene. Just a really solid job right there. But like usual, Monosklogs are not for the website. Fair use just isn’t our bag you know?

Patrick

‘Ello everyone! What Go Up … Brings me down! What a depressing, weird, small, weird movie.

  • It was weird. It is hard to even make fun of. There is just so much that goes into it that seems like it is super serious. Probably super personal. But I feel like it is a mess. Just a jumble of symbols and messages and nothing really gets done particularly right.
  • Side stories alongside side stories. There’s a girl who was paralyzed in an accident, we get to see a story about that. There is Hilary Duff’s story of trying to seduce Coogan. Another girl was in love with the teacher who died. Two other girls are weirdos, and get involved in a variety of shenanigans. Josh Peck has a strange story about being fascinated with the principal’s wife and newborn child. The music teacher (who was in love (?) with the teacher who killed himself) is having a meltdown for various reasons. And Coogan has been fabricating stories about the woman he loved for months to deal with her suicide …. None of these storylines are particularly interesting.
  • Probably because Coogan’s character is a bad person whom I do not like.
  • This is unpleasant and it was a bad BMT film. The BMeTric based on IMDB votes and rating nailed it again (11.7/100 (NOTE: As of July 9, 2016) if you recall, where 25 is just about the BMThreshold for Enjoyment). This week we probably have a bit better chance (Critters 2 has a BMeTric of approximately 35/100, not bad).

That’s it. I want to see the Prequel to this movie called The Shed. It is about all these characters, how they get to be in Mr. C’s class, and how they learn acceptance and love. It ends with Coogan rolling into town. Literally no one will watch this film. Netflix, get off the horn, this movie does not and never will need to be made.

Cheerios,

The Sklogs