Month: November 2016

1995 was a sad year for Whoopi Goldberg. The first half of the 90’s was successful where she was Guinan in Star Trek, two Sister Act movies, Ghost, Sarafina and Lion King. So how did she end up in this turd and how did this turd come into existence?

Between 1990 to 1994 there was a pretty successful (7 out of 10) series called Dinosaurs. They were canceled in 1994 probably because they ran out of ideas. So they could reuse the machines, put a new dino skin on, get a star to be a sidekick, make a feature length movie. What could go wrong?

The story is set in a place where humans and dinosaurs live in harmony and a cop (Whoopi) gets a dinosaur partner that is clumsy and they cause slapstick destruction as they solve the case. Who cares about the plot? The dialogue is concentrated turd.

After some (very little) digging, I found this that puts Whoopi at fault, she was pitched the concept, offered money, accepted it, and didn’t work. The producers sued her to do the work and fulfill her side of the deal. I’m sure the producers would have found someone else if she had said ‘no’ in the first place. She did her best with a shitty script and a robot for a co-star. I’m sure we’ve all been in that situation. You get sold a good story and when you arrive, you see its all just shitty. It works, but it will never be great. The best you can hope for is a ‘pass’. Poor Whoopi and poor movie makers. A bad team pairing.

Here’s a list of things we hated:

• The dino tails keep knocking things over and we are not four years old.
• All the R-rex’s had the surname of Rex
• They ham fisted the we’re not racist ideas with “we need to pair up the rex and the human otherwise people will think that we’re speciescit [sic]”

Should you watch it? Not a chance. If you let your kids watch it, they will become monsters.

I hate it when a hand appears from the bottom to hand me a phone.

1994 was an amazing year. VCRs were getting cheap, VHS tapes were all the rage and more importantly, people loved the 1993 Jurassic Park movie. Cash grab time. We loved this movie because it was just so bad that it was good. The perfect b-movie.

The plot: Mad doctor wants to give life to a robot dinosaur and finds a guy that no one will miss. Doctor puts the guy’s brain in the robot, it comes to life, causes chaos, dies, movie ends. But who cares about the plot? Everything is memorable and the stupidity doesn’t end. Here is most of what we remember:

• The mad doctor is Bernie from Weekend at Bernie’s
• The Rex is has a large base to keep it from tipping over. So the rex never moves and they always have some bad disguise to hide the base.
• The thought they can just remove the brain and put it in another body so they go out picking dead bodies the way you do the 90’s clothes picking montages.
• Most shots where you cant see the scale of his tiny hands has hands that appear from impossible places.
• Rex’s ears are below his mouth
• Rex picks up his fallen friend and dusts him off
• Rex eats a bully
• The bully is somehow the owner of Tammy
• Tammy’s father lets the bully and his gang in the house instead of locking the door and calling the cops
• Bully puts Paul walker in the boot of his car and drops him off in a lion park
• Paul walker dies in this movie
• Paul walker is now just a brain in a tub of water because the Rex is dead (why didn’t they just fix it? It’s just a robot).
• Paul walker gets drunk when alcohol is poured directly over his brain.
• Paul walker wants to see Denise Richard do a strip tease and voice his frustration. Why? The striptease will only make it worse. He has no body.
• The striptease was known as ‘the usual’ to Denise and Paul

In short, shitty story and acting made good with very memorable scenes.

Seriously. Watch this movie.

Its 2008 and Uwe Boll is pissed off at how people reacted to his shitty 2007 Lord of the Rings Knock off and decides to fight back at the market by knocking off a game. I’ve never played any of the Far Cry games because I thought they we’re just rip offs of Uncharted. Turns out that Far Cry started the genre in 2004 and Uncharted was the clone in 2007. Far Cry (2004) was also ground breaking in graphics and won some bullshit award and scored highly on many rating sites. They obviously wanted to cash in on it and made Far Cry 2 in 2008. Both the game and the movie was around October 2008 but the games was set in Africa and the movie was an adaptation of Far Cry 1. Strange. They could have done something awesome and made the two tie into each other. Anyway, I still can’t figure out if the game guys approached Uwe, or if he loved the game and approached them. Doing a bit more digging and found that BloodRayne is a 2005 Uwe movie based on a 2002 game. The game was a 7 out of 10 and the movie was around a 3 out of 10. Looks like Uwe will do the approach and convince the owner of the rights that he was the best man for the job. He probably used the line “I know the last one tanked, but I have learned from my mistakes and this time it will be different, I promise”.

The plot is: a journalist hires a boatman to drive her to a military base to investigate some shit. The boatman is actually an ex-army guy. This is sounding like a Steven Segal movie. No. Segal movies are around the 1992-1995 time. This movie is 2008. Plot details are of the ‘who cares’ variety. The stars are boring, the story is boring, the sets are boring, the dialogue is boring. There are no really memorable scenes either. Cost of production was 30m USD and made around 1m USD or slightly less. Probably a case of Uwe getting more of that sweet German Film Fund money. How did he convince them twice to hand him money on junk?

Give this a skip. Its a shitty shit movie.

 

Burt Reynolds, Ron Perlman, Leelee Sobieski, Jason Statham, Ray Liotta, the retard ‘crash and burn’ guy from Hackers and John Rhys-Davies are some famous stars right? And they’re expensive right? So you better have a good script and directors to get full value from them. Right? WRONG. Uwe Boll, a genius that is capable of sweet talking these people into acting in one of his movies, manages to defy sound judgment and crank out a terrible movie. Uwe is also known to challenge critics to a fist fight. I would be as successful as his movie.

This is a swords and horses epic that would be followed by two equally shitty sequels. What was happening that lead to this movie being released in 2007? The Lord of the Rings trilogy was between 2001 and 2003, Gladiator was 2000, Kingdom of Heaven was 2005, Eragon in 2006 and The Last Legion in 2007. Each of these movies were fairy successful. Lord of the rings made hundreds of millions.

In 2007, the German government launched a German Film Fund to give grant funding to German movies. 296m Euros were in the fund. The budget for this movie was 60m USD. About 45.6m Euro in 2007 rates. So there we have it. The Film fund was the cause of this movie. Uwe convinced them to give him a ton of money to hire some top names and crank out a Lord of the Rings clone in about a week. What could go wrong? How hard can it be?

Lets talk about the Lord of the Rings knock off. I doubt Uwe thought he would make more than one movie so he crammed copies of memorable scenes from Lord of the Rings into this movie. There are orcs, a giant wall, some shire-looking places, magical palace, some Sauron fire things, a hole in the ground that uses lava for fuel and some catapulting shit contraption. Why would the movie fail? We did some good copy work. Don’t audiences like copies of good movies?

Let me try and remember the story. Burt is the king, Hackers retard wants to be king, he hires Goodfella Ray, they burn a town where Jason Statham was a farmer known as Farmer where his main job was to be a Farmer. He could have been farming rocks or water, we aren’t told. Jason gets pissed off and kills all the bad guys.

Here’s some questions that the movie raises and never answers:

• Why the fuck does anyone want this shitty kingdom? It has about 50 people and they all work for the army? The only civilian is Farmer
• Why the fuck is Farmer named Farmer and we don’t know what he farms?
• Why the fuck was Ray Liotta (bad guy) banging Leelee and then Leelee was part of the good guys and didn’t tell them what the bad guys were doing?
• Why the fuck didn’t Lord of the Rings light orcs on fire and use them as ammunition for the Catapult?
• Why the fuck did Ron Perlman think a pick axe was a good weapon?
• Why the fuck didn’t any of the actors read the script before accepting the part?
• Why the fuck didn’t someone read the script before giving it to Uwe?
• Why the fuck didn’t Uwe read the script?

So, should you watch it? Fuck Yeah! It’s retarded and glorious. The world needs Uwe. And Uwe needs money. Its sad that his kickstarter wasn’t funded. He genuinely tries to make a good movie and fails spectacularly. He is the perfect b-movie maker.

WATCH IT!

 

Brian Thompson is a badass. He is mean looking and he acted as the bad guy in tons of other movies. In this 2014 movie, he is the star.

The premise is to showcase the various people that he’s worked with since his career started.

In the first 18 minutes, we saw a news reporter make bad jokes, Brian break the fourth wall, bad sets, poor dialogue, undecipherable accents.

We couldn’t take it. Killed this movie.

Brian, pay someone to make a good story. Don’t do it all by yourself.

This movie captures 1972 like no other movie.

A rich doctor is racist, dying and has experiments on putting an extra head on an animal. When he dies, they use his recipe to put his head on another person. The person is black. He survives and these guys hate each other.

This was 90 minutes long and they explained everything in way too much detail. This movie could have been done in 30 minutes or less. Why didn’t they make movie that goes like: “hey, here’s a freak, this is how the world reacts to him”? We would have watched that instead.

The last 30 minutes was a treat. The black guy ran away from the hospital (ok, it was a basement) and was chased by four cop cars. We saw the same stunt over and over in different angles. This wasn’t the intent of the director. He wanted to make us believe that there were more cars and more crashes. Anyone with eyes would have picked up on the scam.

‘Unfunny’ is the best word to describe this trash. Why the hell was it even made? The plot was thin. The script was basic. The acting was terrible. The stunts..oh stunt, was bad. I think, it was just to showcase the talent of the costume designer. They had a good dummy of the racist’s head to move around. And they stuck on that type of shot for a long time. So, this movie was made because they had a good dummy maker.

Don’t waste your time with this movie.

This is a pretty clever movie. America is out of money in the oil crisis of 1979 and the president comes up a crazy idea to run a variety TV show to get people to call and pledge a donation to pay the debt.

August 1979 was three months after the USA was hit with the oil crisis and over a year before the next presidential election. The reality for Americans was the fact that there was no fuel at petrol stations and may people had parked their cars on the side of the road. This movie makes good use of this fact. It starts with everyone wearing athletics clothes because they run everywhere they go and they live in their cars now.

If you watch Hot Shots or Airplane, much of the funny stuff happens in the background. Same thing here. You have to pay attention when watching it because you also don’t want to watch it twice. Its not very funny. Its just pretty clever.

The main actor is John Ritter from Three’s Company. He is president Chet Roosevelt, an idiot of the Roosevelt family elected purely because of his surname. He’s the guy that green-lighted this idea. The idea came of some idiot making a comment ‘what? like a callathon?’ and Chet said ‘a callathon? you’re a genius!’. The main idiot is Harvey Korman. He is the MC of the callathon. We hated him because he was the whip-stir alien in Star Wars Holiday Special.

Here’s something that didn’t make sense. The reason America was in a crisis, was that they couldn’t get more loans. They needed to pay back an existing loan to some Native America guy. The old Native American’s reason was “I just want to eat. Does that make me a bad guy?”. But later you see a huge enterprise that he owns. NIKE, or Native Indian Knitting Enterprise. So why foreclose on USA if you’re already making income from the clothes? I am pretty sure that the writer just wanted to wedge the NIKE joke in the movie and didn’t pay attention to the effect to the logic. Which doesn’t make sense. They rest of the movie had clever jokes.

Should you watch it? Yeah, why not. It’s not a B-movie. A b-movie tries to be serious and then fail miserably because they usually don’t have the money for proper effects/script/costumes. This is not that.

This movie serves as a love letter to the concept of ‘cash grabbing’. It was released in late September 2012, which looks like the time of the debates of the 2012 USA elections in early November 2012. That is about one month.

Our hero is president Roosevelt, played by unfunny Barry Bostwick. he has to save the world from Japan, Italy and Germany. The presidents and people of these countries are werewolfs. They go around biting people and converting them. Roosevelt personally joins the battle with a wheelchair that has machine guns and silver bullets.

Usually these types of spoof movies have the right events at framework and then events that lead up to it are alternative to reality and the characters are free to do whatever they like and in ‘deus ex machina’ style, the event results match reality. This allows the writers much freedom to make the characters and scripts and dialogue as funny as possible because the McGuffin will always fix the results. Not this movie. The writer is Ross Patterson and was probably asleep at his computer. Nothing funny happens at all. Looking at IMDB, there are 14 producers. The chances that they meddled with the script is high. This could makes Ross a ‘yes-man’, but he’s also a producer. So fuck him. I didn’t see Barry on that list. He’s the true victim. Barry the patsy.

There is no information on the budget or the revenue. I would take a guess based on nothing other than my memory of a handful of other random movies. Revenue $50m and budget $10m.

I can’t understand how this movie got 5.7 on IMDB and 57% on Rotten Tomatoes. I’m guessing that a few people saw it in September 2012 and then, this movie vanished into thin air. Until I saw it.

Ok. What do we learn? To make a cash-grab movie you need a few things:

1. Be timely. You should release it within one or two months of the real event you’re spoofing.
2. Have tons of cameos. People are dumb and will not pay attention to your shitty movie for two minutes if they are excited to see some random famous actor for those two minutes.
3. Too many producers is a double edged sword. You reduce the revenue per producer and you reduce the overall revenue because of meddling.

Movies like this should not be made. Do not watch.