So here we are. We've finished with the big "Wait through the credits to see half of Samuel L. Jackson in an eyepatch!" movies from last summer, and are moving from the Marvel Universe to DC, where things are just a smidgen more dire lately.
Or, at the very least, not as well-reviewed.
Let's see what the YouTube kids have to say!
As has become our February 2012 tradition, high-def Jason Biggs wannabe JeremyJahns starts us off.
PressHeartToContinue sat this one out, so here's Bad Movie Night preshow stalwart indymogul and her latest not-ironic-at-all t-shirt.
Then there's the whattheflickshow kids, with their preponderance of unusued teevees.
And let's not forget ChrisStuckmann, though I can't help but be distrcted by the fact that while these reviews were posted within about a month of each other, he appears to have aged about give years between them.
I feel like if I make fun of the Perspective6 folks, I'll be committing a hate crime somehow. So I won't, and instead I will praise them for keeping it under four minutes. Yay brevity!
But there will be no brevity for us—we're going to riff all one hundred and twenty minutes (give or take the closing credits) of this green stinkburger.
Your hosts Sherilyn Connelly, Mike Spiegelman, and Dan Foley will get all yellow on this movie's ass. (And, ew!)
February 19, 2012
Green Lantern
This is a prequel to The Great Gatsby or something, right? With the green light and all? Like I said, I don't know much about superheroes.
Wackiness which means you can safely cross the street ensues.
Hosts:
Sherilyn Connelly, Mike Spiegelman, Dan Foley, and other Colemans.
Okay, quick question: which came first, Norse gods or World War II?
If you answered Norse gods, you have some grasp of time. If you answered World War II, well, you're into comic book movies.
Thor's technically been around longer than Captain America, is all I'm sayin'.
Anyway, let's enjoy some more video reviews, won't we?
We'll start once again with the high-def JeremyJahns, who continues to do a fantastic if dizzyingly-edited Jason Biggs impersonation.
Not quite as ADD-esquely edited is PressHeartToContinue, who just makes me feel old due to the fact that I don't recognize anything on her walls. A lot of it is video game stuff, I guess?
I do recognize most of the posters on ChrisStuckmann's wall, but that doesn't help much.
The whattheflickshow folks are professionals, and they have teevees behind them showing their logo to prove it.
Fun fact: a couple of the whattheflickshow people worked with Roger Ebert. So did the ReelzChannel guy, but the less said about that, the better. (Though can speak from personal experience that if you call him a tool on Twitter, he will respond. So don't do that.
But do come riff the movie with us, won't you?
Jim Fourniadis, Mikl-Em, and Tim Kay will slam the lid back on this movie's can.
February 12, 2012
Captain America: The First Avenger
The title of a movie seems like a weird place for a firstie, but I've never really understood superheroes.
Dimple-chinned pandemonium reigns.
Hosts:
Jim Fourniadis, Mikl-Em, Tim Kay, and other discharged expatriates.
Comic book movies are here to stay, and we're just going to have to deal with it.
Thankfully, however, we have the people on YouTube tell us how they're dealing with it, though as usual, how they're telling us how they're dealing with it is actually more entertaining than how they're actually dealing with it. Or something like that.
For example, there's your smartly dressed 720p JeremyJahns, who has two tricks that he knows well: turning his greenscreen background into red, and cutting between every sentence. His greatest trick of all is being totally being Jason Biggs while not being Jason Biggs at all.
The spillcom guys just go straight for animation, give or take anything being animated. Also, they use the phrase "gay house," because that's a thing to say that's funny if you desperately want the world to think you're straight.
Using no effects trickery at all, there's MovieBlogTV. But how does he record his sound, anyway? Nobody knows! It's a mystery!
I'm even less certain how yeastmyinfecti0n (yikes!) records her sound, but I'm guessing it's inside a British wind tunnel.
The sound of the equally-British mollylovesmovies is less hissy but also sounds more like she's talking on a phone, but that's okay, because she it's 2011 and she still has a TV/VCR combo in her bedroom. That is seriously OG.
Finally, there's the disconcertingly straightforward mattsmoviereviews, who I think is Australian. Whatever his country of origin, homeboy needs to invest in some frames for those posters.
So what have we learned?
It's a bad, bad movie. That's all you need to know.
Sherilyn Connelly, Mike Spiegelman, and Ziad Ezzat will Branagh all over this movie.
February 5, 2012
Thor
SPOILER: The hammer is his penis.
Wackiness (which u can't touch, so don't even try, seriously) ensues.
Hosts:
Sherilyn Connelly, Mike Spiegelman, Ziad Ezzat, and other sledges.
(This was originally written for sfweekly.com. Also, admission is $15, 'cuz it's Sketchfest.)
When I was choosing a feature for the upcoming SF Sketchfest 2012 Bad Movie Night (Sunday, January 29, get your tickets now!), I knew we were going to need a doozy of a stinker, a public domain oddity whose quality was obvious from the title.
And I found it: 1968's Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women. Sounds horrible, huh? It's not to be confused with 1966's Women of the Prehistoric Planet, but it is to be confused with 1965's Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet, as well as a 1962 Soviet sci-fi film called Planet of Storms.
Confused? I'll explain.
Planet of Storms is an odd mix of pulpy sci-fi and dour Russian cinema. It opens with glum cosmonauts in a Tarkovsky-esque brood-mode.
While there's plenty of brooding left to go, rubber-monster wackiness ensues when they land on Venus, including a mean red mother in outer space.
So Roger Corman bought Storms, had Curtis Harrington dub it into English, re-edit it, and shoot some new footage on the cheap, and Corman released it as Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet. Much of the brooding was removed (as well as a female cosmonaut), and dialogue that wasn't very smart in the first place was dumbed further down.
Never one not to use every part of the cow several times, Corman then hired Peter Bogdanovich to re-edit Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet -- not Storms, mind you, but the already-Americanized version -- into a third movie.
Bogdanovich removed Harrington's new footage, covered much of the redubbed dialogue with narration, and excerpted the intro and other effects from Battle Beyond the Sun, itself a re-edit by Francisco Ford Coppola of another Russian sci-fi film, The Sky is Calling.
Most importantly, Bogdanovich shot scenes of Mamie Van Doren on the shores of Big Sur Venus as the leader of a group of clamshell-bikini-wearing, pterodactyl-worshipping women who are totally prehistoric -- Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women, QED -- and totally worth the $15 admission. Get your tickets now!
By the way, the aforementioned Women of the Prehistoric Planet bears no relation to these other movies beyond the samey-sounding name. Forget I aforementioned it.
And we'll see you on January 29.
Jim Fourniadis, Sherilyn Connelly, and Mike Spiegelman will be doing their own Tarkovsky-esque brooding after riffing through this movie.
Ugh. I cannot possibly emphasize this enough, but I'm going to try by using both italics and bolding:
Johnny Depp wearing eyeliner is no longer enough of a reason for these movies to exist.
Also, fuck shit fuck shit fuck Hollywood so much.
Sorry. This is just the kind of movie/franchise that angries up my blood, even moreso than the Transformers series, which at least has...um...well, okay, it doesn't have anything going for it, but its still not as patently offensive as the fact that $250M was spent to make a fourth goddamned one of these.
Granted, it only grossed $241M domestically, which would almost be reason enough for the series to end...except that it grossed over $1B worldwide.
Fucking shit, world. Stop doing that. You're supposed to be the smart ones compared to America, remember?
To calm myself down, let's all enjoy this fellow's review of the movie, which contain more lip-smacking than any other video on the 'tubes:
Was anyone else distracted by the fact that he doesn't have any refrigerator magnets, or is it just me? I mean, seriously, where does he keep his pizza delivery coupons? WHERE?
In conclusion: fuck this movie.
Your hosts Sherilyn Connelly, Jason Wiener, and Maura Sipila will require over $1B of therapy by the time it's over.
January 22, 2012
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
"Johnny Depp wearing eyeliner is no longer enough of a reason for these movies to exist." There, I said it.
Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr-rated wackiness ensues.
Hosts:
Sherilyn Connelly, Jason Wiener, Maura Sipila, and other law-abiding citizens.
Right off the bat, I liked the books. The first couple were unchallenging but entertaining, and then shit started getting dark with the third book.
Same with the movies, though the fourth film left me cold, and I felt they all lacked the tone of magical realism of the books, opting instead for a more outright-fantasy vibe The fifth I went to see on a Sunday morning at the tail end of its run in IMAX 3-D, and I have to admit, the battle in the Ministry of Magic at the end was pretty great, even if much like in the book, the "magic wands as laser guns" concept felt like a cheat, and whooboy, don't even get me started on my problems with how the series overdid the effects on the lumos spell—
Okay, I'm going to stop myself right there, and instead, let's enjoy Daniel Radcliffe covering Tom Lehrer.
Ah, that's better.
By the way, this is the first Harry Potter movie we ever done. Will we eventually get to the rest of the movies?
Oh, we just might.
Your hosts Jim Fourniadis, Sherilyn Connelly, and Ira Emsig still haven't figured out how this can be the eighth part of a seven-part series.
Originally, The Transformers was a cartoon teevee show which existed solely to sell toys. Refer to our writeup on Masters of the Universe for more on this particular phenomemon, plzkthx.
In 1986, The Transformers: The Movie came out while the series was on the air. It wasn't great, but it was better than one might expect for an animated movie based on an animated teevee series which existed solely to sell toys.
It got a PG rating, the hero died, and Orson Welles did a voice. Oh, remember that "You Got the Power" song from Boogie Nights? That's from The Transformers: The Movie.
We kid you not:
Twenty years later, the director of Pearl Harbor and Bad Boys II makes a live-action version, simply calling it Transformers, in keeping with our post-literate times.
It was a big hit. (Which is not so much the fault of Hollywood so much as it is everyone who paid ten bucks to see it, but pick pick.) So he makes a sequel which was also a big hit, grossing $400M. If not for James Cameron's 3-D smurf movie, it would be the highest grossing movie of 2010. Also a big hit in 2010 was Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel. USA! USA! USA!
So he makes a third, one, this week's feature, which grossed a mere $352M locally (USA! USA! USA!), but $1.1B worldwide. Damn you, rest of the world. (On the plus side, 2011's Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked flopped.)
Anyway, Michael Bay is now making the fourth live-action movie based on a twenty year-old animated teevee series which had already spawned one animated movie.
A fourth movie.
Fuck Hollywood. Fuck Hollywood so hard.
Your hosts Sherilyn Connelly, Mikl-Em, and Tristan Buckner will take some solace in the fact that Megan Fox is gone.
January 8, 2012
Transformers: Dark of the Moon
Shia LaBeouf shouting "No no no!", robot fart jokes, fear of female sexuality, Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay.
Wackiness ensues, but batteries are not included.
Hosts:
Sherilyn Connelly, Mikl-Em, Tristan Buckner, and other autosnarkbots.
You heard about it back in the mid-aughts. You laughed about it.
You probably even blogged about it on your Geocities account or whatever, you motherfuckin' nerd.
But you didn't actually pay ten bucks to see it, did you?
Didn't think so. You probably barely even remember that it existed, or that movies once cost ten bucks and were shown in 2-D.
But that's okay. We here at Bad Movie Night exist to make sure you get a chance to see internet-famous financial flops which you'll probably never get around to putting in your NetflixQwikster Netflix queue.
You probably shouldn't watch it on teevee, though. It won't be quite what you expect:
Anyway, it's our tradition here. It's how we started 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011, after all.
And those years turned out great, huh?
2012 will be better. We promise.*
(Oh, and stick around after the show if you want to watch Mr. Plinkett's review of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull with us.)
*promise not valid
Your hosts Jim Fourniadis, John Hell, and Alexia Staniotes have not yet had enough of this motherfucking movie.
Annual Kickoff Movie!
January 1, 2012
Snakes on a Plane The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by motherfucking snakes.
Slithery wackiness ensues.
Hosts:
Jim Fourniadis, John Hell, Alexia Staniotes and other bad motherfuckers.
So here we are. We've finished with the big "Wait through the credits to see half of Samuel L. Jackson in an eyepatch!" movies from last summer, and are moving from the Marvel Universe to DC, where things are just a smidgen more dire lately.
Okay, quick question: which came first, Norse gods or World War II?
Comic book movies are here to stay, and we're just going to have to deal with it.
(This was originally written for 
Ugh. I cannot possibly emphasize this enough, but I'm going to try by using both italics and bolding:
Right off the bat, I liked the books. The first couple were unchallenging but entertaining, and then shit started getting dark with the third book.
You heard about it back in the mid-aughts. You laughed about it.
