THE 3RD HALL OF INFAMY: Infamy Rises Again

The Curse of the Bigfoot: Kill It with Fire
https://images.app.goo.gl/5HUxXc8MvfCnxvG59
Ugh, to coin a phrase, "worst monster costume ever!"
Oh, the tediousity!
Unlike a previous poster, I found the last hour slightly more coherent. At least the earlier footage was not as bad as the 1970 footage, I got the notion that an anything-for-a-buck porn producer got the opportunity to make a horror film for general release and just spliced this piece of crap to some hastily filmed seventies stuff as it had to be a certain length. I think they also slowed it down to make it fit the proscribed time limit. I watched the last hour at a slightly higher pace and it was some what more coherent.
The seventies monster was so bad. It looked as if they stole some silver duct tape to make the mask. At least, the fifties monster looked more like some kind of totem or tribal mask.
The one moment that made me laugh was when the monster breaks into the ladies house. The shot of the mask coming at the screen as the lady screams was precious.
This is pretty bad and pretty boring. It could be a winner.

Next up...
Meet the Spartans

I've made it to 2024 without having seen a Friedberg - Seltzer film. It was a nice run.

And it has Kevin Sorbo! Man, fresh off of his bizarro racist rantings on Twitter it will be so nice to see his face again!

30 minutes in, and Sorbo has an empty look in his eyes like he doesn't even get the jokes he's telling and is regretting his involvement.


On an unrelated note I'm about to jump off the nearest bridge.

You know, when Hercules was working so hard to sell Hercules/Sorbo as the beefcake one we should lust after, I feel retroactively much better that my heart belonged to Iolaus. (Until Xena came along. Xena-4-Ever.) If Michael Hurst is a racist, terrible person, please no one tell me.

Also, thank god Meet the Spartans is streaming free on Plex. My library doesn't carry it (good for them, honestly!) and it's $3-freakin'-50 to rent from Amazon!

Meet the Spartans

My first ever movie by this infamous pair of directors was Disaster Movie, and despite having laughed like three times, the problem with that movie was that it was so riddled with terrible, even painful jokes that it pretty much cancelled out the three laughs, especially when one of those jokes ended up being drawn out afterwards. Meet the Spartans is a bit different. There's really nothing I felt a strong urge to turn my head away from, which means it was a perfectly watchable movie in its own right. But the big issue is that the vast majority of the jokes are still severely burned out by this point. I should think it would be much more enjoyable to riff the original 300 on your own rather than having to watch a bunch of lame parody moves on this.

Examples? There's really no need this time to include ass-tons of movie and TV references like Happy Feet, Transformers and Ugly Betty. It's obvious that they were relying on pop culture at the time just hoping that people would more easily get the jokes. I guess the deformed Paris Hilton thing was a little funny at first due to the real Paris' fashion consciousness, and I'll admit, the yo mama scene was fairly enjoyable. It even gave me my favorite Kevin Sorbo line in anything I've ever seen him in. Basically, the movie as chuckle-worthy at times, but largely it was just one big fat and ugly "whatever."

I've never been so relieved to have an app bombard me with ads. I enjoyed the much needed respite.

The rare time you just embrace those pharmaceutical ads. "No, please, tell me more about these involuntary muscle movements that may be permanent and the explosive diarrhea!"

I have nothing to add but LOL.

It just occurred to me that the only thing that got a smile out of me was the ad that featured a cute baby. So I guess watching Meet The Spartans did technically make me smile.


PS- it's cheating to stop watching when the credits start because there's like 15 minutes of outtakes that I had to sit through.

Meet the Spartans, 2008

Leonidas (Sean Maguire) and his faithful captain (Kevin Sorbo) must assemble a crack team of Spartans to fend off the army of Xerxes (Ken Davitian) in this parody of 300.

Full of underwhelming and predictable jokes, this film best serves as a time capsule for the low-hanging comedic fruit of the late 2000s.

“Hey, remember pogs?!” probably best sums up the comedic prowess of this movie, which is mostly content to simply name things as 90% of the joke. It’s hard to discuss a movie like this, which primarily feels like a lesser SNL or MADTv sketch stretched to feature length runtime.

Did I find anything in this movie worthwhile? Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhh. I did laugh at the film’s parody of steamy sex scenes, culminating in the joke that Leonidas is simply bench pressing his wife (Carmen Electra). So, yeah, that’s the one joke I found funny. I did also enjoy seeing a handful of familiar faces----what’s up, Tiffany Haddish!---some of them before they hit the big time.

The film does tread lightly into the “offensive” territory that you’d expect. Kevin Sorbo gets to bust out his best blaccent. Brittany Spears is mocked for her public mental health meltdown. All of the women characters are vapid and promiscuous. And this may shock you, but there are even a few very subtle jokes about the Spartans being gay.

But it’s hard to get too worked up about a movie whose calling card isn’t being (or trying to be) edgy, but rather just laziness. You can probably anticipate the punchline to most of the jokes. When someone looks at a man and says, “He has a nice package!”, you already know that the next shot will reveal the guy literally carrying a package. A sequence where Xerxes offers to accept a surrender morphs into a parody of Deal or No Deal and . . . that’s the joke. Because, in case you didn’t know, that TV show didn’t exist back then! Comedy!

I haven’t seen the original film on which this is based, though I doubt that would make any difference. I was aware of several jokes that this film “borrowed” from other parodies, including a gag about a chastity belt and a group of men moving around without horses. The only person who comes out of this film even slightly well is Dietrich Bader, who plays the baddie Traitoro, and who sets himself apart from the rest of the cast by actually managing some decent comedic timing and physical comedy.

What wears you down in this movie isn’t just how bad the jokes are, but how often they are repeated. Though I did get a bit of a laugh from the way that characters are repeatedly sprayed with gunk (usually poop) which is just instantly gone in the next moment. There are at least three different American Idol jokes. There are three different “female celebrity isn’t wearing underwear” jokes. I also thought it was funny that the characters had to frequently name the people being parodied, because the celebrity impersonations often do not just stand on their own.

Unintentional benefit (that the film gets no credit for!): I was unable to turn off the Spanish subtitles, and thus got a fun little review of some words that I haven’t worked with in a while. (Also, dang did the subtitle writers lean into homophobic slurs that didn’t actually match what the characters were saying!).

Hey, do you guys remember America’s Next Top Model? Yeah, me too.

LOL, you're right! The "movie" part is only 64 minutes, bless 'em.

Also, according the closing credits two different women named Misty played their Hooters girls. This is the movie that keeps on giving.

And the "outtakes" are just much longer versions of stuff in the movie, like five more isolated takes of Electra pretending to cheer on the father-son fight.

This is on a free with ads service?



I'd feel guilty if Kevin Sorbo cut a cut of my hard-earned money. I'll watch this early next week.

Last thoughts:

1. Remember when jokes about Donald Trump were just that he hosted The Apprentice and has a bad hair system? Innocent times!!!

2. Both the last episode of The Sopranos and Katie Holmes leaving Tom Cruise feel like things that happened more recently than 16 years ago.

3. It's always so jarring when movies like this have that weird big-budget-yet-cheap-looking visual to them.

4. Best names from the closing credits? I love that someone is named Kiven. I thought it was a misprint, but apparently not!

Philosophical discussion incoming!!

The Amy Winehouse documentary from a few years ago really opened my eyes about how that stuff was treated during that decade. I guess I was too young at the time (and too close in age to the actresses) to catch on. But watching the doc in my late 40s and seeing adult men like Leno/Letterman openly mocking youngsters who were clearly struggling with addiction/mental health was grotesque. And here we have a prominent Hollywood production doing the same. At one point a character dies and another character calls after them "Say hello to Anna Nicole!" Like, were we supposed to be GLAD that the clearly-troubled woman with a young child has died? Weird times.

If similar things are happening to today's starlets, I'm unaware of it. I'd like to think that it's not happening anymore.

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I think that this has improved quite a bit, between both MeToo and the corollary increased focus on the treatment of children/young adult actors. It's striking that the film takes aim at so many young women (Brittney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton), making fun of (1) someone having a mental health crisis, (2) someone having addiction issues, and (3) someone having a sexual video released without her consent. And all the focus on them not wearing underwear with zero self-awareness of how creepy it was that everyone just accepted that it's normal to try and take (and publish) pictures of young women's genitals.

I do still think that there's this weird lust/hate relationship that people have with starlets. There's a scary degree to which people seem to think they have the right to access the bodies/attention/personal information of people they find attractive, and that seems to be at its maximum when it comes to young women. But I think that we're thankfully at the point where people wouldn't get away with, I don't know, publicly counting down how many days until a minor will be legally of age to have sex with.

A movie like this is an interesting time capsule of not just the pop culture references of the time (The Sopranos, You Got Served, Kevin Federline, etc), but also of the nature of the jokes to be made about those things. The sheer amount of references to reality TV competitions was . . . something.

I completed missed this post lol.

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Meet the Spartans

Curse of Bigfoot is terrible in many ways, most of which can be attributed to the amateurish nature of it all. Obviously filmed on a tiny budget and with actors & crew with few to no other credits on their resume, the odds were stacked against it ever being a quality film. Meet the Spartans on the other hand had a budget of 30 MILLION DOLLARS. How many homes could have been built with that money? How many meals could have been delivered to the needy? So yeah, Curse of Bigfoot is a chore to sit through but I don't hate anyone involved in its creation. Can't say the same for Spartans. I can forgive ineptitude but not cynical laziness.

One gets the sense that these were designed to age like milk because the only goal was to recoup the budget within a month's time. So 20 years later we're watching references to people we've forgotten (Sanjaya) and commercials that had stopped running by the time the film hit theaters. There should be a Meet the Spartans poster next to the dictionary's definition of "cash grab".

The early scenes involving the training of the young boy gave me some false hope that there would be actual humor here. I mean, I didn't exactly laugh, but it was at least an attempt at actual satire. The easy-to-poke-fun-at machismo of 300 is being taken to a ridiculous extreme. That's how satire works. What is NOT actual satire is simply acknowledging that a thing exists and then not writing a joke about it.
Is the audience meant to think "Hey, Youtube is a thing and they just mentioned it. LMAOOOOOO!" And I've already mentioned the distasteful jokes at the expense of people like Spears and Anna Nicole, so add a dash of mean spiritedness to this already shitty recipe.

I hate it.

I plan to watch this one Tuesday.