The 2nd MoFo Hall of Infamy : Son of Infamy

Airplane Mode, 2019

You're a basic b*tch, now get out of my liquor.

Logan (Logan Paul) wants to have sex with his internet girlfriend who lives in Australia, and so seizes on the opportunity to attend a convention in Australia, despite being afraid of flying. But when the pilots are accidentally electrocuted, Logan and a charming woman he met on the plane, Jenna (Chloe Bridges), must safely land the plane.

Okay.

Okay.

I think that this movie perfectly encapsulates the philosophical difficulty I have with figuring out my own personal definition of infamy. For me, there's something about the gap between expectation (even if those expectations are relatively low) and reality that makes a film truly upsetting/repulsive/infamous.

Is this movie unbearable? Yes. Did I expect it to be unbearable? Also yes.

Look, this is an extended skit full of half-hearted edgelord humor. At the center of it all is the smirking Logan Paul, a man whose real-life repulsiveness only adds to the difficulty of sticking with the film. Then you throw in below basic jokes about a man breast-feeding a baby, a man being racially profiled by the TSA, or a character always waking up with an erection.

There were three minor blessings in this film. The first is that it's only 80 minutes long. The second and third, respectively, are Chloe Bridges and Stephen Guarino (playing Bruce the flight attendant), who are actual actors who can deliver a line. It's easy to spot the various YouTube personalities who populate this mess, because they only know one way to deliver a joke, and that's screaming at the top of their lungs. Bridges and Guarino, however, at least have some charisma and timing. (Though he is saddled with truly terrible dialogue, I may have carried over some affection for Guarino from his role on Happy Endings as Derrick.)

There's really not much to say about this film. It's shrill and deeply unfunny. At the same time, it doesn't seem like it aspired to be anything other than that. It's awful. But infamously so? I'm still working on that part.

There's a Logan Paul movie? Yikes, good luck with that one everyone.

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Titanic: The Legend Goes On, 2000

Quit kvetchin', Gretchen!

Angelica (Lisa Russo) boards the Titanic with her awful stepmother (aunt?), dreaming of one day finding her long-lost mother. She meets the charming William (Mark Thompson-Ashworth) and the two begin a tentative romance amidst a variety of dramas and intrigues involving the people and animals aboard.

My students in my classroom will often be charged with drawing something . . . and then head straight to their iPads to trace an image from the internet.

This film looks like every single character design was lifted from a Disney film, like to the point that I'm surprised there weren't legal ramifications. There are literally two Dalmatians, a dog that IS Lady from Lady and the Tramp, almost exact copies of the mice from Cinderella and numerous other profiles that are shockingly familiar.

And outside of the copying, the animation is just clunky. Maybe my favorite weird animation moment is when William bumps into Angelica, leading her to drop the basket of laundry she's carrying. William picks up one of the dresses that she's dropped, remarking something like "I bet you look lovely in this." Only the dress he's holding up has been drawn to look like it's the size of a ship's sail. (Okay, yes, it's meant to belong to one of Angelica's less svelte step-sisters (cousins?), but it's still a bizarre, formless image).

There are numerous---way too numerous!--subplots involving the ship's chef, a family of thieves, Angelica's story, William's story, a lusty French waiter, and so on. About a third of the way into the movie I honestly lost track of it all.

For all these complaints, though, this film veers into that can't-look-away trainwreck territory. I actually laughed out loud when the dog started rapping. It's bad, but kind of compellingly so. The overt plagiarism alone makes it kind of interesting viewing. The only thing that the animators really seemed to care about were a handful of times they were called on to render some impressive breasts for characters in low-cut dresses (and Angelica in her wedding dress, LOL!).

So I watched Titanic: The Legend Goes On... (2000). This is an animated comedy with talking animals set aboard the titanic because the sinking of the titanic is of course a cute, lighthearted event... This was bad, but not unwatchable. The characters are obvious rip offs of characters from Disney movies. The rapping dog was ridiculous, but made me laugh. The animation isn't very good and the voice acting is pretty flat I did sort of like that song though. Thankfully, this is pretty short.

I'm paying $1 to watch A Talking Cat?!.

Just putting that out there. Would I like to pay $2 to watch it in HD? NO THANK YOU, AMAZON!

I just finished suffering through the awful "movie", Airplane Mode (2019). I think this is our early frontrunner to "win" this hall. Logan Paul is annoying and unlikable and his "performance" here is terrible. The screenplay is stupid, juvenile, and derivative. I will admit I chuckled a couple times. The best performance in this is from the baby.

Bane

Watched this out of eagerness. See, Takoma's last pic was some of the best dogshit on Earth, so I was hoping her next nom would live up.

I... kinda liked this, though. It's obvious that the sets and actors were B-movie level, but the story kept me intrigued. Yes, it was a generic rehash, but it kept its mystery vibes powerful throughout, and the villain was really easy to hate. Some of it was kinda scary, too. I mean, I still prefer Saw whenj it comes to this kinds of movies, but I want a remake of this. And I wasn;t too disappointed in the end, either. It kinda felt real in a way.

I'm watching another James Eaves movie now, The Witches Hammer. This is way worse, laughably so.

6/10.

A Talking Cat?!, 2013

Ya, so you're a chef?

Phil (Johnny Whitaker) is a retired coder living with his son, Chris (Justin Cone). Chris has a crush on Frannie (Alison Sieke), a classmate he tutors. Nearby, Susan (Kristine DeBell) is trying to find investors for her catering business, getting help from her kids Tina (Janis Valdez) and Trent (Daniel Dannas). Both families are visited by Duffy (Squeaky, voiced by Eric Roberts), a talking cat who gives them valuable life advice.

I'd suggest that it could be a fun drinking game to take a shot every time a character in this film says "Ya" or "Weird", but the deaths by alcohol poisoning would weigh heavily on my conscience.

Like the Titanic animated movie, this one was bad in a way that got quite a few chuckles out of me, definitely veering into so-bad-it's-enjoyable territory. Everything about it is so haphazard that it seems designed to be riffed mercilessly.

The dynamic of the film is such that the writing is terrible and the acting just sinks right down to that level. It's hard to single anyone out, as it's varying shades of stilted, but Whitaker comes off particularly rough. I have to say, though, that the film gives the impression that everyone got exactly one take and, you know, whatever happened happened. But the hair, the goatee, the ill-fitting clothing----they all take Whitaker's Phil over the line into uncomfortable absurdity. Like could no one tell the man in that one scene that he had a huge wedgie? No? Just gonna let him walk away from the camera? That's cold man. That's really cold.

The writing, as mentioned, is so bad. It's a movie where every character, regardless of age or gender or emotion, speaks with the same limited vocabulary. "Ya" seems to start every sentence. Everyone and everything at some point or another is classified as "weird". The characters are also incredibly one-dimensional. A sequence where Susan badgers her daughter into cooking pans and pans of cheese puffs for her investors is just bizarre. Shouldn't Susan, the person who own the catering business, be the one doing the cooking?

This leads into the topic of, like, general incompetence. In one of my favorite LOL sequences, Phil comes over to flirt with Susan. Susan takes a hot pan of cheese puffs out of the oven with her bare hands, and then hands them to Phil. Phil, shocked by the sight of Duffy at their home and not the scalding hot pan of baked goods, drops the pan on the floor. And yet the camera refuses to pan down to show us the ruined cheese puffs. Probably because someone cooked exactly one batch and they were being saved to pay certain cast and crew members. Then there's the scene where Duffy is hit by a car. Normally an injured pet would get me going, even in such a dumb film, but then we see Duffy, clearly happy or high on catnip with a single stretch bandage wrapped around his head, and I just laughed. The "special effects" used to make the cat appear to talk (but only in certain scenes?!) has to be seen to be believed.

So on the topic of Duffy: adorable! Roberts' voice over sounds like it was recorded in a tin can, but while the dialogue is painful it never crosses the threshold into annoying. The cat is very cute and I enjoyed watching it lounge around the various locations.

Very silly. This is a very silly film.

Yeah, I went kind of easy on ya'll this round (both this one and my second nom). I'll talk more about why I disliked this film so much when I review it.

I've seen this and it's only watchable with Rifftrax. I also met Eric Roberts last year and asked him about it and he said his kids loved it.

Bane, 2008

*This review will contain out-in-the-open spoilers, including the end of the film*

Four women---Katherine (Sophia Dawnay), Jane (Lisa Devlin), Natasha (Tina Barnes), and Elaine (Sylvia Robson)--have been abducted into a strange underground facility. Their memories erased, they suffer relentless interrogation and torture at the hands of a doctor named Murdoch (Daniel Jordan) and a mysterious man (Jonathan Sidgwick). At night, they are terrorized by a masked surgeon (Sam Smith, no not that Sam Smith).

For maybe the first 20 or so minutes, I thought, "Man, maybe I was too hard on this film." I haven't seen this movie in about 10 years, and I tend to be pretty generous when scoring films that are obviously low-budget affairs. It is rare for me to score independent films--especially those that seem to be trying--less than a 5. But as the film went on, it became pretty clear to me why this one ended up on my crud list.

Going back to what I wrote about Candy and Airplane Mode, infamy to my mind has something to do with a gap that exists between what a movie could have been or wants to be and what it actually is. That space between expectation and reality is, for me, what makes something frustrating.

So Bane.

This is a film that raises some interesting questions, only for the answers to be either completely obvious and stupid or incredibly frustrating and nonsensical. Anyone who has ever seen a single dang film in their lives would easily guess that one of the women is somehow involved in what is happening. The film even weirdly tries to lampshade this by having Natasha be oddly instantly suspicious that Jane is part of it all.

The longer the film goes on, the more the torture and torment feels random, and the twist at the end that it was basically all random just to generate fear is the kind of "answer" that makes me incredibly annoyed as a viewer. It's the kind of plot element that allows a writing team to just sit around coming up with random stuff. I'm not saying that some of the situations aren't kind of creepy. Natasha waking up and finding that her kidney is gone is icky, and a scene where Jane either remembers or dreams being confined in a tiny cage while surrounded by hostile men is adequately claustrophobic and awful. But something about the pace of the movie never gets the tension and fear to build in the right way. It's all stop and go, with little or no new understanding to keep you engaged.

One thing I can compliment the film on is the lack of sexual exploitation in the film. It's pretty rare to find a film where a woman hostage isn't a victim of rape or attempted rape, and I appreciate that this film doesn't go there. On one hand, given what we ultimately learn about the objectives of their torturers, this actually seems like something that would have happened. But on the other hand I think that including such content would have veered the film into unwatchable territory for me.

What really irked me, ultimately, about this film is the combination of where we end up and just how long it takes to get there. I paused the film at one point when I was getting antsy, only to discover there was still an hour of runtime left. How? Why?! Why is this film so long. When I think back to what happens in it, I can't account for the 100 minutes. And the final scenes? Just really not a fan. Everything feels clunky, from the fact that a character has a literal exposition video to show a character to the declaration at the end that love was what saved everyone. I'm sorry, but maybe you are not watching the same movie I'm watching. That wasn't love, sweetheart, it was guilt. Not quite the same thing. It's the kind of finale that raises a lot of questions, many of which make you reflect more negatively on the content that came before. (My main question: can anyone explain how the surgeon was able to stab such neat numbers into their bodies? Was this guy a pointilist painter in a former life?)

There are some not-terrible ideas here, but there are way too many of them and they are explored in a way that is a huge let-down. The nerve of this film being two hours long.

oh damn i love A Talking Cat!?! it better lose

Do you love it with the fire of a thousand dropped cheese puffs?

Or merely with the teenage exuberance of a college senior who doesn't know how to swim?

I haven’t seen A Talking Cat, but David DeCoteau seems like a good dude. There’s a decent Important Cinema Club episode on him (and I think one of them even interviewed him). I haven’t delved super deep into his work, but I had fun with Nightmare Sisters and Dr. Alien.

Clearly I need to see A Talking Cat

I have to say, friend, if you're already mis-punctuating the title, I'm not sure you're in the spirit of the thing.

And hear I was feeling good and rad that I had spelt everything right

Don't feel bad. If A Talking Cat?! taught me anything, it's cheese-puffs toupee reading lamp play stupid so he likes you glowing orb.

A Talking Cat!

Boy, this is my first one to watch, and it's in the running for the top spot. Talk about a poorly produced crap fest. Bad flat lighting in every scene, shot on what I can only assume was someone's JVC camcorder from the 90s. Writing that makes me want to cut my ears off and throw them miles away. Acting that is...my God....some of the most wooden delivery I've seen in a long time.

Let's not forget the laughable talking CGI bits with the cat. Something someone probably did with a phone app. If someone paid money to watch this, they need to have their bank account taken away from them, maybe put into conservatorship. This is a movie where a group of random people decided...hey, let's just do whatever. No attempt to be good, no attempt at entertaining or...anything really.

Damn, this one sucked.

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"A laugh can be a very powerful thing. Why, sometimes in life, it's the only weapon we have."

Suspect's Reviews

Okay, so here we are and I'm going to go out on a limb here and say even if someone new joins, those second nominations are looking set to be revealed to join the current nominations. I currently have 4. The 2nd Reveal and Deadline for joining comes in 3 days time.

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