I am one of those guys who signed up on here JUST to write a review for this movie. The one thing the film may have going for it is it is probably the record-holder for driving user-account-creation with said users joining for the sole purpose of bashing this movie. If The review page for this movie contained ads or links leading to information about honest-to-God important social issues, the world would quickly become a better place simply because the movie is so boring that people would click away and learn about important problems the world is facing with also what I suspect would be record-setting numbers.
I am actually somehow STILL watching this movie as I write the review, and in stark contrast to the previously mentioned anticipated wonderfully positive effects on world-peace-inducing ads, I have never wanted to kill myself more, and I come from the generation amongst whom the B.U.M Equipment clothing line were once incredibly popular, so that is really saying something. Anyway, I guess if you've read this far, you "deserve" to hear a bit about the film.
First of all, the acting is not only atrocious with a capital "Eff You" to us, the audience, but I cannot determine whether or not this was intentional. The young kids are the worst offenders here, and I won't give them a pass for their age because they and their parents deserve to be punished for participating in this film/allowing their children to participate in it. The mother of the kid from Problem Child probably would have made better career choices for these kids. In some scenes, they over-act terribly. In others, they stare at the camera so stoically I have to imagine the director was dangling puppies above a fire and told them he would burn them alive if the children dared to emote while the crew was rolling.
The older daughter is mildly attractive in a very boring and stereotypical way. The sub-plot revolving around her acting like she wants to get pregnant to anger her father is the best part of the whole film and I will tell you why. If you play her (again horribly over-dramatically acted) PG-13 make out-scenes with the subtitles on, you can get a genuinely hilarious taste of the lyrics from the director's nephew's awesomely cheesy metalcore band. I got more of a kick out of rewinding and replaying the frames where said-lyrics popped up over and over than I can recall anything else since the golden days of rewinding VHS tapes after a Phoebe Cates nip-slip.
The guy who "plays" the father makes some of the goofiest faces directly at the camera since my parents told me that my face would get stuck that way if I kept doing it. My parents are both long-dead, so it has been a long time since I have seen faces that goofy, is what I am trying to say.
The opening scene of the movie takes place in a generic yet fashionably-inaccurate era that apparently blew the budget for the rest of the film. Aside from the previously-mentioned awesome metalcore make out scene, this part is honestly the best part of the movie, as it does a rather remarkable job of disarming the audience and getting us !---! <----this close to thinking the rest of the movie won't be a dumpster fire that I would not urinate on to extinguish. But like I said, this scene blows the budget so hard that later in the movie the crew needed to use the same piece of dental floss to make some (not even spooky, just naked) Barbie dolls turn their heads as they did to make a door appear to open itself not even 30 seconds later. I commend the high school sophomores of 1998 and their masterful use of Avid Premier for these mind-blowing special effects. The scene is a star-wipe transition short of an Oscar nomination. Only Crash over Brokeback Mountain was a greater snub.
The story is there, I think. It consists of a bunch of typical tropes if interpreted by a deaf guy reading Braille with the tip of his uncircumcised penis and dictating it to a pride of lions fighting over a typewriter out of Tom Hanks' collection. I think the part where the dad beats the kid with a baseball bat is actually the actor beating the story-writer to death and this movie was a clever way to put a real-life snuff film available On-Demand. Truly some GENIUS misdirection there, because screw that guy, he deserved/deserves a death much, much worse. The story is the regrettable tribal tramp-stamp on the lower-back of a 40-something writing career that is only visible at dive bar shows where the director's nephew's metalcore band is playing while wearing the t-shirts of their own band on stage. On that note, I am pretty sure the director's nephew is wearing his own band's shirt in the scenes where he is playing the sex-object of the teenage daughter who, by the way, spends the entire freaking movie hating her father (while, again, attempting to get PG-13 pregnant as a big "Screw You, Dad!"), only to spend entirely too much screen time hysterically crying over her father's dead body and telling his corpse how much she loves him. She is probably upset because he won't be alive to subsidize paying for raising her child. To be fair, though, this is the same father who found a ghost-girl in the attic telling him to burn a bunch of stuff and then, instead of following directions, he looks at that bunch of stuff on his bed, then asks his kids to play board games the next morning while they each take turns telling him to go eff himself. The same father who finds his daughter essentially dead on the ground out back and breaks basically every rule ever regarding safely moving someone who could have just suffered a very serious traumatic injury, all while just ignoring his son standing next to her in the yard looking like he just got caught peeing himself (which, SURPRISE SPOILER ALERT, he did!!!! SCARY!!!). The same father who leaves his kids alone and apparently never taught his kids not to take candy from strangers, because when they get punished for (god forbid) allowing their next-door-neighbor into their home, and then justifying it by saying, "She had cake!!!" Honestly, THE BEST parenting this goofball displays is beating his screenwriter son to death with a baseball bat. I think that part was a dream but I was busy tying a noose around my own neck by the time the movie got to this scene to pay much attention.
All in all, this movie was pretty good and I would recommend watcbing it with your kids as a way to punish them when they get bad grades or are starting to feel like disappointments by the time they are in their early teens. Telling them that they have to watch this movie every time they make a terrible life decision is a parenting technique that I wish had been available to the parents of my generation. But much like adults making six-figure salaries by making videos about opening kid's toys that most kids cant even afford, the world is a pretty stupid place where we allow movies like this to exist, and financially compensate those responsible for making them instead of making them sign up on some sort of national registry for life and go door-to-door letting us know that they have recently moved into our neighborhood.
Guessing which words I had to substitute because of profanity rules can be more fun than watching this movie!!!
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