By Emi Gruender and Mia Hanuska
Welcome back to Groovy Movies, where The Shield writers Emi Gruender and Mia Hanuska scour Amazon Prime’s movie selection to find the most hilariously terrible movies! This episode is our very last Groovy Movies, as both of us will be graduating after this issue. Thus, for the last episode, we wanted to end it with a bang, and decided to attempt a Groovy Movie marathon with some of our fellow The Shield peers: Laura Lipscei, Gio Arteaga, and Kathryn Tanaka. Bonus: we were celebrating the 18th birthday of one of us journalists at the same time
Episode 13: Double Trouble
*Beware! Spoilers below!*
Movie 1 – CarousHell
Laura: ★★★★★★★☆☆☆ — 7.5/10
Gio: ★★★★★★★☆☆☆ — 7/10
Emi: ★★★★★★★☆☆☆ — 7/10
Kathryn: ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆ — 6/10
Mia:★★★★★★★☆☆☆ — 7/10
Avg rating: ★★★★★★★☆☆☆ — 6.9/10
Boy oh boy, was this movie a rollercoaster! Unwilling to pay to rent a film we were pretty sure was going to be trash (spoiler alert: we were right), we found the movie on Tubi and just endured the couple of what ended up being well-needed ad breaks. CarousHell follows a carousel unicorn that gets tired of being ridden and going in circles, and decides to break free from the carousel and start murdering people. Yup, you read that right: straight-up murdering people. He’s got a vendetta against pretty much every human alive, but especially the human teenager protagonist’s younger brother, whom they all call Lunchbox. According to our count, this unicorn, Duke, killed about 18 people in his attempts to murder Lunchbox, despite (much to our despair) never actually killing Lunchbox. There’s also an incredibly graphic and quite traumatizing love scene between Duke and a woman at a party (yes, between a plastic carousel horse and a human woman) that we opted to skip past for our own sanity. Whoever is coming up with these ideas, please stop. Oh yeah, and he kills the lady from that scene too. And her boyfriend. And everyone else. Fun!
Our ratings of this film appear quite high, but that was simply due to our amusement at how crazy everyone in the movie was. All of the characters were completely insane and out of their minds, and there’s quite a few humorous one-liners. However, we can’t quite recommend this to others, and would advise to stay far away if you value your eyes.
Notable Quotes:
- “#wincest”
- “You weird bestiality b**ch”
- “You were literally asking for it! With words!!”
- “C’mere, Lunchbox!”
- “Hashtag this party sucks. Hashtag sh***y party. Hashtag carousHell!”
- “CAN SOMEONE PLEASE PAY ME $42.39!!!!”
Movie 2 – Kung Pow! Enter the Fist
Laura: ★★★★★★★★☆☆ — 8/10
Gio: ★★★★★★★☆☆ — 7/10
Emi: ★★★★★★★★☆☆ — 8.5/10
Kathryn: ★★★★★★★★☆☆ — 8/10
Mia: ★★★★★☆☆☆☆☆ — 5/10 (there were no captions)
Avg rating: ★★★★★★★☆☆☆— 7.3/10
After watching CarousHell, Kung Pow! Enter the Fist felt like a fever dream. The movie follows this clearly white guy attempting to become super strong and good at karate. You may be asking, “What else happens in the film?” To which our answer is, “uhhh….”
When we say “fever dream,” we mean we have literally no recollection of what happens. After some research, we believe the aforementioned man’s name is Betty, and he is beefing with this other guy called The Chosen One. Betty has multiple confusing encounters: a fight with a karate-cow (which he wins by milking the cow’s udders empty), a Lion King/Hamlet inspired vision of Mufasa in the clouds, and a therapy session with a mysteriously single-breasted woman. In the end, The Chosen One ends up defeating Betty by tearing off the pyramids that were on his skin (????) and then some French aliens arrive (??????) and The Chosen One goes back home. If you’re confused then great, so are we.
It turns out this film is intentionally a spoof on Hong Kong action cinema (at least that’s what Wikipedia says), and it’s definitely obvious. From the end-credits behind the scenes, we learned that the actual scenes from the film are mainly taken from another movie and just have CGI/greenscreened faces of Kung Pow!’s actors overtop of the original’s. This made a whole lot of sense to us, since it seemed like a lot of the scenes didn’t make sense or that the actors’ mouths weren’t making the shapes they should’ve for the words they were speaking. Although when we started we thought it was just incredibly poor dubbing… No captions and hard-to-understand audio brought down Mia’s score, but everyone else found the jokes really funny and the overall film amusing. We would probably recommend this, but only if you’re with a group—it probably wouldn’t be as funny alone. Oh, and the casualty count for this film? Anywhere between 20 to 150, we lost count.
Notable Quotes:
- “When you two girls stop kissing… I have a fight to win” (to two men)
- “He’s been my father my entire life”
- “You killed my entire family—I didn’t like that very much”
- “The curly Qs on your face are making me hot, I can’t think straight”
- “Weoohooooookweeeeeewahhoooeeeee”
- “I don’t want you to think I’m a sl**”
- “This is not a Taco Bell product placement”
- “Neo, neo, I need to get some neosporin”
- “THAT’S A LOT OF NUTS!”
- “This is live from CNN”
- “Simba?”