"The VelociPastor" Review

After the dour The Batman, we were looking for something lighter when almost immediately Peacock offered up The VelociPastor which has this as its official blurb: "After losing his parents, a priest travels to China, where he inherits a mysterious ability that allows him to turn into a dinosaur. At first horrified by this new power, a prostitute convinces him to use it to fight crime. And ninjas."Alrightee then! A brief 70-minutes later we can say that it definitely has what it advertised on the tin, except more so for it's both a B-movie AND a straight-faced parody of zero-budget B-movies. 

It announces its intentions right out of the gate as Father Doug (Greg Cohan) is shown waving to his parents standing by their car and then an off-camera boom occurs, Doug looks horrified, then they cut back to an empty frame of the street with the notation "VFX CAR ON FIRE." Three times. After fellow priest Father Stewart (Daniel Steere who should be first pick for a John Bolton biopic) consoles him, "So your parents died, Doug. It's what parents do. They die on you," he decides to go to China which we know is China because a big title card screaming "CHINA" is put up and Doug says, "China." No stock footage of the Great Wall; just their say-so. 

While there he encounters a dying Chinese woman who hands him a tooth which scratches his hand. Suddenly he's back in his parish bed, haunted by nightmares with no idea how he got there. He quickly finds out why when he saves a hooker (Alyssa Kampinski) who was being mugged in the park. By turning into a dinosaur. And eating the mugger. Hijinks ensue!

Made for a reported $11,000, writer-director Brendan Steere manages to make it look like at least half as much on the screen. With a cast marginally better than the "actors" in Clerks - though to be fair Cohan and Kampinski are good enough that they have 25-35 IMDB credits each, albeit mostly playing SWAT #3, Woman, and Reporter #2 - The VelociPastor successfully balances the tightrope between mocking cheap genre movies and simply being a bad cheap genre movie. 

It's got enough intentional laughs and doesn't overstay its welcome - take that, Judd Apatow. Some of the gags are so subtle I suspect people dissing it in IMDB user reviews didn't get what they were watching. For example, during the opening credits Doug is shown driving with obvious rear projection screen footage, but that's not the joke - what cracked me up was that they were shining lights on the car to simulate passing streetlights when the background footage is broad daylight. Don't worry though, there are plenty of obvious gags like the whooshing sound effects over the ninja army - all two of them in their homemade ninja costumes - training exercises and the backstory of what drove Father Stewart to the priesthood is Airplane-grade nutty.

I'm genuinely surprised Steere has no credits after this 2018 film. I don't mean to make it sound like he's the next Sam Raimi or even Kevin Smith, but considering how much money gets wasted making direct-to-video dreck and paying stars like poor Bruce Willis a million bucks for a couple of days "work" repeating lines fed to him by earpiece so they can put his face on the poster implying he's the star, why can't someone toss Steere the price of a luxury car to make some more mild entertainment?

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable. (It's currently on Amazon Prime, the free tier of Peacock, the ad-supported area of Vudu and others.)

"Not Another Teen Movie" Review

I was surprised to see while browsing that Amazon Prime Video had the 2001 teen comedy spoof Not Another Teen Movie in 4K UHD (albeit, no HDR), so I fired it up. I saw it when it originally came out, but probably haven't seen it again since buying the DVD in 2002, but have always remembered it fondly as an above-average parody of both then-recent teen movies like She's All and 10 Things I Hate About You as well as classic Eighties John Hughes movies  like Pretty In Pink and The Breakfast Club with heavy dashes of Cruel Intentions, American Beauty and American Pie among many others. (The Hughes connection is sledgehammered by having the school named John Hughes  High School and if you look carefully in the library, there's a Weird Science section.)

The central plot concerns football BMOC Jake (Chris Evans in only his 2nd movie role) being dumped by his girlfriend (Jamie Pressly) for a weird guy who's basically the Wes Bentley character from American Beauty. A teammate bets him that he can't turn an "ugly duckling" girl into a prom queen and selects as his project Janey (Chyler Leigh) who's from the wrong side of the tracks, has glasses and a ponytail, and absolutely disgusting (to Jake) paint-spattered overalls. (Janey is clearly a riff on Rachel Leigh Cook's character in She's All That of whom I remarked, "It's easy to transform an ugly duckling into a swan when she's got flawless skin and great bone structure," and the obligatory makeover scene calls this trope out.) Will Jake win the cynical bet or will he learn a Valuable Lesson about love and people? What do you think? The movie is so self-aware of this hoary cliche that when he makes his bets, they're exactly these conditions.

The rest of the movie is somewhat scattershot as it sometimes leans too hard into direct movie parodies with varying degrees of success and bounces from vignette to unrelated throwaway (like the Risky Business riff where a boy's parents are warning him not to have a party while they're away while kegs and a PA system are being loaded in around them), but it never gets too scrambled and if any specific segment annoys, it will be gone in a minute. A slightly larger issue is that now in 2020, many of the references are foggy memories citing movies from over 20 years ago. The immediate "this is mocking that" familiarity is gone.

But most gags work and there is a blink-and-miss-it cleverness in the details. For example, an early scene has a tour guide explaining to new students that at John Hughes there are no cliques then immediately says, "Let's get all you big jocky guys into a group here on my right and get all you slutty girls over here by me...and all you losers should hang out in the back. Take a good look at the kids standing beside you. They're going to be the only friends you have for the next four years." The five guys' varsity jackets spell out J-O-C-K-S and a banner in the background reads, "Welcome Prospective Cliques." A little obvious, sure, but funny. There's a great out-of-nowhere musical number setting up the prom finale, too.

The cast is uniformly good and there are a few meta cameos, though one may slip by due to the time factor previously mentioned. This sort of broad parody comedy can be tricky as actors have to calibrate just how aware they are of the humor, but it works. It's surprising that this is so early in Evans career - Captain America was a decade away - but it shows he's had a flair for comedy that being the Star-Spangled Avenger doesn't always showcase. (He showed his dramatic chops in Sunshine and more comedy in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.)

While revisiting Not Another Teen Movie I found that while it wasn't quite as good as I remembered, it's still a cut above other lazier parodies. It moves fast, has laughs in both smart and gross flavors, and it entertains.

Score: 7.5/10. Catch it on cable.

This trailer is surprisingly bad and also has several alternate takes not in the movie: