The War Between Mushroom and Peas

Usually I put the year up after the title as well as a picture of the DVD cover, but there's one problem... I can't find any information about this movie. None, zero. I looked it up on the IMDB as well as Googled it and couldn't find anything about it.

I wanted to go with something different today so I busted out one of the many, many dollar cartoon DVDs I have. I decided on The War Between Mushroom and Peas because... did you see it's name? Something tells me that's why I bought it in the first place. Also from now on I'm referring to it as TWBM&P because it's way to goddamn long to write out.

So I read the little blurb on the back and noticed it said:

This must have DVD features the following stories:
1) Little Red Riding Hood
2) Childrens Album
And Other Animated Classics

Color, English, Approx. 60 Minutes

Let me point some things out that are wrong about this.

1) This is not a must have DVD, seriously, no one is rushing out to add this to their collection.
2)Little Red Riding Hood is not on this DVD, in fact only two shows are: TWBM&P and something called Ilaya the Great. I assume those are under the category "Other Animated Classics".
3)60 Minutes... actually it's about 26 minutes. TWBM&P is about 17 and Ilya the Great is about 9 minutes.

We're off to great start!

So let's start off with TWBM&P. Imagine if Salvador Dali took a ton of acid and decided to write a fairy tale. That's pretty much what TWBM&P is.

Meet the King of the Peas

So the king of the Mushroom Kingdom... no, not Mario, decides he needs to husband up his daughter, Princess Whitey. That's right, Princess Whitey. She has many suitors but she's in love with... Browney. So if you're keeping score Princess Whitey is in love with Browney. Browney also spends his day doing manual labor in a field. Oddly enough that's where this story ends. I really figured we were in for some delightful racism... but nope, it really just ends with that.

So the suitors come from all across the land trying to woo the beautiful(?) Princess Whitey. You have the smartest man in all the land, the richest man in all the land and... well this is supposed to be the most beautiful man in all the land.

All man, baby...

Well apparently along with getting sweet, sweet Princess Whitey whoever marries her also gets a huge hunk of the Mushroom Kingdom. So of course the King of Peas wants in on this action... and by that I mean he declares war on the Mushroom Kingdom.

Well the King of the Mushroom Kingdom decided whoever can stop the King of Peas will be the right man for his daughter.

Yes, the King of the Mushrooms looks like a... you know

Well the most beautiful man, the richest man, and the smartest man all fail miserably. So it looks like the King of Peas has won... what's this? Browney swoops in and saves the day? Well who would have guessed.

So Browney saves the day and gets Princess Whitey in the end. It's uplifting. Really.

Then you have Ilaya the Great. It's about overcoming adversity.

Ilaya is born.
Ilaya gets sick.
Ilaya's town is attacked.
Ilaya is too sick to do anything.
3 wiseman call Ilaya a pussy.
Ilaya says "Nuh uh!"
Ilaya overcomes adversity.
So can you.

That's pretty much what I got from the 9 minutes of Ilaya the Great.

Cancer? Get out of bed you wuss.

4 Birthday Fish out of 5.


Squid.

Trauma (1978)

So here we go again. A foreign movie dubbed into English. This time it's an on the edge of your seat, thrill ride of a roller coaster called Trauma, or Enigma Rosso, or Red Ring of Fear, or Virgin Killer, and the list keeps going... Frankly I'd go with Virgin Killer, mostly because it shares the name with a Scorpion's album with a very inappropriate album cover.

Trauma wasn't as horrible as I thought it would be. Don't get me wrong it's still pretty bad, but I guess it could have been a lot worse. Mostly it's kind of an ordinary movie with weird subplots that seem to go nowhere. Like the main character is a detective, who happens to be dating a woman who's a kleptomaniac. Why is she a kleptomaniac? No real reason, she just likes to steal things... it adds absolutely nothing to the story. Though it doesn't really matter because about half way through the movie she leaves him for no real reason. He goes to leave and she says that when he gets back she wont be there, and that's that. What does that have to do with the story? Nothing at goddamn all. There's several little things like this throughout the movie... they don't do anything for the story, and in some places actually just seem to hurt it.

What does this picture have to do with anything? Absolutely nothing, but it's awesome.

That guy up there? That's our detective friend. He's investigating the murder of a sixteen year old girl. You know, when he's not having to deal with his shoplifting girlfriend. So while looking into this girls murder he discovers two things:

1) The girl goes to an all girl boarding school, along with her and her friends they have a secret little club called The Inseparables. All the sudden this movie got a lot more sexy.

2) The dead girl has a sister who's creepy. I'm not sure if she's meant to be, but I'll be damned if she doesn't seem that way.

Either way the dead girl's sister (who by the way doesn't seem all the broken up over the death of her sister, though neither does her mother) pops in occasionally throughout the movie with little hints and help for the detective. Because I hope that if a detective is looking into my murder he's doing so with the help of a ten year old... I hope it's a lot like Cop and a Half.

But don't worry, our detective doesn't rely solely on the help of a ten year old to solve crimes... oh no! You see, the detective is a loose cannon with unorthodox interrogation techniques! And by that I mean he takes one of the people he's trying to get information out of on a roller coaster ride. That's not a metaphor or anything, he literally takes him on a roller coaster ride. That's what gets the guy to talk. Seriously, I've seen Jack Bauer do things that are banned by the Geneva Convention... and this guy takes his suspects to the carnival. Maybe if he doesn't talk he takes them on the tilt a whirl.

Dammit, I get results!

Either way the story is kind of crappy. The plot is confusing with way too many subplots and unexplained things to make it even somewhat decent and the characters seem to do things that defy explanation. Maybe I got an edited version, or maybe it just didn't translate well to English. All I know is I got done with the movie and I know who killed the girl... I think... but I'm not sure how or why, and those things are kind of important in a murder mystery. It's like it started out well and then about halfway through the writers decided to get lunch. From about halfway through till the end just seemed like a convoluted mess.

Is it worth wasting 84 minutes of your life on? Probably not, but what else are you going to do?


3 Birthday Fish out of 5


Squid

Spare Parts (1979)

Going in to Spare Parts I expected something horrible. We're talking about a '70s made for TV move that was shot in German and then dubbed into English. That's pretty much a recipe for disaster right there.

But Spare Parts surprised me... no, not because it was a great movie. Hell it wasn't even all that good of a movie, but it wasn't nearly as bad as I expected it to be. It had its ups and downs but overall came out fairly well.

Spare Parts is about a man and woman, Bill and Monica, who stay at the Honeymoon Motel for their... Honeymoon. First off let me say that I wish there were still motels that cost $7.50 a night... or maybe I don't, I'm not sure. Back to the movie though. Despite the fact that the desk clerk is the creepiest woman ever, the newlyweds decide to stick around and do newlywed kind of stuff (sex) and watch the sun set in a field.

This was their first mistake.

You see, as they're sitting in the field watching the sun set an ambulance drives up to them. Now most people would quizzically wonder what the hell an ambulance is doing in the middle of a field, and in fact that's exactly what Bill does. Monica on the other hand has the complete opposite reaction, she runs away screaming like a mad woman.

Bill should have listened to her.

Bill is kidnapped by the two men in the ambulance and carted away to god knows where, all the while Monica continues running away screaming. Though I can't blame her, the two men in the ambulance did have comically large guns. Either way she takes her screaming all the way to highway where she's promptly picked up by a friendly trucker. I can never decide if that's a good idea. On the one hand she's a hot twenty something blond wearing nothing but a white tank top and short shorts. On the other hand she's disheveled and crazy looking. Kind of a toss up about what's going to happen.

So this is what cataracts are like.

Luckily Trucker Mike is a nice guy who decided to help out our poor, crazy Monica. And I don't mean just a little bit of helping out, I mean going far beyond the call of duty on this one. He's devising plans on how to help her get her fiance back.

The whole movie involves Trucker Mike and Monica devising a plan that would allow them to find out who kidnapped Bill and how they can stop these people. So they pretend to be newlyweds and go back to the same motel that this started in in hopes of having the exact same thing happen again. And luckily for them it does! They manage to extract the information from the ambulance drivers and find out what they want with the people they're kidnapping. Spare parts of course! You see, there's a group that kidnaps people so they can harvest their organs. Seems like it would be easier to target say, homeless people as opposed to normal everyday people off the street who may have families that will miss them... but I guess that doesn't make as compelling of a movie.

The last half of the movie is where it starts to somewhat go downhill for me. It's not that the movie gets bad it's just that it's when it seems to start dragging on. The first half of the movie was generally pretty good, but the last half just seemed kind of odd and a almost like a different movie. The first part was a pretty good horror/thriller movie but the last half just turned out weird. It involved Trucker Mike and Monica going undercover in the group to find out who is behind the whole body harvesting scheme... and then get help from a very unlikely source to bring it down. The last half isn't bad, it just feels kind of off to me.

Like I said, it's not bad and it's not good. The story isn't bad but tends to drag on in places. The characters tend to do things that I don't think normal people would do, but that tends to happen in a lot in movies. The acting isn't bad when, again, you consider it was a made for TV movie from the '70s.

Spare Parts falls into a weird category for Bad Transfer Reviews, because while it's not bad I certainly wouldn't sing it's praises. It's just kind of there. It's better than a lot of the things I've had to watch, but I wouldn't really suggest that everyone rush out and see it.

2 Birthday Fish out of 5

Squid.

Great news!

Been dying to see Mama Dracula? How about Night Train to Terror? Now you can! Thanks to the wonders of YouTube Movies!

Mama Dracula


Night Train to Terror

All perfectly legit and on the up and up. I'll check back occasionally to see if any of the other movies I watched get uploaded.

Squid.

How the Rating System Works

I thought I should specify how the rating system works, just in case you don't read the Mama Dracula review. Most of these movies that I will end up watching are going to be terrible. Not just terrible because of the bad acting, lousy productions, awful scripts, and horrible directing... those are all part of what makes them bad. What I've found generally with these types of movies is that you have all of those things, but you also have a movie that in the end is incoherent and confusing. Plot points not explained, new characters popping in with little to no explanation, horrible continuity issues, etc. It's things like that which take a movie from being bad to a movie being incomprehensible. A lot of those things popped up in Mama Dracula, like the Birthday Fish. I don't know why it's there, where it came from, or its purpose... but here it is. So instead of a lot of one star reviews I've decided to essentially rate there WTF?ness.

WTF?

If a movie is descent and watchable you're going to get one birthday fishes. If the movie is an awful mess that's probably not going to be enjoyed because it can't even be comprehended, then you're looking at a five birthday fishes kind of movie.

Hopefully this kind of clears up the rating system here at Bad Transfer Reviews. Just remember that here, one birthday fish is better than five birthday fish.

Squid.