If nothing else, Super Capers prove dat absolutely anyone can make a movie. You not need to have a good idea or a good skript or good direktor or good aktors. Just two million dollars and you too can take creative equivalent of a big, cheesy dump onscreen.
Some movies me have reviewed left monster happy. Others left monster sad. Still others left monster angry. Dis be de first time a movie leave monster feeling embarrassed – for everyone involved with dis sorrowful excuse for a film. And sad for anyone who watched it, espeshully me. Also for everyone reading dis review. Seriously. You can be doing someting much more constructive wit your time, like sleeping or starting a drug habit.
Monster honestly thought it not possible to get any worse den Shark Boy and Lava Girl, but dat before me watched dis movie. If SB&LG be bottom of de barrel, dis move be de big pile of crap de barrel sitting on top of.
Plot involve some superhero wit no real super powers who get sued by burglar he roughed up. He get sentenced to halfway house where other lame superheroes-in-training reside. Hilarity NOT ensue. Instead, we treated to leftover gags not funny enough for unfunny Superhero Movie, accompanied by cartoon sound effects and music cues dat be dere to remind audience dat Super Capers is supposed to be funny. Oh, and some time travel.
Verdikt: Terruble on every possible level. Monster can’t say for certain, but me pretty sure even de catering sucked.
Rating: 0 chocolate chippee cookies and potential bitter deathbed realization dis be 98 minutes of monster’s life me wish me could have back.
Cookie Monster, do you have any comment on your arrest in times square today for pushing a 2 year old?
People get monster and Grover mixed up all de time.
Cookie
Holy Mary, mother of god-awful! Looks like I picked the wrong week to re-up with the Super-Movie of the Week Club.
This is the kind of movie that is so atrociously bad, that it depresses me to think of all the unfortunate souls out there with unsold screenplays that are actually worth being produced, while dreck like this somehow gets financed, and even worse, distributed. The best that can be said for this movie is that it employed some people other than Ray Griggs for some amount of time – although I suspect that most of those people in the credits worked in exchange only for craft services and a copy of the finished product, the poor saps.
(And speaking of credits, there are a lot of juvenile “antics” inserted into the opening and closing credits, such as “Okay, we a have a really big cast” on one opening title card, and a recipe for chili and cornbread buried in the end titles. Isn’t that so very clever?!? Yuk, yuk!)
Imagine you gave a bunch of 14-year-old boys $2 million for them to play “Let’s make a movie!” one summer, instead of sending them to the juvie work farm where they could at least have been useful. Super Capers would be the result.
Right from the beginning, you know you’re in for a slog through amateur schlock. In the opening scene, a woman in high heels is walking down a dark street at night, being stalked by a would-be mugger. But there’s no sound at all of high heels striking pavement, not even in close-up. There’s some random clothes-rustling sound, but nothing that matches what’s on screen. There’s also some generic traffic noise on a loop, because without that, it would REALLY sound like shit. The lack of foley is just the start of the terrible soundscape of this film. Almost every random action (passing a clipboard to another character, for example) is accompanied by some cartoonish sound effect (like what you’d hear when Scooby Doo slips on a rug and goes flying) that is completely inappropriate to the action it highlights. Why? Because sound effects are FUNNY, right? Right?
Anyway, aside from the laughably bad filmmaking on display, you also have bad writing. I won’t call it “laughably bad” writing, though, because that would be giving it too much credit. Instead, let’s call it unlaughably bad. Because it just isn’t funny. Any of it. Nor remotely entertaining. There is a mildly interesting effect (Puffer Boy turning into his puffer fishy guise) and a choice of bad guy sidekick that briefly takes you blessedly out of the story enough to wonder, “Why does this guy have a minotaur for a sidekick?”, but the rest of this movie is utter trash.
The story makes absolutely no sense. Gruberman has no powers at all. He’s not a superhero, but gets arrested and has to appear in Super Court anyway. And he’s sentenced by Super Judge to serve his time in a halfway house for superheroes. Why he’s sent to “develop his powers” when he’s never demonstrated he has any is a mystery. Why the other superheroes have been sentenced to a halfway house, when they all seem to have perfectly adequate super powers, is similarly never explained.
There’s some theft of gold bars from somewhere, and the superheroes rush off to save the day. The baddies have been cornered on a freeway overpass, blocked in by the cops, who all have guns and don’t seem to need super-help, because the bad guy with the minotaur sidekick has no weapons at all – unless you count the minotaur’s giant stone hammer, which would not be all that effective against a gun. The Superfriends interfere anyway and bungle things until Gruberman, in desperation, prays for help, which seems to miraculously come in the form of a lamppost falling on the minotaur. It is then determined that Gruberman’s “super power” is the “power of prayer”, although Gruberman himself strongly suspects another explanation for the seeming deus ex machina. (He turns out to be right, but who cares, really?)
Then a bunch of other contrived shit happens to engineer a climax in which Gruberman confronts the Judge and learns that the Judge is really: (a) the superhero Dark Winged Vesper, whom Gruberman always admired and aspired to become like; (b) the evil masked man whose actions led to the death of Gruberman’s parents; AND (c) Gruberman’s true father! A whole lot of dialogue is lifted wholesale from Return of the Jedi and Empire Strikes back, and the scene takes place on a cheap facsimile of the Emperor’s chair lair aboard the Death Star in Jedi. Why? Who knows?
We learn that Gruberman’s life up to this point has been manipulated by his father, the Judge, in an attempt to get Gruberman to join forces with him on the Dark Side of the Force – or something like that. Why the Judge’s alter ego is a superhero and not a supervillain, or why he would want his pathetic losery kid with no super powers on his side, is beyond the scope of the script.
Also beyond the scope of the script is why the two female superwomen of this fulsomely moronic tale might find Gruberman remotely attractive. Is it because he’s the star of the movie? Yes, that must be why.
I can’t fathom a reason for anyone, including little kids, to watch this movie. Spending the $2 million budget on Powerball tickets would have been a better investment than burying it in this pile of bat droppings masquerading as a film.
Grade: TC, for Total Crap
Me share you in your misery.
Grate review tho!
Cookie
Time travel, you say.
“even de catering sucked”: good way to hit home “on every possible level”. I saw something on the poster that said, “the origins of ed and the missing bullion”. I feel assaulted by how terrible that sounds. Why should anyone care where bullion they can’t find came from when they don’t even know Ed? It was my stupid fault for not heeding your warnings.
The movie may haved sucked but the review was the best one yet! I’m still laughing.
Does Cookie keep a list of movie scores? It’s hard to imagine this or any movie being worse than SB&LG! I’ll take Cokies’s word for it.
@JeffW: Good luck and safe travels!
I won’t be letting my two year old near anyone who looks like a disheveled University of Kentucky fan right now. Not even Cookie. Maybe Pappaw.
@Tam Dixon:
Thanks for the safe travel wishes! I celebrate my birthday on Friday and then leave on Sunday, so it’s a semi-aborted birthday weekend. If the weather is nice, maybe I’ll smoke some pork on Saturday. It’s funny how in our household I usually end up making my own birthday meals! 🙂
“Just two million dollars and you too can take creative equivalent of a big, cheesy dump onscreen.” 😆 😆 Love your toilet humor! (I grew up with a bunch of brothers.)
“And sad for anyone who watched it, espeshully me. Also for everyone reading dis review.” 👿 Hey!! Speak for yourself! I love your reviews. The bader, the better! (I just woke up from my pre-bedtime nap.)
“Monster honestly thought it not possible to get any worse den Shark Boy and Lava Girl, but dat before me watched dis movie. If SB&LG be bottom of de barrel, dis move be de big pile of crap de barrel sitting on top of.” 😮 Ooooooohhh, that was a low blow!! 🙄 Get over it Cookie!! (you blue rug rat!)
“Rating: 0 chocolate chippee cookies…” 😐 You call that a review? (Take lessons from Kathode) I bet it was better reveiwed on the DVD sleeve. At least their uniforms were pretty and colorful. 😉
(Shame on you too Tam Dixon)
Oh and by the, I took Joe’s advice yesterday and decided not to screen this one (sorry Cookie; you took another bad movie bullet for me). And I’ll miss the next two as well unless I can get them on my tablet in time…that and my internet connection in Naples is likely to be spotty.
Imagine filling a kid’s sized swimming pool with all the dog droppings from the greater New York area and mixing in a ton of puréed Brussels sprouts. Now picture yourself stripping naked, hopping into the pool and wrestling with the naked corpse of Margaret Thatcher while TV cameras beam the spectacle to every TV set in the world.
That doesn’t even come close to the sort of disgust, horror and embarrassment that I felt while watching Super Capers.
Clint Howard what were you thinking? Sure, your brother Ron might be the more famous one but, dude, you were Balok in Star Trek! Have some self respect!
As a connoisseur of parody I rate Airplane!, The Naked Gun and Spaceballs as some of my favourite movies but anyone that thinks that creating parody is easy should look at Super Capers to see that, in fact, it is much easier to create crap.
Ryan McPartlin and Michael Rooker . . . I hope you’ve learned your lessons.
Back when I was in my early teens my cousins, siblings and I made a short film. It was called “The Toohtbrush” (we didn’t notice the typo in the title until afterwards!). It was a two-minute urban horror about brushes of all descriptions coming to life and killing people. We didn’t have any editing facilities so we had to get every shot in the first take. If we messed up we had to rewind the tape and cue it up to record over the bad take. It was also shot without any script. Even so, we had more wit, humour and pathos than Super Capers managed in its 93 minutes.
The funniest moment of the movie? The very end (after the credits if you could be bothered waiting that long) when they hinted at a possible sequel. Hahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!!!! Not in this universe!
Cookie Monster’s suffering for our sake is duly noted and appreciated. Fortunately for me, I was unable to come up with a copy of this movie in time, so I will save a few buck and use them to purchase a more worthy movie to review. And I second Glenn’s question, what about that arrest?
I’ve never even heard of this film. Thank God Cookie tortured himself by watching this so I don’t have to.
Hey it’s my birthday can I get a shout out please
Cookie, it would appear that you are not alone in your review of this piece of crap. From IMDB:
Budget:
$2,000,000 (estimated)
Opening Weekend:
$21,463 (USA) (20 March 2009)
Gross:
$30,955 (USA) (17 April 2009)
You know a movie is gonna win accolades when it the fight scenes take place on a freeway overpass; nothing says Oscar like reinforced concrete. I’m guessing this film is secretly as astonishingly good as that second or fourth Matrix, which also had a big fight scene on a freeway overpass.
Does Cookie have anything to say for himself? I don’t expect it to not be dysfunctional and reprehensible, or even slick enough to be believable, but I’m calling shenanigans specifically on blame-shifting to Grover.
Slightly offtopic, but have to say, the North Korea stuff is getting kinda stupid now, countries are nervous about what’s going to happen next, you now have Japan deploying missile interceptors in important areas around Tokyo now :/
Looks like Cookie got into some trouble:
http://news.yahoo.com/cookie-monster-elmo-times-square-trouble-210557047.html
@ Line Noise:
“As a connoisseur of parody I rate Airplane!, The Naked Gun and Spaceballs as some of my favourite movies but anyone that thinks that creating parody is easy should look at Super Capers to see that, in fact, it is much easier to create crap.”
Yes, I thought the same thing while watching. Made me respect Airplane! and Naked Gun even more than I already did.
Y’know, though, last night it occurred to me what was so strange and wrong about Super Capers’ attempt at parody: it hardly referenced ANY actual superhero movies. Airplane! spoofed airplane disaster movies (and in so doing, referenced all the tropes of that genre). Space Balls referenced actual space movies. Top Secret referenced spy movies. But Super Capers hardly had any superhero movie references at all. There was a load of Star Wars and Back to the Future, some Matrix, and even a glimmer of North By Northwest (!), but the only superhero reference I saw was the bit with Adam West as the washed-up superhero-turned-super-cab-driver. I mean, aside from it being a terrible script shot with lamentable production skills, they didn’t even get the idea of “spoof” right!
Gah! Okay, I’ve wasted enough time talking about this piece of shit. Kathode out.
Dang it. I’m kind of sorry I missed this one. Sounds like it had huge snark potential. Next week I’ll be back home though!
Zero cookies? Not even a crumb? That’s pretty bad. I felt the same way about Man of the Year with Robin Williams. I didn’t even finish the movie and I felt so robbed of my life.