The Queen's Corgi (2019)

A quick introduction to this review. I wanted to raise some money for all the worthy causes out there, and a month ago I found a terrible movie. So I gave a small group of friends this challenge: if at least three of them donated $81.00 (a dollar, per person, per minute of film) to a bail fund or similar organization in support of BIPOC, I would watch the terrible movie and give them a detailed report. This is my preliminary report.

What do you need to know about this film? Well, first off, it's written by the writers of Gnomeo and Juliet (but not Sherlock Gnomes). It was produced in Belgium. It has a 0% score on Rotten Tomatoes. And, disappointingly for me, they redubbed it for American release. I like Jack Whitehall, who originally played Rex. I even really like Jon Culshaw's impression of Trump, which I hear 20ish times a year on Radio Four's Dead Ringers.


But the American cast is ... less impressive. Trump's voice actor did it under a pseudonym. And the top-billed actor is also clearly a pseudonym (cartoon fans will recognize the joke). Almost like they were ashamed of this.

Too bad Joey Camen didn't use a pseudonym -- he plays the only human character of color in the film. The UK cast avoided voiceover brownface by casting an actual person of Asian descent, but this film couldn't be bothered. (I can't find any decent biographical info on Camen -- please tell me if I'm offbase here.)

I assume the redubbing was done to accomodate script changes, presumably to Americanize the script -- I remember a few things that probably weren't in the original, like using "pee" instead of "widdle" or something. Also, for some reason, the swans in St. James' Park were called "evil geese." I mean, do they assume kids in America haven't heard of swans?

But then, the whole thing is divorced from anything real anyway. Prince Phillip is ugly, but he's also a total dick the whole time. I feel like he was probably the original antagonist in the first draft of the script, but that got rewritten to avoid controversy.

Which, I mean, how do you avoid controversy when Donald Trump's visit is an inciting incident in your film? This movie does it by writing him as a goofy child, which would be fun if it were Gerald Ford or Reagan. But real-life Donald Trump owns no dog. He would never pet a dog, or be nice to a dog, or (as portrayed in this film), push a dog around in a plush carriage and speak to it in babytalk. (If that sounds like fun to watch, let me remind you: ZERO PERCENT.)


Just one more small roundup of Trumpy things about this film, and then I'll move on, I promise. Melania (who, in the American version, has a wery-wery veird accent) mentions how big the President's hands are. He's gracious when he has to eat English food, which is the biggest lie in this entire film. This movie wants to make a few broad jokes about the man and move on, as if the entire world population isn't excruciatingly familiar with his monstrous effect on literally all our lives.

But then this movie doesn't expect us to be familiar with anything, not even other movies. It rips off Puss In Boots' big-eyes trick. It rips off the traffic cone road crossing from Toy Story 2. It somehow thinks a training montage, a la Rocky, is fresh and intriguing grounds for comedy. It thinks we've never heard a single riff on the rules of Fight Club.

There are a few jokes that I almost liked -- the film is set at Christmas, so out-of-nowhere, a group of dogs sing "Jingle Bells," a nod to the novelty record which might well be funny in a better movie. Similarly, a bigger role for the swans would probably work as comedy. I also like how kindly Elizabeth is portrayed here; all real-life personality aside, it's sweet to see her enjoy the dogs so much.

To sum up, this is absolutely the worst film I've seen in 2020, but it was for a good cause. If you have a few extra dollars, might I recommend you send them to the Equal Justice Initiative? Or a local bail fund for protestors, many of whom are still locked up in our COVID-hotspots? Or the Navajo Nation COVID fund?

If you donate, and send me a picture of your receipt, I will gladly answer any questions you have about this movie. Thanks for your time. Don't watch the film.

MST3K #112: Untamed Youth

It's Episode #112, with Mamie Van Doren singing rock songs and taking down an evil corrruption scheme!

In our movie this week, Mamie and her sister are arrested for vagrancy and hitchhiking, and sentenced to 30 days labor picking cotton. It's got a lot of teensploitation tropes, and a handful of womens' prison tropes (eg, the cat fight which leads to mutual respect), and like nine songs in 80 minutes (one by Eddie Cochran!). The food is awful (it's actually dog food), the labor is literally deadly, and the judge was in cahoots with the cotton-farmer. 

Sidebar: This one's kinda long, and doesn't have much to do with wisecracking robots, so feel free to jump down below. Sixty years after this film, our for-profit prisons are at least as bad as this movie would suggest, with way too many people jailed way too long for way too flimsy reasons. And it's only gonna get worse. I decided I wasn't going to talk about this in this post, I really wasn't. Until the evil cotton farmer was named "Tropp." 

Sure, he's evil, he harasses the help, and he puts profit above everything else in life. Sure, he makes secret deals to enrich himself, no matter who gets hurt. Sure, he's a duplicitous sociopath who has no respect for women. But Russ Tropp only hurts the people in his town, not the whole damn planet.

And, since it's a Hollywood movie from the 1950s, there aren't many nonwhite people around for Tropp to oppress. How do you make a movie about cotton picking, Warner Brothers, and cast zero African-Americans? (There's one character who's textually Latina, but she's pretty incidental.)

The movie tries to be honest about the realities of life, leading to a scene where Joel has to say "Gee, I'm sorry we even made fun of this movie." But it's just so obviously fakey, like most of the studio teen movies of the time, that I can't take it very seriously. 

And the movie's concept of female empowerment isn't great: the female judge has easily been suckered into the scheme by emotional manipulation. Her overdue enlightenment leads her to do the right thing, but the movie doesn't bother to differentiate how much of that is from her hurt feelings over the betrayal.

The cartoony corruption in this movie is solved easily, and it's hard to believe that about real life. It's hard to hear naive characters say things like "I don't think Mr. Tropp's that kind" without feeling dark about our future.

Right. So, the movie is okay, I guess, as far as teensploitation potboilers of the 50's go. It's got some good songs, thanks to Eddie Cochran (whom I adore!) and the whitebread rock stylings of Les Baxter, early in his film career. (He also scored two of the Corman Poe films I saw a few years ago, though I know him best from his contributions to the exotica music scene.)

It's nice to see Joel and the bots deal with a different type of film. This was their first movie without any horror or sci-fi elements, and I'm sure they questioned if MST3K could work with something like this. (I keep forgetting to pull out my dogeared copy of TACEG to check these things.) The fact it does is testament to the dexterity of movie riffing as an artform, and more specifically to the strengths of the show's format. (I'm also happy to see Gypsy show up in the theater, even if I don't think her run of jokes is particularly strong.) (And speaking of firsts, here's the first reference to Jeff Dunham, long before America loved him for his xenophobic nonsense.)

And how do they deal with the film?  While the host sketches aren't particularly great, the riffing is pretty sharp. The jokes are reaching that rarefied breadth and scope I love most about the show, with plenty that made me laugh out loud. Sure, there are a lot of easy ones about The Wizard of Oz and Andy Griffith, but there's also callouts for Tom Waits and Tobe Hooper and Squeaky Fromme. It's a heady stew, and a lot of us who grew up on the show got a certain percentage of our cultural education from those jokes.

This is my second show in a row to reference Disneyland, Boss Hogg, and Fawlty Towers (instead of Monty Python). They also make a reference back to SPACOM, from my previous movie.

Bonus feature alert: The DVD has an intro from Joel, and an interview about his one-man show, "Riffing Myself." There's also an interview with Mamie, and she's still energetic and active.

A joke I had to look up: "It's Vic Tayback!"
A joke that didn't age well: "Wait, so you’re my grandma, my sister, my mom ... did you marry Bill Wyman?"
My favorite joke: "Hey, it's Blonde Lemon Jefferson."

Odds I'll rewatch this: 4/10. The worst thing about this episode is how I feel about our country right now. I'm pretty sure that my lessened enjoyment of a silly puppet show isn't important, either, so let's move on and someday I'll laugh at this again.
Overall, I rate this one 6/10. The host sketches go nowhere, and I can't wait for better Gypsy material (no pun intended, sorry), but otherwise, it's pretty good.

Up next, we bid farewell to Josh (and Larry), in #113: The Black Scorpion.