String of Bad Movies

We have had a slew of bad movies delivered to us by those nice people over at netflix. I know, we put said movies in our queue, but surely netflix would have identified that we had a terrible lineup and adjusted accordingly. Sadly, they did not.

It began with The Last Unicorn. Curious why our parents put it on the list of “no-see” movies when we were kids after we’d already seen it, I decided to rent it. We almost didn’t make it through! While the story itself wasn’t bad, what ruined it for us were the songs by America…. UGH! Boring boring boring. Sounds assailing my ears make my brain numb. Little did we know this was only the beginning.

Our next netflix was Happy Feet. Never having seen it when it came out (we were enamored by the “other” penguin movie at the time – Surf’s Up – so awesome!), we figured it would be good. I know people who liked it… or thought I did. This one also had songs. Mmm, this isn’t a good sign. Also, I think I never could buy into the story. The main character penguin kept his baby fur through the whole movie! What?? While I did thoroughly enjoy the latino penguins for comedic relief I found the environmental undertone a little too “in your face” and annoying. So, ugh for Happy Feet. Or maybe The Last Unicorn put us in a bad mood.

But then, we watched Doogal. The voice talent is the reason we watched it. So. This movie made very little sense. I think the animators picked their individual characters completely separately from each other – there was a dog named Doogal (sure, okay, normal), a surfer-accented bunny named Dylan (an archetypal character they seem to be throwing in a lot these days to kids movies – do older brothers smoke so much pot that this is a normal character for a child?), a sassy diva COW named ERMINTRUDE (okay, now it’s getting a little weird) played by Whoopi Goldberg, and a rather large-for-the-scale-size SNAIL who is in love with the COW…. his name is Brian.

There’s also a good wizard (who looks like a bobble-head on a large spring – he bounces up and down from the clouds where he watches over everyone) named Zebedee. The characters summon him by shouting his name three times. His antithesis is an evil imprisoned wizard who escapes named Zeebad. Don’t you totally want to see this movie??

It makes about as much sense as a video game-turned movie. I actually wonder if it’s a children’s video game. One of the main things we didn’t like was the lack of a lesson to the story. The main character (Doogal) was flawed with selfishness and yet became the hero of the story while not growing as a character. So, kids are supposed to think that you can be kind of a jerk, but as long as everything turns out in the end, nothing has to change? Sad.