31 Days of Halloween: The Banana Splits Movie

2019,  Danishka Esterhazy (Level 16) -- Netflix

OK, the premise was just so bonkers, I could not resist (eventually) watching. And since we were doing an early Turkey Day, and suffering massive amounts of carb coma, we went with something, "Dumb and easy to watch." So yeah, said premise takes a short run kids show from the late 60s, which itself was a knock-off of The Monkees, pretends it just continued on and on and on until now, and somehow was still very popular. Oh, THAT is not the premise, that is the foundation (which reminds me, I have to continue watching Foundation) for the actual premise is that the characters, thought to be people in suits, were actually giant independently functioning robots, which after a bad software update, Go Bad and start killing people. So, bonkers premise like the Nick Cage Willy's Wonderland but without the Nick Cage insanity.

This movie was bad folks. Baaaaad. Boring main characters, utterly bland villainous characters, relatively mundane special effects and pretty much no plot. Sure, the show is being cancelled by an Evil Studio Exec, so the bad software update causes the robots to interpret "the show must go on" in their own special homicidal way, and the studio audience suffers the consequences is a plot. But not much of one. 

If anything saved the movie, and no it was not saved, it was the presence of a little girl, a supporting character played by Maria Nash (Elinor Wonders Why) who was coerced to join the main character on his birthday trip to see the Banana Splits. She doesn't want to be there, but she is a good kid who makes the best of it. Especially when things go very very wrong. I usually don't like the Precocious Kid but she pulled it off with more heart than the rest of the cast did, even the bevy of familiar Canadian faces, which was weird for a movie shot in South Africa. What is up with the height of door handles in South Africa, and yes, I was more into pondering that then what would happen next in this dumb movie.