Doing a gritty reboot of a previously straight form of media
is such a cliché at this point, it’s become one of the best warning signs that
an imagined revival of a popular series is going to suck hardcore. Some films
may be able to pull off the idea, like the first Brady Bunch movie, but even that
was less about grittiness than it was updating for the times. So you can
imagine what happens when someone takes a seemingly-forgotten Hanna-Barbera
series from the 60’s and tries to turn it into a horror movie.
The main plot centres around the characters of the titular
show, shown as animatronics who go berserk when they discover that their show
is about to be cancelled. Since the Five Nights At Freddy’s movie seems to be
delayed indefinitely, and I’m honestly a pretty big fan of that particular
franchise, I was honestly looking forward to this if only as a temporary substitute
for that.
Unfortunately, the suit actors for the animatronics are so
goddamn bad that it’s rather easy to forget that they’re even supposed to be
robots in the first place. It’s not even that they don’t act at all like
robots; it’s that the actors seemingly pick and choose when they move around
like stiff robots and when they move around like actual humans. It could have
easily been a movie about crazy murderers in costumes and it would’ve been
easier to digest, something ironically enforced by what you get when you google
this film.
That’s not the only part of this whole thing that feels
arbitrary about its own premise; the show it’s based on falls into that
category too. Now, I won’t pretend that I knew a damn thing about The Banana
Splits going into this, but that turned out to be an easy decision since the
film barely makes use of the license as is. At best, the film itself is
apathetic about its connection to a pre-existing franchise, and at worst, it
feels embarrassed to be associated with it. It does the bare minimum in
acknowledging a potential fandom for the show with some of the focal
characters, but other than the subversion into murderous splatstick, it might
as well be an H.R. Pufnstuf movie for all the difference it makes.
Oh yeah, the characters; they suck hard in this as well. The
acting already is pretty dire, with an amount of wooden delivery that’ll make
you feel like you’ve been chewing on pencils for just-under-90-minutes, but the
characters themselves are all caricatures. You’ve got the main family, who are
all rather stock, but at least they’re watchable. The super-fan/streamer
couple, the stage dad who wants his daughter to sing My Humps to impress the
producer and get her noticed, the bland-as-fuck production crew; it's feeble across
the board.
But that’s not even the worst part when it comes to writing.
No, that’s with how this film tries to be cute with its meta style of humour,
which largely consists of just stating the bloody obvious and going along with
it anyway because laziness is excusable if you admit to it upfront, apparently.
When it’s revealed that the step-dad of the main family has been cheating on
his wife, the wife’s response is “God, sleeping with your assistant; you’re
such a cliché!” This is the kind of meta writing that people think of when they
hate metafiction, and as someone with a real weakness for it, even I’m
baffled at how weak this is.
But what about the gore? I mean, if I don’t care about these
people, seeing them die must be fun, right? That’s usually why they end up
written like this in these movies in the first place, after all. Well, while
the gore is occasionally fun, the main visual aesthetic ends up taking the joy
out of it. It seriously looks like something Full Moon Features would make,
just with slightly better production values. The attempts at self-awareness are
about as tolerable, the acting is about as lame; the only things missing are
the puppets, which would honestly make for better robots than what we actually
get here. It’s bad when I’m getting flashbacks to the Gingerdead Man sequels,
and my response is “Why isn’t this more like that?”
This may be another case of me getting my hopes up for a
decent flick only to disappoint myself more than anything else, but dammit,
this film didn’t need to be this painful. Hell, I don’t even have a problem
with this trashy kind of filmmaking; it can be done well, and make for
legitimately good cinema. But this malformed parody of a parody of a
rock-stupid idea, one backed by Warner Bros. in one of their dumbest creative
decisions to date, and one that serves as another example of just how far
Patrick Stump has fallen (he did the soundtrack for this, although good luck
remembering any of it if you decide to watch this for some reason), isn’t even
the fun kind of bad. It’s just a big pile of tra-la-lame.
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