Shemaroo, Shemaroo, Say It With Me, It's Like A Mantra

Imagine that you are a filmmaker from South America or Central Asia with a nice cheap little movie you've just finished making. You've had a minor theatrical release but just haven't made quite enough money off of it.  What do you do with it now? Well, if there happens to be a movie topping the box office in North America that has a similar theme (or you can fake it well enough), you slap a copyright-defying cover on a cheap DVD and sell it to the stupid, the unobservant and the chronically stoned.

Welcome to the sordid world of the Mockbuster, a surprisingly lucrative industry.  Trust me, if a movie has made money in the decades since the home video market exploded, someone has made a cheap rip-off of it somewhere.

The Mockbuster we are here to discuss is Kiara the Brave, which started life at Shemaroo Entertainment (which is really fun to say, by the way) in 2011 as Super K, a Last Airbender ripoff. When The Last Airbender tanked worldwide and was generally regarded as one of the worst things ever, Super K seemed doomed to die in obscurity in India.  That is, until 2012, when another movie, this one featuring a redheaded princess in a green dress, exploded out of everybody's favourite animation studio, Pixar. The brain trust behind Shemaroo quickly realized, "hey, we have a redheaded princess in a green dress in our movie!" A quick title change and some deceiving cover art to transform an irritating side character into the main character, and now you have a Brave Mockbuster.

And oh my God, you guys, it's the best.  By which I mean it's the absolute worst, a hideous, dumb, plodding thing of absolutely no merit whatsoever.  But unlike Pup, which was hideous, dumb and brain-leakingly boring, Kiara the Brave is the kids' movie equivalent of a System Of A Down album - inept and jarring, and yet endlessly fascinating and entertaining because of it.  It is, without a doubt, So Bad It's Good, and while I would never recommend it for children, a group of adults with something mind-bending on hand would get such a kick out of it.

It is the story of Dreamzone, a planet hidden from Earth where all the Clouds live. Ruled by the good King Maximus, who we first meet at his coronation atop a massive tower several hundred miles away from where the approximately seventeen citizens of Dreamzone are cheering for him, Dreamzone is, apparantly, the Perfect World.  Unfortunately Maximus' brother, Dreadmas, is plotting his downfall, and seriously, what are royal parents thinking when they name their kids? "You will be Maximus, the good king, and if we have a second son we'll name him something that will guarantee he'll turn evil and try to take the throne from you in fifty years."

Anyway, Dreadmas' plan, given him by Destiny, a shapeshifting all-powerful being who apparently delights in toying with mortals despite being, to all appearances, the avatar of good, is to use a very complicated formula involving bats' wings, pasta and the blood of Dracula (who appears for like a millisecond and never returns) to create a Super Kloud, capable of controlling all of the elements, and therefore destroy King Maximus.  Unfortunately his two inept demon sidekicks, Accidentally and Suddenly, who don't even get a decent "Who's on First" moment to excuse their names, screw up the formula.  So what comes out of the cauldron isn't the all-powerful agent of destruction Dreadmas had hoped for, but an adorable (supposedly, it's hard to tell when everybody looks this creepy) baby who shoots lightning.  Dreadmas orders his two idiot demons to kill the child, but Super Kloud's inexplicable ability to vomit gemstones makes the greedy creatures decide to hide him and raise him themselves, hoping to become rich.

Super Kloud grows into an adolescent in like a day, and so he's sent off to school, where his inability to control his invincible powers over the elements gets him expelled, instead of, like, taught how to control his powers over the elements, which is what a school for weather-people ought to do.  Despondent, he wanders off, right into the Black Hole, a sort of grey sort of hole guarded over by two serpents who sing a half-Gregorian chant, half hip-hop ode to "dung sauce" - I'm not kidding - before trying to eat him.  He's rescued by Mesmerizer, the King's Gandalf-like advisor, who does nothing but stroke his beard awkwardly and invite Kloud to play with his "many gadgets" that all look like 1980s electronics, before going "Universe-surfing" over to visit Maximus.

All of this is in the first fifteen minutes of the movie, and you'll notice that nobody named Kiara has shown up yet.

Kiara turns out to be Maximus' daughter, a psychotic creepy monster with empty, terrifying eyes who admonishes her father for not making her excited every damn second. But she has red hair and a green dress, so there you go. Her birthday party is very much improved, she thinks, when Super Kloud comes tumbling out of Mesmerizer's ponytail somehow, and proceeds to take everyone's advice to "chill" literally, dropping golfball-sized globs of ice on the castle. The princess and the boy become fast friends, and must band together a team of kids ("kid power" is mentioned several times, and you haven't lived until you've heard the grave, trying-to-be Gandalf voice of the sagelike Mesmerizer proclaim "they're trying to draw you away from your Kid Power, Super Kloud!)  to stop Dreadmas and his even more evil accomplice, Dr. Ozox, who apparently rules pollution, from taking over Dreamzone.

Did I mention that all of these proceedings are watched over and narrated by the Planets Of The Solar System, here represented as grotesque disembodied heads with marvellous moustaches? Or that Destiny's Child keeps showing up, a cranky little boy who can't decide who he should be and so he keeps dressing up as pop culture figures like Spiderman, Jack Sparrow, Harry Potter and... one of the guys from Jersey Shore? and never once decides to be Beyonce?

Nothing in this movie is linear. Nothing progresses naturally from one scene to the next.  It seems making things coherent was too difficult for Shemaroo, who opt to replace story with baffling incoherence and logic with just being batshit insane. At one point Dr. Ozox, who turns out to be the real villain in this piece, has Super Kloud and princess Kiara trapped in his evil lair, and he... just sends them home? Because the very next scene is Super Kloud and Kiara inciting the hideous troglodyte children into a revolt while Dreamzone's towers belch polluting black smoke into the air.

Words can't describe how ugly this movie is.  Everybody's face looks like they were slathered in margarine and then lit from below by a flashlight held far too close to their face, fight scenes happen in slow motion not by choice but because nobody knew how to animate bodies coming in contact with one another, and no two objects actually touch.  Meanwhile, everybody speaks dreeeaddfuuulllyy slowly to accommodate their lines into the terrible animation, and the soundtrack is nothing but public-domain polka and calliope music, tastefully muted in the hope that you won't actually notice the soundtrack is nothing but polka and calliope music.  It's truly a dreadful, dreadful movie, and you totally have to watch it.

Story: What story? Events are strung together like they wrote plot points from eight different movies on little strips of paper and then flung them into the air. 0 Points
Execution: Laughable. 0 Points
Moral: Oh God. FOLLOW YOUR DESTINY, SUPER KLOUD! And don't pollute, I guess, because polluting turns clouds into zombies or something. 0 Points
Songs: There's just the one Dung Sauce song, but then again, that's the Dung Sauce song.  Also the end credits have a really terrific "Super Kloud" theme song that's just the worst, with lines like

You can call me magic

Trouble someone tragic

Simply fantastic

Super K is what I am

0 Points

Did My Kids Like It? I told you, this isn't for kids.  This is for grown-ups who have been chemically conditioned to enjoy it.

Score: 0/4, but oh my God, is it great.

Bonus Post: The Terrifying Totalitarian World Of Disney: Descendants

I have a problem.  It's not really a problem for me, and it's not really a problem for anybody else, either, but "I have a problem with reading too much into kids' shows" sounds a lot better than "I spend a great deal of time thinking about the inner world of kids' shows and trying to figure out how they work".  I have stayed up late wondering, where are Max and Ruby's parents?  Is Mike the Knight actually a prequel to Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves?  What exactly was Sir Topham Hatt thinking when he created an army of steam locomotives with artificial intelligence and the emotional maturity of preschoolers?  It's a lot of fun if you ever want to try it, and if you're a parent of young children it's a great game to play with yourself to increase your enjoyment of the programs that are going to spend much more time on your screen than Orange is the New Black.

With this in mind, let me turn my overactive imagination to the world of Disney: Descendants.  Because there is something very wicked in the Kingdom of Auradon.

I may have brought up the subject briefly in my review, but there is a legitimately universe-breaking problem with Cruella De Vil's inclusion among the villains on the Isle of the Lost.  See if you can find it with me.  The core four villains are: Cruella, Maleficent, Jafar and Evil Queen. Ignoring the seething rage I still get over the fact that Evil Queen is not her effing name, there's a real one-of-these-things-just-doesn't-belong-here vibe with these four.  Maleficent, an all-powerful sorceress and queen of the fairies, laid a deadly curse on a royal princess.  Jafar, an all-powerful sorcerer and occasional genie, attempted a violent coup on the kingdom of Agrabah, attempted regicide and imprisoned and enslaved the crown princess.  Evil Queen, as the... evil queen and stepmother of crown princess Snow White, ordered her murder and then attempted to finish off the job herself, and not at all because she was the rightful heir, but because she was prettier.  All three conspired to harm a royal person or persons.  All three are magic users and legitimate enemies of the state for a magical, fairy-tale kingdom.

Cruella, on the other hand.... what did she do wrong? Besides legitimately purchase seventy-four dalmatian puppies?  She kidnapped fifteen dogs.  That's her entire crime.  Planning to kill and skin them is pretty awful, but I'm pretty sure there weren't animal cruelty laws in England in the 1920s, and even if there were, Attempted Animal Abuse is still not a crime.

So we have here a mortal, with no magical powers, whose entire career of villainy was committed against one family of dogs.  Dogs who, in their own movie at least, were incapable of communicating to their owners except in the normal way dogs always have. Which means that even though the dogs' owners may suspect that Cruella was behind their pets' disappearance and harbour that suspicion until the end of their days, there's still no way of proving it.  And yet Cruella winds up shunted off to the Isle of the Lost, a combination prison camp and ghetto, for the crime of alleged dognapping. Without benefit of either criminal charges or conviction, Beast's cartoon gestapo rounded her up with all the other ne'er-do-wells.

If that's the case, then just what does it take to be classified a villain and dropped into permanent exile? There are thousands of people on the Isle of the Lost - whole families, even - and only a fraction of them have any connection to any Disney villain.  What were their crimes? Mail fraud? Tearing the tag off the mattress? 

How about dissent?

We are told that Beast and Belle united the kingdoms into the overkingdom of Auradon twenty years ago (instead of going on a honeymoon, which would likely have been much healthier). You don't just up and decide to unite a dozen sovereign states by yourself.  There had to be some loyalists around who weren't pleased with the thought.  I would imagine that those dissenters make up a good portion of the population of the Isle.  Entire families, women and children and even babies, shunted off to an off coast slum and forgotten about forever, left at the mercy of a new ruling class of power-mad, pissed off sorcerers.  In other words, the United States of Auradon is a terrifying Orwellian nightmare-state.

It really puts a different spin on the whole "Choose Good" moral of the movie, when "I choose Good!" really means "I choose continued acceptance and fraternization with the totalitarian overlords who would willingly exile me again the second I opposed them!" It also, technically, makes Maleficent less of a villain and more of a revolutionary.

And all because they decided to include Cruella De Vil in their Rogues Gallery, a villain who is one of the hands-down favourites for best-animated villain in any of the Disney movies, but who in no other way fits in with their milieu.  They would have been much better off going with Ursula's kid instead.

Mirror Mirror On The Wall

If, as a hack screenwriter working in the back rooms of Disney's TV department, not renowned for their high art, I was offered the premise of "Let's do some kind of a sitcom thing with the famous Disney villains... I don't know, maybe their kids or something", I think I could come up with probably  a dozen different scenarios better than Disney: Descendants.  Just in the few days since I listened to the movie three times on a road trip and then watched it myself for clarification, I've come up with at least two:

-The children of Disney Villains uncover an even more villainous plot than their parents could ever come up with to destroy all fairy tale life and have to team up to stop it (Disney Villain Suicide Squad), or

-The children of Disney Villains find themselves magically warped into a far future where Fairy Godmother, having used her "Happy Endings" to rid the world of all other magic users, has established herself as an all-powerful dictator (Disney Villain Samurai Jack).

Instead, writers Josann McGibbon and Sara Parriott and director Kenny Ortega give us... the children of Disney Villains are sent to a... prep school where they learn to not be evil through friendship and team sports. Really? Okay, really.

The broad strokes are these: in the years since Belle and Beast were married, all the Disney kingdoms have been united into the kingdom of Auradon, with Beast (Dan Payne) as Overking.  The villains, meanwhile, like Maleficent (Kristen Chenoweth), Evil Queen (Kathy Najimy), Jafar (Maz Jobrani) and Cruella De Vil (Wendy Raquel Robinson) have been banished to the prison colony of the Isle of the Lost, where they have each found time to birth and raise a single child to adolescence, all without seeming to have acquired a spouse at any point.

This is a problem for Beast's son Ben (Mitchell Hope), who is a month away from being crowned King of Auradon even though his father is still very much alive, and he issues a proclamation that four of the children imprisoned on the Isle of the Lost be freed from their slum to attend Auradon Prep Academy and perhaps learn to be decent human beings.

Maleficent thinks this is just grand, and charges her daughter Mal (Hope Cameron), Evil Queen's daughter Evie (Sofia Carson), Jafar's son Jay (the unfortunately named Booboo Stewart), and Cruella's son Carlos (Cameron Boyce) with the task of stealing Fairy Godmother's magic wand during their sojourn so that Maleficent can join it with her own magic staff and take over the world.

Can I just stop here for a second with a little beef?  It's bad enough that in this world, you are apparantly only allowed to name your child a derivative of your own name, but Evie?  Evil Queen's daughter is named Evie?  You know Evil Queen isn't her actual name, right?  She was the Queen of whatever kingdom Snow White was a princess of, and she sure was Evil, but she surely had a name.  It was probably Gruselda or something but it was a name. They retconned her a name in Once Upon A Time but they couldn't do it here? To name her daughter after the derogatory nickname her enemies gave her after the fact is like me naming my kid Nerdy.  And that's nothing on what they do to Jafar, here represented as a stereotypical Middle Eastern shopkeeper with none of the slinky leering cruelty he showed in Aladdin.  Wasn't he a genie the last time we saw him? He's been reduced to Apu. And why is Cruella there?  All the others actually caused harm to or threatened the life of a royal person.  Cruella kidnapped fifteen dogs.  That's literally the only crime she actually committed and it can't be proven.  

Okay, rant over for now.  The four kids are taken through the magical barrier to Auradon, where it is very much the twenty-first century and not the general middle ages where two thirds of the villains had their reigns of terror (and died, but let's not start nitpicking), where they're met by Ben and his girlfriend, Audrey (Sleeping Beauty's daughter!), and also Dopey's nerdy son Doug, who is not a Dwarf in any way. On their first night in their new digs they sneak out to find the magic wand, only to discover it's guarded by powerful magical security, and must wait out a month of school until Ben's coronation, when the wand will be used in the ceremony. The plot involves Mal concocting a love spell to make Ben dump Audrey and fall for her so that she can be front and centre during the coronation.

Will Mal find her evil heart softened by Ben's unquenchable goodness?  Will Jay discover that being part of a sports team is better than being an evil loner thief? Will Carlos discover dogs are really great and not the monsters his mother made him think they were? And will Evie learn that being smart and talented is better than being dumb and pretty?  You bet they will!

To be fair to Descendants, there's nothing really awful about the story or the way it's presented aside from its ridiculous concept, but since they bring that concept up over and over again it continues to get in the way of the movie working. The fact that you Only Matter if you're the child of a famous Disney character means that characters always have to stop what they're doing to mention which cartoon their parents were in. The most glaring example of this is when the only vaguely Asian member of the cast shows up and introduces herself: "Hi, I'm Lanny... (Pause, sigh, eye-roll) ...Mulan's daughter?"

If the movie has a secret weapon it's Hope Cameron as Mal.  It's not that she's doing much, although she manages to portray Mal as having at least two character traits while the rest of the cast is content to stick with just one.  But she has a screen presence that outdoes anyone else on screen at any time, stealing whatever scene she's in and making me really believe that she's confused about whether to be  good to her mother or good to her new friends. She's the best part of the movie, and I really hope that she one day escapes the circle of Disney TV Hell that has swallowed so many talented kids in the decade since Hanna Montana made sticking talented girls into horrible TV shows an industry. On the back side, her screen mother, Chenoweth's Maleficent, is the hands down nod for worst performance, shrieking her eeeeevil proclamations at the highest register and refusing to climb down to anything human.  Fine, she's the villain; her performance should be big.  But her biggest scene (and her one big musical number, the grating "Do Ya Wanna Be Evil?") is the third worst scene in the movie, and you can see the horror and confusion in her eyes when she stops singing to perform a half-hearted soft-shoe, suggesting that a dance choreographer was hired, but didn't show up that day, and director Ortega just told her to wing it.  

Stuck right in the middle is Mitchell Hope as Prince Ben.  Unable to shoulder the weight of doing all the heavy lifting for the "good" side, and unfortunately forced through two awful musical numbers - the overproduced and Autotuned "RiDICulous" is only saved from being the worst number in the film by being immediately followed by Hope's oh-so-white hip-hop rendition of "Be Our Guest" that is an insult not only to the original song but also to the entire medium of hip-hop and the ghost of Jerry Orbach.

Story: I dearly wish I could have seen a Suicide Squad of Disney Villains, but that's my own problem, not the movie's.  0.5 Points

Moral: Don't be evil? is the moral? I have nothing against it, I guess, but it's not exactly stretching the mind.  1 Point

Execution: CGI is used sparingly, thank goodness, and mostly to make sure the ball in the Big Sports Game goes where it's supposed to go without multiple takes.  I didn't mention that the Big Game is actually pretty well done.  Also, Hope Cameron's performance makes it look more like a movie than it really deserves. 1 Point

Songs: The Let's Meet The Villains song, "Rotten to the Core" is pretty good, and Mal gets a good "yearning" song, "If Only", but then there's Maleficent's cackling tap-dance and that horrible "Be Our Guest". 0.5 Points

Did My Kids Like It? Oh, yes they did.  All four times it played in the damn car.  My wife liked it too, although she'll never admit it except under duress. 1 Point

Total Score: 4/5 points.