JoelSchlosberg

I posted a screengrab earlier, but here it is again:

It also only played in 17 theaters.

Is it fair to call Teen Witch a "ripoff" of Teen Wolf if it was originally conceived as a sequel that would openly acknowledge being a successor, before all material connecting it to the original was removed? Like, say, calling Big Trouble in Little China a ripoff of Buckaroo Banzai, Cobra a ripoff of Beverly Hills Cop, or Fifty Shades of Grey a ripoff of Twilight? (OK, that last one counts...)

For all the inconsistencies of this movie's magic, it resolves those of another HDTGM favorite: Kazaam. What if the genie powers in Kazaam were actually the witch powers from this boombox-filled movie? All the issues with the seemingly arbitrary line between "ethereal" and "material" powers, the wish for a car getting ignored after it is unfulfilled, the way Kazaam is able to wander off in between granting wishes, etc. would be resolved if Kazaam was never actually a genie in the first place. Instead, suppose he actually had "ethereal" powers but after learning (via boombox) how their use corrupts during the events of Teen Witch, he pretends that he only has relatively safe "material" powers to produce "stuff" rather than messing with human nature, so that others will not go down the same path?

The two questions about the voodoo I couldn't get out of my mind were "How close does the outfit have to be to the real one to work?" and "If he's not near a staircase, does he go through the floor?"

Ironic that the one John Hughes teen romance movie with actual supernaturalism in it is the one that doesn't self-ripoff Sixteen Candles.

She's just rubbing in Leslie's not being a cheerleader in Leslie's face.

Here it is:

With all the discussion of chairs, nobody's mentioned how Brad hears Louise give two completely different and contradictory explanations of where the chairs in her room went — that they are "being reupholstered" and that "I moved them so I could exercise" — without getting suspicious or even noticing that they don't add up.

Here's the elusive photographic proof:

As is pointed out in the Nostalgia Chick review, the movie has no villain. There are the types of characters that would become villains in a teen movie like this (the stuck-up popular kids, the annoying sibling), but none actually take the initiative to actually oppose Louise enough to serve as an antagonist.

Or

“that show with the girl who touched her two fingers together” which they can't think of the name of is Out Of This World.

With streaming that bad in Canada, does it still have video stores? Alaska still has Blockbusters!

The MadTV 20th anniversary special that aired Tuesday had a cast member doing a Shaq impression, noting that the audience might have seen "him" appear in numerous endorsements or Kazaam.

I'll continue with this...

Roger Ebert's review points out that a plotline of a genie helping the protagonist meet and reform a long-lost father engaged in criminal activities is also in Aladdin and the King of Thieves, released less than a month after Kazaam... except it's not a case of one studio ripping off another, since both are from Disney (Kazaam via Touchstone). And Disney also made DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp in 1990 (so its lost lamp's genie was a couple years before Aladdin's). What was it with Disney and genies in the '90s? The podcast We Hate Movies announced it was going to do an upcoming episode on DuckTales the Movie just at the time Kazaam was announced for HDTGM, so the synchronicity continues! ('90s-era Disney also seemed to have a thing with naming slightly-rebellious adolescent boys Max: Kazaam, Hocus Pocus, and A Goofy Movie.) And man, given how Paul Glaser would never step behind the camera again, Ebert's conclusion that Shaq should use 3 wishes "for a script, a director and an interesting character" is harsh. Was the movie really that badly directed? It's just a straightforward and uninspired take on uninspired material that no amount of camerawork could fix.

10 cents to $20 was the markup on CDs back in the day. If it had come out just a bit later, it would have been laughably outdated, but the CD industry was still riding high in 1996.

When Max survives the fall through the floors in the abandoned building, we see that the floors have deteriorated so that they give way upon his impact. Therefore, they offer just enough resistance to break Max's fall before finally landing on a cushioning pile of rubble, without being too hard of an impact themselves. It's a variation on those scenes where characters land on multiple awnings to break their fall, like the one in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom that was successfully recreated by the Mythbusters. (Disclaimer: does not explain how Max wasn't splattered by the second fall.)

July Diaz, on 08 January 2016 - 04:44 AM, said: the movie calling Jesus a genie I don't think it does. Kazaam says that his granting the wish for junk food is “like the main man did with the loaves and the fish” — and it is, in the sense that it's a supernatural reproduction of items of food.

Kazaam really thoroughly drops the ball on helping Max out with the bullies. Right from that early scene where Kazaam keeps trying to grant Max's wish for a car while the bullies catch up with Max. We saw that when Kazaam first appeared out of the boombox, the bullies immediately fled at the mere appearance of seven-foot-tall Kazaam before they have any idea who he is or what he's up to. So if they knew he was Max's genie, why wouldn't they steer clear from him as fast as they could? (Although the bullies are able to outrun Max when he is pedaling a bicycle, so maybe they have some magical abilities of their own.) However, that isn't the worst part of the tape wish. And neither is the datedness of the notion of a cassette tape being worth a million dollars. It's that Kazaam does not actually "recover" the tape, since he says that if he can locate it he doesn't have to use up a wish... but makes a new copy of it! That's right, for all the movie's heavy-handed message about piracy being wrong, Kazaam commits an act of it himself. (And facilitates Max's dad's associates making further pirated copies.)

Speaking of rhyme schemes, I noticed that "let's green egg and ham it" doesn't actually rhyme with anything. I assumed that line (which features prominently in the Nostalgia Critic review) was used as a forced rhyme with, umm, "slam it" or something, but nope. It rhymes with neither the preceding nor subsequent lines, so there's no reason for Kazaam to use a phrase out of a children's book.

What's the deal with the store that originally has Kazaam's lamp? From the sign advertising only "LAMPS", and from what we see of its interior, it seems to specialize in lamps. Also, it's several stories above ground in the building being demolished, which looks more like a residential apartment than a place with any other stores. How were there ever enough customers willing to go out of their way and up several floors solely to buy antique lamps to keep this place in business?

It's an irony comparable to Men in Black positing that CDs would be replaced by smaller CDs that just a bit after 1996, those blank CDs would have been worth more blank.

And it comes off as even worse in comparison to how clear-cut the limits are for the genie in Aladdin. There's not much ambiguity or wiggle room in "I can't kill anybody", "I can't make anybody fall in love", and "I can't bring people back from the dead."