Photos courtesy of Netflix
Welcome to the first installment of The Binge Watcher! In this weekly column I’ll be reviewing some of the worst rated and reviewed movies you can find on Netflix.
I like to think we got off to an excellent — or terrible — start with this week’s choice. Someone in 2008 looked at the plot of the ’80s classic, “Teen Wolf,“
and thought that it needed a makeover. Their solution? A whiny kid who can make food appear out of his hands.
You just know a movie is bad when you keep checking to see how much time you have left.
“The Adventures of Food Boy” starts off as your typical underdog teen angst movie, with Ezra Chase (Lucas Grabeel) a young man who can’t seem to make it to class on time and will eat any nasty combination of slop his friends put in front of him as a challenge. Our hero decides to take a risk and run for junior class president to help his chances of getting into college. During the debate, he notices that his hands smell like pastrami. Within minutes he’s unintentionally flinging wet cold-cuts at his opponent and the audience. Ezra learns that this is an ancient family gift, meant to be used for the greater good of mankind (the invention of the Sandwich being a notable ancestral achievement).
The production design team really doesn’t get enough credit.
“Food Boy” is your run-of-the-mill low-budget teen comedy, complete with discount pop punk bands taking up most of the soundtrack. The movie has its own rejected Disney Chanel movie charm. The plot is as generic and kitschy as the main characters: boy becomes popular over night, lets the power go to his head, falls for girl best friend, boy goes back to his dorky origins with a better perspective of his place in the universe. It’s simple in purpose, and we can commend the director, Dane Cannon, for not straying off the path.
But this film is disgusting. While it’s not surprising, the movie goes out of its way to gross you out. Repeatedly.
“I gift you with pastrami rain!”
And much longer than necessary. As part of his campaign, Ezra catches the attention of his classmates by trying to drink a gallon of milk in three minutes and throwing up in the process. The director apparently does not understand the purpose of cutaway shots and makes the viewer watch the uncomfortable scene in its entirety; it happens again when Ezra chugs a blend of sardines, mustard and other indiscernible ingredients for charity. This on top of horribly stiff acting, clichéd dialogue and a complete lack of chemistry between the Ezra and Shelby, whose only character trait seems to be a fondness for running.
He’s just glad it’s over.
The most disturbing aspect — by a mile — is how cool all the secondary characters are with Ezra’s talent for making food fly toward them out of nowhere. They delight in pastrami slapping them in face, and reward Ezra for coating the bathroom in mustard by granting him the majority vote in the school election. These people make no sense.
The real hero of the story is our janitor: the school curmudgeon who begrudgingly follows Ezra with a mop and bucket as the protagonist causes mayhem and makes his life difficult. Thankfully, in the end, he gets the love he deserves.
Now, if you excuse me, I’ll try to recover those lost 90 minutes of my life by smothering my sorrows with food.
My sentiments, exactly.
