Totally Awesome

I've seen spoof movies and decided to watch "TOTALLY AWESOME" on DVD. At first I thought it was really terrible even for a spoof....but I kept watching and it kinda grew on me. There were some surprising Laugh out Loud scenes. I think the dance (Flashdance-Dirty Dancing) side story probably seemed funnier on paper (the script) but didn't work. Brittany Daniel is listed as top bill and we didn't see nearly enough of her. KIP was hilarious at times. Not a "TOTAL" waste of time if you just want a few laughs while eating pizza! The "Miagi" spoof of being gay was very funny as well. I thought there could have been more sexiness...but hey--it's VH1 TV movie. Maybe they can't show too much.

I was born in 1986, so, yeah, I wasn't old enough to be a part of everything like some of you guys were, but, as I did get older, I did rent or watch all the 80's movies on TV. I also love 80's music and own a bunch of 80's cd's and listen to 80's weekend on 94.3 OK, now to the movie. I loved it. Was there things that were miss? Yes. Was there things that were hit? Most definitely. More than there were miss. The only things I didn't like about the movie was the character of Max. The movie would have held better without him as he wasn't needed at all and wasn't funny. The second thing was the soundtrack. They played awesome 80's songs, but, there were only like 7 80's songs in the film. I felt like they could have used a good 15-20 songs from the 80's and it would have made a great Totally Awesome soundtrack to buy on cd. Other than that, for the songs they did use, it was awesome. The styles were also quite awesome. And, the spoofs were just hilarious. The TV spots didn't do the movie justice as it was way funny. I bought the DVD on the day it came out, which was today. And, it's unrated, and, for a TV movie, the DVD isn't vanilla at all. There looks to be some decent special features, though, I have yet to watch them. So, be sure to at least rent and watch this movie if you haven't seen it on VH1 yet, because, you'll love it if you're a child of the 80's or before. Heck, I'm sure you'll want to buy the DVD even.

I've just watched this movie on TV, and it seems to me a sad attempt at pointing fun at the 80's, but fails miserable.

"Not Another Teen Movie" wasn't amazing, but at least it nailed the bad 90's teen movies and put some humor into it.

This movie is about a brother,Charlie, (Mikey Day) and sister ,Lori, (Dominique Swain) who move to a new town in California from Pittsburg. The sister loves to dance and trained as a ballerina, so naturally she's crushed when she discovers she can't dance in this new town. The guy is ranked bottom of his senior class in 'coolness' on his first day and makes some feeble attempts to "rise against the cool people."

There's the unattainable hot chick, the jerky popular guy who makes no sense and the freaks. There's also Charlie's best 'freak friend', Billie (Nicki Clyne), who has a hopefully crush on him and can't admit it (Sixteen Candles right there).

The movie progresses with bad references to "Dirty Dancing", "Teen Wolf" and the like.

I won't give away anymore, but I wouldn't recommend this movie unless it's 3am and nothing else but infomercials are on.

It's not nearly stupid enough to be considered "so stupid it's funny" and it's not interesting enough to have any sort of cult following.

(And then there's the creepy janitor (who's an ex-dancer) and the principal who doesn't give a hoot.)

Especially with all of that big name talent. As the synopsis states, "loaded with the typical formula, clichés, bad fashions, and stereotypical characters". It already been done a hundred times before, except those movies were funny back in that time.

This film tries way too hard to be funny, but the dialogue sucks and the characters are so assembly line created. I suppose you can't really blame the actors. After all, they can only go so far with bad writing. Honestly, there are ways to make a retro film fresh and engaging. This certainly is NOT a good example of that. Old ideas, old production tricks, old dialogue repackaged and regurgitated. If you are looking for this type of nostalgic comedy, then rent one from that era.

Sorry, but it's just not that funny. My friends and I have to ask, why spend all this time and money only to come up with a lame product. We don't hate it but we certainly don't like it either. It should have been a low budget indie. At least then you aren't expecting much. There are far better low budget films out there that are much funnier.

I do have to give a honourable mention to the wardrobe however. At least an honest effort was made there.

I watched the entire movie without stopping and deleting it from the DVR. That's about the best thing I can say about "Totally Awesome".

The thing about spoofs is that they only work if they consistently satirize their targets. They need to find humor in parts of the original films that weren't "funny" and find humor in them. This is the biggest flaw of "Totally Awesome". The movie is just lame setups, horrendous overacting and a few interesting ideas that never quite hit the mark. There is very little actual satire. Mr. Miyagi got more laughs in the original Karate Kid than his "spoof" counterpart did during this entire train wreck of a movie. Dominique Swain is another big offender here. I'm sure she was directed to completely overact, but she completely blew past the line separating funny from downright annoying. With maybe one or two exceptions, I found her performance almost unbearable.

It's not all doom and gloom, after all I did get through the whole thing without deleting it. I'm not normally a huge Tracy Morgan fan, but he completely stole the show with the brief role he was given. Even by spoof standards Joey Kern might have been a bit too over-the-top as the nemesis, but he did get me to laugh more than once. There were also some laughs to be found in some of the dancing scenes and the lead actor looked eerily like C.Thomas Howell from "Soul Man" when in black-face.

I guess it's not a complete waste of 100 minutes, but it's not hard to realize why this script wound up as 'made for VH1' filler either. I have a sneaking suspicion that this was shot for theatrical release or possibly direct-to-DVD. The transfer is clearly cropped from some widescreen film format. It's pretty easy to see why it never made it that far. (Altho from what I hear, this is being released on DVD. Oh boy.) Anyways, this one misses far more than it hits. When you are constantly reminded how much superior the original 80's movies are instead of being inspired to laugh at their silliness, the makers of the spoof have dropped the ball.

Who thought the movie "Soul Man" was a good idea? Apparently the same folks that thought "Totally Awesome" was a good idea.