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Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters

Starring: Dana Snyder, Dave Willis, Carey Means, Andy Merrill, Mike Schatz, Matt Maiellaro, Fred Armisen, Bruce Campbell, Chris Kattan

Directed by: Matt Maiellaro, Dave Willis

Adult Swim - Official Site of the Movie

Discuss ATHF on the boards!

Time to play a little catch up and give you guys an older movie I had finished the comic on but hadn’t really gotten around to writing a review for. Not that even the most glowing praise from the most credible critics in the world could have helped the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie register on the box office charts. And the film not really making an impact isn’t too much of a surprise considering how much it had going against it.

It looks like it’s for kids but isn’t, it’s based on a TV show so anything jumping to the big screen and being released with an R-rating pretty much has to deliver a significant increase in vulgarity to appease the awaiting audience. Then there was the bomb thing. A misunderstood ad campaign in Boston gone horribly wrong. Something, which, honestly I don’t think really deterred, people from seeing the movie, but very possibly could have deterred the distributors from putting a lot more money into advertising. Still with all of that the producers of this film should accept it’s short-lived theatrical bow and be content in the buckets of money and potential cult status success this weirdly random movie should have on DVD.

The characters of ATHF will immediately draw in kids with their colourful and poorly drawn (intentionally so) appearance, but like the best cigarette company mascots, what these cuddly, food stuffs are promoting is not so kid friendly. In case any parents out there blindly bought tickets to the first available animated feature in hopes of distracting their children for an hour, and ended up in the ATHF theater, the first 5 minutes will let them know exactly how big of a mistake they’ve made. In a twisted homage to the “Let’s All Go to the Lobby� characters, a new group of animated, inanimate, snack food treats rock through a loud, obscenity filled tune that both scares away the weak-at-heart and sets the stage for the no-holds-barred humor we can expect in the rest of this angry stoners dream movie. (check out the full intro here

Sadly as soon as the song comes to a close a directionless story with no attention span begins taking us on a journey with some strong but very few laughs and even less plot. It revolves around Frylock, Mastershake and Meatwad (I’ll let you figure out which one is which), three creatures with an uncertain origin living in the suburbs on Earth. They struggle for half the film to assemble the ultimate work out station, only to spend the second half of the film struggling to disassemble it after it turns into a giant, Cyclops robot that plays techno music, reproduces and destroys everything in it’s path. That old chestnut.

It’s actually not that bad of a set-up, certainly not in the context of a movie featuring talking food, but the storytelling is so static and fragmented that it becomes difficult to follow. The characters go off on tangents, some of them pretty funny, but all of them distracting to what’s going on in the story. After 40 minutes of this herky-jerky style I became frustrated to the point where even things that were genuinely funny where only a delay for me being able to leave.

Don’t get me wrong, some scenes and characters here are so randomly wacky that you will wiggle right into a giggle fit. For instance, if there were a Time Lincoln T-shirt, I’d be wearing it right now. (Incidentally, in an image search on Google for “Time Lincoln ATHF� turned up this hot picture of Jenna Fisher from The Office, but nothing for the Time Lincoln character.) And there’s an amazing cast on voice talent that come on board to play characters, even for the smallest of scenes. Bruce Campbell as Chicken Bittle as the lost 4th member of the food quartet, is on screen for no more than 5 minutes, but in that time he manages to deliver one of the most memorable moments of the entire movie.

Chicken Bittle is a big part of the origin story that the movie reveals which includes the back-story of where the guys come from and who their parents are. Something that should please the die-hard fans a lot, but to those going in blind I’m sure it feels as arbitrary and out of place as just about anything else in the movie. It didn’t bother me so much though. I was actually really glad that they took the opportunity to do something significant with the feature length story. It makes it more than just a dozen individual episodes butted up against each other end to end.

But that’s the only thing that really sets it apart from the show that you can watch late nights on basic cable. There’s some foul language and a couple of borderline offensive jokes that would be slightly clipped or bleeped on the Cartoon Network, but for the most part there’s nothing in here that really pushes that R-rating in the way fans might be hoping. Nothing like the leaps South Park took when they went to the big screen. And it’s not that vulgarity is a necessity, but for a franchise like ATHF it seems like a perfect fit. Why not exploit the hell out of it? Of course we’ve seen a little freedom backfire in some movies. Was anyone else emotionally scarred by the force-wide masturbation scene in Reno-911: Miami?

Walking out of the theater I was really upset with ATHF. I felt like someone was messing with me for an hour and a half and that if they had just told me I needed to be drunk out of my mind to enjoy it, this could have been a delightful afternoon at the movies. Maybe I should change my rating system to reflect how much booze you need to ingest before a feature length amount of nonsense magically becomes entertaining. It’s too late to test the theory in theatres, but when ATHF comes out on dvd, rent it, get your buzz on and I’m sure you’ll either laugh yourself silly all the way through or pass out before it gets too terribly boring.

Rating: 4 out of 10 - 4 is a low rating, but so much of this movie experience felt like an inside joke at the audiences expense. In retrospect I’m less violently angry about my afternoon at the movies, and part of me thinks a second viewing will reveal ATHF to be either a complete waste or a clunky classic you need to get used to. But the first time through was a painful and frustrating disappointment.

It’s weird. The more time I spend away from the movie the more I find I want to see it again, thus the more likely I am to buy it on DVD when it is released. As fragmented as the story is, I find myself enjoying it in retrospect. Part of me thinks it will shine a second time through or at the very least vaguely appear to be one complete adventure. Plus if the site for this movie is any indicator, the ATHF DVD is going to be overflowing with extra content. Something that is usually a bigger selling point in my eye then it should be.

In the summer when the movie is released on DVD, I do hope that I have the will to Netflix it instead of actually buying it. Of course, it would be even better if they just ran it on Adult Swim in 15-minute segments. I admit, I felt raped and betrayed by the people at the Family Guy when after paying 15 bucks for a copy of Family Guy Presents: Stewie Griffin - The Untold Story, it showed up on TV in three convenient half hour episodes. I won’t be so quick to hand my money over to Adult Swim on something that could potentially be airing 3 times a week come fall. Either way, we’re all probably better off putting our money towards the first season of ATHF (already on DVD), which was random and clever enough to keep the show in production a couple years after it lost that spark.

Ok, so I’m not going to talk about the joke because I think it’s an obvious one. It’s cute and harmless. Not my best but I’m not ashamed of it either. I do want to talk about a social experiment that I conducted a couple of weeks ago with this strip and another as yet unreleased strip for Pathfinder. I posted both comics up in this thread in the members section of the Digital Pimp boards, and asked the board members to vote for which one I thought was better. Not which one they thought was better. Which one I did. I specifically said in the post that one of the comics I thought was nice, but that the other one I loved to death, and I asked them: Which one of these comics does Joe love the most?

The purpose of this was 1 – to give the board members a little sneak preview of two new comics. I try to give them a little treat every now and then to keep them coming back. And 2 – to gage how well the audience and I are connected. To see if we think the same things are funny or if I’m just completely out of touch with my readers

Well, 63% of the voters choose the wrong comic leaving me confused and frightened. Am I so disjointed with my own readers that I can’t even recognize what is good and bad anymore? Can I trust my own instincts after something like this? Who do I turn to!? Why is the sky blue!?

After about a week I decided that I would just have to get over it and move on. I can’t base something as big as being out of touch with my audience on a sampling of just two comics. Though the mixed reaction of love and confusion for the Vacancy strip might be a good indicator that I’m losing it. Either way, check out the Pathfinder (the review will go up soon) strip in the member’s section and vote for which you think is funnier. But if you vote for ATHF, you’re dead to me. Just kidding. But not really.

The official site over at Adult Swim has a slew of great stuff worth checking out including a video game so easy that it became hard. Try it and see if you can finish the first board without jamming a pencil into your keyboard so you don’t have to hold the arrow key for an hour and a half. But the feature that I found to be the coolest was the collection of alternate endings to the movie. There are 9 in total and there are some that I think would have actually been better though the majority are just a wacky good time. It’s nice though that in such a technological age, you can have these kind of options. Why choose one ending when you can instantly get a dozen to your readers by posting them on line. That may sound like old news, especially coming from a guy that posts comics for free online, but it’s nice every now and then to realize how great the age of technology that we’re living in really is.

Earlier today I had a guest strip go up at Taking the Bi-Pass. Dave and his wife Tracy just had a baby and he’s running a slew of guest strips while they enjoy this special time. I was more than happy to contribute though I’m ashamed to admit I took forever getting the comic to him. He was very gracious about it though and proved himself to be the nice genuine guy that his strip makes him out to be.

If you’re not familiar with Taking The Bi-Pass it’s worth your time. Really great relationship humor from the same sort of man-child perspective I try to translate with JLCM. I think you guys will dig it. Thanks to Dave for asking me to be involved and congrats on the little one. And thanks to all of you for reading. See you soon!