BUY IT AT AMAZON: CLICK HERE!
STUDIO: Miramax Family
RATED: Unrated
RUNNING TIME: 69 Minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES: Bonus Movie (my ass): Go Hugo Go
The Pitch
"Okay…follow me here – let’s make an animated film about…wait for it…how evil filmmakers are! I KNOW! Really it just came to me in the shower. Oh stop it – ‘inspired’ maybe, but ‘brilliant?’ No, no..well…okay!"
Fuckers.
The Humans
Bronson Pinchot is the only name you’re gonna recognize.
Promo Pic from the new show: Tony Hawk’s Badass Menagerie
The Nutshell
So, here we have Hugo. What is Hugo? I dunno – some kind of rare mammal thing. So rare, in fact, that he’s the only one in existence. He lives in the jungle with his jungle friends and all is happy until the Evil Hollywood Empire sweeps in looking for the next big animal star. They find Hugo, kidnap him and try to force him to make movies. It’s sad really – they should have just shot the bastard and saved me a few hours…but I digress. Soon Hugo falls prey to the spoiled life of Hollywood Stars and has to be rescued by best friend (and actually implied lover) Rita the Fox. Along the way he makes a few new friends and learns a few lessons about life.
It was then Hugo realized what the cuffs and collar were for..this wasn’t a kids movie at all.
The Package
Where’s the Miramax that brought me the Kill Bills? The Miramax that brought me Pulp Fiction? Apparently if you add "Family" to the company’s name, not only do they lose their balls (which is expected) but they also lose any semblance of creativity or organization. The cover art is ok, but it looks a little…fuzzy. Kinda like those home-printed labels you’d see on a bootleg DVD. Hugo and friends are front and center. The transfer is crap – this was made back in 1990 and you can tell no one made an effort to re-touch the scratches and faded colors from the original print. Audio-wise it’s an atrocity. This is an import (from Denmark of all places!) so obviously it had to be dubbed. The synch was off (even for a foreign language film), the voice acting was horrible…basically zero effort. Well not entirely true – they made the effort to re-arrange the songs. But…why? All you would have to do is perform the songs as they are and just redub the vocals. Why spend time re-writing crappy songs when you could have put that effort into anything else wrong with this thing? Okay, all that aside, here’s the best part – the disc you’re (hopefully never) gonna buy is Hugo The Movie Star. On the cover it proclaims "Includes Bonus Movie: Go Hugo Go!" Now, I don’t know about you guys, but when I see the inclusion of a "bonus movie" I think of Monsters Inc.’s "Mike’s New Car," or The Incredibles’ "Jack-Jack Attack." No, Go Hugo Go is actually the first chapter in the Hugo Series. It’s as long as Movie Star and if you push "Play All" on the menu, it starts off with Go Hugo Go. Which is actually smart because if you play Movie Star by itself, it begins with a scene that would make absolutely no sense unless you’ve seen Go Hugo Go. So, and really think about this, they cut the first half of the damn movie off and included it as a bonus feature (and the only bonus feature at that). The mind reels…
I wish this would have been interactive.
The Lowdown
What is there to say? This is crap. I’ve never been to Denmark, so I don’t know the cinematic climate over there, but one has to question why in the fuck did Miramax pick this up and distribute it? Well, okay, I know why. It’s easy to make a quick turnaround buck on some unknown animated DVD with some cute critters on the cover. See, what makes this movie so bad is the complete and total lack of effort to try and entertain on any sort of basic level. I watched this entire thing and every single element fell flat. Any attempt at humor failed. The songs were horrid. The characters were transparent and one-dimensional. The other thing that bothered me was that they could have ended the story about 5 different times, but no – they preferred quantity over quality. This could have easily been an 11-minute Disney short and probably could have worked. Instead, they made like 15 11-minute Disney shorts and crammed them together. The number of times Hugo gets kidnapped over the course of each movie could rival Kim Bauer’s total in the course of 24 fucking hours. Hugo gets kidnapped, then he gets away. And right when you think the credits are about to roll….BAM! Kidnapped again. The only difference is when Hugo actually started to enjoy the limelight of movie stardom he became a total jackass, forsaking all of the friends that helped him escape the million times he got kidnapped before. So okay, that’s an interesting plot point – but it took him all of 90 seconds to realize his mistake and then we’re back to "How do I escape." This movie hurt my brain. It assaulted my senses and I can’t imagine any instance in which anyone would say anything good about this movie except that it killed in the Blind Buyers market.
Fuck Hugo – fuck him right in his rare little furry ass.
1.0 out of 10