Andy the Talking Hedgehog

Andy the Talking Hedgehog

Dan: Andy? The talking hedgehog.

Cris: Okay.

I've heard of him.

Dan: I've,

watched part of this today, I, I speed watched it but it felt more than that. This it's not the first time we heard it. I'm

Sidey: tO the pod said that we should probably check this one out. Yeah. And Breach is a big devotee of the DTV.

Let's direct a video if you don't know what I'm talking about. Yeah. And is a also if you even wanna drill down further is a big Dean Cain fan. He's a strong output in the DTV world.

Dan: Right,

Cris: sorry, what is dtv direct

What does that mean?

Dan: cinema.

Reegs: Yeah, forget the

cinema,

Sidey: just, like, shoestring just, I don't want to say thrown together because people probably spend, not necessarily on this one, but make, make a lot of effort to make it, but it doesn't, it's not studio, you know, it's just like an in, you know, like indie,

Cris: Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, okay, okay, oh yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, okay, yeah, and that makes

Sidey: And so

Reegs: Often absurd, or cheesy, or fulfilling very strange genre niches, that sort of thing.

Cris: Okay.

Sidey: Bri's also a fan, sorry to labor the point of hate watch.

So hating something but still watching

Cris: I've got a mate like that who swears at the telly. He'll watch someone that he really hates on purpose, just to be angry on what he's watching.

I don't understand

Sidey: And so she said to us that we should definitely check out Andy and Andy, the talking hedgehog

Reegs: and the poster for this movie, which is really the jumping off point.

Cris: It's amazing, the poster.

Reegs: A hedgehog riding a horse, which is such a flagrant misrepresentation of the final product.

I cannot tell you how mo different

Sidey: So, yeah, that's what I had seen that picture.

And. I was expecting like a talking

Reegs: that's it. There is riding a horse. Yeah.

Sidey: And the poster tells you that Dean Kain is gonna be in this, but also Tara Reed.

Reegs: Reade of the Sharknado franchise. You watched that,

Dan: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Reegs: And American Pie too. And

Sidey: what American Pie One

Reegs: fucking Superman for, you know.

Dan: In a decent,

Sidey: stars. They're the proper, you know, household names. I

Dan: I liked his

Sidey: Yeah. So did I. I liked her lowest loan as well. And so I.

This is available on YouTube. Don't worry about any sort of copyright infringement. Fuck that. Like you just like go balls deep. This is available on YouTube and we put it on and I was watching it and Riggs and I were having a conversation over WhatsApp

and I was like, I don't know if I'm watching the right thing

Cris: the right thing here, because

Sidey: it is it has a real amateurish whiff about it.

It starts off, I think it's

Reegs: Oh, it's just footage of, like, stock footage of a hedgehog while this song plays. A song that you're gonna hear on a loop.

Sidey: If

you imagine a child. Or anyone learning the piano right at the very beginning of their piano learning journey, you would play it like a kind of

Reegs: kind of which

Sidey: very, very simple tune, which is what this is,

Reegs: and over.

That's it

Sidey: over and over and over.

So that, that, that goes on in the film.

Reegs: the quality it's right, which meant we watched Tangerine. Do you remember that movie? And it was shot on

Dan: iPhones, Yeah.

Reegs: Okay. And that looked absolutely incredible. You wouldn't,

Dan: stylistically brilliant that

Reegs: I don't know what technology they found in 2018 to shoot

Sidey: I really wanted to labor this point as well. So they made this in 2018 right I did A level media studies in 1996, and we well the school, had bought a camcorder, which was broadcast quality at the time, so that was like, available, it would probably cost a grand or, I don't know, fifteen hundred quid or whatever, and this looked like it was shot on 1980s

Dan: something that

predated that.

Sidey: so grainy, like awful, the sound, maybe it's more the sound that's bad.

Reegs: Well, well

Sidey: but it all comes together to make a, like, horrible

Reegs: horrible mess. Horrible mess, yeah. Horrible, horrible thing. So we get the hedgehog,

Sidey: starts out with because it's not necessarily linear story storytelling.

No,

Reegs: starts in the middle of the action,

Dan: starts where it ends. Yeah. And it's with our hedgehog hero being

Sidey: It's

two, it's two guys.

Right.

Reegs: I was

Sidey: fucking

Reegs: I was watching

Sidey: was like, when I was watching it, I was like, right, I have to remember this.

Honestly, the, the comedy, timing and levels of, of like acting are so much better. And I can't believe I'm saying this in chuckle vision.

Yeah. Like the acting, the comedy, the writing is better in Chavis.

Reegs: Chucklevision.

Sidey: They can't even string one sentence together convincingly, but they just, they

Dan: no, they, they

Sidey: And I, and, and so I was watching it 10, 12 minutes in, texting Reese going, I don't know if this is,

Reegs: know if

Sidey: Like, I thought that I was watching a parody of Andy the Talking Hedgehog, and this wasn't the real one. But it is, this

Reegs: parody of

Dan: You know that when you see Dean Cain.

Reegs: Hedgehog and this wasn't the real one. You know that when you see

Sidey: just Right, so the first thing that's the not the it's not the first thing, but one of the things that struck me is that the animals talk, but there's no attempt to animate their mouth moving.

Reegs: you think of the Fairy

Dan: Oh, but it goes into the fairy godmother scene. You've got some kind of filter that you get on Instagram, just come over.

Reegs: a Windows XP background or something. It's so bad. Because yeah, her, the, Andy's owner, owner, the Tina, I think it is. And she one day professes a wish which Tara Reid overhears and pulls her into her magic world where she's a fairy BFF.

She

Sidey: But yeah, but she goes rogue with the wish, doesn't

she

Reegs: she wishes that all

Sidey: No, the granting of the wish is rogue.

Reegs: Yes it is, yeah. And her boss will turn up to bail chew her out about it and turn her into a toad.

Dan: Yeah, all kinds of

Sidey: It works on many different levels this.

Dan: I obviously only like watched it very, very quickly. Kind of on fast forward to, to get up to

Reegs: Well, you've met, you've missed a lot. Because yeah, so we get, we've had this the wish gets granted, but it grants the wish of all animals

Sidey: And plant life.

being able to talk to different plants, right,

Reegs: So

Sidey: and fauna, yeah.

Reegs: which is going to be pretty shocking when we go back to Andy's owners, because suddenly, you know, the dad, Dean Cain, the star that we came from, who's going to be continuously shot from the point of view

Sidey: of a bowl of cereal

Reegs: yeah, or like a room bar on the floor. So like just staring up at you underneath you, like the worst possible shot that you could ever get of somebody. So he's a handsome man made to look a little bit fat by the camera.

Lovely. And so. He basically mentally disintegrates on hearing, this is

Sidey: It's absolutely true, yeah,

Reegs: He mentally disintegrates on hearing Andy the Hedgehog talk

Sidey: Well, the cat, the cat can talk is it Mr.

Reegs: Whiskers?

yeah, Mr. Whiskers.

Sidey: hairless cats that just look freaky. And it's obviously, I mean, so obviously the same guy doing two shit voices to himself.

Reegs: the voiceover work is so bad, the like attempts at comedy voices for them which is, and he seems to be ad libbing it. At one point I started writing notes for this movie and I realized I was probably making more notes than the writer had of the actual thing because it was all being free balled. So yeah, he has this mental disintegration, there's a subplot where a gang of cheerleaders that all

Sidey: like a bullying thing, isn't

Reegs: stars.

We're gonna show Andy off at a science fair.

Sidey: I

I think they were trying to get in they name, check the Kardashians.

They were gonna try and get like social media fame from filming the fucking talk and stuff.

Reegs: And there's the love plot

Sidey: But the point is that everyone can hear them talk, so

Reegs: But nobody's surprised, I mean, we're not talking about it, cause nobody's really that or, if they are

Sidey: I didn't understand why they thought that they would get famous when everyone can hear them talk you're not there's nothing special about it anymore

Reegs: special about it anyway.

Why wasn't everybody everywhere going, Fucking hell, the dogs just fucking told

Dan: But no, none of that

Reegs: whatever. No, so

Dan: like the original was

Sidey: Dean Kane gets some sort of obsession about crisps. Yeah.

Reegs: He's continuously preparing to go to work, which he never does do. I think because they could only film in the location of the kitchen, because all the mum scenes are done while

Sidey: just standing around the island.

Yeah.

Reegs: dinner all, like, all the time throughout the movie, which is only 75 minutes, but feels about four and a half hours.

Sidey: me about two weeks to get

Dan: get. through it all.

Reegs: there. So, Whiskers and the Chuckle Brothers come up with this plan to, I don't know. It's all the same plan. Put him on YouTube or something or other. Anyway, it all culminates, we can avoid all that, with they're gonna kidnap Andy,

Dan: Which is where we started.

Reegs: We start, and then we get really the best bit of the movie, I think, where Dean Cain vivre.

He had some story about being a high school football,

Sidey: It's a valedictorian, you know, varsity or state

Reegs: And he gets a chance to make the tackle, the big tackle at the end, which he does to a knock off like Superman.

Sidey: The, the, the Hedgehog is like, comedy, comedically just like dropped on the floor after he tackles

Dan: he's being held by this old guy who's kind of shuffling away.

He's not even running and

Reegs: he's absolutely desperate.

Dan: swa

Sidey: slams

Dan: Slams him, but then,

Reegs: hedgehog's gone

Dan: He could have just walked over and said, give me the hedgehog. But

Reegs: Because at some point, by the way she'd unmade the wish. So now they can't

Dan: Right. And then cheerleaders came clapping and his wife ran over as he had his foot on this old guy who's

like dead on

Reegs: and then Dean Cain looks at the camera and says it's okay because I hallucinated it

Sidey: It's all a figment of my imagination. Yeah. He says,

Dan: Yeah.

Reegs: And the credits run with the director talking to

Sidey: himself all meta

Reegs: some point realizing that he is in a baffling display really

Sidey: of

Reegs: I mean it does, I feel privileged to have seen this because we must be in a fairly rare

Dan: Well, as I say, you, you showed me the highlights, you gave me the highlight

Sidey: going to have a cult following, isn't it? Because of, you know, like the rumour

Dan: Well, it made me think, What is the worst film people have seen?

And, please tell us, maybe we'll watch it. Because I think this

Sidey: I mean, we stopped kind

Dan: Sharknado was

Sidey: We, we stopped caring about the metrics about films a long time ago, although I always do make a note of them just to have a look at what the internet thinks. This, this scores 2.

2 on IMDB, which

Reegs: it's this is bad in every conceivable way that there is to talk about films, right?

Because it looks terrible, sounds hideous, it's badly acted, it's short, but it meanders and it's boring. You know, it's just terrible, but you've kind of got to give it to the guy a little bit that he fucking threw this together for like whatever, 50 quid and managed to get Dean Cain to turn up for an afternoon and he's made a fucking movie.

Dan: Yeah,

Sidey: Yeah, the guy is called Joel Paul Reisig, and his catalogue of films are, well, baffling, really.

Reegs: We've got Baby Bulldog which is another Dean

Sidey: that's rocking a 5. 1 average score. Faith Under Fire, 3. 2. Parents Worst Nightmare, 3.

Reegs: Arlo the Burping Pig, have you got that in there?

Sidey: Right up to Horse Camp, colon, A Treasure Tale, 8. 1. That's up there with, like, Shawshank.

Reegs: Amanda and the Fox. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah

It's, it's really something to be

Sidey: want to know what people on the internet thought about it?

Reegs: Yeah.

Sidey: Wow. After viewing the trailer for this film, my hopes were low. However, I am glad I gave it a second chance because, wow. Reid puts in a glowing performance with complexity and grace, and a comeback that is likely to be met with an Oscar nomination.

With Kane as her co star, the chemistry between these two, They're never on screen together. It's palpable. Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper have nothing on these two.

Reegs: Who? The Hedgehog and her? Is that what we're talking

Sidey: think they mean Cain, Cain and her. The chemistry between them. They're

Reegs: they're never No, they don't interact at all.

Sidey: I cannot recommend this film enough. Dean Cain deserves an Oscar.

This is a brave movie about a man's descent into madness.

Reegs: a scene where he's on the bed and the hedgehog is around and he looks drunk to me and I and he's doing a scene where he's talking about, oh, how did things get to this point in my life, like, and I was thinking there's quite a lot of real stuff going on here, Dean, you're

Sidey: I was thinking there's quite a lot of real stuff around me being,

Reegs: Well, and the potato chips are his

Sidey: aren't they?

Let's be clear, this film is not just the visual dissent of a man going insane, it's a visual representation of Dean Cain calling out for help.

Reegs: Yeah, I think it really is. Yeah, I

Sidey: And then this one was my favorite, LGBTQ

icon. Wow, you wouldn't expect such a stereotypical movie to have gay representation, but the chemistry between the two repairmen speaks volumes. Every time these two are in the movie, they're all over each other. I ship them harder. Then the head cheerleader and the dad or Andy and Mike, the hedgehog.

I don't, this guy's lost it. It's a slow bone. So if you don't like that, this is not for you, but the rest of the movie sucks. Two out 10.

Dan: 10. There you go, fair.

Cris: Yeah, wow.

Reegs: So are you convinced to, to finish it off? I mean, after

Dan: after we've heard it.

Maybe some of those other titles you mentioned.

Reegs: Arlo the Burping

Dan: yeah. I'm just, I am kind of

Sidey: when, when we put it, when we put it forward and I started to watch it, I thought the guys are going to fucking kill

Reegs: Yeah. Yeah.

Dan: you I wonder what is the best free film on YouTube that you can

Sidey: Well, coherence keeps popping up, then it will be that.

Dan: there. They

Cris: watch it

Reegs: it on YouTube because you

Sidey: No, and also I should say that there was an update about Shatterbelt and hopefully we'll get to see something. They're planning on doing another premiere thing soon.

Dan: But, I mean, like, you

Reegs: little bit I did see was great.

Dan: These direct to video ones and or direct to YouTube and things, they're They're curious because you say that they're put together very quickly for a small budget.

He's managed to get MacGyver a couple of half decent well known actors together to do it. It seems a waste to have put it together

Sidey: try and do a talking animal where you're not gonna make any attempt to animate the animal.

is a challenge.

Reegs: No, I mean that is the least of this

Sidey: it's awful, it's awful. But there's other, there's other medium where, you know, zero budget things, like fan fiction, you know, all that kind of like fan made stuff, there's good stuff. This just doesn't, there's nothing really good

Reegs: It's sort of just churned out to make a profit But you've kind of got to admire the fucking balls of the guy just sitting around just making it and doing it and putting it out there, really it's absolutely garbage, it's worthless as art, absolutely, or like, anything

Sidey: I do, I do wonder about the people in it seeing it back because they must all see it, right? They're going,

Cris: No, you would be surprised, probably.

Reegs: But how much do you have to pay Dean Cain to get, honestly, this thing can't have been made for, I don't, I haven't got the

Sidey: cameo rates, right? Because he only, he doesn't have that many lines in it.

Reegs: Oh, he was probably there for like, honestly, a couple of hours, yeah.

Sidey: So, you're paying him, I guess, a thousand bucks, maybe? I don't know. I don't know. Let's look him up. Let's look him up on Cameo afterwards.

Honestly, I was talking to people. at work about this, going, honestly, I reckon like three of us could put, churn something out like

Reegs: you could, but you haven't, that's the

Sidey: But yeah, no, no, no, because I know it would probably end up like this. And I

Reegs: yeah,

Dan: I'd love a 2 point, what is it, a 2. 2? Yeah. Yeah, imagine we got a 2. 2 on the IMDB. Yeah. You'd be pretty proud of

Sidey: I would, yeah. It

Dan: it takes a lot of work. It

Reegs: of effort, doesn't it? It takes quite a lot of effort.

Sidey: effort. Doing this takes quite a lot of effort.

Dan: I reckon, maybe in the next five years, we'd have made a Bad Dads film to get more than that score on IMDb.

Sidey: Well, we'll, we'll all score it 10

Reegs: 10

Dan: there you go.

Reegs: of

10. Oh,

Sidey: everyone needs to see this.

Cris: this yeah. At least once in their lifetime.

Dan: for