A Year of Garbage Movies #45, “Spice World” (1997)

A delightfully psychotic trip in time back to 1997, I assume this movie was constructed by having each Spice Girl write 15 minutes of script and then stapling it all together. Find every British celebrity you can, let it simmer for 80 minutes, and you’ve got yourself a band movie.

Something odd jumped out at me when I was looking at the review for this movie. The first is that this is considered worse than “Cross Roads”. You’ll recall that movie features an aborted sex scene with Justin Long so that is an objectively false assessment. The second is that from its release until around 2002, all of the reviews are brutal, 1-star diatribes against pop stars, the poor acting in this movie, the lack of plot, etc… However, starting around 2006 the pendulum swings the other way, and there’s a surprising number of 10-star and glowing reviews. I think some of this is the nostalgia factor, but I think a lot of the negativity was just the bandwagon effect that landed some of the other films on this list.

I will say that if I’m forced to watch a celebrity vanity project movie, I wish it would be like this. Absolutely nothing is taken seriously, there’s barely the pretense of even trying to maintain a coherent plot, and that’s not so bad when you know it was the plan from the outset. Every sequence in this is bat-shit insane, and that makes this movie a lot more enjoyable than you would expect it to be. They’ve taken things as far as they could while maintaining a PG-rating.