I don’t know about you, but I need a break from Batman. So let’s switch gears and watch something absolutely awful! Foodfight!–the title has an exclamation point so you know it’s quality–is infamously bad: it’s hideous, the story sucks, it’s shameless product placement, and it cost $65 million to make because they had no idea what they were doing and then the computers the movie was stored on got stolen. Oops! It eventually limped its way to a DVD release, and here we are. I own this. I make only the best decisions.

You know how in Toy Story the toys are alive and have to hide from humans? Change “toys” to “grocery store product mascots” and that’s Foodfight!. Mr. Clean and Mrs. Butterworth are here, as well as Punchy–you all of course know the name of the Hawaiian Punch mascot–but most of the characters are from made up products, including an ambiguously gay bat that was absolutely supposed to be Count Chocula. We follow Dex Dogtective (Mr. Charlie Sheen as a cereal mascot), his love Sunshine Goodness (Mrs. Hilary Duff as a raisins mascot), and best friend Daredevil Dan (Wayne Brady as an… um… he’s a chocolate squirrel and that’s all I got). When Sunshine disappears, Dex gives up solving crimes and opens a club. When Lady X (Eva Longoria as the new mascot of Brand X products) shows up and tries to seduce Dex, the plot actually starts happening. Brand X is evil and they’re trying to replace all the other brands. The other products fight back, but the agents of Brand X corner the resistance in Dex’s club and try forcing them to sing their anthem. The resistance responds by singing a bastardization of La Marseillaise and… wait a second… Did this movie just rip off Casablanca?!

The answer is yes, and it’s been doing that since basically the beginning. “Of all the produce bars and all the supermarkets in all the world, she walks into mine,” Dex says while dressed a white suit in his nightclub. “You despise me, don’t you?” a slimy weasel asks in a voice that would sound like Peter Lorre if he were a cheap cartoon. But this movie goes a step further, with Lady X ranting against the “undesirables” while standing atop a building with blatant Nazi architecture. It makes this already abysmal movie that much worse. We get it, they’re evil, but invoking the Nazi Eagle and having your troops wear red armbands in a kids film is just a teensy bit… fucking atrocious.

So Dex rallies against Brand X, and my soul dies when I notice I still have a half hour left in the movie. A food fight breaks out and things aren’t looking good for our heroes. In the end they narrowly triumph and we find out that the Brand X representative (Christopher Lloyd, lending credence to my theory that he’s sundowning and will sign anything you put in front of him) is actually Lady X in a robot suit, which is weird because his jerky mannerisms reminded me more of the Edgar the Cockroach from Men in Black. But we also find out that Lady X is actually ugly, and that’s important because… Anyway, Sunshine is freed, she and Dex get married, the movie ends, and I have to live with the memory of the disappointment in my husband’s eyes every time he looked at me while I watched this.

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