Drunk Movie Monday – Spice World

There’s nothing like a trip down nostalgia street to liven up a night of drunken shenanigans. This month’s drunk movie falls firmly into the ‘nostalgia’ category, but it also has the rare distinction of being a movie you can watch cold sober and still feel like you’re drunk, because there’s just no possible way this film is real. But it is. It’s real, it’s spectacular, and it withstands the test of time:

The premier film of my childhood: Spice World. If you haven’t seen or re-watched this film recently, do it right now seriously go. Even if you aren’t a Spice Girls fan. In fact, especially if you aren’t a Spice Girls fan, because there’s something in this film for just about everyone.

The film: Spice World (1997)

The premise: Real-world superstar 90s girl pop group the Spice Girls embark on a national tour, followed by a film crew. Meanwhile, an evil tabloid manager has hired an evil paparazzo to try to discover (or manufacture) the girls’ dirty secrets, to ruin their careers. That’s ostensibly the plot of this film, but I say “plot” in only the loosest sense of the word, because the ongoing “story” gets completely lost about 90% of the time. Instead, the girls just kind of sprint from wacky scenario to wacky scenario, playing up exaggerated versions of their pop personalities and relationships (which have no bearing on reality), and shouting a lot.

Why you should watch it: The wacky scenarios. Good lord, the wacky scenarios. This movie has literally no regard for plot consistency, but it is obsessed with spoofing film genres. Literally every other scene is out of a completely different universe. At one point, the girls are action film stars, each with their own secret agent powers. In another, they wind up in a haunted mansion. Their collective best friend who is super pregnant goes clubbing with them. They prance through an army training montage. They go on a speedboat adventure, dragging along some random kids. They venture into the woods to pee and wind up encountering…no, actually, I don’t think I want to spoil that one. Every single scene is like this, with almost no connection to the scenes before and after it. They might as well have ended each segment with, “and now for something completely different….”

Another element that sets this film apart is the dialogue. Each of the girls has her own over-the-top personality to contend with, but as a whole their personality is characterized by bad puns and a deeply meta sense of humor about themselves. It’s like a bunch of writers just got together drunk in a windowless room and brainstormed stupid one-liner gag jokes for two and a half hours, and then they made a movie out of it. And that’s before you take into account the deliberate nonsense that comes out of the “studio manager’s” mouth.

And did I mention the 90s music? I mean, come on, guys. This is the Spice Girls.

Also Meat Loaf is in it, and yes, he says the thing.

The drinking game: Drink whenever you feel compelled to say, “that’s so 90s.”
Bonus: Finish your glass, dance, and sing every time they get to a musical number.

Where it’s available: Tragically, Spice World is not available anywhere that I could find streaming online. It was, however, re-released on DVD, and you can buy it from Amazon. Or, you know, rent it from the video store. Those are still a thing.

Spicily yours,
M.M. Jordahl

“When the rabbit of chaos is pursued by the ferret of disorder through the fields of anarchy, it is time to hang your pants on the hook of darkness, whether they’re clean or not.” -the Chief

P.S. If you don’t want to wait until you can find a rental (or download–shhh) of the film, I would also highly recommending watching the Spice Girls’ various music videos, all of which are available in their entirety on youtube. They are…interesting. Viva Forever is my personal favorite.