The Nollywood Double Feature That Finally Broke Me
Nigerian cinema is a lot like Bollywood, if Bollywood opted to drop the music and devote the time saved on choreography to drinking instead. Heavy, irresponsible drinking. I tried a column like this with Japanese schoolgirl movies a while ago, so how bad could it be to do the same thing with exciting Nollywood films? Ha ha, you know the answer to that already. Let's go!
The Sex King
I clearly chose this movie thanks to its totally awesome name. The Sex King? How could this steer me anywhere other than straight toward a kingdom of entertaining boners? I was ready to be amused and aroused.
The story begins with schoolgirls who need to pay tuition. They seem to be a little overripe for schoolgirls, but who am I to judge? Lifelong learning is everyone's right. I enjoy their red hats. I do not enjoy that the school principal seems to be officed in an apartment building and has nothing on his desk but a few file folders.
Next, we're whisked away to some bastard hitting on his dead brother's wife. Because, as she needs to learn, she's mourned long enough and she now belongs to this guy, since he's the oldest living male relative. Is that law or custom in Nigeria?
"Yes, surely you know this already."
Either way, it sounds awful, and he seems to have stolen his wardrobe from Three's Company. Also, this lady is the mother of the two schoolgirls who need to pay their tuition. I see a plot forming in the distance!
The next scene features a sweet-booty schoolgirl (keep in mind that she's probably 30) being heavily groped by a man with puffy shoulders. She's stripped of her top and not one but two bras ...
All I could do was shrug at this point.
... and then the dude starts porking her right there in the hall outside the principal's office. What? This must be the Sex King I've heard so much about! Oh, it's the principal. Carry on.
At 10:26 into the movie I get full-on side boob and realize that no one censors these films. I think I just became a man. The music changes about three times during the 20-second sexual interlude here, and none of them work together. It's distracting and hard to masturbate through.
The principal is suddenly speaking to the mom in an office which is not the office he had before. Jarringly, the scene immediately changes to him in yet another office trying to molest one of the daughters, who ... sort of fights him off? And then the other daughter is less fighty, more unsure about it. He'll forgive their debts for sex! The cad!
Uncle Shithead is back to tell mom that he locked up her shop because it's now his and also he's stealing her house. Then he calls her daughters crickets. Low blow, motherfucker! Mom fights back with the most wicked comeback in Nigerian zinger history: "It's your daughters that are crickets, not my daughters."
Do you need some aloe for that third-degree burn?
Anyway, time for another 20-second sex scene that's so hot it's ... over. Moving on. It's around this point that you'll start to really take notice of the curious 30-second filler scenes. Sometimes it's characters we know, sometimes not. Sometimes it's a really weird oral sex scene with no dialogue.
A new student named Jennifer shows up, but there's no time to talk to her, because Mom gets kicked out of her house by Uncle Asshole. He throws out all of her stuff, including two gym bags and a rug. One of her daughters comes home and mom collapses in a heap. Is she dead? I don't know, because now it's a sex scene. A 10-second blowie for the principal, only five seconds with sound.
We learn that mom isn't dead, she's just sick. And maybe the daughter got pregnant, because now the principal is paying her off? And now she's joining a gang.
Which is just two guys smoking by a window.
All of this happens in under one minute. I'll never finish if this much action keeps happening.
After three minutes, the girl is a pot-smoking back-alley alcoholic. Things happen fast in Nollywood. Speaking of, holy shit she just got hit by a motorcycle ...
Stop laughing!
... and now like eight people are standing in a semicircle yelling too far from the boom mic for me to make out clearly what anyone is saying. This is getting really hard to watch.
Things move along rapidly from here, as both mom and daughter are laid up in the same room. Daughter confesses her numerous sins, from sleeping with the principal to getting pregnant to getting an abortion to trying that sweet Mary Jane. Then she promptly dies, at which point mom looks, has a freakout, and also dies. Two family deaths within three feet of each other in 30 seconds! That's a trauma for the remaining daughter/sister.
The sister now has to deal with these events and try to figure out the lyrics to that Color Me Badd song playing in the background. I'm no expert, but I'll offer up a suggestion:
Girl, I know your mom just died
and your sister did too.
But girl, something that's not dead
is my love. For you.
Gonna make sweet love to ya girl
at yo momma's funeral.
Gonna make sweet love, baby
make you take it all.
At the funeral.
The one for your mom.
Fuckin' number-one hit!
The three girls who complain about everything in this movie complain that the sister no longer talks to them. One continuously yells a word I can't make out no matter how often she says it, but no time to worry about that, because the principal is now having sex again for 20 seconds.
Every argument in this movie follows this format:
A: I am telling you to stop this thing!
B: No!
A: You must stop this thing!
B: No!
A: Yes!
B: No!
Then the first person walks away. It's stunning. It's always yelled as well, however needless that may be. The next 15 minutes are filler because the crew still had use of the camera, as near as I can figure. The three girls get in trouble for being bitches, we find out men attend this school, and then someone films the principal having sex.
And is a total creep about it.
You may be wondering how this film ends, and have I got a story for you. It's not about the end of the film; it's about my total inability to view the end of the film. And I tried, man. Like, six times I tried, to get to the end of this movie, and literally every time I fell asleep. It's like a wizard cursed the final 15 minutes to forbid me from being consciously able to take them in. As soon as I get to a certain point, next thing I know, I'm 20 minutes into a different movie on a YouTube playlist.
At first, I thought my inability to watch the movie was a combination of my own tiredness (since I never really sleep) and the utter boringness of the film mixing together like milk and Nesquik to make a tasty, sleepy beverage. But after five times, it became clear that black magic was involved. And I refuse to dabble in that, so who the fuck cares how the movie ends. On to the next one.
Haunted Girls Hostel #2
I decide to go horror for this next one, because I've seen a lot of really bad horror in my life and it's in my wheelhouse. This should be more tolerable.
The first thing I noticed is that, despite YouTube claiming that this is Haunted Girls Hostel #2, the movie itself insists that it's called Ghost In The Hostel. I feel like that's tuning in to Casablanca and getting Blankman instead.
The first scene in this movie is two chicks making out. Oh man, I know what kind of hostel this is! Except a third woman crashes the party, and she looks almost exactly like Emmanuel Lewis. Cut to some other chick, whom I think just thanked God for killing Hitler. What? No time to ask, as she waves hello to the Lord and then we move on to schoolgirls again!
A friendly wave to end your prayers is just good etiquette.
This time, a senior girl is demanding that a younger girl go around the school and find crowds of people, sit near them, and gather info. Info on what? I dunno, God's plot against Hitler? This movie is already very hard to follow.
Soon, we learn that someone may be up to something. Who and what, I have no idea. Seems like this movie also features a school principal banging students, so maybe it's him. Maybe he has a ghost dick. The evidence bears this out, as someone seems to be dying of the milk vomit at around 22:00. Is it milk or is it spooge?!? GHOST SPOOGE!
Seriously, though, please be milk.
This death scene would have more weight if I had any idea who this person was. Was there a girl with glasses before? I can't recall. And is "hostel" a Nigerian slang term for school? Because this damn movie is about schoolgirls again. But there's also some militant Groundskeeper Willie character, and for the life of me, I can't make out a word he says. He has the same accent as every other actor in the film, but he seems to be yelling all his dialogue around a mouthful of marbles.
The director has the balls to film a scene in the rain when they seem to be using a microphone salvaged from a Talkboy. No dialogue can be heard, and my mood becomes more grim.
Oh shit, son, it's a ghost! I think. A schoolgirl teleports into the scene at around 33 minutes and beats the shit out of another schoolgirl with a switch of wood. The beatee runs away. The beater looks around as if to say, "Jesus, is this movie the fuckin' afterlife?" and winks out.
Was that CGI or nah?
I'm starting to have doubts about that nature of the word "horror" in Nigeria. I think that maybe the angriest female character murdered some people and their spirits are haunting her. It's hard to tell, because there are no special effects, so in retrospect, some of these characters are probably just ghosts and I missed that fact. They look and act like everyone else. Nonetheless, angry girl has a magic ring that's supposed to tie and bind the angry spirits of her victims. Amusingly, she had this ring earlier in the movie, but only has it explained about an hour later, when she also receives it. Does that make sense? Why should it? Why should anything in this make sense?
Whole lines of dialogue will be repeated within the same scene, as though the movie itself were trying to fuck with me and make me doubt what I was seeing. Are you sure this character just asked that question? Because if he did, why is he asking it again and getting the exact same answer again? It's very hard to watch and retain any kind of rational plot. I'm starting to understand why the ending of the first movie wouldn't stick in my brain.
I do know that a male character is tired of going to school because all the teachers are being murdered. That is tiring. Also, I can't say how many of those murders made it on screen, but I honestly don't remember it happening in the movie. He consults his sister, whose advice is to maybe switch schools. In the background, another character literally holds his hands like scales, as though weighing the options. This film is fascinating. It may also be the last thing you see before you die.
Suddenly, about six minutes before the movie ends, the devil appears.
Right?
Or maybe he's just a guy in red. But he shoots a laser beam at the angry girl's head because she disobeyed him. Did that happen in this film? I can't remember. I'm going to be honest, I left to make a sandwich a while ago and may have missed a few things.
It totally happened!
Anyway, the devil vanishes and the angry girl proceeds to mock him because his laser did nothing. Has she grown more powerful than the devil? I have no idea.
Angry girl, triumphing over the devil, excitedly tells the spot where he was sitting that she will kill him and he is afraid of her. She repeats variations of this for two minutes as she runs back and forth, removing her shoes, hat, and other items before finally running away. Ominous music plays for a solid three minutes, and all she does is run down a street, put a box on her head, cross the road, and head back the other way. Roll credits.
What the fuck just happened?
I'm never watching another one of these films again. I'm going to mix a drink now, and sit in the yard, for I am exasperated and disappointed. Leave me.
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