The Boonies

The Goonies meet without a paddle!! Can they not come up with anything ORIGINAL? Save yourself the trouble!!

I can't improve on the other reviews here. Basically, yes, dumb, full of cliches, but funny -- and who wasn't perpetually enchanted by both Andi Matichak and the insults constantly thrown her way (my favorite being "Hooters goes to Harvard").

But the obvious question when you see that this was a "TV Series", if you saw it, like me, as a movie, is WTF? How come I never heard of it and can find no record of it?

Well kids, it wasn't actually made as a TV series but as that strange thing with a brief moment of popularity, the "web series". It was made as 12 episodes, each 10 minutes long, for a "network" you've never of called go90.

go90 lived for 3 years from 2015 to 2018, owned by Verizon who apparently had the bizarre idea that people would choose their cellphone carrier based on the ability to watch a series of exclusive short episode video content on their phones. This bright idea cost VZW around $1B and produced pretty much nothing of note, not even many memories of its one-time existence. BUT in its brief life, it did contract for a few of these short episode series, the only one of which of any notability appears to be The Boonies. (The rest were mostly everyone's goto format when you have no money and no ideas -- reality TV nonsense. There is also _We Are CVNT5_ which is a mockumentary about EDM, contracted for go90 a year later in 2018.)

And that gets us to here. Remove the credits, join twelve short episodes together and, voila, instant movie :-)

This film is a parody on stories like the Goonies but years later when they're older. It's a comedy. Cody Ko is also hilarious.

Swinging, nauseating camera, annoying characters, cheap attempts at comedy, horrid direction. Turned off after 15 min

The Boonies is what happens when you throw a treasure hunt, a teen comedy, and a murder mystery into the same storyline and mix them up together thoroughly.

Pay close attention to the beginning. There are six main characters here and a few dozen minor ones. I ended up needing to rewind once or twice to make sure I caught everyone's names. While I did figure out who they all were eventually, the characters were introduced so quickly that I did have take notes about who was who until I got to know everyone. It would have been nice to have a little more time for an introduction in the beginning, although I did soon come to see why that info dump was necessary.

As fast as the pacing was in the beginning, it only sped up from there. This treasure hunt was serious business, and the characters didn't have much time to figure out all of the clues before time ran out. I liked the fact that they were working with such tight deadlines. It made the plot even more exciting than it already was, especially when I factored in the time needed to explore why the victim was dead and who might have killed him.

The twists and turns were a great deal of fun as well. All of the characters had grown up together and attended the same school for years, but that was the least important thing that tied them together. Figuring out the many other connections between them was a treat. I didn't see half of them coming in advance! This is one of the major reasons why I'm not referring to anyone by name in this review or talking about what their relationships were with the other students. Even simple details like those will give away too many clues about what happens later on, and this is definitely the sort of thing that should be watched without any hints in advance about what's going to happen.

There were mature themes in this film involving sex, relationships, and all of the funny ways bodies change when you're a teenager, so this is probably the best fit for a high school aged audience and older.