This is one of the most unusual movies I've ever encountered. Atrocious in every aspect, but unusual. For clarity, we must travel back to the halcyon days of the late 1990s. DVD was making its first strides to make VHS obsolete, with DVD players becoming affordable, and the imminent arrival of the PS2 with inbuilt DVD player meant the ability to watch movies on disc was becoming more common in households across the world. In the U. K. a new release cost £20 (insane given that DVDs were much cheaper to make than VHS tapes) so it wasn't long before companies cropped up to try take advantage of this growing market.
The 2 most prominent here were Prism Leisure and Hollywood DVD. Prism discs came in at £5.99 and were unashamed B movies. A lot of Full Moon stuff and mid-range 80s horror or action flicks found their way onto these discs. Then there was Hollywood DVD. At an absolute maximum these cost £4.99, but we're usually in special offers to get cheaper, things like 3 for £10. The problem with Hollywood DVD was you genuinely had no idea what you were getting; if you were lucky it was a Nu Image creature, but there was more chance of you getting a TV Pilot that wasn't picked up. They were notorious for picking up awful movies that had stars before they were famous and editing the sleeve to give them too billing, regardless of their part.
It was one of those aforementioned deals I found myself in possession of With Friends Like These... via alongside Ken Wahl's failed vigilante tv pilot The Gladiator and The Legend of Bogg Creek II. You know the worst thing? I was looking forward to it! It's sleeve had a bit of mystique about it - no pictures, and a 3 line, vague blurb that told me nothing. All I had to go on was a monstrous figure reaching out on the cover and an 18 rating. What was this that they couldn't even show pictures from?
They were probably embarrassed. It's an anthology, and quite impressive in that it has 3 opportunities to present stories and managed to make an utterly awful job out of all of them. There's a bookend 'plot' revolving around a bus and a narrator who chronically over uses the word 'Relationships'. The purpose appears to be our protagonists are all on that bus at some point but don't expect any explanation beyond that.
Our first focus falls on a hapless man who buys a classic car that telepathically communicates with him and starts to
dominate his life. Christine it ain't.
The second and probably the most interesting, though that's a low bar, sees a slobbish man discover the tuna casserole in his fridge evolve into a sentient being that tries to help him improve his life.
The third, and mercifully final, tale involves a girl who meets the perfect man on a dating service only for him him to prove more than meets the eye.
Yeah I'm not beating around the bush, this is awful from start to finish. Awful dialogue, bland plots that offer no excitement, acting that I'm being generous even describing as such (very few people involved in this movie appeared in another) this is a complete full house of awful. I genuinely believe someone at Hollywood slipped the BBFC some money to ensure this got an 18 to give it some street cred as there is nothing to earn it.
This film has no redeeming features. It's not so bad it's funny, it's just unrelentingly, mercilessly, awful. Thankfully it's now very hard to come by, and frankly it wouldn't be any great disaster if every copy of it were to be destroyed.