Golden Film's Beauty and the Beast (1999)

Well, we have the Good Times Entertainment version out of the way, so let's dive right into the Golden Films' take on Beauty and the Beast.

Plot: The story is mostly the same as with the last film, except Beauty has three greedy sisters and no brothers, her father leaves because of a storm that hit both his ships and her home, Beauty has had dreams about the human form of The Beast before she ever meets him, and three ghosts have taken part of the story by going inside the book of Beauty and The Beast, which is read by The Beast.   ...Yeah.

So if you guys have read my review for the Good Times film, I talked about how they could've just thrown whatever they wanted from beginning to end without any real thought put into it, as opposed to the somewhat considerable effort that was put into that movie. The Golden Films version of Beauty and the Beast however, did just that. It's so bad that when my siblings and I were watching this, my brother Tommy would keep ridiculing me for pointing out a major problem with the movie, since I was clearly putting much more thought than the filmmakers. The Good Times film was laughable at best despite some little form of effort, but here, the only good things about this film that I can think of is that the animation is much better, and with that, Beauty at least looks pretty. I can barely keep track of what's wrong with this movie, partly because there's too many bad things, but mostly because the music drowned out the story and characters. I don't think I've ever imagined that to be possible, but this movie proved it. There's so much music needlessly played in this film that it became nothing but noise. A good sum of that comes from how they keep reusing musical tracks over and over again. Usually tracks of music from The Nutcracker Prince or Swan Lake. Anything else is their own music that are either set up poorly, or just come out of nowhere. For example, there's a scene where Beauty's sisters sing about how they want more of whatever they had back when they were wealthy. Now the scene starts with Beauty asking a question...and then as soon as one sisters talks, the song pops up, and at the end, Beauty is kicked out of the house. So she says something, the sisters sing, and then she's kicked out of the house. Just like that. There's another song that just starts just out of nowhere with no build up whatsoever. It's just Beauty singing with this imaginary man that turns out to be the human form of The Beast with footage of the ocean in the moonlight, fish swimming, and a Unicorn that is all of the sudden a Pegasus in the next scene. Don't ask me how the last part happened, it's just one of those things where Tommy would ridicule you for putting more thought into it than the filmmakers. Anyway, the real problem with this particular song is that it's really unclear what they are even singing about. I guess it's some sort of love song, but it really doesn't express it as such aside from just the tone of the music. In fact it drags so much because of it, that, that it felt longer than it really is to my siblings and me. Like, you know when you're having a brief conversation about something annoying, and by the time you're done, you take a moment before you realize that it's still going? Yeah, that pretty much happened to us with this song. My brothers and I were talking about everything that was wrong with the song as it went on, and then a few moments after we talked, I think it was my brother Johnathan who said, "Is this still going?" I later found out that it's actually about 4 minutes long, but it dragged on so much that we couldn't tell. And then you have the song of the three ghosts. Oh my gosh, is this song annoying. I could go on as to why I hate this song, but let's just say I've been pinching between my eyes as I type about it. And then we get to the final problem with the movie; the characters. First we have the characters that get the most attention out of all of the other characters, including Beauty and The Beast; the ghosts. They are so unbearably annoying. All they do is talk about the story and how Beauty is definitely the one to fall in love with The Beast or how much of a grump The Beast is, and of coarse, sing. It just is so irritating to watch these guys. The Beast and Beauty don't even have anything to go on as a relationship. I mentioned in my review to the Good Times film about how The Beast in that version at least showed that he had both a monstrous side and a caring side to him. So in that movie, we at least see that there's more to him than just a mean old monster. Here, we don't really see squat of there being any good in him at all. The most of what we see is him throwing a tantrum every time Beauty tries to reach out to him. She will say one little nice thing to say about him, and then he just yells at her, going on and on how there is nothing nice about him and that he's a monster. We at least see both Beauty and The Beast try to form a relationship between them in the last film, but here, we have little to nothing to go off of. Heck, in the end when she says she loves him (yeah I don't think I'm giving anything away there), not only is it a surprise to all the people who are trying to kill him, but even he is surprised to hear her say that. Yeah. It's that kind of poorly made relationship. I'll also briefly add that The Beast isn't even all that beastly looking. If anything, he looks more like a giant ape.

And that's my review for Golden Film's Beauty and the Beast. It's filled with countless plot holes, much less character development then the first film, and so much music that it drowns out the characters and story. While the Good Times film is bad, it was a so bad that it's good kind of bad. This is just annoying. If you want to see any of this, just watch Phelous' review. Otherwise, this is a major skip.

Rating: 5%