I’ve been intensely sick this week – struck down with some kind of horrible debilitating illness that left me couch bound for almost a week. After a few days of feeding my Bene-addition (severe addiction to Benedict Cumberbatch) with Parade’s End and Star Trek Into Darkness, I thought I’d take a break with something a little lighter. The answer, my friends, was Spice World. It’s such a brilliant, mindless and completely idiotic work of art it begged for a blog post all of it’s very own so on that note, I give you 11 things you totally forgot about the Spice World movie.
[divider type=”standard” width=”1/1″ el_position=”first last”]
1. Victoria Beckham can’t sing or dance
I love Posh, I do but she’s a pretty terrible performer. There’s a reason why she rarely sings solo and why they pan the camera past her really quickly and settle on Mel B who can shake her money-maker like nobody’s business. She just kind of twitches in the background like a sexy praying mantis. It’s possibly the best thing about the movie.
2. The ‘inside’ of the bus would not actually fit inside the bus
I don’t know whether or not that was supposed to be a joke or if they actually didn’t care but it’s mathematically impossible for the inside of the bus scenes to actually be the inside of the bus they showed.
3. It doesn’t matter though because the inside of the bus was fucking awesome
Remember how each girl had her own area? Baby Spice had the swing with all the stuffed toys and Scary had the animal print bean bag and Sporty had her own gym? And Posh had the mirror where she could choose ‘The little Gucci dress, the little Gucci dress OR the little Gucci Dress?’. OMFG I love this movie.
4. All the amazing cameos
Alan Cumming, Elton John, Robbie Williams, Stephen Fry, Bob Geldoff, Jennifer Saunders and Meatloaf to name a few. I’m pretty sure I recognised none of them the first time I saw it which made it even more delightful the second time around.
5. This line from Posh Spice that makes absolutely no sense (not helped by the fact that she exaggerates every second or third word for no apparent reason)
‘And THEN there’s the little GINGER one that’s FULL of USELESS infor-MATION about MANTA rays!’
I’ve been using this has a non-sensical haughty reply every time Mr Smaggle asks me to do something I don’t want to do.
Mr Smaggle – ‘Can you put a new garbage bag in the bin?’
Me – ‘And THEN there’s the little GINGER one that’s FULL of USELESS infor-MATION about MANTA rays!’
Mr Smaggle – ‘Why do you keep saying that? You’re not making sense.’
Win.
6. That bit when Scary Spice calls their manager a ‘div’
I looked it up and apparently it’s short for ‘unemployment dividend’ so it refers to people on welfare. Kind of like the English version of the Aussie ‘pov’ shortened from ‘poverty’. Ah the 90s. Back when it was acceptable to shorten welfare terminology to slang that means ‘a bit shit’.
7. Platform sneakers
I for one was delighted when these made a resurgence in the last few years but I have to admit I was a bit devastated that I couldn’t get any that were as badass as the originals.
8. That weird bit with the aliens
I was about 14 years old when the Spice World movie was released and I can’t remember thinking that the alien bit was at all out-of-place but re-watching it again as a grown up, it literally comes out of no where. There’s no explanation for it. The girls all just pile off the bus for a mass public side-of-the-road-wee and these aliens show up. It’s ridiculous and supremely excellent. Especially when Geri kisses one.
9. The haunted mansion
Again with the weird story lines. I’m not sure if I missed some in-joke about the shaky-ness of the plot (there is a plot-within-a-plot though where there’s a dude pitching bogus ideas for a Spice Movie but the link is pretty weak) but they all of a sudden end up at a weird haunted mansion place. I feel like the writers all got drunk, wrote down their ideas on a bunch of cocktail napkins, threw them up in the air and shot the film in the order that they fell without making any cuts or changes. It is a perfect example of cinematic fuckery and I love every second of it.
10. Posh Spice wearing that super classy camo dress in the boot camp scene
When I was 14, I don’t think I’d ever seen anything that glamorous in my entire life. If you’ve invited me to a wedding this year I’ve got my outfit SORTED. Boom.
11. The flashback to Wannabe in the cafe
That lovely scene where the girls are all sitting around and scraping together their pennies for a cup of coffee at the local cafe and performing the song ‘they just wrote’ which was Wannabe. Ah memories. That scene would have been a whole lot more meaningful if we didn’t all know that they were the commercially formed and highly profitable brain child of Herbert band management in the UK who assigned them each their Spice personas which actually had very little to do with their true personalities. Cute story though.
[divider type=”standard” width=”1/1″ el_position=”first last”]