It's not very often when the marketing campaign has more social impact than the movie it is promoting, however that's case with "Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie for Theaters". 2007 began with a bang, when Ignignokt and Err, two sideline characters from the Cartoon Network Adult Swim animated show "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" were depicted in a light brite like format and placed on magnetic signs on buildings throughout cities in the US as part of a guerilla promotional effort to generate interest in the upcoming movie.

When the Boston police decided to respond to the appearance of the lor-res plastic signs as a possible terrorist threat, the underground advertisement shut down the city for a day and generated a media circus that had almost every news channel naming the show for almost a week. And although it cost the CEO of Cartoon Network his job, and its parent company, Turner Broadcasting a two million dollar settlement to the city of Boston it seems like a bargain when you consider the amount of worldwide media exposure the characters had.

The Mooninite Boston bomb scare was an unintentional social phenomenon that illustrates just how paranoid some communities in America have become. And now a few months later and the Aqua Teen feature length movie arrives in theaters and it doesn't quite strike the chord that the chaos its marketing campaign created.

The "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" is a surrealist comedy about a group of talking fast food products. Meatwad, Frylock, and Master Shake spend their days like much of their college aged target audience, hanging out and having weird times and being hassled by a creepy landlord and the occasional space aliens that drop by unannounced.

The biggest challenge for the film, will be to motivate the "ATHF" fans into getting up from their couch and spend almost ninety minutes away from their favorite recreational distraction. However, in the case of the Aqua Teen movie, it hardly seems worth the trouble to leave the house as the movie doesn't really offer much in the way big screen entertainment and can easily be enjoyed in its regular TV format.

While there are some highlights like the stylized intro credit sequence, and the voice over cameos from Bruce Campbell, Chris Kattan, Schooly-D and Neil Peart from Rush, there isn't much more to the movie that the late night TV show doesn't already offer. There's uncensored foul language and some scenes slightly more grossed out than what they get away with normally, but the movie plays like a really long episode of the show which reveals that maybe and hour and half is more time than any one Aqua Teen plot needs.

Staying home and watching eBay for a Mooninite LED sign to go on sale, for Movie Magazine this is Purple.

© 2007 - Purple - Air Date: 4/11/07