Sometimes I fall asleep with the TV in the bedroom on and wake up to a really bad movie. So bad that I can’t tear my eyes away from it. Or weird. Weird enough that I’ve come here to ask if perhaps I hallucinated it. Two that really stand out in my mind are Strangeland, a movie starring, produced and written by Dee Snider and Arena, it doesn’t star Samuel L. Jackson but he’s in it.
You think you can imagine how bad a movie starring, produced and written by Dee Snider from Twisted Sister could be. Or how weird. Or how gory. But you cannot imagine how bad AND weird AND gory it all is. Body modification is involved. Don’t watch Strangeland. Especially don’t watch it to the very end like I did.
I give a whole lotta leeway to action movies but this isn’t really an action movie. I don’t think there was even one explosion. There are confusing flashbacks and many fight scenes as our hero is kidnapped and forced to fight in an arena pay-per-view style, I think. Because of Sam L. I think. Not to give away the ending but I think the hero is actually a cop. I think. My husband informs me that the star, Kellan Lutz, has gone on to do legitimate bad action movies. I dare anyone to watch this movie and come up with a more coherent synopsis.
We all have done this, right? Sat watching a movie dumbfounded? Please tell me I’m not alone.
Billy the Kid vs. Dracula, an unintentional comedy classic with Virginia “Mrs Olsen” Christine and John “The Preacher” Carradine. I was channel surfing one Saturday afternoon and flipped past it. My older brother took one look and said “You turned this off?!? What are you, out of your mind?!?”
We watched it to the end. An hour of our lives well wasted!
I watched valerian and the city of a thousand planets with my two teenage kids and we were caught between switching it off on account of terrible dialog with a preposterous meandering story, and laughing through the unfolding train wreck.
We watched it all and now we know not to watch it ever again
Jupiter rising fell into the same category although Eddie Redmayne scenery chewing was pretty comically decent.
I LOVED the opening montage, but was underwhelmed by much of the rest. I feel like it was really hurt by bad casting. The female lead was passable(but only just), but Keanu-lite had no charisma. Luc Besson gave Herbie Hancock a small role, but not small enough. He was dreadful. I didn’t like the casting for the main bad guy either, Clive Owen. He wasn’t BAD per se but I think he played it too straight. It’s like they took a bad guy from a serious movie and put him in this mess. Another Zorg would have been welcome here. Fixing the casting and making a more ridiculous bad-guy might have taken this more into cult-movie territory.
I LOVED the weird world-building, like in Besson’s more-loved The Fifth Element. I’ve watched both movies several times and will watch them again.
Anyone else catch the Fifth Element Easter egg in Valerian? The guy who tried to rob Bruce Willis outside his apartment (“Nice hat.” "You like it? <>) was one of the soldiers on the bus, and at one point, Laureline says to him, “Nice hat.”
I had an operation recently, so I’ve been watching too much Amazon Prime & Netflix while I recover. Jesus, there is some bad shit on there, and not in the entertaining way either. I just watched My Dinner With Jimi on Amazon Prime, which followed the rise of the musical group, “The Turtles” and their trip to England, featuring a 20 minute dinner scene with Jimi Hendrix and Howard Kaylan . I can’t for the life of me figure out why this movie was made, except perhaps as a Uwe-Boll-esque tax writeoff. It meandered and had no purpose.
I used to put Jupiter Rising on for background noise when I was living alone in a little apartment. Repeated viewing allowed me to actually understand the premise, which is even stupider than it seems when you just watch it casually.
I shall explain: at first it seems like Jupiter (Mila Kunis) is either an heir to a galactic royal family, or even a reincarnation, which is far fetched, but whatever. But no, she is actually a “recurrence”, meaning that she is genetically identical to a dead royal family member. No relation, just happens to have the exact same genes. So apparently, intergalactic law states that if you have the same genes as a dead noble, you are legally entitled to all their stuff. I shit you not.
There’s a 2017 film called “Check Point” which I saw while browsing through Amazon Prime. The description interested me, made it seem like a Red Dawn style movie (something about a small town having to band together to fight off the first wave of an invasion of foreign troops) but the actual movie itself is so much goofier.
Basically there’s an American ISIS (literally, a group of American soldiers in Iraq go AWOL and form their own terrorist group attacking American soldiers all over the world) and their first domestic target is a small town in North Carolina (the reason why they chose the town becomes obvious later) So they secretly infiltrate this town and the main characters (a bunch of former wrestlers, old action stars, and TV actors) wind up having to defend their town against them as American ISIS plans on stealing the nearby museum ship USS North Carolina (filmed on the actual battleship) and using it to shell Washington DC (though this is all a distraction so they can send a small commando team using some Civil War era tunnels to get underneath the White House). Also there’s a weird thing where American ISIS also wants to start a second American Civil War and have the South rise again but they also explicitly say that (since it’s 2017) they consider Trump a yankee and have no problems with assassinating him in the movie. So the entire movie is a bizarre mixture of action movie cliches along with the most unnecessarily complicated plot for an action movie I’ve seen in a while but the action is so goofy you have to watch it. If you ever watched to see Bill Goldberg and Kane Hodder have a wrestling match on the deck of the USS North Carolina and then have the Neo-Confederates who try to rise up against the Government have a shocking amount of racial diversity in their ranks, this is your movie.
In college, one of the local independent stations would run “Movies 'Til Dawn” and would cycle through some truly bizarre flicks. Our favorite, which came up in the rotation at least once a quarter, was “Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires”, a Hammer Dracula-Kung Fu movie from the early 70s.
Peter Cushing plays Van Helsing. Instead of warding off vampires with a crucifix, you keep them away with little Buddha statues. Bats on clearly visible wires fly behind stagmites and a martial artist pops out the other side and begins fighting the good guys. Dracula addresses his minion in English, while the minion replies in subtitled Chinese, and the two never appear face-to-face in the same shot, obviously filmed separately with body doubles shot from behind.
Really bad, and really addictive. When it was on, you dropped everything, rounded up anyone who was still awake, and watched until the end, willingly sitting through a zillion phone sex and used car commercials.
There are plenty of Bad Films that I love – I was holding Bad Movie parties before MST3K ever hit the air, and there are several I could recommend, but some aren’t really “so bad you have to keep watching” – their makers actually had enough skill to turn out a movie that’s entertainingly bad. And some are intentionally bad, or compilations of the best parts of bad movies.
In the “so bad you had to keep watching” group, I recommend one that I saw under the title Tales from the Past, but apparently has had several titles. the IMDb lists it as Gallery of Horror. It actually has John Carradine in it and Lon Chaney, Jr. It’s an anthology movie, like the infinitely superior Dead of Night or Tales of Terror, but is very badly made – poorly written, badly acted, abysmally shot and printed in poor film quality, and with “twists” you can see coming from a mile away. The best portions of the film are literally stolen from Roger Corman movies – I mean that they spliced in scenes from The Raven and The Terror and recorded new dialogue over them.
But you keep watching in the hopes that it’ll get better. Only it never does.
I was flipping channels once and I stumbled across the Canadian movie “Prom Wars”. I stopped because I recognised Alia Shawkat (Maebe from “Arrested Development”) but I kept watching because I kept thinking “What the hell is this?” It was just plain weird.
Thankfully, I watched it through the filter of MST3K, so it wasn’t a total loss. The “sex scene” was so PG, it reminded me of the Dwayne Johnson Family Guy re-enactment. [may be NSFW]. The plot was so bad, acting even worse, and the stage/sets so terrible, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of making the movie was so a studio could actively take a loss for the tax writeoff.
The redeeming factor for me were the riffs on the main character’s name/image. “Biff McRockHuge,” “Joe McBicep,” or “Thick McLunkhead.”
Good point about the casting, that might have made a lot of difference. I know the original comic books that the film is based on well; there the male lead is actually a bit of a sop which might explain (but not excuse) the bland casting. Laureline, though should have more spunk: Louse Bourgoin, the actress of Les aventures extraordinaires d’Adèle Blanc-Sec would have been perfect.
But the dialogue should indeed have been better to save the movie. Compared to The Fifth Element this seems like wasted opportunity. Still, I did find it enjoyable. Didn’t notice The reference to the Fifth Element, though, nice catch.
I went to see Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets in the theater opening weekend because I love The Fifth Element so much, and was so disappointed.
After that opening montage. . .the opening was pretty awesome, and then. . . disappointment. I think it made the rest of the movie look even worse by comparison.
