I actually own the DVD for I Was A Zombie For The FBI.
I lived in the Memphis area when this was being filmed. I was a freshman or sophomore in high school and my best bud had a '57 Chevy that he and his dad were restoring. There was some sort of “car casting call” and my friend’s Chevy made the film! Not more than a street background scene or something, but he got to hang around the filmmakers all day for whatever day it was they used his car. Alas, I did not get to partake in the festivities. Missed my chance.
It’s been covered by MST3K, and I got to well, enjoy isn’t quite the right word. Who knew that the Navy could so easily get away with developing and deploying such giant robots without anyone really having much to say? Who knew you could so easily crawl out of one that had crash landed into a planet? Who knew that the Army was so trigger-happy about nuking New York? Who knew that a frightened child could be so easily found? Who knew that the nominal white-guy main hero could be such a jerk and still be the main hero? I was aghast, as anyone would be.
Battleship, Pacific Rim, Cowboys & Aliens, Battle: Los Angeles, John Carter, Valerian, Jupiter Ascending aren’t “terrible” movies. They just aren’t particularly good, given how expensive they were to make. They’re just sort of dumb, CGI-fest, sci fi films that sort of want to be the Next Star Wars. Although considering how the actual “Next Star Wars” played out, maybe they are closer than they thought.
I’ll admit that if I stumble across the Costner dystopian duo - The Postman or Waterworld - on some random afternoon, I usually let it play out.
I’ll agree on most of those, but I disagree with John Carter. It was a good movie, and well-made. It wasn’t just a “dress up our flimsy screenplay with lots of CGI and no one will notice how bad it is”. Unfortunately, it got screwed over by the incoming Disney team who didn’t “own” it and didn’t want it, and so didn’t promote it even as well as Disney usually promoted its less features.*
*Did you see any John Carter action figures or activity books or McDonald’s Happy meals or any of the usual movie tie-ins? No.
When we were first dating, my wife and I went to see a film called “Sex and Zen,” thinking it was going to be some sort of artsy erotica. Instead, it was more like Hong Kong’s answer to “Porky’s,” but with a less coherent plot.
The main character has trouble getting women because of his small manhood, so he decides to get a transplant - from a horse. He then goes on to have a series of ridiculous, contortionistic, physics-defying sexual adventures with a number of beautiful women, and… well, that’s about it as I recall.
One IMDb reviewer said, “This film does for sex scenes what ‘The Blues Brothers’ did for car crashes.” An astute description.
We sat and watched the whole thing, but instead of being turned on, we bonded over mocking how stupid it all was.
The video game Command And Conquer Red Alert 2 features a cut-scene of the Soviets nuking Chicago halfway through the campaign as their invasion of the USA falters and they start doing scorched earth as they retreat.
Many of the flicks mentioned here aren’t all that well know.
Bill & Teds Excellent Adventure was on the other night. Like watching a train wreck you can’t look away from.
Every historical character was acted horribly. On top of every other part, that is. The story is stupid and B&T need the shit slapped out of them.
If someone had never seen George Carlin stand-up but saw him act in movies, they’d never want to ever see his routine. Every tv and movie role he did was lame, boring, and unfunny.
And, yet, I just had to watch. I’ll kick my own ass later, thank you.
^Tried to edit that bit but forgot there’s a 5 minute window and accidentally deleted instead …
Take Two:
Flightplan starring Jodie Foster.
Jodie Foster plays an aircraft engineer working in Berlin whose husband fell to his death from the top of a building. She is taking his their six year old daughter and his body back to America on board a plane she had worked on. Early in the flight she takes her daughter to an empty aisle at the back to catch some sleep and when she wakes up her daughter is missing and when she asks around nobody says they ever saw her daughter on board. Not a single passenger on a packed plane. Not a single crew member.
And that’s just a synopsis of the beginning. It gets weirder and full of plotholes once the other characters get more involved.
I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this movie precisely because it’s so all-consumingly STUPID!!!
I remember seeing it right after it came out, just because I got to the cineplex too late to catch the movie I’d wanted to see. I hadn’t laughed so much since I’d seen the first Naked Gun movie.
The scene where Ted philosophises with Socrates had me in stitches, as did the Pronto Pup at the shopping mall.
I had never realized before just how happy dumb people are, simply because they’re too stupid to give a fuck. Kinda makes me feel left out.
I liked Excellent Adventure but I absolutely loved Bogus Journey. Which I understand puts me at odds with the rest of Bill and Ted fans. Most seem to prefer the original.
I just loved Death and the Evil Robots and the possessed Dad scene. I could’ve done without Station, but the rest of the movie was perfection.
The villain isn’t great in Bogus Journey. It had a few more flaws, but it also has higher production values and it’s immensely original, remarkably so for a sequel.
I’m with you. The first one is watchable only for the chemistry and interactions between Bill & Ted (and Jane Wiedlin was pretty cute). The story is stupid and most of the non-Bill/Ted jokes are pretty cringy, like a middle-aged screenwriter’s idea of what a middle-schooler would think is cool and funny (Napolean on a water slide? Abe Lincoln proclaiming “Party on, dudes!”?). I do give it props for doing a better job than most time travel movies of thinking through the ramifications of time travel and how having a time machine would work as a deus ex machina.
But I found Bogus Journey to be genuinely funny and clever.
