The Day After Tomorrow drives me apeshit. The father nobly treks through the cold and snow to find his dear son stuck in New York… TO DO WHAT?!
“Yay! Dad, thank god you’re here! Get the rescue choppers and we’ll load everyone in at get out! … Oh, well, then get the bus! … No bus either? Huh. Well, surely you brought food and blankets and water for us, right? … None of that either, huh? Well we didn’t really plan to entertain tonight, and we didn’t really prepare enough lamb for guests, but maybe one of these extras will die of the cold and you can eat him.”
While Pitch Black was ‘enjoyable’, the Chronicles of Riddick has to be right up there with stupid premises… I mean, using Religion as a means to enslave a society, what kind of stupidity is that?
Master of Disguise still wins the ‘worst/stupidest movie ever’ award in my book.
The Idaho Transfer. Low budget 70’s film by Peter Fonda about a bunch of scientists who build a secret time-travel program to avoid an upcoming holocaust of some sort. The only people who can survive the trip are teenagers. That’s not the stupid part, though, only the tip of the stupid iceberg. The stupid part is the reason behind the holocaust, which you only find out during the big reveal at the end:
The 70’s energy crisis was only the beginning. Since humanity ran out of fossil fuels, they decided to start using humans instead as a fuel source. Do they do it in a cool Matrixy way? Nope, they just jump out of their cars (in their silver jumpsuits) whenever they’re running low on fuel, grab a convenient specifically-bred primitive human and stuff them into their tank, kicking and screaming.
It’s all symbolic, maaaan.
There’s quite a bit more stupid to be had in the movie, but that’s the most I can recall without enduring a pain-spike in my forehead.
Consider this: How could a humanoid species, apparently evolved in an Earthlike environment, and capable of breathing Earth’s air (therefore definitely a carbon-based lifeform), possibly be vulnerable to water?
You’re right. Without knowing their reasoning, we can’t decide whether it makes sense or not. For instance, I was just thinking I’d like to take a vacation on a planet with oceans of hydrocyanic acid. It makes perfect sense.
Wait, no it doesn’t. Visiting a planet covered with gigantic oceans of poison doesn’t make sense under any circumstance! Particularly if you’re not going to take any precautions whatsoever to protect yourself.
But the best part of why it’s a horrible movie is when Mel Gibson remembers his wife’s last words, and advises Joaquin Phoenix to “swing away.” Thanks, dude, because the idea of hitting it with a blunt object is such a wacky, far-out scheme that no one would have ever thought of it without supernatural assistance!
What I never understand is why people feel so much need to defend this horrible movie’s horrible premise. I don’t get why people enjoy it at all. The “insights” the movie offered up were banal at best, the plot was absolutely unbelievable on its surface, what the hell is there to like about it?
Whjile I will gleefully point at Signs and laugh – and have, frequently on this Board – the premise in Alien Nation was that the aliens were genetically-modified organisms deliberately bred as slaves, and that this vulnerabiluity was a control mechanism.
I find it hard to believe that even a power-hungry alien overlord race would go to such extreme lengths as throwing out a pretty basic and essential building block of organic chemistry as saline and making creatures have a bad reaction to it, but can buy it if I squint real hard.
In Signs, though, the aliens and their motives make no sense at all. Naked aliens running around on a water-filled world, their only apparent weapons great strength and poison gas with a range conveniently shorter than a baseball bat? If you tell me that it’s not supposed to make sense, that it’s just a device and symbolic and all, and I’ll ask how come they didn’t make this a war movie or a western with equally improbable foes. I can’t help thinking it’s got a lot to do with the low regard people have for science fiction, or at least for its integrity.
Why do we call the creatures we see in the movie “aliens”? Yeah, the characters believe they are aliens. But there’s no particular evidence of this. It seems more likely that they are bogey- or possibly booger-men. They are incomprehensible creatures who do incomprehensible evil deeds for the purpose of creating fear and terror. They hide in closets and shadows. They are defeated by magical incantations and hope and family values. Maybe they come from another planet, but the name of that planet is The Planet Of The Bogeymen.
I like how the plot required a conspiracy involving an air marshall, a flight attendant, and a German mortician.. What, did they just happen to bump into each other in a bar, and hatch a plot?
It’s been years since I’ve seen this film, but since it was just released on DVD, I couldn’t help but think of how stupid the premise is, as well as I can remember it: The Wizard. This mentally challenged kid wants to go to California- except “California” to him is this place he went to with his dead parents so he can put their ashes there or something (of course, we don’t find this out until the end of the movie). So these two kids befriend him and take him on the road to California. So it’s a road trip movie, right? Wrong. It turns out that the kid is really good at video games, so when they find out there’s going to be a big video game competition in California, they decide to enter him in it. So it’s a road trip/buddy/competition picture that’s basically a drawn-out advertisement for Nintendo with a plot that barely makes sense.
OK, another movie with a blatantly stupid premise. Stigmata.
See, there’s this secret scripture, with an explosive message…that Jesus is everywhere, that a priesthood is not neccesary to intercede between the layman and the divine. Things like:
HERESY! Naturally this message must be suppressed by the Catholic Church at all costs…including murder. Because if people ever suspect that priests aren’t neccesary, they could break from the holy church! No one has ever had this thought before! This is the kind of thing that could cause priests to nail theses onto church doors! Dogs and cats living together! A massive, well, PROTEST against the Catholic Church!
And of course Jesus intervenes to help bring this lost knowlege to the public…mostly by torturing and sexually abusing Patricia Arquette.
And at the end the truth is revealed! This secret document really exists! It has recently been revealed! And the church is really trying to supress it! And this document is…the Gospel of Thomas! The document that will finally blow the lid off the corruption that is the Catholic Church. Discovered in…1945. Yep, this document has been around for 60 years, but the Catholic Church is so threatened by it that they would…well…what exactly has the Catholic Church done to keep the Gospel of Thomas secret, or hidden? Nothing? Wow, you mean this really real document that could destroy the church, so destructive that you imagine them murdering people to hide the truth…and in real life they do nothing?
