“Oogie” is right. The troubling posters for this film have been haunting theaters for months, and now the damned thing is out. Somehow they managed to get talented people like Cloris Leachman, Cary Elwes, Chazz Palminteri, and Christopher Lloyd to appear in it. (How? Vast sums of money? Blackmail? Can they all be that down on their luck?)
Anyway, the reviews have been rolling in at Rotten Tomatoes:
shudders What hell have we unleashed upon the children of the world? The stars must be right because the only explanation for this…this thing is a particularly sadistic eldritch abomination. You’d think we’d have learned from the Teletubbies and the lasting trauma they’ve caused, but then…this gets made.
I just saw the trailer last night (we rented a Will Ferrell movie), and I honest to god kept waiting for the punchline. I did not believe this thing could be a real movie.
I saw that review in the New York Times, and it was hilarious. I was trying to figure out if this show was based on an existing TV series or children’s book, but apparently it’s an original concept (although the Wikipedia article indicates that they tried unsuccessfully to get the rights to make a film version of the Teletubbies, so apparently they made this instead). The budget was “only” $12 million, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they make back multiples of that in box office and home video sales.
I meant outside of his byline. Like James Stewart was always credited as such, but people frequently called him Jimmy, even people who’d never met him.
On Wednesday it made $102,564 at 2,160 theaters for an average of $47 or about 6 tickets per site for the day. It may hit a new record low for weekend gross of a wide release movie.
It’s not a truly cheapo knock off film: $20M rumored budget. And it has some respectable names like Cloris Leachman, Christopher Lloyd, Chazz Palminteri, and Cary Elwes.
Do the people who work on movies like this know they are producing a piece of shit, or do they just think “Hey, I’m getting paid!”? Is the entire thing an exercise in cynicism? I don’t know which is worse, the thought that every single person involved in this is a shameless whore, or that they really believe they are making something good.
If you watched the version of At the Movies which he was one of the critics for the year, he was always called Tony, never A. O. except in the introduction. You know, the one where Ebert wouldn’t allow them to put their thumbs up.
Thank you for making me feel good about the intelligence level of my country again. It appears that you can go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public after all.
An article I read today said that this thing was not based on a popular book or TV series or type of toilet paper after all, but was made up to seem like it.
If you’ve seen some of the people promoting movies on TDS, it is clear that sometimes they know it is crap. Blame the writers, the directors, and the producers. For everyone else, it is a job. And don’t even blame the director if he uses a pseudonym.
I’d say blame the financial backers also, but they get theirs from the box office.
According to the review in my local paper, the copyright date on this movie is 2009. Which suggests they tried to fix a mortally wounded movie, and finally just gave up.