Sometimes a creative work is so crappy, it’s hilarious, and sometimes it’s even crappier, so that it’s not even funny, only painful (see, e.g. The Last Airbender).
But with the second category, you can still get some huge laughs from a sharp commentator who falls on their sword and digests the work for you. For instance,The Happening in Fifteen Minutes .
And now, I have discovered the following description of a free Kindle book, Love, War and Magic , by Jeanne Haskin.
Ceridwyn Nightsong chose to be born of a Sidhe god and the next Unseelie queen in order to inherit magic that would help her fulfill her mission. She is one of thirty souls tasked with acquiring strengths and allies against the outcast, evil spirits that escaped their antimatter prisons to corrupt and exploit mankind.
To avoid absorption by her enemies, Ceri’s motives must be pure and her strategy unconventional. Force cannot be met with force. Hate and vengeance would be her undoing. Allied with one of her reincarnated kindred, a selkie, a human, and a winged white fox named Guinevere who becomes her sex-starved alter ego, Ceri learns that success depends on tactics—the more imaginative, the better.
Blood gnomes are fought with stories. A wolf suffers death by Barry Manilow. Laughing hyenas and their redneck cousins are neutralized with jokes. Gangster rats and weasels, hippy cats and Bohemian chickens become donors of faerie dope, so a war can be overturned with folk songs instead of violence.
Eluding danger is simple until the restoration of mortal magic causes a ripple effect that makes pacifism impossible and Ceri crosses the line of indecency to save the animal community.
I don’t know if the writer at Smashwords meant me to be rolling on the floor laughing while reading that, but I was. I am so veryvery glad that I will never have to read this book (I pretty much knew that from the first two words of the description!), but I enjoyed the synopsis immensely.
Now, whether it’s full of snark, or so earnest it makes you giggle, please share your examples!
WotNot
February 28, 2011, 7:40pm
2
Despite being a fan of almost all things superhero, I’ve never been able to sit through an entire episode of Smallville.
But I’ve been reading Chris Sims and David Uzumeri’s reviews of the final season, and enjoying them enormously.
The Jabootu review of Battlefield Earth has to be a classic.
Here’s another that was originally on that site.
Miller
February 28, 2011, 7:47pm
4
Ceridwyn Nightsong chose to be born of a Sidhe god and the next Unseelie queen in order to inherit magic that would help her fulfill her mission. She is one of thirty souls tasked with acquiring strengths and allies against the outcast, evil spirits that escaped their antimatter prisons to corrupt and exploit mankind.
To avoid absorption by her enemies, Ceri’s motives must be pure and her strategy unconventional. Force cannot be met with force. Hate and vengeance would be her undoing. Allied with one of her reincarnated kindred, a selkie, a human, and a winged white fox named Guinevere who becomes her sex-starved alter ego, Ceri learns that success depends on tactics—the more imaginative, the better.
Blood gnomes are fought with stories. A wolf suffers death by Barry Manilow. Laughing hyenas and their redneck cousins are neutralized with jokes. Gangster rats and weasels, hippy cats and Bohemian chickens become donors of faerie dope, so a war can be overturned with folk songs instead of violence.
Eluding danger is simple until the restoration of mortal magic causes a ripple effect that makes pacifism impossible and Ceri crosses the line of indecency to save the animal community.
This actually sounds like a book I’d like to read. Has anybody read it? Is it really bad?
My personal favorite bad movie is The Trial of Billy Jack . There was a time in the long-ago Johnson and Nixon administrations when I was SuperPacifist! The Man With Delusions of Gandh-ure!, and that movie delves into my own hilarious psychology from those days. This isn’t the original Billy Jack , which did have some brief moments of insight–after that became a hit, the family responsible for it decided that making the sequel twice as earnest, twice as strident, and three times as long would guarantee an even bigger hit.
Caveat Emptor: The attachment is written from a somewhat conservative viewpoint that relies, let us say, upon some questionable assumptions. They actually help in this instance to leach out the full absurdity of the whole Brobdingnagian mess!
I love his rules and am sorely tempted to steal them for when I rate a book.
That a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere. But the “Deerslayer” tale accomplishes nothing and arrives in air.
They require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it. But as the “Deerslayer” tale is not a tale, and accomplishes nothing and arrives nowhere, the episodes have no rightful place in the work, since there was nothing for them to develop.
I won’t steal them, because I would abuse them badly - too many of the books I read break most of those rules.
George Scithers used to quote Twain’s rules in his guide to writing. They’re still very good guides.
Wil Wheaton’s reviews of the first season of ST:TNG make it almost sound interesting .
I’m really enjoying this, thanks! It’s especially fun if you’re reading along with the Slacktivist dissection of the Left Behind franchise, which itself fits the OP standards to a T.
furryman , as I read the synopsis of that book, I wavered back and forth between, “OMG, this must be dreadful,” to “this could be the most awesome book ever,” but considering it’s a free e-book, I’m betting on the former.
While I’m sure the movie itself was a stain on the human psyche, this review of [It's a Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad Movie: Reader Review: Sudden Death, by Faux Pas ](Sudden Death), is almost enough to justify the money spent on the movie itself.
Zsofia
March 1, 2011, 4:33pm
12
Here’s a dissection of a romance novel called Unicorn Vengeance that evidently features neither a unicorn nor any vengeance.
Twain wrote another piece on Cooper’s Prose Style that doesn’t get reprinted as often, but I find hilarious:
An excerpt:
YOUNG GENTLEMAN: In studying Cooper you will find it profitable to study him in detail-word by word, sentence bv sentence. For every sentence of his is interesting. Interesting because of its make-up, its peculiar make-up, its original make-up. Let us examine a sentence or two, and see. Here is a passage from Chapter XI of The Last of the Mohicans, one of the most famous and most admired of Cooper’s books:
Notwithstanding the swiftness of their flight, one of the Indians had found an opportunity to strike a straggling fawn with an arrow, and had borne the more preferable fragments of the victim, patiently on his shoulders, to the stopping-place. Without any aid from the science of cookery, he was immediately employed, in common with his fellows, in gorging himself with this digestible sustenance. Magua alone sat apart, without participating in the revolting meal, and apparently buried in the deepest thought.
This little paragraph is full of matter for reflection and inquiry. The remark about the swiftness of the flight was unnecessary , as it w'as merely put in to forestall the possible objection of some over particular reader that the Indian couldn't have found the needed "opportunity" while fleeing swiftly. The reader would not have made that objection. He would care nothing about having that small matter explained and justified. But that is Cooper's way; frequently he will explain and justify little things that do not need it and then make up for this by as frequently failing to explain important ones that do need it. For instance he allowed that astute and cautious person, Deerslayer-Hawkeye, to throw his rifle heedlessly down and leave it lying on the ground where some hostile lndians would presently be sure to find it-a rifle prized by that person above all things else in the earth-and the reader gets no word of explanation of that strange act. There was a reason, but it wouldn't bear exposure. Cooper meant to get a fine dramatic effect out of the finding of the rifle by the Indians, and he accomplished this at the happy time; but all the same, Hawkeye could have hidden the rifle in a quarter of a minute where the Indians could not have found it.
Cooper couldn't think of any way to explain why Hawkeye didn't do that, so he just shirked the difficulty and did not explain at all. In another place Cooper allowed Heyward to shoot at an Indian with a pistol that wasn't loaded-and grants us not a word of explanation as to how the man did it.
No, the remark about the swiftness of their flight was not necessary; neither was the one which said that the Indian found an opportunity; neither was the one which said he struck the fawn; neither was the one which explained that it was a "straggling" fawn; neither was the one which said the striking was done with an arrow; neither was the one which said the Indian bore the "fragments"; nor the remark that they were preferable fragments; nor the remark that they were more preferable fragments; nor the explanation that they were fragments of the "victim"; nor the overparticular explanation that specifies the Indian's "shoulders" as the part of him that supported the fragments; nor the statement that the Indian bore the fragments patiently. None of those details has any value. We don't care what the Indian struck the fawn with; we don't care whether it was a, struggling fawn or an unstruggling one; we don't care which fragments the Indian saved; we don't care why he saved the "more" preferable ones when the merely preferable ones would have amounted to just the same thing and couldn't have been told from the more preferable ones by anybody, dead or alive; we don't care whether the Indian carried them on his shoulders or in his handkerchief; and finally, we don't care whether he carried them patiently or struck for higher pay and shorter hours. We are indifferent to that Indian and all his affairs.
There was only one fact in that long sentence that was worth stating, and it could have been squeezed into these few words-and with advantage to the narrative, too: "During the flight one of the Indians had killed a fawn and he brought it into camp." You will notice that "During the flight one of the Indians had killed a fawn and he brought it into camp," is more straightforward and business-like, and less mincing and smirky, than it is to say, "Notwithstanding the swiftness of their flight, one of the lndians had found an opportunity to strike a straggling fawn with an arrow, and had borne the more preferable fragments of the victim, patiently on his shoulders, to the stopping-place." You will notice that the form "During the flight one of the Indians had killed a fawn and he brought it into camp" holds up its chin and moves to the front with the steady stride of a grenadier, whereas the form “Notwithstanding the swiftness of their flight, one of the Indians had found an opportunity to strike a straggling fawn with an arrow, and had borne the more preferable fragments of the victim, patiently on his shoulders, to the stopping-place” simpers along with an airy, complacent, monkey-with-a-parasol gait which is not suited to the transportation of raw meat.
Omar G’s recaps of Smallville over at Television Without Pity were the best thing about the show (he quit after the 8th season, though). This one had me in tears.
Royals games can be depression for a Royals fan to listen to, but the witty comments of my buddies on RoyalsReview.com makes it very entertaining.
The Agony Booth has some hilarious reviews of all kinds of things. They even have a Worst of Trek series.
Seanbaby’s best work is reviews of bad video games , but he also used to do bad movies, like Turkish Superman-level bad movies. Can’t find those, though.
The format is different (short animated videos), but Ben Croshaw (aka Yahtzee)'s Zero Punctuation is worth watching even if you don’t play video games.
BigT
March 1, 2011, 8:00pm
18
This is what the Nostalgia Critic has done for me for pretty much all the bad stuff he reviews. Including Never Ending Story III and The Secret of Nimh 2.