I wouldn’t call it a “bad movie” myself. It’s Pageantry. In fact, it’s Pageantry Writ Large. You don’t expect good acting or good scripting from something like that, you expect Tableaus.
And I’ll take issue with your claim of Bad Costumes - I think the costumes and the scenery excellent. Much of it is due to the conceptual art of Arnold Friberg (who died only five years ago). Friberg not only did conceptual art for The Ten Commandments, and some “inspirational” and Western art, he did the paintings that hang in the LDS Visitor’s Center in Salt Lake City, and the ones used to illustrate the Book of Mormon. If you flip through that edition of the BoM that the missionaries hand you, or you vacation in Salt Lake City and visit Temple Square, you’ll get a strong Ten Commandments vibe from the impressively robed Nephites and Lamanites, and the rustic yet tough-cool garb of the people, where even the kids wear leather headbands and wrist strengtheners.
On that note: Undercover Blues. Dennis Quaid and Kathleen Turner goof around and deliver various amusing quips while Stanley Tucci and Fiona Shaw - two of the finest character actors out there - compete for the Most Outrageous Fake Accent and Best Scenery Chewing awards. Personally I think Tucci wins both but it’s a close thing. “Mah nem ees MUERTE!”
I look at it as “Ghost Rider 3”, only without the flaming head.
Spartacus isn’t pageantry, though. It’s a well-written flick, with a script by Dalton Trumbo. A very different beast.
If your criteria are “Big Movie, Lots of People, Lots of Money. Very Long. Set Long Ago”, you need to look more carefully. Spartacus (and all those circa 1960 historical epics) and The Ten commandments aren’t remnotely similar films.
The costuming and hair styles used have a distinct 1950s “I’m playing dress-up” quality to them, vs. any attempt to try to look 1200 BC authentic. Some remakes today appear to have a better authenticity quality to them, but I’m sure if I’m still around 40 years from now, those will look fake to me, too.
Of course they’re not, but Spartacus is big in Pageantry, with a huge supporting supporting cast, phalanxes of armies marching over the hillsides, etc. Everything is big and splashy.
So, how does your definition of ‘pageantry’ differ from that?
Split Second starring Rutger Hauer. I don’t think they missed a single cliche in this action-horror-sci fi melange. It works, though. It probably wouldn’t with anybody else in the lead role, but Rutger Hauer has an amazing ability to make schlock worth watching.
I recently watched ‘Wild Card’, after seeing it rated as 5.6·IMDb; 28%·Rotten Tomatoes, and 40%·Metacritic. So… with low expectations. I thought it was a laugh riot! A very, very silly parody of most of Jason Statham’s movies, probably along the lines of Last Boy Scout and Last Action Hero - both of which I also enjoyed.
Your definition of Pageantry is very different from mine.
“Pageantry” is not synonymous with “costume drama”, which is how you seem to be using it. “Pageantry” means presenting iconic images that represent scenes from a story. I use the term as in “REligious pageant”. The Passion play at Oberammergau is Pageant, pure and simple. People go to it to see the scenes from the Dearth of Christ – the Triual, the Crucifiction, etc. Nobody bgoes to a Passion Play for the dialogue, or to see character development
The Ten Commandments is Pageant in this style. You go to see The Plagues and The Partinmg of the Red Sea and so forth. The dialogue isn’t really necessary.
Spartacus is a whole different ball of wax. It’s not anything like a Passion Play
Another vote for Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.
There is a scene wherein state policemen are firing shotguns at an unseen target, while tomatoes are rolled past them. “We can’t hold them back!”
I’m still looking for a copy of The Lost Continent.
A yacht full of characters at odds (and a hold full of smuggled dynamite) gets snarled in the Sargasso Sea and finds prehistoric monsters and several trapped ships left over from the Spanish Armada, ruled by Teenage Pope Joffrey, who feeds people he doesn’t like to the Sarlacc, which he keeps in the basement of his flagship. We learn all this from a woman with enormous breasts (which spend the entire movie on the verge of falling out of her bodice) who escapes from Teenage Pope Joffrey’s harem and wants to join our modern day yacht people.
Wonderfully, energetically brain damaged. One of the films made during that magical time when Hammer Films’ coffee supply seems to have been dosed with psychoactive drugs.
Another vote for Starship Troopers. I love the book as well, but think they’re both great in their own way. A true movie rendition of the book is a pipe dream, “Join up now!”
Weirdly enough, “The Lost Continent” was the first movie I ever saw where the breasts were kind of a distraction.
On the yacht, we’ve got all this Peyton Place drama going on. Meanwhile, over at the Spanish Armada, we also have the Psycho Teen Pope, a Sarlacc, the Spanish Inquisition, and all this OTHER drama going on. And in between, we have these amazing sea monster puppets that occasionally attack boats, travelers, and each other.
And then we have poor li’l Dana Gillespie and her Two Enormous Talents. And I can’t even remember any of her dialogue, because I spent every scene she was in staring at her chest and wondering if they were fiiiiiinally going to go teetering over the edge, so to speak. She may have been the greatest example of the Theiss Titillation Theory I’ve ever seen.
Yeah, this movie had stuff happenin’ all OVER the place.