The Day the Earth Stood Still Beamed Into Space

When a huge starfleet of pissed off aliens comes to Earth to carry on cranky, we'll know it's because 20th Century Fox sent them the remake instead of the original.

Who could blame them, really?

The Many Faces of Bad

As longtime readers, all three of you, already know, I'm come to know bad movies of many kinds and styles. And today I've decided, for my amusement, to break bad movies down by arbitrary categories, in hopes of groping toward my bad movie aesthetic.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin.

(This post, incidentally, is dedicated to the late Jesse Helms, a beacon to bigoted halfwits everywhere, whose long political career is one of the many things that North Carolina will have to spend the next ten thousand years apologizing for.)

Worst Movie I've Ever Watched on a Premium Cable Channel: The Lonely Lady

Because I was actively repressing my memory of this movie, I almost put Glitter here. Now Glitter is a singularly awful, cheesy, and exploitive look at the ugly side of show business; but nobody tried to rape Mariah Carey with a garden hose, or marry her off to an impotent guy who carries said garden hose around whenever he really needs to win an argument, or place her spread eagled on a pool table while some sleaze shoots pool balls up her crotch. Mariah Carey, even in the delicate mental state she was in during the making and promotion of Glitter would never have agreed to such humiliations. Pia Zadora, however, being of sound mind, agreed to it straight away. Indeed, her billionaire husband financed it. The Lonely Lady could be used in aversion therapy. Anyone who watches it will shun show business, movies, pool tables, typewriters, eurotrash, garden tools, or human sexual organs for at least ten years. This movie made me ashamed to be a multi-cellular organism.

Worst Movie I've Ever Watched on Basic Cable: Jaws: the Revenge

I will give this movie credit for this much: it gave me a catch phrase to use whenever someone does something impossible in a movie. In this picture, the shark attacks a plane that Michael Caine's character has crashed into the ocean. The plane goes under, and presumably Caine does to; but a moment later his cast-mates are fishing him out of the drink, intact, and wearing dry clothes. When they ask him how he evaded the shark and made it to the boat (they don't notice his dry clothing), he says "It wasn't easy!" I say that all the time when I watch wild, inexplicable action in pictures now. Thanks, Jaws 4! Basic plot of the movie? Mrs. Brodie suspects that the shark who attacked her husband in the first movie is now after her and her family. (Apparently, somewhere on the Paramount lot, the shark and Michael Myers merged into one.) So she flies to the Bahamas to be with her son and flirt stupidly with Michael Caine. Eventually, to save everyone else--because everyone else can't just pick up an move to Nebraska where the shark would have a really hard time--she decides to sacrifice herself to the shark. There she has flashbacks to moments in previous Jaws movies, and this is odd because she wasn't present for the moments she flashes back to. Eventually, the black guy dies, the shark roars, and the movie ends.

Worst Movie I've Ever Watched on Video: Monster A Go-Go

This movie contains two lies in the title alone. There's no monster, and there's no a-go-go. There's a lot of black screen to make you think your television is broken. There's a lot of tedious dialog that never goes anywhere. There's a long scene where an actor leads the camera away for a long walk down a long hallway, so that it won't see the "monster" tearing up the room the actor has left. There's an actor who, before he answers the phone, makes a "Brrring-Brrring" noise. There's a full cast change in the middle of the movie.

Roger Ebert once described a movie as being no improvement over a blank screen. This movie was a blank screen, occasionally interrupted by visible tedium. Stay away.

Worst Movie I've Ever Watched on An Airplane: Armageddon

Because I'm tired of bitching about this picture, I'll turn it over to the fabulous Bad Astronomy and the equally fabulous Roger Ebert. My only addition to what they'll say is what I said when I first saw this piece of shit: "I wanted to walk out of this movie, and I was on a plane!"

Most Morally Degrading Picture I've Ever Seen: tie Sidehackers, Amityville 2: The Possession, The Lonely Lady

Okay, in Amityville 2, a possessed teenaged boy barges into his sister's room one night and asks to take naked pictures of her. Eeew! Right? Y'know what's even more disgusting? She shrugs and whips her top off. The boy's possessed. I want to know what her excuse was supposed to be. Five minutes later, the two are having sex. Why is she involved in that? Is she supposed to be evil too? I thought the point of the movie was that this family was fine before they arrived in this house. It looks to me like they were pretty fucking evil to start with. I would have thought that Satan, or whatever evil hell beast held sway over the Amityville house in the movie, would have seen that and said, "Whoa! Okay! You motherfuckers are too sick even for me! You ought to be ashamed of yourselves, Mr. and Mrs. Caligula! Keep the damn house, and may you rot in the filth of your incestuous fornication!" Repugnant!

(Also, there's a moment in the movie that just defies explanation. The demon has possessed the teenaged boy in the movie, yet the demon also barks instructions to the teenaged boy through his Walkman. Why would this be necessary if he's possessed the boy? Does the demon just need to think out loud a lot?)

The Sidehackers starts out as a pointless, but harmless movie about a ridiculous sport called sidehacking, in which a team involving a motorcycle rider and a guy who hangs off one side of the motorcycle, race around. Soon we meet two sidehackers. One sidehacker's girl tries to seduce another sidehacker, fails, and for revenge claims she was raped. In revenge, the aggrieved sidehacker kidnaps the other sidehacker and his girl, beats him, and rapes her to death. And then it gets grim. By the end, you wish that humanity would just curl up on the floor and die.

You know how I feel about The Lonely Lady.

Respected Film That I Dislike Intensely: Happiness

I respect many things about Todd Solondz's Happiness. Solondz gets good performances from his actors. His dialog is frequently witty and sharp. He has a good eye. But I came away from this film feeling as if it was saying to me that sexual desire inevitably makes people hypocritical, mean-spirited, neurotic, and violent. The characters felt over-determined, which might not have been a problem if they'd been over-determined in service of a picture whose theme struck me as true. Instead, his movie's view of sexuality brings to mind that over-celebrated twit Camille Paglia, whose view of sex the late Molly Ivins dissected in the following fashion:

Paglia's view of sex--that it is irrational, violent, immoral, and wounding--is so glum that one hesitates to suggest that it might be instead, well, a lot of fun, and maybe even affectionate and loving.

I don't know if the fun, affectionate, or loving aspects of sexuality had ever occurred to Solondz; or if he decided to ignore that reality because it wouldn't help him build his case against the upper-middle income suburbanites he apparently loathes. Either way, his denigration of human sexuality leaves me thinking of Happiness as a well-made picture that is also deeply wrong.

Worst Movie I've Ever Seen in a Theater:

I hate to punk out at the end like this, but because I know one of the people who was in this movie and wouldn't want to piss him, or her off, I'm going to demur on this one. (That person, if he or she has guessed which movie I'm talking about, should know that I thought that he or she was the best thing in it, for whatever that's worth.) Those who know me and promise not to tell tales out of school can email me for the offending movie's moniker.

Until next time, kiddies.

Do You Ever Feel Like Crying But You Don't Know Why?

I know why. You must have sensed it, this ineffable, dark presence that looms over all our lives, suffocating our hopes, strangling our dreams, sapping our collective will to live and think and do. A presence so terrifying that none but the boldest of us dare whisper its name.

Yet I'll whisper it.

Come closer.

Closer.

Okay, Casanova, back off a little.

Here it is.

They're bringing the Smurfs to the big screen.

Last one to leave civilization, turn out the lights.

Pirates of the Carribean: At World's End

Three hours...

Three mindbendingly dull hours...

Three mindbendingly dull hours I'll never get back...

To understand how I feel about Pirates of the Carribean: Blah, Blah, Blah... all you need to know is that a major plot point involves all of the Pirate Lords converging on a place called Shipwreck Island to engage in...A MEETING! A ROUNDTABLE FRIGGING DISCUSSION! They could have booked a fucking Marriott in Singapore or wherever the hell they were, but they go instead to Shipwreck Island, a name which promises, but fails to deliver, actual shipwrecks. (I understand in the first draft of the screenplay of INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM, Mola Ram holds a thirty-minute seminar in the Temple of Doom--complete with slides and a generous Q&A session--about the votive objects of the Kali Cult and the veracity of heart-removal legends. Impatient, Indiana Jones cracks his bullwhip and asks several pointed questions about Mola Ram's scholarship.) This is the key symptom of POCBBB's mortal disease. There isn't a promise that this movie makes that it doesn't break. Instead of a streamlined, amusing comic adventure starring Johnny Depp as the world's feyest buccaneer, we get nothing but a parade of special effects, rambling psychotic explanations, and battle scenes notable for their lack of actual battle.

In this movie, two huge fleets of warships line up to have a fight that promises to make Trafalgar look like a sculling contest between the Harvard and Princeton alums. Do they do battle? Keira Knightley gives a speech that supposed to be a rousing, St. Crispin's Day/Braveheart style address to the pirate sailors to prepare them for such a battle. But in the end, only two ships fight. They then carry the battle to a third ship--the one carrying the movie's major villain. Does the Major Villain fight back? No! Does he call upon his big ass fleet to help? No! He stands there and lets the two ships blow him off the water. Why? I don't know!

And it's not as if the movie didn't try to explain! The first two hours consist of little besides explanations, endless, painful, impenetrable explanations whose every word added another layer of confusion. The el-cheapo-stinko movie The Cave Dwellers has a famously bad scene in which a boring old guy calls time out on the movie he's in to summarize, for twenty minutes or so, the previous movie in the series. But with the bigger budgets that Jerry Bruckheimer can muster, everybody gets a whack at being the boring old guy. The result is a narrative so convoluted, so unfocused, that for all its supposed intricacy it feels more like a story a four-year-old is making up as he goes along.

If I were religious, I'd want to know just how much penance this movie counts for.

Bad Movies About Show Business

This blog post might have concerned itself with something brilliant--Joseph Mankiewicz's All About Eve or Robert Altman's The Player. All these little pixels could have been put into the service of extolling their brilliance, but alas, their master is a masochist, and must devote himself to that peculiar species of bad movie called the shitty show-biz expose.

We'll leave Showgirls out of this, for no other reason than that I've never actually seen the whole thing and don't want to put it on my Netflix list. Instead, we'll begin with the movie that features jerky dancing, jerky middle-aged teen-agers, and jerky oily, sleazy drug dealers. Yes, it's The Girl In Gold Boots:



As you can see, sweet bippies are out in full force in this picture, which delivers the news that some of L.A.'s sleazier go-go dancer nightclubs were under mob control. (I'll pause for your gasp.) In the movie, Michelle works at EAT, a trendy little bistro that her abusive, drunken father owns. So desperate is Michelle to escape from EAT that she hooks up with Buz, the world's oldest living dead-end kid. Together, Michelle and Buz make their way to L.A. At some point in their travels, they pick up a fey young hitchhiker named Critter, from whom flowery language pours like a flowery language spigot.

Michelle hopes one day to become a dancer, and that gives Buz the idea of setting her up in one of the mob's most fashionable joints. His sister, the titular Girl in Gold Boots, (using "titular" in this context has its hazards) dances there whenever she manages to get off the pipe. Will Michelle become the headline attraction? Will the house band play one of Critter's songs? Will Buz get a piece of the Lufthansa heist and live to spend his money? Yes. Yes, and no, not in this movie anyway.

The movie does force audiences to confront some difficult issues, such as what it says about a society that the mob can pack a nightclub with dancing this lame. Michelle is a terrible dancer. Buz's sister is a terrible dancer, though it's easy to believe that she's sullied her pretty mind with heroin. Critter is a terrible singer/songwriter. And Buz is a talentless hack of a criminal. They get two hours to pool their incompetencies to form a cascading cataclysm of ineptitude. The result is painfully dull, though it is fun to watch Buz's reaction shots when Critter punches him in the face near the end.

But there are movies that take place at EAT, and there are movies that eat the soul. And such a movie is The Lonely Lady, a film funded by Pia Zadora's billionaire husband so that America could see Ms. Zadora sexually humiliated and traumatized for its amusement. If she didn't divorce him after this, she should have:



I remember watching this flick when I was twelve. My parents were asleep and I was looking for a glimpse of premium cable skin. Little did I know the price of that glimpse was watching Ray Liotta (who I'll bet never screens this movie for friends at his house) try to rape Pia Zadora's character with a superphallifraglicistic garden hose spigot. Conservative Christians spend a good portion of their lives pushing for abstinence education in schools. I don't think we need it. Screen The Lonely Lady in a health class, and none of those kids will reach in between their own or anyone else's legs for fifteen years.

Todd Solondz's Happiness was a major turnoff, but I got the impression that it was supposed to be. I'm guessing that the producers of The Lonely Lady somehow believed that their movie was going to be a turn-on, and all this folderol about how tough it is for women to make it in Hollywood without making it in Hollywood was just a smokescreen. Well, I guess my erotic tastes differ from Zadora's husband, because, even at the horny age of 12, The Lonely Lady made me sick.

I think I will go watch All About Eve now. I need to feel better.

A Couple of Hideous Films

To distract myself from the bad economy, the war in Iraq, and my own personal struggles, I watched two of the worst movies Hollywood ever made (and to think, neither one involved Michael Bay).

Let's take the second one first, a film with no conceivable reason for existing except, well, maybe as a stimulus package to keep the Southern California economy going, we have 1978s Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

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Janet Maslin, reviewing this film for the New York Times, described it as "a business deal set to music", and I can't dispute her. The object of the game here seemed to be to find as many people as humanly possible to sing Beatles songs, except, naturally, the Beatles. If you ever wanted to watch Alice Cooper, Steve Martin, or George Burns sing a Beatles song, this movie is talking to you. The plot is some nonsense about the band's retrieving instruments that the Future Villain Band (Aerosmith) stole from them, but the plot is no more important here than it would be in a porn movie. It's all about finding excuses, however strained, to sing Beatles covers. And oh do those excuses grow strained. I pulled muscles just following them. I expect that all the checks cleared, and that the cast did okay for their contributions to soundtracks and image sales for t-shirts and assorted swag. But honestly, who gives a shit?

From bad to worse we go. I can honestly say that Concorde, Airport '79 is a better movie than Monster A Go-Go, for this reason. Monster A-Go-Go lacked both a monster and any trace of a-go-go, while Concorde did have a Concorde (or a model of one anyway) and two airports (or models of them anyway). And from the looks of it, the action did take place in 1979. So the film is, if nothing else, a triumph for the Truth in Titling movement.

Here's a clip. It's in German, but you don't need to follow the dialog precisely to delve the multiple layers of insanity and inanity contained in this six-minute sample.



Yes, it's amazing, isn't it? Who knew you could just open the window of a jet at supersonic speeds, stick your arm out, and fire a flare to distract a heat-seeking missile. If only the Air Force had been hip to this, they could have diverted all that money for countermeasures into schools, hospitals, or urban renewal.

Other things I learned from Concorde:

Men appreciate it when their friends, after setting them up with women they fall in love with, inform them that the woman was a hooker.

That if I want to kill the person who could expose the dark secrets of my industrial empire, it is far easier to try to bring down her passenger jet by rigging a missile test to malfunction, getting a rogue pilot to chase the jet with a French Air Force F4 Phantom, and by planting a device which opens one of the plane's cargo doors and decompresses the passenger compartment than it is to hire a professional killer to shoot the one person I'm actually trying to kill in the back.

That heads of corporations who participate in major felonies always sign their names prominently on all incriminating documents.

That small private jets are nearly as fast as supersonic transports. (And to think that Lockheed never included that in the brochure!)

That old women with bladder diseases who get trapped in airplane bathrooms while the plane is spinning are funny.

That airline passengers feel intense loyalty to their flights. Even after someone launches missiles and combat jets against their aircraft, they'll still come back after a day's layover to continue their journey on the same plane.

That there was an era when someone thought a cameo by Charo was a selling point.

Yep. I watch them so you don't have to.