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IMDb Bottom 100: Popstar
Popstar
“Popstar” is one of the few movies in the IMDb Bottom 100 that I had never heard of before. I seem to recall Aaron Carter’s very brief celebrity status, but definitely don’t recollect his even briefer acting career.
“Popstar” is plagued with some of the same issues that sank “From Justin to Kelly”: namely, the primary acting role is thrust onto a celebrity who is in no way an actor. Carter clearly struggles with all of his lines, and sounds like he is uncomfortable with the pressure of acting (even though he is essentially playing himself). It made me curious as to how he wound up in this movie: was it an obligation, as was the case in “From Justin to Kelly” for Guarini and Clarkson? In any case, his performance is abysmal, and is a major weakness of the film.
I have to say though, I was impressed with the writing on this movie. I didn’t think a high school movie could be more detached from reality than “Bratz”, but “Popstar” manages to do it.
The lead character (Carter’s love interest) is one of the most perplexing piecemeal characters I have run into. She is a superfan of Carter’s whose room is covered in his image, but she is also an academic perfectionist who goes through an ugly duckling arc. She is said to have a perfect SAT score and pending full rides to a number of universities. So, there are a few issues with this: first off, there is just way too much going on with this character, and it is all way overboard. She isn’t just a fan, she’s a superfan. She isn’t just smart, she is supersmart. Also, there’s is the significant issue that most of these qualities are told to the audience instead of shown, so it comes off as even more extreme as it is bludgeoned into your face. Worse yet, her actions don’t actually support the things we are told about her, particularly in regard to her academics. For an example, here is the last shot of the movie:
This is a story that she writes, that is supposedly a veiled parallel to the romance of the movie. She reveals the story’s existence to Carter in a flirtatious concluding scene, after which the shot fades into this image of the computer screen. Keep in mind, this was written by a character who we have been told has standing offers for full rides to Stanford and UC-Berkeley. Here is the transcript of her story:
“This is the story of a High School Princess and a Pop Star. It ends at magic hour at Westward beach, quite a romantic spot. This story has a happy ending. All stories should have a happy ending; but they don’t.
Anyways they will live happily ever after…Just like in the movies.
He wants her, she wants him……AND THEY KISSED!!!”
That’s it. That is the whole story. Again, it was established earlier in the movie that this character had perfect SAT scores, and is basically the most brilliant academic for miles. I just can’t even wrap my head around this. I mean, the existence of the story could have easily just been a veiled metaphor about their relationship for the sake of dialogue and a happy conclusion, but she actually typed this up according to the final shot. She clearly couldn’t have felt too strongly about this tale of love, because that isn’t even a decent plot or structural outline. For a character established as an extreme academic perfectionist, that is some shoddy work to say the least. Does this mean she doesn’t care about her relationship as much as her schoolwork (or even enough so to put forth an effort), or has she learned to sacrifice her perfectionism and just let things in her life be imperfect? Ok, maybe I’m getting it: this is her accepting the reality of a flawed world, and her imperfect place within it. Brilliant.
Adding to the fantasy-world quality of “Popstar” is the central conflict of the plot. Carter has only come to the school and befriended the Super-Genius Girl in order to cheat off of her to pass his classes. When it comes time for the exams, he winds up getting caught. In reality, this result in a failing grade without any doubt. In “Popstar”, Carter is given a second chance due to the persuasive power of monologues, and because he apparently has testing anxiety. As I understand it, having testing anxiety is something that should be divulged to the teacher and consulted on with parents, and ultimately worked out in a way that can alleviate the student. It is not, however, an acceptable excuse for cheating on a test. Regardless, Carter is given his second chance, but this time he is allowed to take his test on a lit stage in the school auditorium, because reasons. Not only does he pass the test, he apparently does better on it that SuperGenius (She didn’t get a perfect score? That doesn’t seem consistent).
The last problem with this movie that I will mention (trust me, there are more) is the cast. Note that the problem here is the cast, not the acting (that is a different issue altogether). There are so many characters in this movie, and barely any of them are on screen enough to matter. I couldn’t keep up with the names or their relationships to the primary characters in the slightest. There were stepmothers, best friends, bullies, mothers, fathers, wise janitors, agents, nerds, and teachers who all just wandered in and out of the movie with minimal introductions and very little to do. This may be the worst job of character introductions I have seen outside of “They Saved Hitler’s Brain”, and there is absolutely no excuse for it.
Between the abysmal acting, vapid story, and weak writing, there isn’t actually much to enjoy in this movie. It is certainly incompetently made and generally bad, but it doesn’t have a whole lot of charm to it. It isn’t nearly as contrived as “From Justin to Kelly”, but it is only a stone’s throw away from that level of exploitative garbage. It isn’t a movie I can recommend, but I will say that I had a good chuckle at that last shot of SuperGenius’s magnum opus.
…AND THEN THEY KISSED!!!
IMDb Bottom 100: The Garbage Pail Kids Movie
The Garbage Pail Kids Movie
Argh. This movie is atrocious, every little bit as much as I was led to believe it was. To start off, I consider Nostalgia Critic’s scathing review of this flick as mandatory viewing:
Honestly, there isn’t much to add to that. “Garbage Pail Kids” is so loosely structured and plotted that there isn’t much to talk about. I will get to review of this film as well soon, but there are a lot of similarities between this and “Blubberella”: they both rely on tired, crass humor, and they both depend far too heavily on improvisation for content. You will notice in clips that the Garbage Pail Kids are constantly just making noise in the background, or filling up their scenes with rambling noise. There is just no way that was all scripted: I can almost guarantee that the voice actors were told to just riff away in the recording booth, and the result is a jumbled mess. Which brings us to the voice acting…
To call the voice acting “bad” is beyond generous. It is a chorus of screeching, wailing, cackling cacophony. To be fair though, I imagine that the voice actors were doing exactly what they were told to do. The Garbage Pail Kids are supposed to be repulsive, which would justify them sounding so horrible. That said, it doesn’t make it any easier to listen to, and the fact that they are usually all making noises at once throughout their scenes makes the experience all the worse. The in-person actors are just genuinely bad in this movie, most notably the child protagonist and the band of (much older) bullies who torment him.
I would be remiss to not mention the nightmarish puppets in this movie. Just take a good look at these:
I think that is all I have to note about the horrific work on that front.
Last but not least, I have a serious issue with the message of this movie. It claims to be a “beauty is what is on the inside” tale, with the GPKs as an example of good people (creatures? aliens?) who look strange/ugly. The writing has all of the subtlety to take a subplot to break people out of the “State Home for the Ugly”, where apparently all of the greatest minds in the world are held because of physical imperfections. Back to the titular kids, though: there is nothing to indicate that they are, in fact, beautiful on the inside. One of them threatens to eat the child protagonist on more than one occasion, and another one brandishes a knife more than once with minimal provocation. They are just horrible beings, outside and inside.
I would never recommend this movie to anyone. The meandering plot structure would make the movie boring even if all other elements were on target. As it is, there is nothing on par about this movie: everything is mediocre to abysmal. I am genuinely shocked that this is no longer in the IMDb Bottom 100, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see it show up back on the list before long. In short, this movie is an assault on the senses in every possible way, as if it were an art project manufactured with the intention to cause cinematic displeasure.
Plotopsy Podcast #3 – Maximum Overdrive
Maximum Overdrive
Episode 3 of the (Plot)opsy Podcast spotlights one of my favorite good-bad movies, 1986’s “Maximum Overdrive”. Stephen King took up the role of director for the first and last time in this cult classic about killer machines possessed by aliens…or a comet…or something. It features some of the most ridiculous deaths in mainstream cinema history, and is a must-see flick for bad movie fans. As it turns out, there are some interesting narratives tied up behind the scenes of this one as well. Enjoy!
The trailer for Maximum Overdrive oozes with hubris on the part of Stephen King, who introduces the film in much the same way that Alfred Hitchcock once did. King does this while simultaneously putting down the many well-regarded adaptations of his works by other film-makers in the past. I’m sure this trailer is one of the more embarrassing entries in the history of Stephen King.
IMDb Bottom 100 in theaters!
The good folks over at Rifftrax are going to be doing yet another live simulcast for the holidays! The former Mystery Science Theater 3000 gang are taking on an old favorite: IMDb Bottom 100 member and cult classic “Santa Claus”, a Mexican-made children’s movie in which St. Nick lives in a sky-castle with Merlin and battles demons for the souls of children.
You can check it out in select theaters around the US and Canada (maybe elsewhere?) on December 4th. To check where it is playing near you, go to the Fathom events page here, and throw in your local ZIP code. Or, if you happen to be in the Nashville, TN area, you can go to the in-person showing at the Belcourt Theater! I went to the live Rifftrax of “Godzilla (1998)” at the Belcourt this summer, and it was an absolute blast. I recommend making an evening of it if you can.
Also, I highly recommend checking out the old MST3K episode on “Santa Claus”, which is among the best of the series. I’ll be covering the movie later in December here on the blog as well for the IMDb Bottom 100 reviews, so keep your eyes open for it!
So Bad It’s Good: The Proudly Formulaic, Brazenly Homoerotic ‘Tango & Cash’
I’ve been going through a bunch of old Kurt Russell movies lately, and boy does this one stand out. “Tango & Cash” is amazing fun in retrospect, particularly in just how clueless and out of touch it all is. I heartily recommend tracking it down, DVDs of it tend to float around all over the place.
IMDb Bottom 100: The Wild World of Batwoman
The Wild World of Batwoman
“The Wild World of Batwoman”, in case you couldn’t have guessed, has no relation to The Dark Knight or DC Comics. That said, the movie is a clear attempt to capitalize off of the popularity of the Adam West “Batman” television show (enough so to get sued): yet the hammy style and the bat aesthetic was about as far as the similarities went content-wise, however. The majority of the film consists of dancing sequences, clips from unrelated movies, and inexplicable vampirism (yeah, Batwoman is a vampire). Who needs crime-fighting and bat-related gadgets/shenanigans when you have vampires who occasionally dance?
The plot centers around a near-magical piece of spying equipment: a newly-developed listening device that can hear anything that is spoken (or something to that effect). A mysterious villain named Ratfink is dedicated to stealing the device, and through kidnapping and blackmail attempts to have Batwoman (an apparently famous vigilante leader) do the deed for him. It all gets needlessly complex and nonsensical from there, with a few shots of mole people pulled from a different movie, but ultimately Ratfink is defeated and unmasked. He then confesses that he only wanted the device because he is a voyeur, which means that the sinister plan and super-villainy was all way overboard.
The acting is “Batwoman”, if you can call it that, is very bad. It wouldn’t have made much of a difference considering the writing, but it is very clear throughout the movie that the majority of the cast was not there for their acting abilities. The villain characters, as you would expect from the time, are either buffoons, racist stereotypes, or mustache-twirlers. Again, no actor could have made the characters passable, but that doesn’t change the end result on the screen. Outside of Batwoman herself, there isn’t an adequate performance in the movie.
I can’t think of any reason to recommend this movie. There is a lot of dancing, the plot is old-school silly, but the pacing and editing is so abysmal that the movie is nearly unwatchable. You can check out the MST3k version of the film, because there are a few laughs to be had in there, but outside of that frame the movie is absolutely skippable. The movie could have actually been a fun “Batman” rip-off with better writing beneath it, but that just isn’t the case here. It reminded me a lot of “Horrors of Spider Island”: there is a large cast of non-actors who are essentially there to dance, and the writing is a step below amateurish. “Spider Island” at least had some effects in it though, whereas “Batwoman” doesn’t really go anywhere or do much of anything. This was a movie designed to make a trailer out of, and trick audiences into a theater.
Here are the MST3k highlights of “Batwoman”, which is going to be more worth your time to watch than sitting through the whole damned movie.
IMDb Bottom 100: Aag
Aag
“Ram Gopal Varma’s Indian Flames” (also known as “Aag”) was the first Bollywood movie to make it into the IMDb Bottom 100, and helped start the growing international trend of the list. As you should expect, it isn’t a good movie. However, as is sometimes the case, there is more to the negative reputation of “Aag” than the poor quality of the movie on the screen.
“Aag” was initially planned as an official remake of the beloved Bollywood classic “Sholay” by Ramesh Sippy. It was even titled “Ram Gopal Varma Ki Sholay” during development, until it was ruled to be in violation of Sippy’s copyright and trademark on the film (the character names were ordered to be changed as well). To make things worse in the court of public opinion, numerous members of the cast and crew of “Sholay” spoke openly against “Aag”, meaning no one was particularly excited about the movie even before it hit theaters. The best parallel I can think of is whenever someone has done a remake of Hitchcock: audiences and critics are not usually receptive to the idea of readdressing films regarded as timeless.
Unsurprisingly, the movie was a massive critical and box office failure. After all of the production shenanigans, I honestly think it may have failed regardless of the quality of the movie. But, as it so happens, “Aag” is no masterpiece.
To start with, the movie is far too long for what it is, and is not structured in such a way that the length is justified. The run-time is 164 minutes, but the structured made it feel even more inflated from there. There were numerous points throughout the second and third acts where I thought the movie was coming to a conclusion, only to have the conflict fizzle out and the pieces on the board reset. To say that this was frustrating doesn’t cover it in the least, mostly because of the entirely uninteresting characters the audience is subjected to throughout.
While “Aag” has a fantastic villain character (Babban) played by Amitabh Bachchan, the rest of the cast is a stone’s throw from abysmal. Whenever Babban isn’t on-screen, the movie screeches to a halt underneath the shittiness of the acting and writing. The leading duo, who should carry the film, are two of the least interesting characters in the story. One of them primarily fills the role of comic relief (poorly) until the last act, whereas the other does less emoting than Keanu Reeves. There are love interests shoe-horned for both characters, most notably Gungroo, who might be the worst-played and worst-written character in the movie. She spends most of the movie either threatening violence on people or being harassed by one of the leads (named “Heero”, groaningly). She ultimately magically falls in love with “Heero” after a jarring musical number and a handful of shenanigans, because of course she would. There is one other decent character outside of Babban (Inspector Narsimha), but he is more passable than he is good, and he never owns a scene in the way Babban does.
You can tell that there is the skeleton of a decent movie buried underneath the layers of dull sediment of this film, but that just makes the experience all the more disappointing. It feels like someone took the story beats and concepts from a classic story, and then locked a bunch of unpaid interns in a room and demanded that they recreate the movie before they could get fed. Rushed, amateurish, and without any regard for an audience: that pretty much nails the writing issues with “Aag”.
I do not recommend watching “Aag”. There isn’t a lot of entertainment to squeeze out of this, and you could do far better things with the time you would spend watching this movie. The performance of Amitabh Bachchan as Babban is pretty delightfully over the top, but not good enough to redeem the movie as a whole. I haven’t seen “Sholay”, but I am willing to wager that it is a much better time than “Aag”.
Seven Hells
Last month, I had the pleasure of attending the Gateway Film Center’s premiere of Seven Hells: a collection of lauded horror short films that have made the festival circuit in recent years.
It is a real shame that short films rarely get significant distribution, because they can be a whole lot of fun: particularly in the horror genre. Seven Hells is a showcase of some of the best horror and horror-comedy short films out there, and is at its core an experimental attempt to promote them to a more casual theater-going audience. To say the least, the concept is well-intentioned: the films deserve a wider audience, and audiences deserve these films.
Seven Hells only has a loose frame between the segments, but it doesn’t need to be flashy: its strength is in the existing short films that make up the content, and they have already proved their muster to festival audiences. The connection between the segments is simple: each story is a tale of everything metaphorically (or literally?) going to hell for someone. It is simple, and it works.
The weaknesses, where they exist, are related to the mostly uncharted format of the movie. The short films vary wildly in tone, with some being campy horror-comedies (Killer Karts, Horrific) and others that are dead serious and macabre (Cold Turkey, Black Sugar). This causes a little bit of whiplash, but it doesn’t ultimately damage the collection as a whole. Would it be a better experience if it were solely focused on one style or the other? Probably, but I don’t think it would be dramatically different in the end, and there is something to be said for the collection showcasing the diversity within horror.
The pacing is somewhat hampered by the inclusion of credits within each segment (rather than being bookended on the entire collection), but that’s the extent of the complaints I have with Seven Hells. When it comes down to it, the intention of the movie was to expose some fine films to a more casual audience of horror fans, who would otherwise never have seen them. In that regard, I thought it was quite successful. After all, I’m a horror fan who can’t make it to film festivals, and I would not have seen this shorts without Seven Hells.
Speaking of which, here are the trailers for the seven short films that comprise Seven Hells:
Jack Attack
The dialogue in Jack Attack is really snappy, and the effects in this are top-notch. I love the original concept here, and it also features the rarity of a decent child actor.
Incident on Highway 73
This is suspense mastery, and yet another brilliantly original concept. I also thought this had some particularly brilliant sound work and cinematography that fantastically enhanced the tension.
Killer Karts
Seeing the trailer for this is what got me in the door to start with. It is a funny short without being overtly humorous, instead relying on the outlandishness of the concept. Killer grocery carts? Yes, thank you. It also manages to be of genuinely good quality, resisting the temptation to drift into Tromatic territory with its off-the-wall premise.
Cold Turkey
Certainly the darkest film in the collection, this was the only time I felt some real tonal whiplash during Seven Hells. That said, Cold Turkey has some astounding practical effects, and is frankly haunting in its depiction of a self-starving cannibal.
Blac k Sugar
Black Sugar was maybe the coolest stylistically out of the bunch, and is also the only one I recall to extensively use computer-generated special effects. I am typically a bigger fan of practical effects, but the CG here is used brilliantly to depict a hellish alien world. Black Sugar is yet another incredibly original concept, focusing on a group of teenagers experimenting with a mysterious drug.
Horrific
A clearly Sam Raimi inspired tale of one man’s struggle against a Chupacabra, this is an absolute blast. It is probably the shortest entry, but it might be the one that stuck with me the most. Next to perhaps Killer Karts, it is the funniest of the bunch.
Til Death
Seven Hells is the brainchild of Jason Tostevin, who contributes the final segment in the collection. Til Death has some great comedic acting and some really fantastic make-up effects, but there were a couple of things that bugged me about it story-wise. Unlike the others, it actually has a happy ending. That alone wouldn’t really bother me, but the characters in the segment are, in my opinion, the most loathsome in the collection (I’m including Cold Turkey in there). The main characters are all in unhappy marriages, and decide that they should all kill their wives to escape their respective hellish matrimonies. They are all childish and cruel, and the karmic system that underlies most horror stories would leave them to their hellish fates, and definitely not allow them to live happily ever after.
There is an implication that the characters mature over the course of murdering their wives and killing themselves, but you don’t really see it happen. The credits roll over happy images of the various married corpses, who have apparently re-found love after their deaths. It just didn’t feel right to me: they should have been doomed to an eternal life with their undead spouses to pay for their heinousness, but instead they learn to enjoy it.
All of that said, Til Death has some really great comedic moments, and it is exceptionally well-crafted. Honestly, I might just be over-thinking it: the film leans more towards comedy than horror, and I may have just wanted it to lean the other way. It also probably wasn’t the best capstone for the collection given the upbeat ending: after all, the theme of Seven Hells is about things going bad.
It is to be seen what sort of distribution Seven Hells will get, but my hope is that it will go far and wide. Even if it doesn’t, I hope that the concept isn’t abandoned: the format of Seven Hells is undoubtedly the best way to publicize short films to a larger audience, but it may some tinkering to make it more marketable overall. In any case, I whole-heartedly recommend checking it out if you can. Who knows, maybe it will pop up on Netflix one of these days?
IMDb Bottom 100: Breaking Wind
Breaking Wind
“Breaking Wind” is yet another “[Movie] Movie” (a term used for modern, lazy parody movies in the vein of “Scary Movie”) in the IMDb Bottom 100, joining “Miss Castaway”, “Epic Movie”, and “Disaster Movie”. I have basically exhausted everything I have to say about the inherent issues with this particularly abysmal genre, but “Breaking Wind” does at least have some specific issues all its own. First off, it is about farts.
“Breaking Wind” is a parody of the “Twilight” movies, deriving the title from one of the sequels (“Breaking Dawn”). As you can gather from the title, a large quantity of the attempted jokes in the film center around farting. There is what I would describe as an aggravating number of fart-related gags throughout the film. The few attempts at humor that aren’t directly fart-related are at least crass and lazy, or are so dependent on knowledge of the “Twilight” franchise that casual moviegoers are not going to understand them. Check out the following clip, in which Danny Trejo cameos to fart a bunch, reference random things, and parody what I assume was a specific scene in one of the “Twilight” movies:
Wasn’t that nauseating? The whole movie is pretty much like that. I wonder if this was the low point of Danny Trejo’s acting career?
On top of the lazy humor, “Breaking Wind” also suffers from the fact that it isn’t even the only “Twilight”-centered parody movie. Friedberg and Seltzer, the typical “[Movie] Movie” duo who were behind “Epic Movie” and “Disaster Movie”, released their own “Twilight” parody (“Vampires Suck”) a good year and change before “Breaking Wind” hit theaters. And, unbelievably, “Breaking Wind” writer/director Craig Moss has a worse track record than the Seltzer/Friedberg duo when it comes to parody films. His only other credit at the time was the annoyingly-named parody “The 41-Year-Old Virgin Who Knocked Up Sarah Marshall and Felt Superbad About It”, which has a whopping 2.7 on IMDb: only marginally better than “Breaking Wind.”
Not only is it lazy and second-rate, but “Breaking Wind” doesn’t seem to understand its audience either: for a movie that nearly requires knowledge of the “Twilight” franchise to follow, it is incredibly mean-spirited towards fans of the books and movies. The movie ends over clips pulled from YouTube of “Twilight” fans reacting ridiculously to “Twilight”-related events. It comes off as really uncomfortable and unnecessarily shitty to a group of people who could theoretically be buying tickets to the movie.
As with any of the modern generation of parody movies, there isn’t anything redeeming enough about “Breaking Wind” to justify recommending it. The humor is dated and crass when it does exist, which is not often. This one just needs to be chalked up and archived as yet another dumb parody movie, and never re-addressed again.
Misan[trope]y 