Boy, is there a lot to say about Leonard Part 6. In general, failed comedies are some of the hardest movies to sit through. They have one primary purpose: to draw laughs. If they aren’t doing that, they aren’t going to be saved by any other aspect of the movie, such as how a bad action movie might be saved by an impressively hammy villain. Leonard Part 6 is a rare exception in my opinion: it absolutely fails to get the laughs it aims for, but I genuinely enjoyed sitting through it. The movie was incompetently written and executed in such a way that I was in a state of awe through most of the film, which is better state than I had expected. There were points that I laughed, but it was either at the absurdity of the plot, the overacting, or the low quality of the effects every time. Regardless, I was able to sit through the movie easier than most of the Bottom 100 films I’ve been through so far.
When people have asked me if I have run into any pleasant surprises in the IMDb Bottom 100, this is usually the one movie that I mention. I have described it as akin to Douglas Adams’ “Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, if Adams had been a moron. There is an absurd element to the movie that has potential, but none of it is ultimately clever or capable of producing genuine laughter. For example, there are a number of instances in which Leonard (Bill Cosby) attempts to reconnect with his ex-wife. During these segments, the wife oddly covers Cosby in food (spaghetti if I recall correctly). It isn’t funny and it doesn’t make sense, but for some reason the movie plays it off like it should be hilarious. The situation is strange and unexpected, as are most of the happenings in the plot, but they aren’t funny beyond their inherent oddness. I found myself spending most of the movie wondering “what the hell is happening here?”, but I will say that I was never tempted to turn it off. It was a strange ride, but not one that I particularly regret taking.
The acting throughout the movie is very much constrained by the poor writing, but there are a few stand-outs. Joe Don Baker has a role as Leonard’s former boss, but he only shows up occasionally throughout the movie. His character is mostly there to catalyze the plot, but he manages to pull off a pretty entertaining sleazeball G-man despite limited screen time. Bill Cosby, who plays the lead, is probably one of the most forgettable people in the movie. Despite being a producer 0n the film, it doesn’t seem like he really wants to be in it. Given that he later disavowed the movie in post-production and has actively prevented it from getting a television release, he clearly isn’t a fan after the fact either. The villains (extreme animal rights activists, by the way) are pretty memorably hammy, but my personal favorite performances are by Leonard’s unexplained Jeeves-like butler and his nonsensical, vaguely eastern-European psychic consult. Neither character is necessary in the film at all, and pretty much only exist to make the movie that much stranger.
The plot to this movie is a bit difficult to explain. The movie starts with an assassination carried out by a rainbow trout, which is later explained as the action of a terrorist organization that has discovered how to mind control animals. This gets more convoluted as the plot develops, because the terrorists are animal rights activists. Why would extreme animal rights activists enslave animals to do their bidding? They seem to imply that this is going to liberate the animals in some way, but that is some confused logic that I don’t want to delve into. What is more important and perplexing is that vegans apparently explode into sawdust when exposed to raw meat in this universe. Yeah.
In any case, Bill Cosby’s Leonard is a retired super-agent who has apparently become extremely wealthy from doing covert government missions. His former employers are forced to turn to him to deal with the terrorist threat, and hijinks ensue as we follow Leonard through his mission. There is unexpected ballet, CGI ostrich action, a car with a tank cannon, and some very poorly executed explosions along the way.
I honestly can’t recommend this movie enough. It is a strange experience, and a complete train-wreck failure of a movie that is hard to look away from. Some apparently haven’t been able to enjoy this movie, but I thought there was some real entertainment value in it as an academic example of how not to make a comedic movie. You really have to just turn off all of your thought processes and embrace the confusion for this one. Just ride the ostrich.
Time Chasers, or Tangents, is yet another IMDb Bottom 100 movie that can attribute most of its popularity to Mystery Science Theater 3000. Personally, I don’t think it is nearly as bad as most of the other movies on the IMDB Bottom 100. I actually enjoy it as a movie pretty well, despite the film’s obvious shortcomings.
The biggest flaw in Time Chasers is that the film-makers clearly didn’t have the capability to execute the vision of the script. Ultimately, I think that almost entirely came down to a lack of funds. Overall, I am impressed at the product that they did manage to create given their limitations. It creates some humorous moments as they improvise a number of their sets, but they put more effort into it than some other similarly-cheap movies. I think that the film also falls victim to the times in retrospect, as the special effects that are used in the time travel sequences look incredibly cheesy now, not to mention the fashion.
The MST3k riff of the movie focuses a lot on what they see as a miscasting of the lead character. The actor certainly doesn’t strike as a typical film lead, but his character isn’t supposed to be an action hero. He is a physicist and a hobbyist pilot, so why would it be necessary for him to look like a movie star? I also imagine that the film couldn’t afford experienced actors anyway (I’m assuming that from the dialogue delivery), but that “flaw” isn’t something I hold against the movie. The fact that none of the actors deliver lines very well is another matter. Again, I think they were making due with what they had available. I’m impressed that the whole movie is as watchable as it is given the circumstances.
Despite the poor acting, mediocre (and over-reaching) script, and low budget, Tangents is a thoroughly watchable movie. It is by no means fantastic, but it did a pretty good job of keeping my attention. Their future segments come up very short due to their limitations, but bringing in American Revolution reenactors actually served them pretty well in creating their 1777 setting towards the conclusion.
As with any movie like this, a good hammy villain goes a long way in making the final product entertaining, and Tangents really lucked out there. The antagonist is a great corporate CEO bad guy, who seems to get progressively more evil as the movie goes on. The whole movie picks up whenever he is on screen, and he almost makes up for the dull romantic aspect of the plot.
In general, I can recommend this as an enjoyable “bad movie” watch. It isn’t on par with a legitimate release by any means, but it has enough going on to be both watchable and enjoyably incompetent, and the pacing never slows down to a crawl like many poorly made amateur films do. The incompetencies are mostly compartmentalized into areas that make the movie more entertaining, which is a pretty rare occurrence. The MST3k riff is a pretty good one, but this is a case where I don’t think it is necessary to enjoy the movie. If you want a slightly more obscure pick for a bad movie night, this is a swell candidate.
“Chairman of the Board” is a movie starring the infamous prop comedian known as Carrot Top. It is exactly what you expect.
…
Do I need to keep writing? Yes? OK, fine.
This is a movie that had absolutely no chance of succeeding, because its fatal flaw lies in its premise: it is a movie that (I assume) was designed around Carrot Top. There are lots of reasons that can lead to a movie falling on its face, but typically there is at least the nugget of an interesting movie idea buried at the core of a bad movie. This is not one of those cases.
I would actually be interested to know more about the story of how this movie got made. Who pitched it? Who put their money into it? More importantly, who greenlit this script when the only other credit to the writing team at the time was the atrocious “Leprechaun 2”, the worst of all of the Leprechaun movies (an impressive feat)? From some cursory IMDb digging, I noticed that the director of the film has a screenplay writing credit, which makes me wonder if he may have had a heavy hand in some rewriting. It clearly didn’t help much, but maybe there was an attempt to fix the unfixable.
There is unfortunately not much information out there about this movie that I can find. Most of what is out there is related to a Conan interview in which comedian Norm Macdonald lambasted the film’s premise prior to the release, and correctly labeled it “box office poison”. Apart from conjecture, there isn’t much solid information to be found. The IMDb trivia solely mentions that this was Carrot Top’s only starring role in a movie. Thank goodness.
Let’s get started with the plot autopsy (Plotopsy?).
Carrot Top’s character is introduced to the audience as an irresponsible man-child who spends all of his money on funding moronic personal inventions (props) instead of paying his rent. He refuses to get / hold down a job because…reasons. He likes to use his infinite free time to surf, which he also incorporates his props into. If I recall correctly, he invents an emergency break for his surfboard. I’ll let someone else figure out the physics on that one.
The plot appears when it is made clear that Carrot Top’s character, Edison (ugh), is about to get rightfully evicted by his landlady. He fails to hold down a series of jobs over the course of a montage, during which I assume the audience is expected to laugh. He also has all of his useless inventions rightfully rejected by a representative of an invention firm of some sort. At this point, it seems like Edison is going to hit rock bottom, and may be forced to mature in order to start piecing his life together as an adult.
Instead, he serendipitously befriends the head of a major research and development company, who then promptly dies for the convenience of the plot. For the further convenience of the plot, this well-regarded and now-dead businessman decided to leave his legacy and the future direction of his company to the strange person he met at the beach recently, and decided to change his will to reflect this fact just before his death. And so, Edison gets a job as the head of a major corporation.
Most of the rest of the movie could be summarized as “Carrot Top won’t shut up, and shenanigans ensue.”
Through those various shenanigans, Edison acquires a love interest (one of his employees) and sews the seeds of his destruction through being massively incompetent and trusting someone who clearly despises him. He does have one “brilliant” invention: a frozen dinner that comes with a television screen and a feature program. Yeah, it is a TV dinner. Yeah, it is a bad idea. Yes, they play it off as a good idea that is wildly successful.
The next section of the movie can be summed up as “Sabotage and just desserts.”
In this section of the movie (my favorite), all of Edison’s incompetencies and his ill-placed trust come back to ruin him. He is ultimately betrayed, fired, evicted, and left unconscious on a beach. Unfortunately, the movie does not end here.
The movie ends with the corporate antagonist being exposed for his sabotage of Edison, the board overthrowing him, and Edison turning down the only job ever genuinely offered to him in his life. He recommends his love interest take over his position at the head of the company (the board does so), and instead of ethically deciding to find employment elsewhere or remain an unemployed dreamer indefinitely, takes a job underneath her in the R&D department, maintaining the dodgy nature of their professional/personal relationship. They joke about this in front of the entire board of the company, and everyone laughs and plays along.
In case you were curious, all of the writers of this movie still get work in television as of 2013, and the director is attached to the already much anticipated “Jingle All The Way 2” starring Larry the Cable Guy, which is slated to go straight to hellDVD next year.
I can’t recommend this movie. It is almost worth seeing just for the spectacle of its strange and unlikely existence, but not quite. This movie is actually out there in a bunch of “family fun” DVD compilations, so it is shockingly still getting circulation after all of this time. Unless you have a high tolerance for both bad movies and the constant, nail-on-chalkboard sound of Carrot Top’s voice spewing nonsense dialogue, when you should really never seek out this movie.
I think that I have lost count of how many times I have watched this movie. Just to be clear, it isn’t because I like it. This is one of those movies that is so boring and forgettable that I keep forgetting about major aspects of the movie, so I wind up watching parts of it again. As I write this, I watched the movie most recently within the last week. However, I don’t recall a pretty important aspect of the ending. Still, I’ll do what I can to lay this one out for you all.
“I Accuse My Parents” is framed around a court case, in which a young man is on trial for a murder. We open with the judge prompting the accused to give testimony in his own defense, to which he dramatically claims, well, “I accuse my parents”. Then he poorly defends the claim through recollections, and that is our movie.
First off, the setting has the potential to be interesting. There are some great movies out there that use the progress of a court case to tell the story, and they often go to interesting places where they play with unreliable narrators as they are put on the stand. This movie missed a brilliant opportunity to play with the unreliable narrator concept in particular, because it is established relatively early on that the accused is accustomed to lying on a regular basis (he blames his parents for making him pick up that habit, more or less). Despite that, there is no reason given for the audience to be skeptical of any of his testimony, and no one speaks to counter his recollection of events. Basically, the entire courtroom takes the testimony of the accused, a self-admitted grandiose liar, as gospel recollection of all events. Admittedly, this is a simple message movie that isn’t going to delve too deep into anything, but this is one of the most ridiculous courtrooms I’ve seen in a film.
The characters are all very one-dimensional and flat, which contributes greatly to the difficultly of sitting through the movie. The lead character is the only one who really changes in any way, and even his developments are shallow. He goes from being an ace student to a charlatan quasi-gangster and back again over the course of what I believe was only a handful of days, and there is only one scene where we actually see him reconsider his actions. All of that said, the accessory cast are all similarly dull. It is possible that the poor portrayals should be a criticism aimed at the script and the director, because it almost seems like they were instructed and boxed in to acting like they were in a cheesy PSA (this was the 40s, I assume they didn’t know any better). Regardless of where the fault lies, the characters come off as very uninteresting and unconvincing. The only exceptions to this are the parents (the ones he “accuses”, if you recall). The mother character is an alcoholic party animal, who is played up to the maximum. I really wish she had more screen time, because the scene where she drunkenly crashes a PTA meeting is one of the only thoroughly watchable bits of the movie. There is also a great segment early in the movie where the mother and father bicker after coming home in the evening. The father character is a biting, sniping, sexist, miserable suit of some kind. He fires a few verbal darts at the mother, but he generally just blends into the background with the rest of the accessory cast outside of a select scene or two. In his case, the character is supposed to be generally absentee, so I can kind of understand him not standing out or getting a ton of time on screen. Still, I doubt it was a creative decision to make him particularly dull.
So, here comes the bit I don’t remember. As the plot progresses, the lead character gains a love interest while in the midst of one of his lying binges. She is connected to the owner(?) of the club where she performs (yeah, we get a musical number in this) semi-romantically, who also is into organized crime in one way or another. This mob dude recruits the protagonist into doing some sort of menial criminal work (you can tell how well I am remembering all of this, I’m sure). Mob dude connects that there is romantic shenanigans a-brewing between protagonist and the club singer, and decides to remove our “hero” from the equation. At this point, something happens. The love interest breaks off from the lead at the behest of the mobster, and other things happen. Protagonist-liar-pants runs away, and unsuccessfully attempts to rob a diner in one of the worst attempts at a criminal act ever played out on screen. The cook manages to talk him down (and subsequently hires him as an assistant) over the course of the attempted robbery. Good work there, ace.
After hanging around in the diner for some unclear amount of time, he returns home. Things happen, and he ultimately faces off against the mobster character. If I recall correctly, the mobster is killed over the course of the altercation, which is the reason for the trial.
That is the best I can recollect of this movie without looking anything up, and I have probably watched this 6 times, and 3 for sure within the last couple of months. This movie is painfully boring to watch, and the MST3k helps less than you would hope it would. It isn’t as bad of a film as “The Starfighters”, I could compare it more to “The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies”, but without the cheesy effects and hammy acting that provided the few saving graces for it. “I Accuse My Parents” is really just a prime example of the message movies that were popular way back when. They weren’t deep, they weren’t artsy, and there was never much thought put into the acting or the plots in them. Like “The Starfighters” this movie is more like a historical tome than anything: it is an artifact of cinema, which I think would otherwise have been completely forgotten if not for the attention brought to it by MST3k. If watching this sort of cheesy message movie appeals to you ironically, or you enjoy cackling at the outdatedness of these sorts of films in general, then “Reefer Madness” is a much more famous and much more entertaining movie to check out. There are even some more recent edits of it that colorize the weed smoke to be a toxic green (IIRC), which makes the whole thing much more hilarious. That is a fun movie to sit through, “I Accuse My Parents” is not. However, if you are a MSTie, then this is a riff worth checking out. I think it is one of Joel’s best, but I am also firmly on Team Mike.
“Ed” is a thoroughly incompetent piece of work, but not any less watchable that the countless other dumb animal-centric family movies out there as far as I can tell. The effects are all a bit worse than you might expect (all of the chimp effects are embarrassing), but the jokes are exactly the sort that you should anticipate from a movie like this. Poop jokes and pants getting pulled down are pretty standard fare throughout, and cracks about back hair pop up constantly. Real deep stuff.
The writing beyond the jokes is horrible, with things happening with very little set up or explanation. For instance, the chimp knows how to play baseball because he was owned by Mickey Mantle apparently? Did Mickey Mantle train chimpanzees as a hobby? There is also a point towards the end of the movie where the team’s owner sells Ed to a circus on the eve of the championship game. Why throw a serious wrench into your team’s championship run, and give up the established staple of your marketing to boot? At least, why do it at that time? Wouldn’t his value go up even more if he had a pennant to his name? Was he a pending free agent aiming to test the waters of the open market? Also, the movie opens with Matt LeBlanc’s character at an open tryout for minor league baseball. He states that he never played baseball on any level, yet he clearly loves the sport and is very capable of playing. How? When did he gain these talents? Why is he trying out now after all of these years of zero interest in organizational play? Is there a catalyst for his actions? If his parents were about to lose the farm, that would actually put some stakes into this film. But no, the parents just disappear from the film after the opening segment. They don’t even show up to any games, shockingly.
The acting didn’t actually seem all that bad outside of the token child actor and the eponymous chimp. Let’s be honest, what on earth could any actor have done in a movie about a baseball-playing chimp?
I’m not sure how this director wound up with this job. There is bound to be a bizarre story behind it, because he has exclusively worked on documentaries outside of this movie. Honestly, this would have had more potential to be funny if it were played out as a sports mockumentary about the rise and fall of a third base playing chimp’s professional baseball career. Anyway, the director’s experience at least explains why the whole film just seems…off.
Last huge problem with this movie: the title. Give me a pun. Give me a dumb joke. Give me something relating to animals, chimps, baseball, sports, or anything actually relevant to the movie. Don’t just make the title the chimp’s common, human name. How is that going to trick anyone into watching this movie? Come on, put in a little effort here folks.
When I froze the Bottom 100, this was sitting low at #85, which I was somewhat surprised by. This movie has problems, but I’m not clear on how this is dramatically worse than the endless Air Bud knockoffs/sequels or Cop Dog. Sure, this is the bottom tier of the animal-centric family movies, but you can’t exactly have high aspirations for any of them. That all said, this movie is definitely miserably bad (and one of the worst movies I have sat through so far), but it is plenty possible to sit through if you absolutely must. I just have a particular dislike for family movies, so I am admittedly a bit biased against this thing straight out of the gate.
By the way, it is on Netflix if that sounds like your kind of thing.
The Final Sacrifice is one of those perfect B-movies. This is the sort of thing that you hope to find when you take a gamble on an unheard-of DVD or VHS.
I’ve been taking my time writing this review because I really wanted to find an unriffed copy of this film. The MST3K crew clearly dug this movie up out of nothingness and made it into something absolutely iconic. This is probably the best riff of the Mike Nelson era, which is saying a lot. Unfortunately, the popularity of the riff means that it is very easy movie to track down, but not without the charming silhouettes of the snarky trio.
I’m still going to keep my eyes open for a unriffed copy, but I also want to keep moving forward with the list. So, The Final Sacrifice.
The acting is bad, but in a good way. The lead is very miscast for a hero character, but does what he can with it. The villain is outstandingly over the top, and has one of the most ridiculously evil voices you will hear. If anyone actually has a voice like that, there is simply nothing else they can do with their life apart from evil and treachery. Without the riffs, I would be willing to bet that the villain character would be the saving grace of the whole movie. According to the IMDb trivia, none of the actors got paid for this movie, so I have to applaud them for the effort they did put into this thing.
The writing is honestly just really silly. Whoever named the lead character “Zap Rowsdower” need to be given an official award, and subsequently never allowed to write anything ever again. The plot is indescribably baffling, but at the very least the title isn’t completely irrelevant to it. The mystery element of the story isn’t so bad as the movie gets started, but the payoff on it is equal parts predictable and shallow. I really don’t want to spoil the movie, because everyone should watch this thing, but I will say that it is a great, dumb B-movie ending.
Right now this is sitting at #66 in the IMDb Bottom 100. I don’t think this is going to fall out of the Bottom 100, but it has been falling a bit recently. Honestly, I think it deserves a spot on the list just because of the entertainment value of the riff. Without the riff, no one would even know about this movie. At the core, this was a student movie made for absolutely nothing, and probably would never have qualified for such a “prestigious” list without the MST3K attention it received. Once again, I think the position of this movie on the Bottom 100 is a nod the the influence of the MST3K team on the entire hobby of riffing on bad movies.
I can recommend this riff (at the very least) to anyone. I think this is a fantastic introduction to Mystery Science Theater 3000, and an absolutely hilarious job. I might not recommend the movie to Canadians, because the movie may hit a little to close to home. City-resurrecting cults are a very serious concern up there, or so I hear.
What is there to say about this? The whole run of _____ Movie films are the same in concept and execution. They are parody patchworks that wouldn’t be able to cut it in the deep and prestigious marketplace of ideas that is YouTube. When a “joke” in one of these movies isn’t a direct reference to something in pop culture at the time, it is some sort of gross-out gag or crass visualization. Usually the jokes are an underwhelming and tiring combination of both of those things.
The acting comes off as particularly creepy in this movie, as the leads are supposed to be portraying children in the story. At least, it seemed implied to be the case. There are occasional scenes involving a high school (I think?), which makes things less clear as far as the character ages go. In any case, it is uncomfortable to picture the characters as children in a number of the scenarios they are put into, and the whole movie gets dark very fast with that in mind.
Not that the filmmakers cared, but there is no way any of these movies can stand the test of time. They date themselves with their references, which as stated before, comprise the entirety of the “humor” in the films. Watching this movie today, I was reminded of blockbusters that have already dropped entirely out of the public consciousness. There was one particular reference to the trailer of the previous Superman reboot, a franchise that has notably already been re-rebooted. A good parody movie can actually stay timeless, even while poking at then-current films. Airplane! is the obvious example of this. The jokes and humor are vastly independent of the movies that are being lampooned, so they stay entertaining through the years. The ____ Movie franchise has clearly failed in this regard, because the films are already incredibly dated only a few years after their releases.
Anyway, this is not an entertaining movie. A failed comedy is the worst kind of cinematic train-wreck, and doesn’t typically have the potential redeeming values that failed dramas and horrors can provide (good practical effects, hammy villains, etc). I don’t recommend this movie to anyone, even if you are the sort that is endlessly entertained by poop jokes.
The one interesting aspect of this film (that gets a disappointing amount of screen-time and really dumb dialogue, as you would expect) is Crispin Glover playing Willie Wonka. I honestly think he fit the role excellently, and firmly believe he would have been a finer casting choice for the character in the remake than Johnny Depp. He is a more genuinely eccentric and unpredictable sort of actor, and that kind of volatility is part of what made Wilder’s incarnation so memorable in my opinion. That sort of makes me even more disappointed in this movie though, because he seems so wasted in this mess. It also reminded me of Burton’s attempted Willie Wonka movie, which isn’t something I am ever going to enjoy. Ugh.
I am a little curious as to how this one in particular has hit the bottom 100 while others in the franchise have not. They have all seemed the same to me, and this one didn’t seem much worse than the others. Maybe the fact that it is such a re-tread on the style is part of why the votes for it are lower. Then again, it might be because all of the primary films lampooned are completely forgettable. Most of the framing of the film pokes at The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, which I don’t recall being that big of a hit. I don’t honestly care why this is so lowly ranked among the ____ Movies, I just know that I want them all to burn in a cleansing fire as a sacrifice to the Comedy Gods.
This is one that I actually hadn’t seen before, but proved to be amazingly bad. I have no idea how I had missed this one for so long.
Let’s start with the special effects. The aliens in the movie look completely ridiculous, to the point where rubber suits were genuinely a better option. At the time, the effects might have looked truly grand. But, as we all know, effects from this era have not aged gracefully at all. Come to think of it, the aliens look nearly identical to the animated chess pieces from Star Wars, which is appropriately one of the worst effects in Star Wars. All of the laser effects are pretty laughable as well, though I will give them credit for the many objects they decided to set on fire throughout making this movie. That was pretty awesome in a lowly, Michael Bay sort of way.
However, that is all kind of overshadowed by the really bad makeup and props in the movie. For example, everything about the lead character’s design was horribly botched (we’ll get to that in a minute). The “laserblast” gun looks preposterous, and is clearly a hodgepodge of whatever was laying around in someone’s garage. Given it is the basis of the movie’s title, I think some effort should have been put into it. There is also an infamous sequence where the lead blows up a Star Wars sign on the side of the road. It isn’t a billboard or anything, just a blank sign that said “Star Wars”. Apparently this was added in after the movie was complete, because of someone’s overconfidence I would assume.
The makeup when the lead character goes into…uh…hyper mode(?) is some of the laziest work I have ever seen in a movie. Someone had the bright idea to just paint the guy’s face green, and then leave it at that. How did they think that would be acceptable? His “mutation” while wearing the laser gun specifically turns his face green, with no other physical effects. Brilliant.
Speaking of the “mutation” the lead character goes through, there really is quite a presentation of bad acting here. When he is in this altered state, the lead actor spends most of his time madly flailing his arms. He occasionally fires the gun when he can keep his arms still long enough, but he goes right back to the flapping afterwords. The rest of the acting in the movie is unremarkable, save for the two stoned cops thrown in for comic relief. Speaking of which, does the guy on the right here look like Sean Penn to anyone else (http://tinyurl.com/lhpltbo)? Anyway, they ham it up a little bit, but the rest of the cast is pretty flat.
The writing isn’t spectacular, but the story idea has some promise I suppose: A kid with a chip on his shoulder finds a superweapon that subsequently corrupts him and leads him to seek vengeance for perceived offenses. I think the ending could have been much more interesting and less anticlimactic, but this was clearly a movie that no one bothered to put a whole lot of effort into. Why would I be surprised?
It should be no shock that there are a number of other goofs and errors throughout the movie, but I’m not going to put the effort into enumerating them. This movie is bad, but it is definitely the good kind of bad. This is the sort of film that you can watch and laugh at, which is always what you are hoping to find when sifting through bad movies. Again, the MST3K riff is brilliant on this movie, and adds a lot to the entertainment value. I can certainly recommend it if you are looking for an awesomely bad watch.
The trailer has everything you need to see about Lawnmower Man 2. The only thing missing is the cheesy #2 villain who is actually the main antagonist for most of the movie, but overall the trailer hits all of the (very few) highlights to be found in the trash heap of a movie.
Honestly, this movie is horrible. No arguments there. It isn’t, however, the worst I’ve seen, and by a pretty significant margin at that. The acting is hammed up by the bad guys and generally shittily done by the kids, but the writing and the effects realistically killed the film quite thoroughly before the actors ever came upon its corpse. The editing is also exquisitely bad, which was apparently the result of a serious hack job postmortem by producers in a hopeless attempt to make the film semi-marketable. Despite all of that, it is moderately watchable due to a handful of bright spots.
As I mentioned earlier, this came out in 1996. Independence Day and Twister also came out that year. Watch the trailers of these three movies and compare the effects. It is unbelievable that they came out within months of each other. This movie belongs in the 80’s in the worst possible way, and missed it by the better part of a decade. Interestingly, that makes this movie both anachronistically terrible and entertaining at the same time. Something about those crappy early 90s computer effects is just dopily charming, y’know?
I spend a lot of time pondering what makes bad movies bad. I think the biggest issue with this one, beyond the script and even the effects, is the general fact that it is so misplaced in time. It was a relic in regards to special effects when it came off the presses, and to make matters worse, there wasn’t any call or need for a sequel to the original in the first place. No one was clamoring for a follow up to “Lawnmower Man”, and if there were people doing that, no one could hear them from their basements. It was just a bad idea from the start that someone decided to roll with.
Speaking of rolling, let’s compare this to Rollerball (2002), which I can’t help but do for some reason. It was also a movie bringing back a “franchise” that no one ever even sort of cared about, which is a notable similarity. However, the premise of Rollerball actually had some promise for an interesting movie, and it subsequently managed to disappoint every expectation. To Lawnmower Man 2’s credit, at least no one expected anything exciting or interesting from it (at least I hope they didn’t). The two movies also share legendarily miserable story pacing, overly stylized settings, and two of the most boring dystopias in recent cinematic history. So, I suppose they have more in common than they should, given Rollerball came along many years later. You are supposed to learn from the failures of your predecessors, folks.
As a concluding note, this must be in the running for one of the worst sequels ever made. I’ll keep that in mind at least, because American Psycho 2 is sitting on my kitchen table. Not in the bottom 100, but maybe it should be? If you have other recommendations for awful sequels I can watch, I’d love to hear them. However, I’m not planning to watch Christmas Vacation 2.
Well, there isn’t much to say for this movie. This is one of those movies that relies on massive amounts of stock footage just to get by, and it makes the whole thing just about unwatchable. It can only just barely qualify as a movie. It is a series of uninteresting scenes interspersed with stock footage of planes (mostly in the act of refueling). It reminded me of a B-movie I recently watched called Frogs, in which stock footage of animals starts attacking the people living in a remote swamp. That is actually an overall enjoyable crap movie though, making it nothing at all like The Starfighters.
The acting, when there is acting, is not exactly your typical fare of most B-movies. It feels and sounds more like a classic social hygiene films, but without the entertaining cheese and vapid moral message. It isn’t as over the top as Reefer Madness, as it is quite a bit more subdued in regards to the tone and acting. I think all of the military style throughout the movie gives it that rigid quality, and prevents anyone from being particularly interesting. The same pretty much goes for the writing, it is just completely forgettable. The plot is not very deep, mostly just a father and a son arguing over whether bombers or fighters are cooler (fighters obviously, right?). The whole thing just doesn’t entertain in the slightest.
If you took Dr Strangelove and cut everything but the stock footage of airplanes refueling over calming music, and repeated that for an hour, you would have something pretty close to The Starfighters
I actually don’t think this belongs on the Bottom 100 (#68 currently), because there is no reason a movie like this should have enough votes to qualify. I would bet there are countless movies on par to this from the early 60s, but they have all been rightfully forgotten. It isn’t one of the worst movies ever made: it is a slice of history, a relic of an extinct style of film. This should absolutely have the low rating that it does, but I think it almost deserves to exist on a different plane than the other movies on the Bottom 100. The vote quota exists in theory to prevent the endless numbers of movies like this from flooding the Bottom 100 list. The list would be absolutely overrun with unwatchable social hygiene movies and homemade YouTube films that don’t deserve any kind of recognition on a list of this kind.
At the same time, this movie does belong on this list. This is a movie that is absolutely saved by the MST3K riff in every sense. Not only does it make the movie watchable, but this is one of those films that would have been completely forgotten if not for the MST3K treatment. I think that fact enough gives it an understandable case for being on a list like this. MST3K made this movie memorable, and turned it into more than what it is on the surface. I feel the same about movies like Red Zone Cuba, which shockingly does not have a spot in the Bottom 100. The votes for this movie aren’t about the movie itself, but a testament to the influence of Mike, Joel, and the Bots on the hobby and culture around terrible movies today.
*this is the first video I did, and is much longer and rougher around the edges than the others*
I decided to repost this video, primarily because I spend quite a bit of time talking about Devil Fish and The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-up Zombies in there. As for Boggy Creek 2, I feel like it is a comparably boring movie to those two. Nothing particularly stands out in the movie, and they show the monster far too early on for there to be much suspense or anticipation. The effects and acting are both typical 0-budget fair, and there just isn’t much else to say about it. There is apparently an entire sub-market of Sasquatch movies out there that you can delve into if that seems up your alley though.
This movie is Sharktopus if it was made in the 1980’s Italy. Yow.
It was obviously a Jaws knockoff in concept, but it clearly went very wrong. Everything moves very slowly in this movie, and all of the plot lines are equally boring. None of the dialogue is very good, and there is tons of bad science loosely thrown around to try to explain the squid-shark thing. I particularly like that it is supposedly going to break down into individual cells and reform into countless copies of itself if they don’t destroy it within a set amount of time. That is some impressive garbage writing. When it comes down to it, the writing is definitely at the rotten core of this movie, everything else was just orbiting it. I don’t even have anything to say about the general plot. There are scientists doing something. Some bad scientist made a sharktopus for some vague military reason. Sharktopus is eventually stopped. End on freeze frame of elated laughing.
As bad creature movies often do, the monster was shown far too early on here, which is always an issue if the monster is the key to the film. On top of that, it looked really damn goofy. It looked good as far as quality goes, particularly for a movie like this, but it the design of the thing was horrendous. It didn’t look intimidating or frightening, it just looked…odd. As the dialogue loves to remind everyone, it is clearly not a shark. Despite that, one of the most common alternate titles of this movie is simply “Shark”. Good job there, folks. Aside from the monster, the blood effects used are really shoddy. There is a point where a character is shot and instantaneously has clearly fake blood dried on his shirt. Just lazy work all around there.
As with any Italian movie aimed to a US audience, there is bad dubbing here. It is better than some movies for sure, but it is definitely a long way from good. If you are used to watching crappily dubbed movies, it isn’t particularly jarring. For a casual audience, I’m sure it would be distractingly noticeable though. The acting is pretty much standard fare for this sort of movie, but it is pretty overwhelmed by the dubbing regardless.
This is another one of those movies that is so entertaining in concept that it is baffling how they messed it up to the point of it being boring. Showing the monster early hurt for sure, the bad effects hurt, the dubbing hurt, but the inability of the writing to keep this movie going at a decent pace was absolutely fatal to the film. A movie that ends with a sharktopus being torched with flamethrowers shouldn’t be so absolutely unwatchable. There isn’t much else to add, this is just a thoroughly boring movie to sit through. There are too many dull attack scenes throughout the movie, which means that there is no suspense and no stakes involved at the climax. It thus makes the climax of the movie monotone with the rest of the film, which makes it feel even longer than the movie actually is. All of the attacks even look the exact same for the most part. Jaws goes after a few different sort of targets to give some variation, which makes the attack scenes more interesting to watch. No such luck here.
This movie is currently #48, which places it very close to …Mixed Up Zombies. There are some definite similarities between the two, but I would give the edge slightly to Devil Fish for reasons I don’t entirely understand. They are both similarly boring and poorly paced, and both have an interesting enough premise. I suppose the flamethrower scene, lack of poorly shot musical scenes, and mostly mediocre camera work puts Devil Fish just ahead of …Mixed Up Zombies in regards to entertainment value.
I don’t understand why on earth this had to be a musical. All of the numbers are distracting, poorly shot, horribly executed, and they drag out the story much longer than it has any need to go. I never thought I would praise Girl in Gold Boots, but it looks like a professional musical production compared to this mess.
Related to the musical numbers, the costuming is surprisingly dull given the setting of the movie at a carnival. The makeup on the antagonist is way over the top though, which I see as an all or nothing thing: either go all out with the makeup and costumes or don’t. The MST3K folks make a really big deal of the hair in this movie. Personally, I think it is just a relic of the era it was made in, but it does look pretty hilarious in retrospect.
The cinematography in this movie is just straight bad. There are POV roller coaster shots that are excessively shaky to the point of causing nausea. There are superimposed images on superimposed images in an attempt to look surreal. Worst of all, the performance scenes are just inexcusably poorly shot for something billed as a musical (again, why?). There are also excessively dramatically angled shots during the initial palm reading scene, which the MST3K guys hilariously riffed without saying a word: they all just leaned dramatically in a given direction to imitate the shot. Personally, it reminded me a little of the Lord of the Rings ripoff scene in House of the Dead, in that it immediately brought to mind the intimidating shot of General Ripper behind his desk in Doctor Strangelove (this one: http://tinyurl.com/n2psd6j). I don’t think this one was nearly so blatant or intentional though, it didn’t take me out of the movie at all. It still looked pretty bad though, without any doubt. It just totally missed the mark that they were aiming for.
There isn’t much to say about the acting apart from that it was 60’s style cheesy. None of it was good, although the villain hammed it up a little bit. Nothing stood out like Torgo in Manos for sure. I actually think if the villain had played it up a little bit more, this would have been a little easier to sit through.
As it stands, the pacing of the plot in this movie just killed me. It has musical numbers chained to both ankles, and can barely hobble along through the run time. There are scenes that are too long, and plenty of footage that isn’t necessary at all throughout the movie, like San Francisco stock shots in The Room. I think this movie could be recut into something slightly better, but only slightly. There just isn’t quite enough decent content in this for a full-length quality movie.
I do like the premise here, though. Pre-Romero zombie movies are interesting to bump into, and pull from the classic zombie lore that is mostly forgotten by cinema. This sticks to the mind control / voodoo aspects of classic zombieism pretty well, and could have been a good horror movie with a different director, writer, cast, and 100% less musical numbers. You know, a different movie entirely.
This is another one I hadn’t seen before, and expected very little from. I interestingly have way more to say about it than I could have imagined I would going into it. From what I had seen in reviews of the movie, it is criticized for being essentially a string of loud noises and colorful images without any actual substance behind it. That is absolutely accurate and inarguable. This movie is as vapid as movies come.
However, there’s something that seeps out of every goofy, ridiculous pore of this movie: nostalgia. This movie suffers from the same issue that Lawnmower Man 2 does, in that it is completely misplaced in time. It is a 2005 movie trying to recreate the success of a 1994 movie that in turn relied entirely on long-expired, Tex Avery style cartoon humor left over from the mid-century. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such an anachronistic film.
The longing for a return to simplistic cartoonish violence hangs over the movie, which gives it an oddly sad tone at times despite the constant stream of bright colors and noises. Jamie Kennedy’s character is clearly an avatar for the film’s writer, who (unsurprisingly) was a struggling cartoon writer, working on shows like “CatDog” and “Aaahh!!! Real Monsters” in the 90s. When things are actually focused in on the lead character, there is an interesting metamovie to dig into. There is a lot of honesty written into the character throughout the movie, particularly before the zaniness gets put into high gear. I really felt bad for the writer of this movie, because it has to really suck to suck at the thing that you most love doing. I get the feeling there are some really unfunny original ideas in this guy’s head that have been rightfully and routinely shot down throughout his entire career. He doesn’t realize that his ideas are bad though, because they are just like the cartoons he watched as a kid and loved (and went stale decades ago). I would bet that he has been fired after a flopped pitch meeting before, not unlike in the movie. If you watch it from that angle and ignore the near-plagiarized cartoon that makes up most of the movie, it is actually a mildly interesting (and very depressing) movie.
If you are a fan of the old Tex Avery Looney Tunes stuff, I still couldn’t recommend this movie to you. I can recommend that you go on an “Animaniacs” bender, because that show knew how to pay homage to the past while still being original and funny. I dearly wish that I had spent this movie’s run time watching “Animaniacs”…
On to more failures in this movie:
I’m not going to gripe on the acting. Jamie Kennedy was absolutely devastated by the outcome of this film, and it is clear he is doing what he can with what he was given. And I didn’t hate Cumming as Loki, surprisingly. His costuming was, at best, distractingly stupid though. (Oh yeah, this movie involves Norse mythology by the way. I want to treat it as canon with the Marvel movie universe pretty bad) Everyone else was just…there. Steven Wright was actually a pretty convincing scumbag boss, who oddly never faced a comeuppance. He didn’t have much screen time to speak of, however, and Mr. “Super Sounds of the 70s” has a knack for lulling into the backdrop with that voice. The real problem with this movie in regards to acting were the…nonhuman?…actors.
It is no shock that some of the people behind Cats and Dogs were involved in this godawful mess. The special effects are absolutely horrendous, and look like they could have been lifted directly from Cats and Dogs, which was released a number of years prior to this one. Once again, this movie is completely lost in time: A 90s movie with bad early 00s CGI and 40s cartoon writing. The practical effects didn’t look so bad on the actors, but the CGI dog and baby were just a atrocious, and they were regrettably the primary focus of the film. There isn’t much else to say, except it looked really damn bad and distracting.
This movie is sitting at 38 in the bottom 100 currently. I can’t argue with that placement, primarily because of the disparity of quality I’ve seen among the movies I’ve hit so far. This was less generally boring than Lawnmower Man 2 (to be covered in Part 5) and less rage-inducing than Pledge This! for sure, but not fun to watch by any means. I think it belongs in a special cage on display as an example of how humor needs to evolve to survive, and as a warning to not make unnecessary sequels to already bad movies.
There’s not a whole lot to say about this one. I actually don’t hate the story to Soultaker, it is just executed really poorly all around. The soultakers themselves are really unconvincingly done up, and the “souls” (read: glowsticks) are just silly.
There isn’t a whole lot of tension to the movie for some reason, despite them being chased down and running against a clock. I think the movie really needs to be shorter, and perhaps cut a little better to build up suspense. The movie just does a bad job in pacing, and it doesn’t help that everything moves slowly in the movie anyway. This is a movie where the riffs don’t even really help the film much, though they don’t do a bad job with it.
The acting doesn’t particularly hurt the movie, but I feel like if someone had put in the effort to go overboard, it would have been much more watchable. Maybe not better though, to be perfectly honest.
This is sitting at #41 in the Bottom 100 right now. I’m not going to argue with that, but it is a very forgettable movie. I’ve probably watched it five times at one point or another, and the only things I have ever remembered about it were the glow stick souls and Joe Estevez in a leading role. Not one I can recommend.
Reviews/Trivia of B-Movies, Bad Movies, and Cult Movies.
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Misan[trope]y 