Oh my God, we made it!  Or no wait, I made it!  What did you do?  Nothing, that’s what (that’s not fair, you did read it).  But here we are, Bad Movie March is officially behind us (or it will be in a few hundred words or so).  It was certainly an experience.  Thirteen films, none of them legitimately “good,” but several of them genuinely enjoyable (although not in the ways they were intended to be).  Movies like Plan 9 From Outer Space, The Room, Battlefield Earth, Gamer, and Troll 2 countered ineptitude with sheer enthusiasm, making for delightful movie-watching experiences (with the right mindset, that is).

Movies like Meet The Spartans, Jennifer’s Body, The Happening, and The Ugly Truth, on the other hand, paired gross incompetence with a misguided method of filmmaking making it impossible to even enjoy them ironically.  Others like Twilight barely evoked a response due to a complete lack of energy on anybody’s part.  And The Wicker Man possessed an energy unique unto itself, making for an experience that will never be replicated.  But the prize for worst movie of Bad Movie March goes to Remember Me for having the audacity to go from agonizingly boring melodrama to a last act that is plain insulting and induced sheer rage.  For being profoundly misguided on all points, Remember Me beats frontrunner Meet The Spartans due to the fact that money and effort were put into the filmmaking process, making it that much worse by comparison.

Today’s entry probably would have taken the cake had I not watched it through the filter of Joel, Tom Servo, and Crow (CROOOOW!).  Manos: The Hands of Fate concerns a family getting lost on their way to a vacation home and stumbling across a house in the middle of the desert seemingly occupied by a deformed individual named Torgo (his deformity is a set of giant knees, apparently he was supposed to be a Satyr, which doesn’t come across at all).  Torgo lets them stay the night even though he says his master won’t like that even though his master is dead (but not in the way we think of being dead).

Torgo’s master is an undead… thing, it’s not specified, who has a horde of similarly undead wives, and none of them are pleased that Torgo let a man in the house, so they decide to kill the man and the little girl, and then turn the mother into yet another undead wife.  Some of the wives don’t want to kill the child, and after a lengthy wrestling match (“This is probably the only reason the movie got made” says Crow) they decide to leave the child alive, kill the father, and punish Torgo.

And that’s the whole movie, pretty much.  If that seems simple, you’re right!  There are several loooooong dry sequences that serve no purpose other than to pad the runtime.  There are several instances where The Satellite of Love gang, given nothing to work with, can do nothing other than to repeatedly state the movie’s title (“Sooo… Manos.” “The Hands of Fate.”).  Even the on-camera interstitials eschew the typical sketches and devolve into Dr. Forrester and TV’s Frank apologizing for the extra crapitude of Manos.

There’s even one scene where two of the cast members stand around for way too long prompting Joel to seemingly lose control and shout, “Do something!”  From what I can tell, it deserves it’s status as “The Worst Movie of All Time” and can’t in good faith recommend watching it without the MST3K treatment.  There’s really not a whole lot else to say, the experience was hilarious, as most MST3K movies tend to be.

So seek it out, but make sure it’s not an unfiltered version.  Quentin Tarantino claims to love Manos and has one of the few surviving 35mm prints of it, but Tarantino’s attitude towards film doesn’t often align with the general public’s (in his defense, he supposedly calls it one of his favorite comedies).  I, for one, wouldn’t dare try to view it without Joel Hodgson and Co. helping me through it.

So there, that’s it, we did it!  No more theme months for a while, it was fun, but it was challenging as well.  I may give it another shot at some point in the future, Musical May might happen, or Action August (unlikely, since I’m reasonably well-versed in action films), Screwball September is a definite possibility, because I would love an excuse to devote myself to the extended work of Cary Grant.  And depending on how masochistic I feel, I may give Bad Movie March 2: The Quickening a go next year.  But we’ll see.

But that’s all for now.  Thanks for reading.  It was a pleasure to Move On Dot Org, piss on hospitality, and get torn apart, Lisa all for the sake of providing you with a little shadenfreude.  After this, Adventures in Pop Culture will go back to random musings on pop culture at large and I’ll go back to watching movies that are actually good.  So hang on tight, Spider Monkey, because the future looks bright.  So bright, in fact, that it’s blinded me so bad, I can’t see anything at all.

Posted under Kyle's Adventures in Pop Culture

The Sixth Sense was just terrific, wasn’t it?  And Unbreakable is still totally underappreciated for being the awesome movie that it is.  And hell, I’ll say it, despite some lapses in common sense, Signs maintains a spooky atmosphere that numerous horror movies can only dream of.  And The Village… well okay, I never saw The Village, I’ve meant to, but I haven’t gotten around to it, yet.  And I have no plans on taking in The Lady In The Water anytime soon.  And I can’t even pretend to want to see The Last Airbender. Which just leads me to a question that’s been asked a thousand times before… what the heck happened to you, M. Night Shyamalan?

His downward trajectory unfortunately continued with today’s installment.  The Happening is less a horror movie, and more a facsimile of one.  Like if someone were raised in a bubble with very limited access to the outside world, and then suddenly was released and told to make a horror movie, the movie they’d wind up with would look a lot like The Happening.  Which makes the fact that this was Shyamalan’s sixth film confusing to say the least.

The film kicks off decently enough with a couple sequences involving multiple people suddenly finding themselves overcome with suicidal tendencies, but the atmospheric touches provided by the opening are quickly lost once Mark Wahlberg’s science teacher is introduced.  Wahlberg delivers all his lines with a vocal cadence not typically found amongst human beings.  It works well enough in his first scene, where he’s teaching a class and he comes off as just an overly enthusiastic science teacher, but the delivery sticks around long after the kids are gone, lending a bizarre incredulity to everything he says in the entire movie.

The news that a toxin has been released leading to the aforementioned suicides gets leaked, prompting everyone to think it’s terrorists and flee the cities.  This includes Wahlberg, his wife (Zooey Deschanel), his co-worker (John Leguizamo), and his co-worker’s daughter (Ashlyn Sanchez).  They leave by train, which is fine, until the train stops in the middle of nowhere, due to a complete loss of communication.  So everyone hunkers down and waits for news.  Then the news rolls in.  It turns out the attacks are continuing, and they are happening in smaller and smaller towns.  So everybody panics and flees again.

Leguizamo hitches a ride with people who are headed to New Jersey so that he might find his wife (that doesn’t end well for him), and Wahlberg, Deschanel, and Sanchez hook up with some slightly kooky plant-growers.  They offer their theory of what’s been happening; they think it’s plants releasing the toxin as a means of dealing with the ever-expanding human population.  Apparently the plants aren’t pleased with what we’re doing to the earth and are defending themselves the only way they can.

Eventually the group accepts this theory and runs with it.  And it turns out they’re right.  And I will give Shyamalan credit for not having some big twist in the last five minutes that changes everything that’s come before it.  About halfway through the movie it’s thought to be plants, for the rest of the movie everyone thinks it’s plants, and despite some stupid rumblings about never really knowing for sure exactly what caused it, it’s plants.

The only problem with that is that it’s plainly stupid.  Because this is supposed to be a horror movie, and you know what aren’t scary?  Plants.  Also wind, which is how the movie shows you the plants are attacking (that sentence made me laugh, and I wrote it).  Granted, hurricane-level winds are pretty terrifying, but the most we ever get in the movie is a stiff breeze.  Not very menacing.

But that’s only the beginning of The Happening‘s problems.  It pangs me to say this, but Zooey Deschanel sucks in it, and I love Zooey Deschanel.  But her and Wahlberg seem to be engaging in some sort of bug eye-off, with Deschanel the natural frontrunner (because her eyes are freaking huge), but Wahlberg comes from behind and claims the prize in the end.  I will grant that the scenario they find themselves in would be perplexing, but the, let’s call it “style” that they have chosen to express that is so bizarre, that it had to have been intentional.  Leguizamo is no better, but I have long since expected anything better from him.

And just when you think it can’t get any worse, Spencer freaking Breslin shows up to bring the whole movie down another notch.  Spencer Breslin is the child actor that makes child actors feel good about themselves.  He is astonishingly terrible in everything he’s ever been in, and not surprisingly, The Happening didn’t break his streak.  Fortunately he gets murdered (kind of gruesomely, too).

After all, this was Shyamalan’s first R-rated movie.  Unfortunately he doesn’t do a whole lot with that, aside from a handful of kind of grisly images that wind up being more funny than scary, like the guy who sets himself up to get run over by a lawn mower, or the guy who opts for suicide by lions (yes, really).  It’s pretty tame stuff, and the movie didn’t actually need it.  Nor did it really need the late addition of Betty Buckley as Mrs. Jones, a backwoods woman who’s been cut off from the outside world, and who doesn’t add anything to the film aside from a generic creep factor.

Eventually the scary wind goes away and everything goes back to normal, until it’s revealed that a few months later the same thing’s about to happen in Paris (ha, suck it, France!) which means that this thing’s about to get real.  And that’s when the movie ends, on an uninspired note capping off an uninspired movie.  One that took a couple decent actors and made them terrible.  One that took a once decent director and made him more terrible (with only himself to blame).

Posted under Kyle's Adventures in Pop Culture

A warning to all ye who enter here, I’m totally going to be spoiling the ending of this movie, because it’s more or less the only thing really worth discussing about this otherwise achingly dull melodrama.  So only proceed if you have already seen Remember Me, or if you just don’t care.

But before we get to that, I suppose I’ll give you a quick rundown about what the film’s actually about.  Remember Me is Robert Pattinson’s attempt to prove that he’s capable of playing more than just a brooding vampire.  But all he’s able to prove is that he’s also able to play a brooding non-vampire.  I suppose that technically counts as a stretch.  Here he plays Tyler, who is still dealing with his beloved older brother’s suicide, and who has an ongoing feud with his emotionally distant father (Pierce Brosnan).

He has shunned his family’s wealth, and his baby sister is the only family member who he is still actually close with.  His issues with his dad come to a head when one night while out with his friend Aidan, he decides to stop a barfight (probably under some vague notion of just needing to feel something, man!) and is arrested.  Aidan calls Tyler’s dad who bails them out, which establishes that Brosnan thinks financial support is enough to still qualify as parenting.

The rest of the plot comes from Aidan recognizing Ally (Emilie de Ravin), the daughter of the arresting officer (Chris Cooper), and suggesting that Tyler get revenge on him for being unnecessarily aggressive in the arrest by hooking up with her.  Tyler doesn’t want to, but recognizes her from a class and approaches her.  Thus begins the awkward love affair, complete with emotional baggage from both parties.

To go along with Tyler’s brother’s suicide and daddy issues, Ally supplies a hefty dose of witnessing her mother’s murder and a matching set of paternal problems.  For Chris Cooper is kind of a jerk (in the movie), but the movie uses the mother’s murder as too much of an explanation for that.  Under some notion of him not being able to save her, he now goes way too far to keep Ally safe, but there’s too much natural jerk-ness present for us to totally buy that, especially in the scenes where his protectiveness turns to physical violence.

Eventually Cooper figures out where Pattinson lives and confronts him, which leads to Pattinson confessing to de Ravin that the impetus for their relationship was getting revenge on her father, which leads to a break up, and then an inevitable reconciliation.  While all this is going on, Tyler’s sister Alyssa (Caitlyn Rund) has been having her own subplot.  Alyssa, thanks to a rarely present father, has numerous confidence issues which have extended to school and have affected her ability to connect with classmates.

And that climaxes when, at a classmate’s birthday party, the other girls hack off part of her hair, sending her into an emotional tailspin that finally gets her father to take notice.  This was actually my favorite storyline, in that it was the only storyline that affected me, because I have a baby sister and seeing her get messed with kind of riled me up.  So when the scene came when Tyler took Alyssa to class with an undesired new hairdo, and Tyler, after a girl snickers at her, pushes her desk and throws a fire extinguisher through the window, it marked the only time in the film when I was filled with positive emotions (because you don’t screw with a guy’s baby sister, that’s uncool).

This gets Tyler arrested (again) and bailed out by his dad (again), but this time his dad actually shows up instead of a lawyer, and seeing his dad personally invested in his daughter helps to resolve a lot of Tyler’s issues.  So things are looking rosy when Tyler has to go to his dad’s office to sign some papers until it’s revealed that the day that’s going down is September 11, 2001… and guess where Tyler’s dad works?  Yeah, he works in the World Trade Center.

It’s a profoundly misguided twist that serves no purpose other than to stoke the audience’s emotions.  It’s a move that they in no way earned, and if it stirred up anything other than white hot vitriol in anybody who watched it, well, then they were differently affected by the story that preceded it.  Because up until that reveal, Remember Me is nothing but shoddy melodrama filled with characters that are less well-rounded humans, and more bundles of dysfunctions, neuroses, and quirks.

Even the usually reliable Brosnan and Cooper struggle to find the humanity in their roles (Brosnan does a little bit when dealing with the daughter, but again that might be my personal connection to the story), and the script does them no favors.  Because Remember Me is pretty poorly written, as well.  There’s a scene when Ally asks about Tyler’s major, and Tyler responds that he’s Undecided.  Ally asks what he’s undecided about.  In my head I was thinking, “He’d better not freaking say ‘Everything!’”  Yeah… he says “Everything.”

But it’s still not as bad as that ending.  For full disclosure’s sake, I knew about the twist going in, but that still doesn’t change how inappropriate and completely jarring it is.  Nor does it prepare you for the experience of viewing it for yourself.  Never have I gone from dreadfully bored to full of rage over a movie in a shorter time span.  And neither the boring section or the rage-inducing one have anything worth recommending to them.  So do yourself a favor, if you haven’t already seen Remember Me, don’t make any effort to rectify that situation.  Seriously.

Posted under Kyle's Adventures in Pop Culture

Well, we have finally arrived at the Gerard Butler Double Feature (or GBDF, if you will), and now that we’re here, I kind of wish I had chosen two movies that fit together slightly better than these two.  I probably should have replaced Gamer with The Bounty Hunter, or The Ugly Truth with Law Abiding Citizen, but what are you gonna do?  This will at least give us an idea of the contrasting types of terribleness that Gerard Butler is capable of (and for the record, I’m not here to solely lay into Gerard Butler, there’s plenty of Katharine Heigl-hatin’ to be had, as well).

Let’s begin with The Ugly Truth.  The movie takes place at a television studio where Katharine Heigl is the producer of a failing morning show.  Despite the struggles around the studio, she remains calm about the situation, largely thanks to the inexplicable number of friends she has at work, even though she’s scarily controlling and uses a freaking whistle to get people’s attention.  This is, I suppose, a means of showing that she has her professional life is in order, while her personal life suffers.  But the reality is that her personal life sucks because she brings that same bossy demeanor on her dates, complete with a checklist of ten qualities all potential suitors must have.

This is completely at odds with Gerard Butler’s sex-advice guru.  In an effort to boost ratings, the station manager (Justified‘s Nick Searcy, one of the best things about that show, also the best thing about this movie) hires Butler as an on-air commentator giving sex advice with a spin.  That is, if you can call rampant misogyny a “spin.”  His segment is called “The Ugly Truth.”  What is “The Ugly Truth,” you say?  Well, according to the movie, it’s that all guys ever want is sex and sex alone.  They become interested in women because of their looks, and stay interested because of what they do with their looks.  Well, I’m here, as a card-carrying man, to say that “The Ugly Truth” is a lie.  At least for most guys.  I’m sure it’s probably true for a large number of 19-year-olds, but I’m 24 and can confidently say that if I don’t like your personality, I won’t want to spend time with you.

But despite that, Butler’s segment becomes a runaway success, which is completely ridiculous, because he blatantly refers to numerous non-PG acts of love-making on the air, and as previously mentioned, is completely sexist.  The idea that this would fly in a world where the FCC and the Parent’s Television Council exist is completely at odds with having the word “truth” in your title.  But anywho, despite being initially repulsed by him (and rightly so), Heigl eventually goes to Butler for advice in seducing her new orthopedic surgeon neighbor, with his sculpted abs and face and other checklist-approved attributes.  Butler opts to help her by changing everything about her.  Cue the “spending time together” montage that shows that, you know something, these two kids have chemistry!

From there it’s not a question of if they’ll get together, but when.  The entire thing is labored, and the evidence of that is right there in the very first second of the film.  Before the credits even roll, the first thing you hear is the opening refrain of Katy Perry’s “Hot N Cold,” which hits upon a theory I have.  It states that if a film’s major music cues come in the form of songs written in the last two years, that film is not to be trusted.  And lo, The Ugly Truth is definitely not to be trusted.  From the infamous vibrating panty gag which was basically ripped from When Harry Met Sally, to Butler helping Heigl on her date via earpiece, which isn’t technically ripped from another film, but only because it’s so stupid that nobody else would have done it.

Occasionally the film stops pretending like it’s harsh world-view is something that everybody agrees with, and lets the characters’ humanity shine through.  In those moments the movie is easier to swallow, but in the end you just want these two crazy kids to get together not because they’re fragile creatures in need of love, but because they’re both awful people who need to be with each other so that nobody else has to.

The other half of our GBDF went down a lot smoother, but for wildly different reasons.  Now before I proceed, I have to admit that I didn’t choose Gamer because of it’s reputation as a rote, uninspired action thriller.  I chose it because, quite frankly, I just wanted to see it, and this gave me a good excuse.  And after watching it, I have to say, it’s actually not that bad.  It’s not great, but quality is relative.  So if you put it up against Grand Illusion, then yeah, Gamer pretty much sucks.  But if you put it up against, say, GI Joe, then it suddenly looks a lot better by comparison.

The movie concerns a group of convicts in a mildly dystopian future who have elected to take part in Slayers, the ultimate exercise in schadenfreude.  Slayers is the post-modern version of a first-person shooter, with actual people implanted with “Nanites” (basically new brain cells that allow an outside user to control your actions) acting as the characters in the game.  Any inmate who survives for 30 sessions goes free.  As the movie begins, Kable (Butler) is only three sessions away from release.

But as the story progresses, it becomes clear that the game’s designer Ken Castle (Michael C. Hall, having more fun than the entire cast put together) isn’t actually going to let him go free (I’d tell you why, but that would kind of spoil the movie).  So Butler’s user, Simon (Logan Lerman) cuts the strings and lets Butler take control, which leads to his escape.  Because all Butler wants to do is get back to his wife and daughter, the former of whom works in Slayers-predecessor Society, a real-life version of The Sims.

The latter has been evilly adopted by Michael C. Hall, setting the stage for the final confrontation between Castle and Kable, which plays out in a delightful way (more on that in a second).  For all the ideas that are pretty blatantly cribbed from other movies, I would say that Gamer still qualifies as a success, because unlike The Ugly Truth, it never pretends like it’s doing something totally unique.  It has its clever hook, and it’s content to cruise from there.  That sounds like a complaint, and it’s true, I wouldn’t have minded if it strived for something more original, but as action thrillers go, Gamer is more than adequate.

Actually quite more, because there are a handful of scenes that border on genius.  The Slayers sequences are all well-executed reproductions of the chaotic melees that are most shooters, and directors Neveldine/Taylor add several nice touches, from the gag about the guy stuck against a wall, to Butler switching to a pistol when his machine gun runs out of ammo.  Another bit of mad brilliance comes from the honey-baked Michael C. Hall introducing himself to Butler to the tune of “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” complete with a small squad of mind-controlled minions serving as backup dancers before they get all murder-y.

But my favorite sequence comes with our first look at the world of Society, which is an absolute perfect depiction of what a live-action Sims would look like.  With spastic editing, a color palette set to ‘neon’ and rapid glances at women exposing themselves at random, balloon-holding priests breaking into a sprint to go who knows where, and an ever-present conga line, all set to The Bloodhound Gang’s “Bad Touch,” N/T (as they are called by nobody) let the manic glee from their Crank movies shine through.

My complaints about the movie are limited.  Gerard Butler’s oddly restrained performance is one of them.  Given that this movie in no way required subtlety, I feel like if Butler had let a little Leonidas shine through, Gamer probably could have transcended rote action thriller, and become something much bigger… or at least a camp classic, those are always fun, too.  Like I said, it’s not the best movie ever, but for good “shut your brain off and stare at a screen for an hour and a half”-type entertainment, Gamer works just fine.  And it’s way better than The Ugly Truth.  So there’s that.

Posted under Kyle's Adventures in Pop Culture

Let’s ponder John Travolta.  If ever an actor has had a more interesting career trajectory than his, I don’t know who that someone would be.  After a promising start in films like Saturday Night Fever and Urban Cowboy, his career hit the skids in the 80′s, starring in a string of movies nobody remembers and the talking baby trilogy (although I love the first Look Who’s Talking, I don’t care what anybody says).  Then a young up-and-comer fresh off a staggering debut cast him as a permanently stoned assassin opposite Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction (I’m talking about Tarantino, if you didn’t pick up on that).

The buzz garnered off his role as Vincent Vega carried him on another winning streak through films like Get Shorty and Face/Off, but just like the tides, so too did his career wain, yet again.  Films like our entry today, Swordfish and Be Cool starred a slightly more self-aware Travolta, but one still in need of another resurgence.  Then along came Hairspray, and with that a promise of a braver Travolta.  One shucking the not-entirely-gay-friendly trappings of his… religion?  Is that the right word for it?  A Travolta decked out in a fat suit and a dress, playing a role that was written for a gay man (and is since usually played by gay men), and declaring to the world that he is here, he’s (probably) not queer, get used to it!

Then came freaking Old Dogs, obnoxious Robin Williams vehicle and potential Bad Movie March contender, and we’re back to one of his… oh, let’s be nice and call them “valleys.”  And yet through all of this, Travolta has remained a star.  Through some combination of charisma and black magic (probably),  Travolta continues to find work, most of it bad, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see at least one more comeback, he’s that powerful.  So much so that back in the late nineties, his passion for an L. Ron Hubbard novel, alone, got a film made.  A film that would go onto practically sweep the Razzies, sure, but how many films have been made just because you liked a book, hmm?

Battlefield Earth has what could generously be called an infamous reputation (being declared Worst Film of the Decade’ll do that), but despite numerous eviscerations by the world at large, nothing can really quite prepare you for the experience of watching it for yourself.  It begins with sub-Star Wars text setting the stage for us.  It’s the year 3000.  1000 years ago, a group of Psychlos from the planet Psychlo (shouldn’t they be “Psychlons?”  I don’t go around saying I’m a “Minnesota”) invaded Earth and nearly wiped out the human race.  They have since been mining our precious metals and teleporting them back to Psychlo.

We open on a post-apocalyptic-on-a-budget scene (desert setting, constantly-tilted camera, yellow tinge borrowed from a number of much better movies), with Barry Pepper and a small colony of people hiding out in caves.  Pepper elects to go out for supplies which is met by resistance, for some reason.  But he goes, and he meets up with two guys who promise to show him a god if he’ll give them some food.  So they walk until they come upon a destroyed city (a terribly unrealistic matte painting) and the “gods” they show him turn out to be statues (gods that were frozen for ignoring their godly duties).

It’s in this where I have the tiniest of nitpicks.  The humans, as depicted in the film, have gotten selectively stupid over the past thousand years.  So things like statues and mannequins and glass are completely foreign ideas to them, but they still have a decent grasp over certain colloquilisms.  Pepper is constantly referred to as a “greener” as in “the grass is always greener…”  So, apparently, the humans passed down pointless expressions, but nobody thought statues would be a good thing to remember?

Anyway, the three of them are captured by Psychlos (which is really hard to type, I miss the ‘l’ every time), and forced into slavery.  But not before Pepper gets ahold of one the guards guns and kills him with it.  It’s a futile gesture, because he’s promptly caught again, but it begins the notion that the humans (or “man-animals” as they are referred to by the Psychlos) are possibly smarter than they thought.  This holds great importance to head of security, Terl (Travolta) who wants to use the humans to mine gold out of a mountain that the Psychlos can’t get to because of radiation that will react violently with the air they breathe (the Psychlos breathe a poisonous substance, so there’s never a scene without somebody wearing a stupid-looking breathing apparatus on their nose).

That’s totally against protocol, but through some shady dealings he gets his way and the humans are trained to use the mining equipment.  Part of this training includes hooking Pepper up to a machine that teaches him the language and history of the Psychlos, instilling him with a natural leadership in the inevitable revolt.  Because, as mentioned, the Psychlos can’t approach the gold-filled mountain, so the humans are left completely unguarded, and so naturally they plan a revolution that involves using old Air Force jets (which still fly just fine, even though I doubt anybody’s been refining any jet fuel for the last millenium), blowing the roof off the Psychlo’s headquarters and exposing them to our atmosphere, and stealing a nuclear weapon and teleporting it to the planet Psychlo and destroying it.

If that sounds bad, you’re right.  It is.  And it would easier to watch if more people in the movie realized that.  But they take it so seriously!  There is even a Braveheart-like speech where Pepper encourages them all to fight for freedom.  And this is all because of a hammy John Travolta in elevator shoes and Rasta-drag.  It’s all just a little ridiculous.  I’m actually a little surprised that this wasn’t the film that killed Travolta’s career (well, not really, his latest outcrop of films has proven his career to be pretty much invincible).  It certainly seems to have done a number on Barry Pepper’s, who is not nearly as famous as he should be (although he does just fine as a character actor).

In the end, it’s not surprising this movie failed.  The acting is terrible, the special effects are lousy to say the least, and its vision of a post-apocalyptic wasteland is uninspired at best.  What is a little surprising is how much of a joy it is to watch Travolta.  Sure, he’s terrible in it, but he’s also the only one who seems to be having any fun at all.  It’s a small victory, and his performance isn’t enough to upgrade the material past “so bad, it’s good,” nor is it enough to save the movie’s occasional stabs at humor (lame jokes based on the Psychlos misunderstanding of life on Earth, i.e. them being confused at why dogs weren’t useful for manual labor, and assuming Pepper’s favorite food is rat, because that’s the first thing he scrambles for after three days without a meal).

But hey, it’s something, right?  So while Battlefield Earth is anything but a good movie, it’s at least an amusingly bad movie.  I say it’s probably for the best that it got made, lest ironists get bored.  So grin and bear it, my friend, and just thank your lucky stars that the proposed sequel never came to fruition.  Not even Travolta was powerful enough to make that happen.

Posted under Kyle's Adventures in Pop Culture

Cool it, Twi-hards!  My inclusion of Twilight in Bad Movie March is only due to the fact that the movie is so hyper-focused on a demographic not known for having high standards for the films they enjoy.  So, metaphorical 14-year-old girl who is probably fuming at my insinuation that Twilight isn’t the greatest movie evarrrrr, calm down.  You’re just not terribly discerning, meaning the movies you love tend not to appeal to, really, anyone else.  But hey, you do many other things well; I mean, without you we probably wouldn’t even have emoticons.

But on to the reason we’re here.  I, not being a 14-year-old girl (apologies to non-14-year-old girl Twilight fans [I will not say Twi-hards anymore than I have to]), had never really had a reason to see Twilight, aside from the desire to actually know what it was that I had been making fun of all this time.  I’m not a fan of Kristen Stewart (she was okay in Adventureland, but could have been replaced by literally anybody; she was also not bad in Into The Wild, but she’s in that for what? Five minutes?), Robert Pattinson does nothing for me (again, not a 14-year-old girl), and with all the vampire stories available, the idea of watching one in the form of a melodramatic teen romance didn’t do a whole lot for me (I’ll stick to Buffy, thanks).

But there was still that desire to be fair in my ridiculing, which meant that at some point I was going to have to watch it.  So I did.  And the result was a resounding… meh.  Let me clarify, Twilight is by far the best-made film I have watched so far as a part of Bad Movie March (not the highest praise, I know), but if we’re classifying by my enjoyment of the films, it doesn’t even crack the Top 5.  But I didn’t hate it.  I really had no emotional reaction to it whatsoever.  Except for the occasional bit of abnormally bad dialogue (“You’d better hang on tight, spider monkey.”  Really?!) or bizarre special effect (like the scene where he runs up the mountain… he’s like a gazelle!), the whole movie went by without registering in either direction, good or bad.

Except for the glitter.  Oh, the glitter!  I’m not sure what’s more ridiculous, that vampires sparkle in sunlight, or the fact that two seconds after demonstrating said sparkling, Edward (Pattinson, if you weren’t aware) explains that his is the body of a killer (a fancy, fancy killer).  I know a lot has already been made of the sparkly vampire thing, so I won’t harp on it too much, but, I mean, come on!  They sparkle!

But seriously, the film actually isn’t terrible, I freely admit.  It’s just kind of dull.  It does a capable job of capturing the outsized emotions of teenaged romance, and that feeling of “I love you now and therefore I will love you forever” (the vampire mythology handily lends itself to that sort of thing), but capturing teenage romance (which is rarely a thing of subtlety) and turning it into a decent film do not necessarily go hand-in-hand.  Some additional effort is required, that the filmmakers, unfortunately, didn’t put in.  If it’s improved upon in the sequels, I can’t be sure, as I (obviously) haven’t seen them.

Anyway, Twilight is the story of Bella (Stewart) who moves to Washington to live with her dad, after her mom and step-dad decide to travel with the step-dad’s minor-league baseball team.  Bella starts at her new high school, where she instantly makes a half dozen new friends (oh to be a pretty girl, apparently), but her gaze is immediately drawn to the mysterious, albino-like Cullen family, Edward specifically, who shows up slathered in pale make up and… is he wearing lipstick?  Or is that just the white make up enhancing the red in his lips?  All I’m saying is I’ve seen some great actor reveals in film, this wasn’t one of them.

The attraction is mutual, but Edward has a strange way of showing it.  When he lays eyes on her, he acts as if he’s repulsed by her, but he really just wants to kill her, and is repulsed with himself (yeah, that old story).  It turns out that Edward can read people’s minds, but he can’t read Bella’s, which makes her alluring (which is basically the opposite of True Blood).  But, being a vampire and all, he tries not to get too close, except when he does, making for a weird romance pinball game for the first half of the film.

Eventually, Bella puts the pieces together and figures out what he is, and they start to date (another vampire story where the fact that he’s like 90 years older than she is doesn’t come into play).  Bella is welcomed into the Cullen household (sort of) and is even invited along to play baseball in easily the film’s most ridiculous scene.  But it’s that scene where the action really kicks in.  Because as Bella and Edward have been playing ping pong with their feelings, elsewhere in town people are being killed by a different group of vampires.  These scenes flirt with the horror genre but don’t succeed due to the fact that, well, they aren’t scary, relying instead on quick flashes of mysterious figures and warped camera angles (the camera angles thing happens a lot during the movie, but the visual panache doesn’t make up for the overall beige-ness of the story being told).

The other group of vampires confronts them on the baseball field, and one of them, a tracker, pegs Bella as human, and essentially takes on hunting her as his sole purpose in life from that point on.  So the Cullens whisk her out of town, but the tracker follows and, not to spoil anything, but Edward fights him and wins (shocking, I know).  It all ends with Bella and Edward at the prom (aww), but not before Edward has a mild confrontation with Jacob (Taylor Lautner, who shows up periodically throughout the movie, but isn’t a terribly large presence, yet) that suggests that they both know what they both are (Jacob’s a werewolf, if you didn’t know), thereby setting up the sequel.  Oh, and Bella suggests that she wants to be turned into a vampire, cementing the vampire-as-metaphor-for-eternal-love thing that’s always present in these kinds of stories.

Now unfortunately, given Lautner’s small presence in the movie, I was not able to decide if I was for Team Edward or Team Jacob.  Well, that and the fact that everytime Jacob showed up, I began to channel Psych‘s Shawn Spencer (“Look at his hair… it’s horrible”).  To do that I would have to view the sequels, which I’m not in a hurry to do.  Not to say I wouldn’t though; if they’re as bland as the first one, I could think of worse ways to spend my time.  But, given how boring Twilight was, I very much doubt that the sequels would turn me into a Twi-hard (rats, I said it again).

Posted under Kyle's Adventures in Pop Culture

Let’s talk about sequels.  If I said that sequels usually aren’t as good as the original, you would (sarcastically) respond, “Oh really?! Tell me more!”  And I’d be all like, “Well if you’re gonna be that way about it, maybe I won’t even talk to you!”  And you’d be all, “Good! I didn’t really want to talk to you in the first place!”  And then I’d get upset, because that’s kind of a hurtful thing to say, you know, and I’d probably cry a little bit, and then you’d feel bad and apologize, but I’d wonder if you really meant it, or if you were just saying it because you don’t like to see a man cry, and why don’t you learn to accept people’s weaknesses?!

Wait… where was I?  Sequels!  Wow, sorry.  So yeah, sequels usually aren’t as good as the original (the occasional Batman film aside), but usually (actually, almost always) a sequel will at least in some ways be a continuation of the original’s story.  But not so much in the case of Troll 2.  I haven’t seen Troll, but I’ve been assured that it’s would-be sequel has nothing whatsoever to do with the original.  It doesn’t even have trolls in it (you’ll understand [sort of] in a second).

The film begins rather abruptly with a prince being chased through the woods by a horde of goblins (see?) in a sequence that’s pretty poorly narrated by an unknown figure.  It turns out that the story of the prince actually is a story, one that’s being read by an old man to his grandson, until the little boy’s mother walks in and reveals that the grandfather isn’t there.  In fact, the grandfather’s been dead for six months (dun dun dun), and the boy, Joshua, has apparently had a hard time letting go.  This leads to a terrible scene where the mother basically yells at her son for not being able to process death (I’m not kidding).

This subplot leads to a potential notion that maybe the whole business of goblins and dead grandpas will turn out to all be in Joshua’s head, and Troll 2 will actually turn out to be an examination of the psychology of a child, Curse of the Cat People-style, but that’s way too high-brow for this movie.  No, Troll 2 is just about a bunch of goblins who want to turn you into vegetables and eat you (did I mention the goblins were vegetarians?).

The problems start when the family decides to take, arguably, the stupidest vacation ever.  In a bid to unwind and get away from it all, they choose to take part in a house exchange program with a family of farmers.  Yes, their idea of going away for a little r & r is to go live like farmers.  But that’s not the worst of it, the farm in question is in the tiny hamlet of Nilbog (Get it? Say it backwards.), and the Nilbogians go to no great lengths to hide their creepiness.  But the family (Joshua aside, because his grandpa somehow knows everything about goblins and is giving him advice… from beyond the grave) remains completely oblivious to it.

So oblivious that they proceed with the home exchange and hand over their house keys to the creepy creeps who live at the farm, and take no issue with the fact that most of the food that’s been left over for them is an unnatural green color.  It turns out that the goblins need you to eat their food, this is what starts the process of turning you into a sickly vegetable stew that they can then devour.

Although for as deliriously weird and unique as that idea is, the filmmakers barely make use of it.  Only two people fall victim to it.  Which leads me to the subplot featuring Joshua’s sister’s boyfriend, Elliot and his buddies.  To preface this, Elliot is the kind of guy who is only attractive to girls in bad movies, because he’s a selfish doof who’d rather hang out with his idiot friends all the time than hook up with his hot girlfriend, and because he says things like “you trying to turn me into a homo?!”  But anyway, Johua’s sister, Holly invites Elliot along on the vacation, with the sole proviso that he NOT bring his friends lest she break up with him forever.

So naturally, he grabs his friends and heads up in an RV, with the promise that Nilbog is crawling with young, single women.  One of his idiot friends actually does spy an attractive woman running through the woods, sweating green due to eating goblin food (don’t ask) and he chases after her.  They are met by a gaggle of goblins, one of whom spears the idiot friend, so he and the girl run off and take shelter in a spooky house (really not a good idea) where they meet a creepy, creepy lady who obviously doesn’t have good intentions, yet they apparently don’t notice and drink the… potion, I guess, that she gives them.  And bam!  Vegetable city.

The creepy, creepy lady is the leader of the goblins or something, and she is in charge of watching over the piece from Stone Henge that gives them their powers (yes, really).  Eventually everybody figures out that something’s totally off with these people, an idea that is cemented once one of the goblins disguised as a person (because they can do that) catches fire thanks to the Molotov Cocktail that Joshua’s grandpa gave him… from beyond the grave, and after being extinguished is revealed in his true, gobliny form.

So the family conjures up the grandpa, and Joshua is magicked to the creepy house where the creepy lady lives, and his grandpa tells him that to defeat the goblins, they need to put their hands on the piece from Stone Henge and think about goodness (this is exhausting).  That doesn’t work right away, so grandpa gives Joshua a special backpack with the warning that he can only pull out what he needs at the time that he needs it (making it the most convenient thing in the history of ever).  And the only thing he pulls out of it is a double-decker bologna sandwich which he eats at the goblins to drive them away (yes, he just eats it… at them).

Then his family shows up and they go back to putting their hands on the stone and thinking about good things.  And thus Troll 2 unexpectedly joins Dark City as a film that climaxes with the heroes defeating the villains with the powers of their mind, with no physical activity to go along with it, which always reminds me of Futurama‘s Fry defeating the giant brain by thinking at it.  Nothing like going out on an additional bit of really unintentional humor.

Because the only source of entertainment this movie has to offer is unintentional, with it’s creature effects that look like they cost all of about six bucks, to some truly horrendous acting from everybody involved, to the central idea that people would be so willing to eat neon green food from a creepy stranger (important safety tip: don’t do that).  It’s terrible all the way through, but it’s more or less the good kind of terrible.  I hesitate to really say much more on the subject; this is a film that doesn’t need a critic to pick it apart and tell you why it’s bad, it does that all on its own.

Posted under Kyle's Adventures in Pop Culture

Film cultists are a strange breed.  There is no real rhyme or reason to the films they choose to exalt.  Sometimes their behavior saves a brilliant film from obscurity (The Big Lebowski), sometimes they just respond to an off-kilter film (Rocky Horror Picture Show), but most often, it seems, they tend to throw on their irony coats and embrace films that, if we’re being objective, kind of basically suck.

It’s the latter that brings us here today.  Tommy Wiseau’s… mmm, let’s call it a movie, The Room is very much not a movie made with competence.  But it fits snugly into the Plan 9 mold of being a project of passion, all the same.  In that vein, The Room taps perfectly into what makes a film so bad that it becomes good.  NOBODY was asking for this film, and so the only reason it exists at all is because Wiseau had a vision and carried it out to the end.

The story concerns successful banker Johnny (Wiseau) and his fiance Lisa (Juliette Danielle).  Oops sorry, I meant to say “future wife,” the word “fiance” is never uttered in the film (whether that was a conscious choice by Wiseau or because he wasn’t sure what the word for it was remains to be determined).  Johnny and Lisa are due to be married in a month’s time, but Lisa has fallen out of love with Johnny and into love with his best friend Mark (Greg Sestero).  Mark resists, because Johnny is his best friend, and he can’t and oh alright.

So they make sweet, sweet, kind of disgusting love with each other behind Johnny’s back.  And Johnny remains clueless, even though Lisa promptly begins to make up stories about him hitting her and bragging about sleeping with Mark to pretty much everyone she knows.  Her mother, her friends, her mild acquaintances, they all tell her to tell Johnny the truth, but she won’t do that because even though she proclaims to have no feelings whatsoever for Johnny anymore, she doesn’t want to hurt his feelings, you guys.  It’s completely ridiculous.

It is at this point in the write up that I realize that nothing I could ever write on the internet will ever do justice to the actual experience of watching The Room.  Tommy Wiseau has an acting style that can never be expressed in words, it needs to be seen to be fully understood.  So on that note, I recommend going to YouTube and watching one of several available clips from the film to really comprehend what it is we’re dealing with.  Here, try this one, Acting lessons from Tommy Wiseau.

Did you do it?  It’s pretty crazy right (and sorry about the link, I can’t for the life of me figure out how to embed video, traditional methods aren’t working).  So take what you saw in that clip and extrapolate it over an hour and 40 minutes.  Pretty epic, right?  But the glorious incompetence goes beyond Wiseau’s acting (and everybody else’s, for that matter, the rest of the cast doesn’t get a free pass).

Wiseau clearly had no idea how to make a movie.  There’s one scene where Denny (Philip Haldiman), an orphan who Johnny looks out for, is confronted by a drug dealer to whom he owes money.  The scene quickly escalates into said drug dealer pulling a gun and threatening to dispatch Denny, lest he get his money.  Fortunately Johnny and Mark show up and haul the dealer away, and the incident is never mentioned again (it does sort of pay off later on, but it’s still completely unnecessary).

Also, there’s a seemingly ever-present football that demonstrates Wiseau’s cluelessness at what normal people do for fun, instead assuming that all guys ever want to do is toss the pigskin around (even while clad in tuxedoes).  Oh, and did I mention that every time there’s a love scene the film turns into a softcore porno?  Because it totally does.  Lisa will get that look in her eye, which men are, for some reason, unable to resist, and some really bad R & B music will come on and the ensuing coitus will invariably be filmed in a pseudo-artistic manner (through a sheer curtain that Lisa and Johnny have around their bed for some reason; through the posts on the railing when Lisa and Mark get it on on the staircase).

And just like most softcore pornos, it is nowhere near as sexy as it thinks it is.  Which shouldn’t come as a surprise, by this point.  Because it would have been nothing short of a miracle for Wiseau to have somehow succeeded in that aspect when he so thoroughly failed everywhere else.  Sure, since it’s initial (very, very small) release, The Room has been embraced by a select crowd of people who treat it more as a comedy than as the relationship drama it started out as (Tommy Wiseau, himself, has also gotten on that bandwagon, claiming that was always his intent, which is totally true, I’m sure).  But despite a cult following, that doesn’t change the fact that The Room is bloody awful.

And it is, from start to finish, from the acting, to the directing, to the writing (all courtesy, at least in part, of Wiseau, himself) complete and utter rubbish.  But it’s rubbish that I am thoroughly pleased to have seen.  It’s rubbish that I would not be opposed to experiencing again (though maybe not as sober, next time).  It’s rubbish that deserves the cult following that it received, and it’s rubbish that will hopefully continue to enjoy its ironic life.

Posted under Kyle's Adventures in Pop Culture

Never before in my life has a movie filled me with so much dread, and I hadn’t even pushed play, yet.  I was literally staring at the DVD menu, completely petrified at the thought of continuing any further.  I began to doubt the merits of Bad Movie March, and I wondered if anyone would mind if I just completely bailed on the whole thing, three entries in.  I was shaken to the core by the presumed terribleness that waited for me inside Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer’s 2008 something-or-other, Meet The Spartans.

But I persevered.  I pushed play and braced for awfulness.  And it’s a good thing I did, too, because everything you’ve heard about the “film” is absolutely true.  It’s a giant load, plain and simple.  Lazy joke-writing, lousy acting, and indifferent direction are present in practically every frame of Meet The Spartans.

For those who don’t know, it is sort of a take on Zack Snyder’s 300.  But unlike better spoofs like Airplane! or Hot Shots, which skewer pretty specific movies, but use different character names and plotlines, this is about a Spartan king named Leonidas who takes a small subsect of his army to fight Xerxes’ Persian army at the Hot Gates.  Seriously, not a drop of effort.

So basically, if you saw 300, all you really need to do to see Meet The Spartans is subtract Snyder’s visual aesthetic, add a few mentions of Paris Hilton, a hundred “jokes” about how the Spartans are gay, and a painfully unfunny breakdancing segment and you’re there.  It really seems like Friedberg and Seltzer’s process of writing “jokes” consists of, “Britney Spears, lol. Lindsay Lohan, amirite?! Gay. Bahahaha.”  I’m still not sure how I didn’t punch a hole through my TV while watching it.

There is an unusual phenomenon that occurs as you watch it, though.  All throughout the “movie” I could feel myself wanting to smile.  Not because anything happening onscreen was worthy of it, but because my brain recognized that what I was watching was at least striving for comedy, and wanted to reward it.  Unfortunately, the movie is so completely soul-crushing, that I couldn’t even manage a grin.

In that way, it is basically the inverse of the film that started this feature, Plan 9 From Outer Space.  Because whereas Plan 9 is, yes, a terrible movie, Ed Wood’s wide-eyed optimism and zeal more than makes its presence felt onscreen, and that’s what makes it a pleasure to watch.  It’s poorly-made, but it’s poorly-made with love.  But Meet The Spartans just feels cold.  And it’s doubly frustrating, because (and I don’t say this without a lot of trepidation) Seltzer and Freidberg could potentially be decent filmmakers if they just put in a little bit of effort.  I know!  It’s crazy, but it’s true.

There are several scenes early on in the “movie” that rather impressively mimic the look of 300.  They don’t quite have Snyder’s panache, but that was probably a budget issue.  The entire prologue, detailing Leonidas’ rise to the throne, does a surprisingly effective job of capturing the same look and atmosphere, albeit with some truly terrible “humor” thrown in (the wolf from 300 is replaced by a gangsta penguin, did your head almost explode? Mine too).

Or the scene where they force the enemy soldiers off the cliff in silhouette, again, is shockingly competent, until they reveal that a diving board has appeared out of nowhere.  Or the scene where we follow Leonidas as he personally shuffles several Persian soldiers loose the mortal coil.  They perfectly capture Snyder’s slow-down-speed-up style and the snap zooms in and out, but they lose that goodwill again when Leonidas shucks sword and spear for wet towels and atomic wedgies.  Their writing constantly gets in the way of their direction, that is until the end, when the money clearly ran out and they really stopped caring.

If someone who gave half a crap wrote a script and handed it off to Freidberg and Seltzer with the caveat that they could contribute no material to the film in question and they put in a modicum of effort, I dare say that movie would be… not great, by any means, but probably inoffensively decent.  Instead they continue to write “movies” that make lazy knockoffs feel good about themselves.  Watching this, I can only assume that the studio approached them, gave them a sum of money and a DVD of 300 and said, “Give us an hour and a half of film, please.”

And I can attest, with a clear conscience, that Meet The Spartans is an hour and a half long, and that there is something to look at the whole time.  That is the highest praise I can bring myself to give this “movie.”  Because despite showing some visual promise, it is nowhere near enough to bring this within the realm of good.  It’s not even enough to bring it within the realm of bad.  This is the film version of an atrocity.  From the rampant homophobia, to extended gags that are predicated solely on just finding the mention of pop culture figures funny, to the scene where Leonidas is training his son by performing an ever-escalating series of wrestling moves on him as his mother looks on lovingly, because ha ha ha child abuse, apparently.

And it made money!  Not a lot, granted, but enough to turn a profit!  Why do people endure this willingly?  Don’t you know that if you keep seeing them, Freidberg and Seltzer get to keep writing them?  So just stop already, stop until they decide to quit raping our senses.  Stop until they decide to try to make a decent movie, or scratch that, stop until they decide to try, period.  The choice is yours, America.

Posted under Kyle's Adventures in Pop Culture

The Wicker Man is a weird movie.  And I’m talking about the original, here.  You have bizarre Pagan rituals (not the People Against Goodness And Normality kind, though), naked women crying at a loved one’s gravesite, and several digressions into musical numbers.  It’s incredibly bizarre, but the filmmakers were well aware of just how bizarre it was, and knew they could just take a step back from it and the weirdness would shine through, all the same.

The Nicholas Cage remake, on the other hand, doesn’t have that same confidence in the material.  So pretty much from the outset, we, the audience, are punched in the face by strange (not unlike Mr. Cage in a bear suit, but we’ll get to that).  In the original, the residents of Summerisle are clearly uncomfortable with strangers, but they at least feign hospitality and dress in modern clothes, so it takes a while for the policeman and the audience to figure out just how off these people are.

But in the remake, Cage first has to bribe his way onto a plane to get to the island, and is then “greeted” by a group of women in colonial garb and some men holding a mysteriously dripping sack.  From there, we find that he has stumbled into a goddess-worshipping matriarchy, led by Ellen Burstyn (slumming it here in the Christopher Lee role) where the men don’t speak (it’s implied that their tongues have been removed).  Basically the only way to make it less subtle would have been to have Cage turn to the camera every fifteen minutes or so and yell “Isn’t this freaking weird?!?!” (and I’m totally convinced we will see that in a Nicholas Cage film one day).

His reason for being on the island is basically the same as in the original, he received a letter from a woman who lives there saying that her daughter has gone missing and she needs his help to find her.  Only, now the woman is his former fiance, adding an at least mildly interesting spin on the story.  Another spin that’s less interesting?  Post traumatic stress disorder. 

In both versions of the film, the main characters become gradually more unhinged as the story progresses.  In the original, Edward Woodward’s Sergeant Howie is a deeply Christian individual, and as his religion becomes more and more at odds with that of the natives, so too does his sanity become more at odds with him.  The remake, however, starts with Nicholas Cage’s Officer Malus making a traffic stop for a little girl who threw a doll out her car window.  During this traffic stop, the car is violently struck by a runaway semi truck and the little girl and her mother die a fiery death, with Malus unable to prevent it.

So by the time he gets to the island, he’s already a bit heightened, and things only get worse from there.  Which makes for some really unusual comparisons.  Take, for example, the scene where he shows the missing girl’s picture in a classroom.  The dialogue and blocking are basically identical to the scene in the original, but Cage’s ramped-up delivery imbues the scene with a tone unique to the film, and not in a good way.

Because the biggest difference between the two films?  Well, the original is kind of awesome.  The remake is very much not, buut there is still some definite entertainment to be had.  An over-the-top Nic Cage performance pretty much always guarantees as much.  And indeed, Cage is certainly over the top, here.  His acting in the film is the stuff memes are made of, from him running up to a woman and punching her in the face (whilst clad in the aforementioned bear suit), to his rather loud urgings to pick another form of torture (NOT THE BEES!!!), to, perhaps most famously, his peculiarly angry demands to know how a doll got burned (HOW’D IT GET BURNED?! HOW’D IT GET BURNED?! HOW’D IT GET BURNED?! [Seriously, how'd it get burned?]).

And a deliciously campy Cage performance is almost enough to bring The Wicker Man into “so bad, it’s good” territory.  Unfortunately, the rest of the film is just a rote, uninspired remake that really doesn’t have anything new to say.  Sure, it changed the social structure of the natives from a more generic commune to a matriarchal society, but it doesn’t really do anything with that (aside from give Cage the opportunity to call them bitches once they catch him at the end).

So while there is definitely some unintentional fun to be had (and truth be told, I laughed my ass off more than once), it’s not enough to actually recommend the film that threatened to drag Ellen Burstyn’s career down in the Wicker Man’s flames.  Because seriously, she deserves better than this.  Nicholas Cage, on the other hand?  Well, much like his character in the film, he’s here of his own free will, and he’ll take his punishment.  Screaming all the while.

Posted under Kyle's Adventures in Pop Culture