Reviews
The Cell (2000)
The first movie I've ever walked out of
If you took the really bland bits of a psychology textbook, and mixed them liberally with the most annoying visual aspects of current sneaker commercials, then lightly topped it all off with a smattering of ideas stolen from better films, you'd end up with a dead ringer for this accident of a movie.
There was nothing to like about this thing at all... Horrible acting from all involved, a laughable bad guy (where did the idiot costume designer get his wig anyway? Was it really a leftover from Dumb & Dumber?) drab sets, uninteresting characters, and about one cliche every second, interspersed with the kind of ugly visuals one gets in pretentious-artist rock videos.
It's a real mind-bender of a film, and not in a good way. I've seen some bad films in my time - the Postman, Waterworld, ISHTAR, Battlefield Earth.... but even those films had a fragment of entertainment value (some more unintentionally than others) but this long-winded, self-sumg tribute to the director's ego was caried out with such sterile, all-knowning seriousness that any entertainment value it may have had, even in it's badness, was drained away.
It was like a laundry list. I was actively calling the action play-by play. Oh, look! amongst all this horror, a pretty horse! Bet you a thousand bucks it's killed gruesomely in the next fifteen seconds. BANG! SLICE! All this film needed was a fruit-cart being toppled to give it the full "overused drama cliche" treatment.
I could forgive the film's lack of original ideas, if it hadn't been so undeservedly smug about itself. Keeping in mind that this idea's been done to death a million times, and in far more entertaining films... Hell, even "Dreamsacpe" bothered to reinvent the idea, by tossing an attempt to assassinate the president into the mix.
And as weird-out, trippy visual art films go, it's barely pale in comparison to a Terry Gilliam film - so it doesn't even win on that account. It's second-rate, rehashed trash - the visuals slipping back and forth between full color and gritty grim-filter drabness in a way that art-school dropouts have been wetting themselves to try ever since "The Matrix".
I didn't bother to see the end of this stinker, because as I noted in the title of this review - this is the first film I have ever walked out of. Gone. Splitsville.
I understand that there is no surprise twist ending, which might have wrung some life out of the second half of the film.. and that the ending is in fact a complete downer.
I can't believe I passed up a South Park rerun on TV to watch this thing. It was a completely wasted evening, and all involved in the creation of this film should be banned from further attempts at the form, for the good of the industry.
Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957)
Trashy, Campy fun
Credited by many as "The Worst Movie Ever Made" this film's charms lie in its unashamed goofiness. As you watch you'll be presented with Paper Plates for flying saucers, sets created out of window curtains, and a script that pulls in and concentrates cliches from both the sci-fi and horror genres.
It's not a blockbuster, but it is entertaining - and it allowed Bela Lugosi to spend his final days doing what he loved to do: Make Movies. If for just that, this film should be treasured.
Battlefield Earth (2000)
I can't say enough about this film...
It's hard to know where to start reviewing this film. Usually, reviewing films is easy, because of significant things that I can say I liked or disliked while watching, but in this case, everything was so incredibly bad that I find myself nearly in a state of shock.
A worse film couldn't be made on purpose. Not even Dr. Forrester and TV's Frank would want to show this film. "Manos, Hands of Fate?" a delightful romp by comparison? "Howard The Duck?" A commercial success by the same measure.
Some people just shouldn't be allowed near Hollywood. It appears those people are scientologists.
Misfits of Science: Deep Freeze (Pilot) (1985)
Too Good To Stay On TV
Misfits of Science was just one of a collection of shows released in the 1980's with creative conceptual ideas. Some, like Knight Rider, went on to achieve cult symbol status. Others, like Automan, faded into obscurity.
Misfits was one of those programs destined to fade, helped along by the untimely death of Dean Paul Martin, the actor portraying the show's driving character, Billy.
Almost a satire of comic-book concepts such as the X-Men, the show revolved around a government-funded "weird science" shop called Humanadyne and a group of teenagers with exceptional powers gathered together by Dr Billy Hayes, who had the idea originally to start a basketball team with them.
The show featured such topics as synchronicity, paranormal phenomena, and alternate universe theories in a vaugely x-filesesque manner. For a comedy program it was far ahead of its time, making use of science fiction concepts, without making light of them.
Coming on the heels of the box-office-smash Ghostbusters, Misfits was designed to appeal to the same audience, with the same style of humor, a task it excelled at.
This show desperately deserves to be released, in it's entirety, on videotape.
Megaforce (1982)
A live-action GI-JOE cartoon, sold to the wrong audience.
Megaforce is a live-action cartoon.
Place the entire decade of the 1980's in one package. You've got overly computerised techno-pop music, a "hero" lead who can do no wrong, with hair moussed out to *there*, a villain who's just evil for evil's sake, neo-deco futuristic vehicles with loud, wild paint jobs, and best yet, heavy military artillery and lots of big explosions topped off with stuntwork the likes of which hasn't been seen since The A-Team went off the air.
It all comes wrapped up in a goofy, over-the top comic-book style story that looks like it was filmed by someone who wished he was making rock videos instead.
Think "cannonball run" only armed to the teeth.
A lot has been said about how bad this film is, and while it's not great, it's really not as bad as some make it sound. The problem is really, this is a kids' film in the style of The Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - but some marketing genius decided it had to be packaged and sold to the public as a military action film in order to draw audiences. Deceptive marketing guaranteed that the audience drawn would be the wrong one, doomed to annoyance when their expectations weren't met - and that people who would have wanted to see it, if they'd know what it was, would get scared away and go see something else.
You won't hear a single curse in the entire film, nor toilet jokes, and as far as violent content goes this movie falls well below most anything you'll find on TV, with no death scenes, and no blood. Nobody even gets hurt in the film, with the film-makers going to great lengths to show that even the bad guys are escaping unharmed. The jokes are awful, and the script is simplistic - in short, your kids will get a kick out of it, but your drinking buddies won't.