I’m super-excited because Husband is actually going to get a whole day off someday soon and we’re just going to binge on the Unholy Detritus on our Tivo until our brains melt.
We’ll save The Manitou for last because it is without question one of the all-time great Bad Movies. Of all time.
Wrath of the Titans is a clunky inept sequel to a clunky inept remake of a clunky inept movie from the 1980s. Young Boomers/older Gen Xers, who thought the original Clash of the Titans was great because they were young and impressionable when it first came out (and were probably stoned when they saw it) are now the people green-lighting the big budget IMAX 3D reboots of movies that they would realize weren’t very good if they weren’t currently working as “Creatives” and consequently making business decisions while smoking pot.
The people who greenlit this movie also know two things. One, that the kids who are willing to shell out weekend box-office don’t comprehend, or care, that the original movie was Not Great. Two, GenXers will Netflix or purchase the reboot in a fit of pique and/or out of misguided nostalgia. What this means is this: lots of people will get paid.
Everybody wins.
Except us, because we’re watching it. Right. Now.
This movie, like all movies, co-stars Liam Neesen.
Seriously. What the hell?
I just watched The Haunting (1963), one of the all-time scariest movies of all time ever. I spotted the 1999 remake on HBOHD and, being too sick to think, decided to see if it was as bad as I remembered.
It was. Got a post about that drafted, you’ll have to wait for it a little longer – the relevant point here is that the remake starred Liam Neesen.
Husband decided to watch all the Star Wars movies. We watched 4, 5 and 6 over the holidays. But we know who’s in the the first 3: Liam Neeson.
Our Tivo, OverLord II, recorded Unknown for us. Never heard of it. Looked at the description. Liam Neeson.
The Netflix fairy sent Battleship. Liam Neeson.
The Dark Knight Rises? Liam Neeson.
Maybe the connection here isn’t “Liam Neeson.” Maybe it’s “our questionable movie selection judgement.”
I’ve been sick for 3 weeks. I don’t know what Husband’s excuse is. I guess that doesn’t explain the last 20some years of our movie watching co-existence, does it?
Moving on.
I guess I have to quit copying IMDB links for Liam Neeson movies and pay attention to the screen if I want to describe Wrath of the Titans to you. There aren’t any spoilers in here. To be fair, I think to have a movie spoiled you probably need to care about the outcome. Trust me, no one should care about the outcome of this movie.
Except Liam Neeson’s agent, who should probably wake up with a horse head in his bed or something. This dude has been in some shitty, shitty movies.
Wrath of the Titans. Wrath of the Titans is about Perseus and Zeus and a bunch of other Gods who lived back in the Ancient Greek Lack of Hygiene World.
Liam Neeson is Zeus. His half-human son, Perseus, has to rescue him from the underworld and
I just realized I’ve been sitting here trying to remember why the guy woke up with the horse head in his bed in the Godfather and I’ve forgotten what came next in that unfinished sentence you see above this paragraph. I fall asleep every time I try to watch the Godfather. I’ve seen the scene but I have no idea what it means. (What? It was before my time. Plus I was afraid of New Jersey as a kid so the Godfather isn’t really my thing. Sorry).
Back to Wrath of the Titans.
Perseus has Poseiden’s pitchfork. It’s a Magical God Pitchfork, which means that it glows orange whenever it’s near manure, I think. That describes the overall quality of the script for this movie, so the pitchfork glows a lot. Husband thinks it might be more complicated than that, but Husband had to get up at 6 a.m. on a Saturday and work all day and he’s had a few drinks so I don’t know that you should trust him.
Plus, he’s still really bitter about the whole midi-chlorians thing, which he seems to be holding Liam Neeson personally responsible for.
So, Perseus has the pitchfork and he goes off to find his Dad.
Perseus ends up in a cave with Bill Nighy, one of our favorite actors. Nighy performs a monologue from a one-man Off Broadway show. Or outtakes from Love Actually. I’m not really sure, but I think it must be one of those. Then he shows Perseus and Andromeda a shortcut to destroy the Underworld that seems to defeat the whole “I’m on an epic quest” story-arc.
Husband: “There’s a small thermal exhaust port right below the main port!”
Liam Neeson, incidentally, was in Love Actually.
Wait, what’s Andromeda doing there? When did she show up? Perseus rode off alone on his Pegasus. Then he fought a bunch of badly rendered monsters and then I think he flew around some more.
Whatever.
Sometimes the dialogue is hard to understand. The sound mixing is actually pretty good. To be honest, the biggest problem is that we keep yelling lines from other movies, which makes it hard for us to hear the movie we’re watching. Husband hasn’t seen Taken, and neither of us has seen Taken 2 or the forthcoming Taken 3: the Quickening, but all of the trailers look the same so it seems safe to just make up dialogue.
Seriously, how many movies can there be in the Someone Stole Liam Neeson’s Daughter franchise?
It’s possible I made Taken 3 up…but I bet it gets made.
Since Perseus gets around on a fast-flying Pegasus, I’m not really clear on how all the other characters seem to be able to keep up with him. Nevertheless, Pegasus and Perseus go flapping away and everyone they left behind is just somehow with them in the next scene.
Husband: “A small one-man fighter should be able to penetrate the outer defense!”
Hang on a second, there’s some kind of fire-monster warrior guys attacking our band of plucky morons. That’s sort of cool.
Honestly, I have no idea what’s happening.
Husband: “Get this big walking carpet out of my way.”
The tagline for Wrath of the Titans is “Feel the Wrath.” That’s the best they could do?
Anyway, Andromeda and Perseus are on an epic quest. At some point while I was trying to make up a joke about feeling the wrath a bunch of shit happened and now I’m confused about who’s fighting who or what the quest is. It seems to have changed.
I actually thought the movie was over because they’d gotten out of the Underworld and put on deodorant (I think that’s what they were doing. I might be mistaken). But now the people who I thought were mortal enemies are fighting on the same side and I can’t figure out who in the hell they’re fighting.
Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers summed it up when he wrote, “…Clash of the Titans sucketh the mighty big one.”
We aren’t even bothering to recite movie dialogue anymore, we’re just moaning and mumbling to ourselves. Husband just said something about his blast-shield being down, but, having realized that the credits are rolling and our servitude is over, we’re both too busy scrambling for the remote to think clearly.
post-script
After the movie ended I was giving this post a quick edit to remove eighty percent of the profanity while Husband stared at the blank TV screen looking, frankly, happier than he’d looked over the last 92 minutes. That was when our furnace – which is located in the basement – directly below the television – emitted a terrible sound.
Husband has been down there for the last 10 minutes trying to repair it enough that it will limp along until Monday. Mostly, we’d prefer not to pay Double Jeopardy Magical Super-Overtime, or whatever the rate is you have to pay for a furnace repair at 10 p.m. on a Saturday night in February. Honestly, I’m also a little afraid if we call the furnace company they’ll send Liam Neeson over. Or, the more likely scenario will occur: my cough medicine will take control of my mouth and I’ll just blurt out a request that they not to send Liam Neeson.
They probably don’t get a lot of out-of-the-blue requests to not have Liam Neeson dispatched to people’s homes. It actually wouldn’t be the craziest thing I’ve ever called and asked them. Still, cross your fingers that Husband’s repair gets us through. Just in case, we won’t be subjecting the furnace to any more bad movies this weekend. It’s all Downton Abbey from here on out.
Yeah. Right.
We saw a trailer for the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie. In an fit of pop culture conformity we decided to watch the last two Pirates movies since we’d only seen the 1st one.
We slogged through Dead Man’s Chest. Good movie? Not really, but it was fairly entertaining. We adore Bill Nighy and Johnny Depp is Johnny Depp.
Next, we tried to watch At World’s End. How bad could it be?
When I put it on the Netflix queue, one of the reviews said, “Everything you expect and less.”
That was an overly generous assessment.
Rotten Tomatoes tells the whole story. If only Rotten Tomatoes also told the actual story, because I have to tell you that the what was playing out on the screen was a stupid mess that didn’t make much sense.
When we paused the movie after nearly an hour and saw that it still had TWO HOURS LEFT we decided to watch an old episode of Charlie’s Angels and go to bed. We didn’t bother to finish watching the Pirates movie because it bored us to tears.
Let’s review: Husband and I. Quit. Watching.
We are the people who watched Hellbound in it’s entirety. Chuck Norris kickboxes the devil. And you root for the devil.
We are the people who watched Bloodrayne in it’s entirety. “Not as bad as getting your eyelid caught on a nail”.
We are the people who watched every fucking episode of Galactica 1980 so you don’t have to.
We are the people who watched the Jayne Mansfield Story , a movie narrated by Arnold Schwartznegger. Before he learned to speak English even somewhat phonetically. Best line: “Buuuf Jaaaaaa Ahhh Lav Ewe.”
We are the people who watched William Shatner’s Incubus. Incubus, the 1st – and only – feature film entirely in the made-up language of Esperanto.
We are not an easily defeated people.
Sidenote: we’re watching Love and Other Drugs while I write this draft. Not boring at all, but I mention it because I’ve realized that the giant eyeballs of Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway are distracting when the two of them are onscreen together. These people can’t be a couple. If these people breed, they’ll give birth to fish-eyed babies. Really super-cute fish-eyed babies, but still, fish-eyed babies.
Where was I? Oh, right. Boredom. I’ve watched every single episode of Land of the Lost. To the best of my knowledge, the only people on Earth who can make that claim are me and Will Ferrel. He no doubt got an assload of cash out of the deal. I did not, but I probably should have.
You may think you’ve seen every episode of Land of the Lost, because they used to show the same 6 episodes over and over in rotation with other Sid and Marty Krofft shows on Saturday mornings. You have not seen every episode. There are FORTY-THREE episodes of Land of the Lost and if you try to watch them all they will crush your soul.
We didn’t give up on At World’s End immediately. We left it in the bluray player for a few days. Periodically, we’d sit in the living room and stare at the dark TV screen while trying to psych ourselves into finishing the movie.
Years ago, right after it opened, we went to see the Matrix. It hadn’t become a massive phenomenon yet, but the “What is the Matrix?” ad campaign and Keanu Reeve’s face were inescapable. Sometime in the middle of the 1st act, a couple came in and sat next to us. He was next to me, she was next to him.
5 minutes after they sat down the woman blurted, “Keanue Reeves is in this!”
She continued to talk.
5 minutes late she interrupted herself to blurt, “There’s Laurence Fishburne!”
I finally shamed them with my shushing and aggressively assertive dirty looks. Her boyfriend told her she needed to shut up because she was annoying everyone else. She finally seemed contrite.
A few minutes of blessed silence.
Then.
“Did I tell you your sister called?” He asked her.
“No, what’d she want?” She replied.
“She just called to say hi.”
When we tried to watch At World’s End, I found myself missing my old friends from the Matrix. Had they been here there at least would have been something coherent to listen to.
Hathaway. Gyllenhaal. Gigantic eyeballs.
Eventually we abandoned the idea of trying to slog through the rest of the movie. We took it out of the player. We looked at the disk as we put it back in the Netflix envelope. Even looking at the disk bored us.
Seriously, what are Jake and Anne’s combined ocular volume? It must be abnormally large. It can’t just be that they both have prominent orbital sockets.
I was going to take a staged photo of Husband looking bored while holding the At World’s End disk, but even the idea of getting the camera to take the picture bored us.
We actually own Hellbound, the Jayne Mansfield Story, and Galactica 1980. No one should own Bloodrayne.
You could argue that Ed Wood was boring, and you’d be right. But Ed Wood’s boringness was wrapped in a crunchy shell of exuberant wackiness that you can’t stop watching. You might lose consciousness, but later you’ll be sorry you did and you’ll try again and eventually you’ll finish the movie. Plus, Ed Wood’s movies were short. This Pirates thing? It’s 3 hours long. 3 hours of a plot better suited to a candybar commercial.
The average human eyeball weighs about 7.5 grams and has a volume of 5.5 cm3.
A movie can be inept and still have charm, or at least entertainment value. You can dress dogs up in fur remnants and call them Killer Shrews. You can drop the boom into the shot, put a pig mask on an otherwise naked Peter Coyote, or create a plot that’s so scientifically implausible even Glenn Beck knows it’s inaccurate. Just don’t be boring.
Don’t ever, ever, ever be boring. Boring is a sin.
I’d like to retract the statement about Peter Coyote and the pig mask. That was a terrible movie. Still, we finished watching it. Or we all passed out. I can’t say for sure – that was a long time ago.
At World’s End was so boring I can’t even blog about it without taking little breaks to think about other things. I’m not sure we’ll go to see the 4th installment, On Stranger Tides. It’s 3D and the trailer looks cool, but I remember people getting excited about the trailer for Waterworld, too, and look how well that turned out.
I was restoring some more archives and I found the “review” I wrote for Hellbound, one of the all-time great terrible movies. I thought I’d post the trailer for this delightful piece of cinema and link back to that old review because this movie is a work of genius. Genius, I tell you.
Happy New Year!
The stalker squirrel didn’t get me, but the movie Bloodrayne almost did.
Like most films adapted from video games, Bloodrayne is great. If your definition of “great” is, of course, “poorly directed, ineptly shot, incoherently edited, and really seriously badly cast.”
Through the judicious use of the fast forward button, you can condense the movie down to about 27 minutes of entertainment. That’s not enough to salvage the movie, but it’s an amusing way to spend time drinking a cup of coffee. Even the casting of Ben Kingsley and Geraldine Chaplin couldn’t save this movie.
It occurs to me that if you really disliked someone, you could give them this movie as a present and then insist they watch it. To be sure they have to sit through the whole thing, bring beer, act deadly serious about the entire enterprise and keep control of the remote. Rewind and re-watch the “good” parts just to drag out the “fun.” You’ll suffer, too, but I suspect that your target will never, ever bother you again. (I wonder if this would work on a squirrel?)
Highpoints of “the film” included a graphic slo-motion sex scene in some sort of dungeon. This scene did not, thankfully, involve Ben Kingsley and Geraldine Chaplin. Additionally, there was a lengthy and bizarrely random montage of decapitations with gratuitous arterial blood spurts that were totally out of sync with the rest of the movie in just about every way imagineable, including plot, tone, pacing and lighting.
Also, Michelle Rodriguez in what appeared to be a pirate’s costume. It’s possible that by this point I just wasn’t paying attention at all anymore, so I’m loathe to mention that I’m pretty sure Meat Loaf was running around in drag.
Not even Rayne’s propensity to miss her mouth while gulping blood from a chalice, thereby enabling said blood to splash artfully down her cleavage, could save this stinker.
I think I’m making it sound much better than it is.
At least Michelle Rodriguez can probably cop a “I was drunk and didn’t know what I was doing” plea. Sadly, I just realized the film was written by Guinevere Turner who turned the screenplay of American Psycho into a cutting (no pun intended) feminist social satire. I guess everyone has to pay the bills.
I thought the movie had Bill Nighy in it, but thankfully (for his sake) I was mistaken. (If you don’t know who I mean, he’s the excellent actor who stole the show in Love Actually and Underworld, among other movies, with the sheer force of his presence).
If you’re even slightly tempted to watch Bloodrayne, and you don’t have a sponsor or some other responsible adult who can come over to your house and make you step away from your DVD player, at least go read the reviews at Rotten Tomatoes first. There are so many great ones, I can’t pick a favorite, so I’ll just cite this one: “This is a movie that begs you not to watch it.”
Another review at Rotten Tomatoes said that Bloodrayne was “not as bad as getting your eyelid caught on a nail.” Trust me, you’ll have a much better time reading the reviews than you will watching this movie.
Immediately after watching Bloodrayne, we watched Silent Hill. I suspect that Silent Hill was pretty good, but by comparison it seemed brilliant.
I hesitate to praise Silent Hill too deeply because I also watched Valentine in the aftermath of Bloodrayne and even that didn’t seem awful at the time. Valentine was a serial killer movie starring David Boreanaz, Denise Richards, and Amy Irving’s daughter that Tivo recorded from basic cable at 2 a.m.
Yeah. Enough said.