Entry tags:

icftbb, movie reviews

It Came from the Bargain Bin II: Revenge of the Bargain Bin
The Story So Far.

Quite a lineup today. I need to remember to do this more frequently, since the worst thing about terrible movies is how dreadfully easy they are to forget. It's like a self-defense mechanism. I'm trying not to think about having to watch Dungeons & Dragons AGAIN so I can write it up properly.

Anyway, here you are: more movies I only watched to save everyone else the trouble.

*** = I'd watch it again.
** = Pleasantly surprising.
* = So bad, it's good.
- = So bad, it's AWFUL.
-- = Unpleasantly surprising.
--- = KILL IT WITH FIRE.

Sharks in Venice (2008) [-].
Writer and Director: Danny Lerner
Starring: the least-talented Baldwin

Now, I'm not convinced that Stephen Baldwin isn't a mutated shark himself: for one thing, his eyes and features appear to be incapable of showing any expression at all. Of course, sharks are typically not to be found wearing tight shirts that show off their luscious man boobs omg, so that's out. Definitely a mammal, that guy. Moving on.

I admit that I have a weakness for exactly this type of movie. Whether it's Zombie Strippers, Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter or Snakes on a Plane, some movies really are exactly what it says on the tin, and that's okay. Unfortunately, Sharks in Venice fails to live up even to the extremely low expectations created by its title. A good alternate title would be "Sharks in Bulgaria" (where the movie was actually filmed), or even "Attack of the Stock Footage", since there's no reason to believe that 90% of the "shark" in this movie was anywhere near the rest of it. If you ever want to make your very own JAWS but don't want to either a) film real sharks, b) build an expensive rubber shark, or c) create a reasonably convincing digi-shark, try Shark Movies for Dummies: Shark Attacks on Film in Three Steps So Easy, Even A Dummy Could Do It by Danny Lerner:

Step 1) Film a bunch of sharks. Any sharks, doing anything. Tape them off the Discovery Channel for maximum laziness. Get them swimming in various directions, biting things (doesn't matter what), charging... you know, sharky stuff.
Step 2) Film an actor underwater. Have him pretend to be reacting to something, then yank him off-camera with a rope around his ankles.
Step 3) Splice shark footage and actor footage together in the following sequence:
+ actor swimming
+ shark swimming (ominous music)
+ actor looking at something with concern
+ shark swimming (more ominous music)
+ actor looking at something really scary
+ shark charging (ORCHESTRA STING)
+ actor yanked offscreen by teamsters
+ shark swimming again, this time tinted red with Digital Effects (tm)
INSTANT SHARK MOVIE OR YOUR MONEY REFUNDED!

Actually, Sharks in Venice did have both a rubber shark and some digi-sharks, and they looked so awful that they only got one scene each. It's possible the horrible shark-splicing used in the rest of the movie was a last-ditch effort to save it, once all involved realized how dreadful the Special Effects came out, but I have to wonder why they bothered.

This movie is so goddamned lazy and insultingly stupid that I find it personally offensive. It's purportedly set in Italy (though filmed, as I mentioned, in Bulgaria), but every Italian character speaks in the manner I've come to think of as "Jean-Claude French"*: inserting one random word of their own language into every other sentence, but otherwise speaking English. When done in the presence of anglophones, this is annoying, but these characters even speak Jean-Claude Italian to each other when no actual English-speakers are listening. Toward the middle, the dialogue shifts from "painful, yet hilarious" ("I don't see why these people are so against the idea of a shark attack") to "selections from the Big Book of Action Movie Clichés". The Captured Damsel actually says to the villain (a mobster, naturally, 'cause it's Italy): "You'll never get away with this," a line that might not have been quite so terrible if I hadn't yelled it mockingly at her five minutes before.

I can't even tell you all the shit that's wrong with this film. Beyond bad dialogue, bad sharks, bad Venice, and bad Baldwin man-boobs, there's the diving scenes, where they - seriously - just dubbed dialogue over the top of them. Never mind that the actors have regulators in their mouths and are really obviously not talking; they're just telepathic, I guess. Costumes change from scene to scene without warning, handcuffs are repossessed and replaced with rope in the next scene, Stephen Baldwin magically regrows his leg and no one seems to notice or care, and "Venice" is experiencing terrible digi-water flooding. There's a scene where a group of characters in a boat really conspicuously pull up to the "dock" in a boat on a trailer. I don't know how they expected to get away with this shit. Arguably a movie called "Sharks in Venice" isn't a serious film exercise.

And that's the let-down, really. There's potential for awesome here: sharks! In Venice! What's not cool about that? Chunks of gondoliers everywhere! Unfortunately, the movie is 10% sharks in Venice, 30% half-baked treasure-hunter-Mafia-mystery, and 60% hideously-wooden-Baldwin charging around thrusting his man-nipples at people.

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Dragonquest (2009) [--]
Tagline: Our Fate Lies in the Hands of One.
Better Tagline: Did You Ever Wonder What Happened to Marc Singer from The Beastmaster?

Hoo boy. I think, somewhere, somehow, I was cursed by an unusually subtle gypsy to watch every piece-of-shit movie ever made about dragons, and believe me, it's a shit-drenched category to begin with. Even the good dragon movies are just "sort of okay" by objective standards. Somewhere between Merlin and the War with the Dragons and a LARP, there's this piece of crap.

The "quest" is your basic assemble-all-pieces-of-the-mystical-McGuffin shtick, with the extra Mario-RPG angle of having the McGuffin pieces be brightly-colored stones that fit into an amulet that looks like something you might have seen in your grandmother's costume jewelry box when you were ten. The general idea, as I understood it, was that each of the stones could only be earned at the end of a task that demonstrated some virtue or other, but the presentation is so goddamned sloppy that it looks as though Our Hero valiantly won The Stone of Not Smoking, the Stone of Not Bathing, the Stone of Giant Fucking Spiders, the Stone of Swallowing Any Bullshit Story Anyone Happens To Tell You, and the Stone of Cremating Some Old Guy. Look, I wish I was making all of that up.

This movie's crimes are many, especially that most heinous of all effects-driven film transgressions: using the same footage over and over. This movie was determined, determined, I tell you, to squeeze every last inch of mileage out of its CGI shots, so if you see an obvious digital effect (and don't worry, it will be obvious), you can look forward to seeing it at least three more times.

On the other hand, Thumper's mom says that if you can't say something nice, you shouldn't say nothin' at all. So, uh . . . some of the scenery is very nice? Daniel Bonjour, who stars as the film's main character/Chosen One Arkady, is very convincingly confused and slightly horrified about everything? Marc Singer takes a fall with great conviction? I dunno.

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Zombie Nation (2004) [---(-)]
Directed by, written by, and starring: Ulli Lommel.

OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD. The best thing about this movie was the cover art on the DVD box. Seriously. I've seen a lot of bad movies, and this is the only movie I've ever seen that scores an absolute null in all categories. Bad cinematography. Bad effects. Bad acting, bad dialogue, bad costumes and set design, bad soundtrack, bad makeup, BAD PLOT OMG SERIOUSLY. Taken by itself, the basic premise - a killer cop drugs and murders young women, then buries them in the desert, until they rise from the dead and come after him - is merely obnoxious, but the presentation manages to edge this one over the line into fetish fuel. There's no one specific element that does it, except the obvious fact of this movie's existence. Someone, somehwere got off on making this piece-of-shit film, and by watching it, I've been roped involuntarily into someone else's sex act. Some movies are a thoroughly enjoyable mind-fuck, but this one is a peeping Tom.

Other than that? The only reason anyone should ever watch it is as the most complete collection of "How Not To Make a Movie" errors I've ever seen. Apparently, every indoor scene was shot in the same warehouse: if the sound quality (or lack thereof) wasn't enough of a tip-off, they didn't even bother to paint all the walls within camera view, so the "police station" set turns into an abandoned warehouse about 4/5ths of the way up the wall. (Also, there's a gong. Why is there a gong? We don't know.) There are several scenes where you can see the cameraman's reflection. The "zombie nation" consists of a handful of girls whose only sign of zomb-ness is really heavy raccoon eye makeup.

There is no discernible plot, so here's some randomized scenes: There's an interrogation scene where the witness is hauled to his feet and shoved through a door, and no effort is made to hide the fact that he is not handcuffed. He's not even zip-tied. He's holding his wrist with one hand. There is another scene where the "zombie" girls sit around solemnly eating take-out cheeseburgers. There is a series of flashbacks to a scene where a bald man is repeatedly and brutally spanked. There's a Fight Club derived scene of two men whaling on each other for no reason, since all they accomplish is crushing a bunch of empty cardboard boxes lying around (maybe that was the point, who knows?) There is NO POINT to any of this, it's all just stuff. Which happens. And isn't connected to anything else in the movie.

Or, in one word: CRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAP!

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Men With Brooms (2002) [***]

Okay, I'm cheating a bit, since this is technically an old favorite, but 1) it's still a bargain bin refugee by any stretch of definition, since I'm sure none of you have ever seen it (or, indeed, even heard of it) and 2) I need some positivity in this sea of suck, especially after that last one.

This is an underdog sports movie... about curling. I'll say that again: an underdog sports movie about curling. Like in Zombie Nation, the director, main character, and co-writer of this film are all the same person, but fortunately that's the only point of similarity. I will let the four main characters introduce themselves:

Lennox: I'm a drug dealer.
Neil: I bury dead people.
Eddie: I have a single digit sperm count.
Cutter: And I'm a naked cheater. I say we go for it. Are you with me? Let's do it.

The plot is, well, pretty much how you'd figure. Nothing that happens in this movie will come as a surprise to anyone who's ever seen a movie before, but it's not so much the "what" as the "how" that makes it entertaining. There's a lot of quirky charm in the characters, the setting, and the sport of curling as it's presented in the movie. The story is obvious, the script mostly isn't, and most importantly, this movie contains Leslie Nielsen, but keeps him mercifully in check. I actually forgot he was in it when I made eclipsegryph watch it with me, which is impressive, considering that I hate watching the guy and ordinarily break out in hives in the first five minutes or so of any movie he's in.

Plus, if you watch this movie, there's a chance that the next Winter Olympics might make slightly more sense to you. I'm just sayin'.

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* If you got that reference, I apologize, ma petite.