Time Traveling Dinosaurs Attacked By Killer Locusts

The Admiral and I used to play a game called "Good Movie, Bad Movie." We'd go to Horkleys, the local video stop in Rexburg before Hollywood Video, and one of us would be in charge of picking out a good, quality film that we'd enjoy watching and one of us would be in charge of picking out the stinkiest, stanky, stank-bomb of a movie that we'd enjoy making fun of. It was good times. Sometimes the so-called "good" movie turned out to be lame, sometimes the "bad" movie wasn't bad enough to make fun of and, instead, was just mediocre. But most times we took great joy in holding our own personal Mystery Science Theater 3000 session and seeing which of us could be more witty. (I have to confess - usually, it was me.)

Some part of me still finds perverse joy in the concept of the bad movie - the film so bad, it's hilarious just to think about. I was thinking about this last night as I was flipping through the guide on the Dish and saw that, for the 497th time this month, Patrick Swayze's Roadhouse was playing on CMT. The movie itself is bad, real bad, but the description in the guide raised it (or lowered it, I guess) to a new level of laughable lameness. It was something like, "Hired to clean up a Missouri bar, a PhD bouncer woos the local doctor and tames the whole town." PhD bouncer? Woo? Tames the whole town? You can't tell me that description doesn't smack of awful goodness.



The SciFi Network (or SyFy as it has now been inexplicably rebranded) has these themed weekend suckathons - six movies in a row about dinosaurs running amok, six movies about killer insects, six movies about time travel, six movies about time traveling dinosaurs facing off with killer insects, etc. The movies, when I'm allowed to tune into them, are always bad. They star Lorenzo Lamas or Casper Van Dien. They're all filmed in the producer's backyard. They all look like the special effects were produced by the AV club at the local high school. Bad. But the descriptions make them hilarious: "Backpacking college students accidentally awaken a rock monster which ravages the countryside" or "A team of mercenaries is unprepared when attacked by a swarm of irradiated locusts." Awesome, right?

Anyway, it got me to thinking about some of the poorer films I've ever seen. There's all kinds of bad - something expensive and well produced that's morally bankrupt and spiritually empty (not to mention boring) like Kiera Knightley's The Duchess. There's mid-grade, B-list, just-trying-to-be-like-everybody-else date schlock like Can't Hardly Wait, Sweet Home Alabama, Love Actually, etc. And then there's C-grade, under-funded, how-did-this-ever-get-made garbage on film. From this particular category, I choose A Sound of Thunder.

Even though it stars Ed Burns, a respectable B-list actor, and Ben Kingsley (he was Ghandi for crying out loud), this movie was one of the worst things ever put on film. it's a loose adaptation of a Ray Bradbury short story. The idea is that, in the future, tourists can travel back in time. However, the rule is they can't change anything in the past. Naturally, someone does - one guy steps off the suspended path and smashes a butterfly 65 million years ago. Because of that one, small change, the future alters dramatically and everything goes to hell. It's a cool idea and, in Bradbury's story, it's left open and ominous enough that the reader can fill in the blanks with his imagination. The film version looks terrible, makes no sense, features Ghandi in some kind of white-shock fright wig, and, most importantly, has a climax that involves gorillas crossed with dinosaurs. Yep, you read that right, gorilla-saurs. Bad.



According to IMDB, the movie cost 53 million to make (where that money went, I have no idea - maybe Ben Kingsley required his trailer to be made out of solid gold or something) but only made 8 million worldwide. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film got an overall rating of 8%. That's out of a 100, in case you're wondering.

So it's the kind of movie that would be perfect to watch with the Admiral or my brothers because it's so bad, it's good to make fun of. Sadly, I watched it alone. Anyway, I'm curious - what's the worst movie you've ever seen? It doesn't have to be fun-bad. It can be just bad-bad - but I'd love to know what movie you saw that you would even recommend to an enemy.