Bad Movies

[chuckro]

Edgehopper hosted a bad movie night this weekend. Despite the RiffTrax accompaniment, they were still really, really bad.

Glitter's biggest problem was that it lacked any sort of narrative thrust. There was very little real conflict, there weren't any overarcing themes. Honestly, it was kinda boring--essentially the They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot trope over and over again. Also, for a Mariah Carey vehicle, it had strangely little of her performing. I think it says something when the glaring anachronisms are the least of a movie's problems.

Battlefield Earth was typical bad sci-fi worldbuilding (Why/how did all of that technology survive a thousand years? If you have interstellar transporters, why do you need to mine inhabited planets? If your planet's atmosphere can be ignited by radiation, why don't you have a filter on your transporters? Or a waystation?) combined with John Travolta playing the dumbest evil overlord I've seen outside of a Conan story. Seriously, his character on Welcome Back Kotter was smarter.

The Room is in the running for worst movie I've ever seen ever. This is Death Ship levels of bad. The first half-hour has all the plot of a softcore porn movie (and the leading lady has all the acting skill of a porn actress), but then it devolves into inexplicable scenes featuring characters with inexplicable motivations, abruptly dropped plot threads, a character that vanishes and is replaced by someone who's never introduced, and Tommy Weiseau's Braziaustriatiastan accent. Oh, and Weiseau's rampant and blatant misogeny as demostrated by the female characters in the film. By the time the ending arrives, you're cheering for it; it's probably not the effect he was going for, but it's the only pleasant moment in the movie.

Comments

[cubby-t-bear.livejournal.com]

Hey! Thulsa Doom was a great evil overlord!

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

I was thinking more Thoth-Amon, who seems to spend his time blundering towards letting Conan defeat him.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

The thing with The Room is, this is the type of poorly thought out, poorly executed, self-indulgent fantasy that makes up 99% of slush and a good 50% of agented manuscripts. As such, it is not novel in its badness to me. I just don't have an interest.

You know they say happy families are all the same, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way? Novels are the opposite. Good novels are good in their own way, but bad novels are all bad in the same way.

[cubby-t-bear.livejournal.com]

I have not noticed that happy families are all the same. But yeah, there are certain very common threads in bad fanfic :)

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Not talking about fanfic, dude. Talking about novels submitted to publishers. These are common threats across fiction writing in total. So don't go sticking the bad tropes on fanfic.

[cubby-t-bear.livejournal.com]

Ah. That makes sense. But I have had zero experience with novel submissions to publishers (aside from what gets published, obviously), so I was afraid to generalize there.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Whhhyyyyy did you have to link to TV Tropes???

I am still there....

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

Because I'm evil.

Actually, it's because TV Tropes will ruin your vocabulary, and I want to be able to talk to people.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I can't believe that, a day later, I'm still there and I've only run into one page so far that I had already heard of. Jesus.