Bad Movie Month #31: Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films

It's over!

Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films (2014)

Directed by: Mark Hartley
Produced by: Veronica Fury, Brett Ratner
Written by: Mark Hartley
Budget: I can't find any solid information concerning this documentary's budget.

Starring: Menahem Golan, Yoram Globus

Just because it's Bad Movie Month doesn't mean I have to exclusively watch bad movies. It also means I can watch movies about bad movies, and Electric Boogaloo is just that.

Were I to go back and redo my list of movies to watch this month, I would have included more Cannon films. When it comes to B-movie studios, Cannon ranks the highest on that particular ladder, and this documentary explains why in pretty good detail.

The Cannon Group started between Dennis Friedland and Chris Dewey as a production studio which bought and produced the cheapest possible scripts they could find, with their budgets often limited to $300,000 per film. The vast majority of these were English versions of foreign-language softcore porn, with barely-there stories and lots of nudity. But as the 70s marched on the company started to flounder as lack of returns and tax wrangling serious hurt the company's financial strength.

So the two sold the company to a pair of Israeli film buffs, Manahem Golan and Yoran Globus, who essentially created the modern B-movie reputation.

Their business model consisted of buying the absolute cheapest scrips they could find, creating a poster for the as-yet-unfinished movie, and presenting it to potential investors. If the movie was purchased, they would knock it out in a few weeks as cheaply as possible and release it. This led to the creation of posters for a multitude of movies that never actually saw production, and often never left the script  at all; however, it also gave rise to what was essentially a revival of a studio-system studio, where Cannon could control every aspect of the movie in-house.

Several of Cannon's big hits were from the 80s, including Enter the Ninja, Death Wish, Missing in Action, and the first Breakin'. Rather than let the mild successes go to their heads, Golan and Globus continued with their cheap production methods through the 80s, often producing over 40 films a year, which is absolutely insane. Many of these were over-hyped by the studio and seriously underperformed, but Golan had the ability to somehow convince people to continue funding his movies.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your view of the company and its practices), by the late 80s an early 90s Cannon's financial juggling caught up with the company and they were investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission to determine whether Cannon misreported their finances. This, combined with a string of financial failures, including Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, Captain America, and a failed attempt at a Spider-Man movie, Golan and Globus split and Cannon was gone, in all but name.

Electric Boogaloo is a look at The Cannon Group from people in the movie industry who worked with the two lead studio heads, including actors, writers, producers, and other production crew members. Overall it provides what seems to be a level, fair look at some of the practices, and doesn't shy away from the bad parts.

Sometimes with documentaries concerning people who are still active or alive you see either attempts to tear down the person's reputation or hail them as a champion of some particular vision. Electric Boogaloo doesn't seem to fall into either trap, and instead provides what seems to be a good representation of Globus and Golan as two guys who really like movies, who really wanted to make movies, and who made the best movies they could using their resources. Cannon definitely had some strange beginnings and people in the documentary don't shy away from calling the company out for its early exploitative nature.

But, the movie also doesn't shy away from the impact that Cannon had on the modern film landscape. The action movies we see today (the documentary points to Olympus Has Fallen as one example) are held up as simply Cannon movies with actual production value and care put into the scripts. It's something I hadn't considered before, but the point is presented that Cannon actually shaped the current action scene and movie, which I think has some merit.

One thing I would have liked to see from the documentary is actual interviews with Golan and Globus, but the movie addresses that at the end: the two were approached to appear in the documentary, but both declined...and several months before this movie was released, they produced their own documentary called The Go-Go Boys: The Inside Story of Cannon Films. Unfortunately I wasn't able to find a copy to watch, as I would have loved to compare the two, but such is life.

Again, if I were to do this again I would probably put some more Cannon movies onto the list. The biggest problems would be choosing which ones, and trying to make sure they wouldn't overshadow everything else. Maybe next time I'll just do a Cannon month, because there's certainly enough different movies to choose from.

Should You Watch It?
I think that, as a documentary, Electric Boogaloo accomplishes everything a good documentary should. It goes into the background, the current events, and gives a wide variety of opinions on how and why the subjects ticked. If you're into movies at all and would like to learn a little bit about the company that produced all those Chuck Norris VHSes, give this a shot.

Thanks for reading.

Bad Movie Month #30: Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo

I'm no expert, but that shoe looks
impractical for dancing.

Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo (1985)

Directed by: Joel Silberg
Produced by: Allen DeBevoise, David Zito
Written by: Charles Parker, Allen DeBevoise (screenplay), Charles Parker, Allen DeBevoise, Gerald Scaife (Story)
Budget: Low

Starring: Lucinda Dickey, Adolfo "Shabba Doo" Quinones, Michael "Boogaloo Shrimp" Chambers

When an evil realty developer wants to demolish the community center and replace it with a capitalist temple shopping mall, three proletariat dancers band together to take down filthy bourgeoisie dogs through endless dance numbers.

I might be reading into that a little bit, but you get the idea.

The movie takes place in the 1985, the most 80s year of the 1980s, with all the male belly shirts, big hair, and choreographed street dance routines you could ask for. While Killer Klowns may have been the epitome of the Ugly 80s, Breakin' 2 portrays the glam-80s, where all we wanted to do was dance and get perms. There was probably still the cocaine problem, but it helped us look good in spandex, so it was all good.

The acting throughout is the epitome of phoned-in 80s sequel acting, the sets and costumes would seem exaggerated if that wasn't what people actually wore, and the writing is what you'd expect from a dance movie. It's interesting seeing that dance "films" up to, and including, the most recent Step Up still follow the same beats and plot points.

The Rad
The dancing is the focus of the entire thing, and at least everyone in this movie can dance. And when I say dance, I mean they move. Not only that, but the movie embodies all the classic cheesy 80s tropes: evil realty developer, a group of misfits fighting the man, a dance battle under a graffiti-dappled bridge, and at one point a group of people dance battle with nunchaku and trash-can lid shields. If that's not rad, I don't know what is.

There's a scene where Michael Chambers dances up the wall and on the ceiling, and it's actually really impressive as an effect thanks to its execution. Here's the scene in question, if you're curious. The weirdest part is that this happens in the universe of the movie. Yeah, partway through one of the characters walks in and notices him literally dancing on the ceiling, which means that at least one of the people in this movie can violate the laws of gravity through dance. Why couldn't the entire movie be about that?

The Bogus
The movie speeds through every single dialogue scene to skip to the dancing, which makes it feel like an advertisement for a community center, rather than an actual movie. While the dancing is entertaining to watch, it's pretty much fluff without anything of substance to support it. If you cut out all the dancing, you'd have a movie that lasts maybe twenty minutes. There are also numerous montages of city life, so many that it's probably appropriate to refer to most of this movie as pure filler.

In all honesty, nothing here really happens, despite the fact that there's so much going on. It sounds like a contradiction, but after all the dancing, conversations, and "plot" finishes and the credits roll, you realize there wasn't much to the movie. It's all glitz and filler, and though the dancing may be well done it gets tiring after a little bit.

At the one hour point (gee, notice a trend) the movie grinds to an emotional halt. This is about where the "Storming the city hall meeting" scene takes place, and it feels like it should instead happen at the end. Instead we follow with an assault, hospital dance number with nurses who heal the sick (and resurrect the dead!) through dance...not a joke, this all happens within the movie's universe, and is clearly not supposed to be a musical-style dance scene. No one comments on it, no one mentions it ever again, and it's treated as if it's completely normal.

The Rest
"2: Electric Boogaloo" has become a pop culture monument, indicating a sequel that no one really needed. It's actually the reason I chose to watch this movie, because until I watched it I didn't have much context for it aside from the fact that it was a sequel title. I did some research and it doesn't actually seem that the movie showcases the actual Electric Boogaloo dance much, if at all.

This movie was produced by Cannon Films, the iconic studio behind a huge number of the memorable low-budget releases ranging from the 60s to the 90s. The first Breakin' was actually one of the last financially profitable movies released by Cannon before their distribution deal with MGM fell through. Apparently there were some major contentions between the writers and producers of Breakin' 2, primarily due to the fact that the producers wanted to maintain a G-rated movie and the original writers trying to create a more serious look at inner-city 80s culture. Yeah, seriously.

I want to see a Cabin in the Woods style deconstruction of dance movies, where dancing is a method to unlock some sort of primal underlying hive-instinct in the human mind. Something a little like the music video for LMFAO's Party Rock Anthem, but actually, you know...well done.

Will You Dig It?
Though I found it entertaining, you will have to have a high tolerance for the 80s in order to watch this. It kept me entertained for the most part, but I found my attention wandering whenever the on-screen action slowed down.

However, as a white guy whose signature dance move is "Bend your knees in time to the beat," I had a pretty good time overall.

Bad Movie Month #29: Age of Dinosaurs

Someone skipped arm day.

Age of Dinosaurs (2013)

Directed by: Joseph J. Lawson
Produced by: Paul Bales, David Michael Latt, Michael Meilander, David Rimawi
Written by: Hank Woon, Jr.
Budget: 

Starring: Treat Williams, Ronny Cox, Jillian Rose Reed, Joshua Michael Allen, Max Aria

I swear I didn't know this was an Asylum movie until the first credit popped up.

When a laboratory resurrects dinosaurs and performs genetic experiments on the animals, it's only a matter of time before they get loose and we start following The Lost World story beats.

This is a movie where evil science must push forward to accomplish its goals, no matter how many "setbacks" or "troubles" the processes encounter. As one character says early on, "why start with butterflies and lizards when you can get going with the cool stuff?"

The Good
At certain points the dinosaurs are animatronic and actually look pretty good. The designs are goofy sci-fi schlock, with horns and spikes in random places, but the movements look alright. The unfortunate thing is that the animatronics are only used once or twice after that first scene, but at times they opt instead to use shadows projected on a wall which is at least an artistic choice that seems to have been driven by the realities of their low budget.

Compared to the other Asylum movies I've seen this one feels like its crew put in the most effort. While that isn't saying much considering the general lack of care the company spares for its productions, it stands out, especially when you consider just how dumb Snakes on a Train was. The difference seems most apparent in the quality of the direction, because unlike most others, Age of Dinosaurs actually looks like a movie. The difference is so notable that, with better actors and effects I could see this actually working as a fun B-movie, rather than an attempt to cash in on Jurassic World.

The Bad
It's when the animatronics are replaced by CGI that the dinosaurs start looking like crap. The first shot of the carnotaurus walking around and biting someone's head off looks cheap. The shots of the dinosaur's eyes look really, really cartoony. Of course, this doesn't just apply to the dinosaurs but the environments and setting whenever computers are used to render their holding cells or cloning pods. At one point a bunch of glass shatters towards the screen as a fuzzy mesh. During a chase scene the dinosaur's model is animated faster than it should logically be moving, so it looks like it's sliding along the ground.

One thing that doesn't help the animation is the dinosaur designs themselves. It's fairly obvious that the people who worked on this movie never actually studied dinosaur anatomy, because each one looks like a drawing by someone who thinks dinosaurs are cool without actually knowing what they looked like.

As expected the acting isn't anything to write home about, except for when it's really, really bad. The movie's "kid," Jade, is a stereotypical brat, complete with attached cell phone, college acceptance/rejection subplot, and imitation Jennifer Tilly squeak. The scientists and crew are a group of pretty blonde women who can't seem to forget that they're reading off a script while they aimlessly twiddle with buttons and knobs on a control board. Wheelchair CEO (I can't remember the character's name) does fine as an amoral, big-picture science guy.

The movie outright steals several shots or scenes from the Jurassic Park series, including the classic velociraptor-kitchen scene, even down to the framing. Here is the shot from Age of Dinosaurs. Here is a shot from Jurassic Park. Uh, I mean, surely this movie was a monument of ethical writing and film-making.

During one action scene there's a SWAT team shooting at the big bad dinosaur, and the captions indicate that there should be gunshots...but it looks like they forgot to put in the muzzle flashes and sound effects, because all the actors are doing is shaking their guns and pretending to shoot. Of course, this scene comes immediately before the dinosaur takes down a CGI helicopter, so maybe their budget could only afford either gunshots or helicopters.

I don't know whether Netflix provides its own closed captioning or if it used the movie's native CC tracks, but whoever created it should be embarrassed. There were numerous typos, inaccuracies, and missing words which really shouldn't happen in this day and age.

The Rest
Sometimes I wonder why we can't get a good dinosaur movie. I don't mean that as a joke, despite how silly it might be. The original Jurassic Park is great, but I can't really think of any other high-profile, well-received dinosaur movie. I might just start writing a treatment for Jurassic Continent...

Should You Watch It?
Honestly...this might be worth your time. As the movie goes on it gets goofier and goofier, hitting critical mass around the one hour mark. Special scenes of note include the "No joke!" dinosaur text, the exploding elevator, and a spinosaurus somehow chilling on top of a huge skyscraper. There is enough here that you might be able to overlook some of the Asylum crap.

Extra
The Asylum has had some success recently making original trash like Sharknado, which at least shows they are self-aware enough to understand their place in the current pop culture landscape. With this under their belt I wonder whether the Asylum couldn't make some sort of respectable name of themselves, in the same vein as Troma or Cannon, by abandoning their mockbusters altogether and producing low-budget camp fluff. While 2015 showed no sign that they were going to stop making crap, Sharknado 4 is planned for release sometime in 2016, so if that's successful maybe the studio can continue branching out.

Bad Movie Month #28: Pocahontas 2: Journey to a New World

Can someone get this movie a blanket?

Pocahontas 2: Journey to a New World (1998)

Directed by: Tom Ellery, Bradley Raymond
Produced by: Leslie Hough
Written by: Allen Estrin, Cindy Marcus, Flip Kobler
Budget: I couldn't find any information about this movie's budget anywhere online.

Starring: Irene Bedard, Billy Zane, Jim Cummings, Donal Gibson, David Ogden Stiers, Linda Hunt, Jean Stapleton, Russell Means, Finola Hughes, Brad Garrett

Some time after the events of the first movie, Pocahontas hears rumors that John Smith has died. When a John Smith replacement arrives, he whisks Pocahontas back across the sea, where everything ends up far happier than it does in reality.

Between 1994 and 2011, Disney produced and released roughly 49 direct-to-video movies. The vast, vast majority of these were sequels to theatrical Disney releases both recent and classic, including Mulan, several Aladdin follow-ups, and a sequel to Bambi where the titular character murders a lodge full of hunters after noticing his mother's head mounted on their wall (that may not have actually happened, I haven't seen it). At best these were accepted and forgotten about, and at worst they were regarded as the trash they were and destined for landfills or given to the least favorite child as a birthday gift.

The first Pocahontas movie was at least a Disney animated classic. This one? Not so much, despite its half-assed attempts to call back to the best parts of the first.

The History
Would you have guessed this movie isn't historically accurate?

The Bad
The animation has taken a serious hit, more so than you might think from a straight to video sequel. Grandmother Willow in particular looks really, really bad...as in bad Photoshop masking bad. The actual motion of the characters is jerky and lacks that fluidity that earned Disney a name in the 90s. When characters speak the animations are over-the-top in a way that reminds me of the Ralph Bakshi Lord of the Rings, where everyone gesticulated wildly. The background characters don't move at all, and at points it looks like the animators forgot to replace their stand-in models. There's an extended sword fight/action scene towards the end, and it's best described as tepid.

The characters have been reduced to their roles, rather than actual characters. Pocahontas is a spunky girl hero, the animals are groan-inducing "comic" relief, and that's pretty much it. This is just emphasized by the awful voice acting from pretty much everyone involved. Bedard obviously has no interest in this, as her Pocahontas sounds like she's on downers throughout the entire thing. Zane plays Rolfe as a goofy, cock-sure diplomat that with some of the most annoying "quips" put to script. The animals make all the necessary chattering noises when appropriate.

Hey, you remember how the songs in the original Pocahontas were woven into the plot and served to describe and elaborate character motivations? How "Colors of the Wind" reinforced the movie's emphasis on nature, how "Just Around the Riverbend" foreshadowed Pocahontas finding some meaning in a cause? Well all that metaphor has been replaced by characters singing about what they see and telling the audience how they feel.

For a movie that's only 72 minutes long, there sure is a lot of filler. Long dance scenes, comedy bits, and animations that feel like they're going on longer than they should just to use up time. It makes the movie feel like it was stretched out from a 44-minute TV special to a full-length movie.

I'm not going to talk much about whether this movie is "problematic" in its portrayal of various cultures and how they interact because I'm not really qualified to speak on that. Suffice to say, it handles it with all the sensitivity and tact that a 90's straight-to-video sequel possesses.

The Rest
I don't know what else I can really say about this. If you've seen one Disney sequel you've pretty much seen them all.

Should You Watch It?
No.

Bad Movie Month #27: Manos: The Hands of Fate

Lavese las manos, por favor.

Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966)

Directed by: Harold P. Warren
Produced by: Harold P. Warren
Written by: Harold P. Warren
Budget: $19,000 (roughly $139,000 in 2015, according to US Department of Labor)

Starring: Harold P. Warren, Diane Mahree, Jackie Neyman, Tom Neyman, John Reynolds

Michael (Warren), his wife Margaret (Mahree), and their daughter, Debbie (Neyman) are on a family vacation in Texas when Michael gets lost on the desert roads. They stumble across a lodge owned by the mysterious Master and his multiple wives, who are some sort of pagan cult that sacrifices people to a hand or something.

Manos: The Hands of Fate is the Casablanca to Plan 9 From Outer Space's Citizen Kane. Released around the same era, with roughly the same quality, the pair of them form a perfect storm of disastrously hilarious camp. This is the result of a movie which started as a bet and was plagued with production issues throughout. After whipping up $19,000 and promising the cast and crew a cut of the profits (because he couldn't pay them a wage), Warren spent a summer creating this cinematic masterpiece.

This is going to be fairly brief, simply because this is a movie I think everyone should watch once. It's pretty much impossible to divide this into good or bad, so let's just start.

The so Manos it's Manos
The first thing you'll notice about the movie is that it starts with a fade-in and several seconds of crackling microphone feedback. The audio quality will stay consistent throughout, with the regular hiss of poor pickup. This is interesting, considering every sound effect and line of dialogue was dubbed back in during post-production. This is particularly noticeable when the words coming from the speakers don't actually sync to the actor's delivery.

The second thing you might notice is that the acting is hilarious, even if you haven't noticed the dubbing issues (I doubt that's the case though). Problems stemming from the size of the sound stage and lighting setup meant that actors had very little space they could move around in. When characters have to run somewhere we see them take a step or two, then fade to a shot of them in the new location. When Michael and Margaret are frantically searching for their daughter they stand outside the front door, stock-still, shouting and waving their flashlight around.

Certain scenes look like they're from a silent-era film. The lighting used during various outside shots created what looks like an unintentional iris shot, and when combined with the lack of color it looks like something spliced in from Birth of a Nation. In addition the lights apparently attracted moths, which are clearly visible flying into and out of the camera's view. There are constant cuts to a couple making out in a car who continuously get told off by police, and nothing ever comes from it. There are multiple different shots of the Master's wives fighting each other, seemingly without any stop. At one point the movie cuts away from the fighting, we have a full length conversation, and it goes back to the wives who are still fighting. This occurs multiple times.

The score is a mix of piano and...clarinet? Whatever it is also sounds like a leftover from the silent film era, so much so that I constantly expected title cards to pop up and tell me what everyone was saying.

Apparently there weren't enough profits to compensate anyone except Neyman and her dog, who received a bicycle and dog food, respectively.

The Rest
For some bizarre reason there was a video game adaptation released in 2012 which featured retro-style graphics and sound design. It got mixed reviews, which is far better than I would have expected. Luckily there hasn't been an attempt at a remake, but I feel like it's only a matter of time before someone who misunderstands why it's entertaining will try and produce it.

Maybe it would work as a stage musical.

Should You Watch It?
Yes. Words can't quite sum up just how off-kilter this movie is.

Bad Movie Month #26: The Toxic Avenger

This won't prepare you.

The Toxic Avenger (1984)

Directed by: Michael Herz, Lloyd Kaufman
Produced by: Michael Herz, Lloyd Kaufman, Stuart Strutin
Written by: Lloyd Kaufman, Joe Ritter
Budget: $500,000

Starring: Mitch Cohen, Mark Torgl, Andree Maranda, Pat Ryan, Jr.

In Tromaville, New Jersey (the pollution capital of the world), Melvin Ferd (Torgl) is a tiny little nerd regularly harassed by the thugs who visit the gym where he works. When exposure to toxic waste turns Melvin into a superhuman freak, he uses his abilities to get revenge.

The Toxic Avenger was Troma Entertainment's first big hit after originally producing sex comedies and exploitation films during the 70s. When Lloyd Kaufman had the idea to film a horror movie, this was the result. Watching a Troma movie is an experience; there's something strangely surreal about each production, and The Toxic Avenger is no exception.

This is one of those movies that opens with a "sexy gym" montage, so that should give you a good clue about it already. Straight from the start we get the extremes of all the necessary 80's tropes: sexy gym, big hair, murderous bullies, thug in a headband, girl in a WHAM! shirt, sexploitation scene, and a clear shot of a skull getting crushed under a car tire.

The Good
Though there's not much real "horror" to the movie, the transformation scene where Melvin's skin bubbles and breaks as his hair falls out is actually pretty unnerving. It all looks practical and impresses even compared to today's effects.

And that goes for the gore, too. When someone gets a finger put through their eye or a bloody jaw, it looks good, if a little over the top. There are several moments where people have their skulls cracked, broken, or crushed, and each one looks pretty convincing.

The fight choreography, when there is any, is actually not bad. It's goofy, sure, but you can at least tell what's happening throughout. The stunts are also fairly well done, far better than I would have expected.

The Bad
The worst part about this movie is that there's so little you can really criticize when the entire thing is 100% intentional. Calling the acting bad is redundant, because no one bothered to be anything but camp. To say the writing is bad is to describe every Troma picture's script. It leaves little to say except that you shouldn't bother watching if you aren't prepared for one of the (intentionally) worst movies you'll ever see.

The Rest
Dividing the good and the bad in this one was really difficult, because Troma is in a league of its own. It's definitely the strangest superhero movie I've seen, and not in a bad way.

Gee, there's talk of a remake. Not interested. There are already a lot of sequels, and I think that's plenty of Toxic Avenger for now.

Should You Watch It?
Yes, but I think this is probably something to prepare for, instead of having it sprung on you.

Bad Movie Month #25: Silent Night Deadly Night Part 2

"Naughty this!"

Silent Night Deadly Night Part 2 (1987)

Directed by: Lee Harry
Produced by: Lawrence Applebaum
Written by: Le Harry, Joseph H. Earle, Dennis Patterson, Lawrence Applebaum (story), Lee Harry, Joseph H. Earle (screenplay)
Budget: $100,000

Starring: Jean Miller, Eric Freeman, Elizabeth Kaitan, James L. Newman

This movie was first revealed to me through the internet fossil website YTMND, more specifically through the above clip of the infamous "Garbage day!" scene. I have not seen the first one, and otherwise had no idea what this movie was about before I started it.

Several years after Ricky's brother Billy committed a series of grisly Christmas murders, Ricky is being held in a mental hospital until he can be tried for his part in the first movie's killings. But when Ricky escapes, it's his duty to find out who's nice, and who's naughty...and murder the naughty ones.

This is one of those slasher movies that likes to take the exploitative route, with cheap effects, over-the-top violence, and tawdry nudity and sex scenes. The characters all have plenty of one-liners, though Ricky takes the cake by delivering one every other line or so. The characters are all fairly unlikable or undeveloped, and the murders are fairly mundane, rather than elaborate Christmas-themed events.

The So Bad It's Good
There's a number of lines with hilarious delivery. Any time Ricky talks to his shrink he sounds like he's forcing the words out through his teeth, and the words are often met by an equally stilted one-liner from the shrink. It's a really funny case of movie-therapy, because I can't imagine this therapist made that type of remark when he earned his license.

The performances are hilarious. Freeman does his best in coming across as a cold, arrogant psychopath but the way he raises his eyebrows after pretty much every "I'm evil" line is really goofy. Newman as the shrink feels like a combination of Blackadder-era Hugh Laurie and John Cleese, and all that that entails. In the last forty minutes the movie starts to come into its own with the performances and writing, particularly after Freeman is given free reign to go all killer.

The So Bad It's Bad
The movie starts with a series of flashbacks, which aren't so much flashbacks as reused footage from the first Silent Night, Deadly Night with an occasional voice-over. Because I haven't seen the first one this didn't bother me too much, but if all of the flashback stuff is reused footage than I can only imagine how much filler this is for...fans of the first one, if there are any. For real, there's enough reused footage that I would have probably asked for my money back.

No, really, the entire first movie is retold through flashback over the first 45 minutes, with reused footage from all the important plot points played in sequence. It's probably the most filler-full movie I've seen in a while.

This movie has a following as a cult slasher movie, and I partially understand why. Unfortunately, the parts that make it entertaining are separated by long stretches of exposition and information dumping which really make the movie drag when it's not being funny. Other than the humorous stuff, not a lot happens. The biggest issue is that it doesn't feel like a slasher movie as much as it does a movie about a murderer. I realize that's kind of a minor difference, but when you're watching them it matters.

There's a lot of rape in this movie. It's a delicate topic, and I'm not going to go too far into it here, but I counted at least three different attempted rapes within the first hour, with varying outcomes. Just so you know.

The Rest
The final Silent Night, Deadly Night is number 5: The Toy Maker, released in 1991. I wonder when we're going to get the tongue-in-cheek, reference-filled remake. We got a remake of the first one in 2012, which was pretty well received for what it was. Considering Hollywood is looking for anything to remake maybe holiday season 2016 will be deadly.

Should You Watch It?
You might get something out of this if you're a fan of campy holiday slasher movies, but be prepared to deal with some really sufferingly slow parts in-between the laughs. If you really want to see the best parts, skip to the 40 minute mark, as that's when it becomes something memorable.

Bad Movie Month #24: The Star Wars Holiday Special

Not long enough ago, not far enough away.

The Star Wars Holiday Special (1978)

Directed by: Steve Binder
Produced by: Gary Smith, Dwight Hemion (executive), Joe Layton, Jeff Starsh, Ken Welch, Mitzie Welch
Written by: Pat Proft, Leonard Ripps, Bruce Vilanch, Rod Warren, Mitzie Welch
Budget: ~$1,000,000

Starring: Harrison Ford, Peter Mayhew, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Anthony Daniels, Art Carney, Kenny Baker, Bea Arthur, Don Francks, Harvey Korman, James Earl Jones

When the Wookiee holiday Life Day is threatened by the Empire, it's up to our heroes to help the walking carpets get their holiday on. Along the way there's countless celebrity cameos, yawn-inducing variety television skits, and the distinct feeling that your brain is slowly seeping out your ears.

The Star Wars Holiday Special has a legendary reputation as one of the worst things ever put to film, both as a Star Wars tie-in and as a production itself. After the release and success of A New Hope CBS pitched the idea of a television special to George Lucas, and everything else is history. Though Lucas wasn't actually involved in this, he is responsible for the story and narrative, so he is most definitely not blameless.

The movie begins with Han and Chewbacca escaping the Empire in a short sequence, followed by roughly fifteen minutes of nothing but Wookiee shrieks and roars. The story swaps between the actual Star Wars stuff, Wookiee yuppie shenanigans, and the endless barrage of awful variety show performances and shorts from a variety of 70s icons and stars who no doubt took their regret with them to the grave.

The very fact that this was created demonstrates the staying power of the Star Wars franchise, because if something like this had been released after, say, the Fellowship of the Ring, then I can't imagine Jackson would have had the perseverance to continue the series at all.

The So Mediocre It's Tolerable
The animated sequence that serves as Boba Fett's introduction to the Star Wars universe at least has Boba Fett atop a dinosaur, so there's that. Again, I can't help but wonder how a character introduced in such a way made any positive impact on the fan base, especially considering the original portrayal of Fett in episodes 5 and 6 show him as nothing more than incompetent or lucky. Fett is easily the coolest part of this, so much so that he feels incredibly out of place.

Jefferson Starship's performance of "Light the Sky on Fire" is okay, I guess. Bea Arthur shows up as a bartender at a Tatooine cantina and sings a song about having one more round before the Empire comes and murders everyone. Her performance almost sells the idea that she owns a drinking establishment while under the thumb of an oppressive government, and I would have far preferred the special follow her character.

The So Bad It's Horrible
There's pretty much nothing here worth watching, even as a bad movie. This is firmly one of those movies where "bad" means "not entertaining."

No one here is putting any effort into their performances. Hamill is all wide-eyed with some truly terrible makeup to cover his car accident scars, Ford has obviously decided that this could potentially end his film career, and Fisher looks like she's deep in her drug problems. Art Carney tries to be a fast-talking charmer, but he looks like he knows he's above whatever science fiction goofery he's acting in.

The variety shows are consistently awful, boring, nonsensical, and anything in between. The early cooking segment with Harvey Korman in...alien drag (maybe?) had me sitting in slack-jawed amazement and inspired a similar reaction as a robot of some sort that kept glitching out. Jefferson Starship shows up about halfway through to sing on a bad soundstage, and...I can't really remember any of the others. They appear on screen without much fanfare and vanish without leaving any impression except a slight sense that you've just been witness to something that should not be.

Not only are the variety shows badly done, but the ideas behind them don't make any sense within the Star Wars galaxy. There's very little reverence towards the series, and ultimately it makes the entire thing come across as a cheap tie-in to capitalize on the success of A New Hope. None of them feel like they belong in a Star Wars movie at all.

Though the animated sequence feels most like an actual Star Wars story, the animation is actually terrible. Not only is it the worst of late-70s animation, the actual character designs make everyone look like they have a mild case of elephantiasis. Han Solo in particular looks like someone painted a human face on a leather bag and draped it over a skull several sizes too small.

The So Weird It's Awful
Art Carney shows up a bunch as a trader who serves to at least partially tie the various stories together by delivering gifts to various characters. At one point he gives Itchy a hologram that feels disturbingly like a porno. Essentially, Diahann Carroll shows up, tells Itchy that she's his fantasy program, and sings a forgettable song while wearing a wig made out of a mop head.

This special and everything in it is officially considered C-Canon within the Star Wars Continuity, meaning that everything happened unless it's specifically contradicted by one of the TV series or movies. I'm pretty sure that, even with the new canon brought in by The Force Awakens, everything portrayed here still happened.

It feels like parts of this were directed by people who don't know basic film principles. At certain points the shots break the 180 degree rule, with characters looking in wildly different directions than the blocking would indicate. The actors go about their scenes with all the enthusiasm of extras earning a bad paycheck.

There are a number of musical numbers throughout, and I'm pretty sure each of them is set to one of the musical pieces from the series. Bea Arthur sings a song to the tune of the Cantina song, Fisher sings one to the Star Wars theme, and I think there are a few others I missed. It was honestly difficult at times to pay attention, simply due to how non-entertaining the entire thing was. It's hard to explain how strange it is hearing lyrics put to these iconic pieces of music, and it feels wrong while watching, like...you are watching something that should not be. It's difficult to find another way to state that emotion, but it's the best way I've found: this entire thing feels like something that should never have been created, and probably would have been better forgotten.

Life Day apparently involves using wookiee totems to transport yourself to the center of a star, where you wear red robes and stand on a foggy stage to do nothing but roar at each other while Carrie Fisher fails to hit her high notes.

Should You Watch It?
No. If you feel so inclined look up the animated sequence and watch that, but really, it's not worth the almost two hours it takes to watch the entire thing.

The Holiday Special is exactly as bad as everyone says it is.

Bad Movie Month #23: Plan 9 From Outer Space

"Future events such as these will
affect you in the future."

Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959)

Directed by: Ed Wood
Produced by: Ed Wood, Hugh Thomas, Jr., Charles Burg, J. Edward Reynolds
Written by: Ed Wood
Budget: $60,000 (roughly $489,000 in 2015, according to US Department of Labor)

Starring: Gregory Walcott, Mona McKinnon, Tor Johnson, Vampira, Bela Lugosi (posthumously)

When aliens invade and start resurrecting the dead to attack the living, it's time for us as a species to face...grave robbers from outer space...uh, I mean, survive in the face of plan nine from outer space.

Plan 9 is arguably the best known of Ed Wood's films, and one that exemplifies his style of film-making, if that's what you could call it. It's been held up as an example of how many of Wood's ideas may have been just a little higher than he could reach with his budget and, potentially, skill as a director and writer.

It's notable as Bela Lugosi's last screen credit. Wood and Lugosi developed a close friendship towards the last few years of Lugosi's life, and Wood planned on his inclusion in an abandoned film of his. After the actor died, Wood used what footage he had in this one. This is fairly easy to notice at certain points because Wood utilized almost every scrap of film from Lugosi's part, including trims and shots that would normally have been left on the cutting room floor and the drop in quality is noticeable even through the standard Wood camp.

The So Bad It's Good
The physical production is the Woodiest of Ed Wood movies, with cardboard headstones, a jet cockpit rendered by a curtain and nondescript steering yokes of some sort. At several points actors will bump into the headstones and you can clearly see them wobble against the curtain hanging behind the set. Whenever you see an actual UFO flying around it's clearly tied to a string and moving against a backdrop and the only exterior shot of the landed ship is represented by the corner of a building and a ladder.

Action scenes are handled with the classic Wood style, with stock footage cut in with very cheap original footage. The UFOs are either model kits, hubcaps, or plates on strings, and the first combat sequence where the military fires on the aliens uses real military stock footage of launchers and jets. Much like the chase scenes these are seriously hindered by the small sets.

Chase scenes are likewise hilarious, with actors running around the same set. This creates the unfortunate effect of making it look like everyone is running back and forth over the same twenty feet of graveyard, while scenes of Lugosi and the stand-in show obvious changes between outside locations and on-set shots. Gunshots are the old-school smoke-and-sparks, and getting hit by a gun apparently makes you develop a minor full-body twitch.

It feels like some of the actors are stage actors, some are film, and others aren't actors at all. Certain characters have a flourish to their movements and dialogue that screams Theatre! while others are competent, and even more don't seem to quite understand what they're doing at all. I'm fairly certain that at spots you can see the actors look down at a copy of the script when they forget their lines.

The entire plot of the movie hinges on classic bad Hollywood science, with the premise that a bomb could explode light particles (or atoms, as stated in the movie) and start a chain reaction that blows up the universe itself. There's an anti-war message in the movie, combined with an environmental message and speech about uniting to better ourselves. Each one is explained within a five minute monologue, just like all good movies.

The So Bad It's Bad
Some of the performances dip into bad, rather than funny bad. Vampira's performance as a zombie is lifeless, pun both intended and not intended. At certain points her facial expression looks more fitting to a bored funeral goer rather than a risen corpse.

There's a lot of filler between shots of the UFOs flying around, people walking, and other miscellaneous footage that doesn't contribute much. There's at least a minute-long scene where the same footage of a military general looking through binoculars is reused. While most of these are actually pretty amusing, it gets tiring at points. There are plenty of moments where the scene will change to a group of characters simply standing around before going back to the actual story.

The Rest
Plan 9 feels like the classic black and white b-movie that every other one in recent memory has been modeled off. With the cheap sets, stilted delivery, and brilliantly obtuse script it's got that perfect camp formula.

There was a remake released in February, 2015 which is sort of an homage/remake/mockery of the original. I haven't actually seen it, but it appears to be a remake with modern horror gore and parody elements. It might be worth checking out, but I don't know that it's necessary. It feels to me like the problem you get when a mega-fan takes over production of an IP and emphasizes their own vision for it. In all honesty I probably would have preferred just a straight shot-for-shot reshoot.

Should You Watch It?
Absolutely. I've seen The Room referred to as the Citizen Kane of bad movies, but that title is far more appropriate to Plan 9. It can fit in at any spot on a bad movie list, either as the first as an introduction or at the end as a grand finale. There's plenty here to entertain. I haven't gone as far in depth on this movie as I could have, because I truly think this is a movie everyone should see at least once.

You can watch the movie in full either on Youtube or Wikipedia.

Bad Movie Month #22: ThanksKilling

Everything on this cover is accurate.

ThanksKilling (2008)

Directed by: Jordan Downey
Produced by: Kevin Stewart, Jordan Downey
Written by: Brad Schulz, Tony Wilson, Grant Yaffee, Kevin Stewart, Jordan Downey
Budget: $3,500

Starring: Wanda Lust, Chuck Lamb, Ryan Francis, Aaron Carlson, General Bastard, Lance Prdmor, Natasha Cordova, Lindsey Anderson

We start with a shot of a woman's naked breast, which belongs to a topless pilgrim as she's chased and murdered by an evil turkey. The first line of the movie? "Nice tits, bitch."

A Cabin-in-the-Woods full of friends are looking forward to enjoying Thanksgiving break when they learn about an evil turkey given sinister life through Native American necromancy. This zombie turkey, named Turkie, appears every few centuries to murder every white person he sees.

Ultimately, ThanksKilling feels like an homage to b-movie slasher holiday movies, and is exactly as ridiculous as that would seem.

The Good
Primarily, the movie revels in its tropes, despite the fact that it's very formulaic. The story gleefully movies from one horror trope to the other but escalates everything a step or two. Characters at one point refer to each other by their archetypes, there's the standard camp fire story that turns out true, and each character has a perfect role to fill. The thing that stops this one from being derivative is that it never takes itself too seriously and will turn to the camera and wink when things are starting to get just a little too familiar. That duty generally comes up whenever Turkie is on screen.

The tropes it plays straight are played wonderfully straight. Turkie's weaknesses are listed in an ancient book the characters get from the library, there's a best-friend-died montage (complete with original song), and various other plot points found in the genre are slapped on screen one after the other. Highlight for spoilers: This is another horror comedy where there's a sex scene between the monster and a character, but yes, this time it's with a turkey.

The main characters are a collection of standard horror movie folks, and the actors all play into the roles perfectly, though I wouldn't necessarily call them quality performances. The nerd is properly sniveling, the main character appropriately jockish, and the rest each fulfill their roles admirably. The Old Ones can rest easy after watching this one.

I hope Turkie becomes a regular holiday villain. The one-liners he spouts are absurd, even when compared to the worst of the genre, and as a murderer he's a straightforward kind of guy. In many horror movies the script treats the villain with some sort of reverence, treating Jason or Freddy like the coolest guy ever. ThanksKilling takes that villain worship to the next level, with Turkie's apparent ability to make people forget that he's a turkey. At one point he shows up wearing a skin mask of a dead character's face, and none of the kids catch on at all.

The writing in the movie is probably best described as irreverent. The dialogue is filthy in the vein of the best b-list exploitation horror movies, with plenty of cursing and sex acts. The gore effects are practical and over the top, which is perfect for this movie.

The Bad
The budget and acting will probably be enough to turn a lot of people away, which is understandable, considering the movie feels like it was made for $3,500. At one point Billy hallucinates a roast turkey on the side of the road which looks like a literal piece of clip-art on the screen. The tipi is a bed sheet on a broom stick. The actual quality of the footage is really low.

Though it feels aware enough of the tropes of the genre, throughout I was wondering how much of it was actually intentional, because certain decisions felt like mistakes, including some aspects of the score. I'm willing to give the movie the benefit of the doubt, but I can imagine some wouldn't.

The Rest
ThanksKilling 3 was successfully kick-started, which I'm fine with.

This feels distinctly like a movie I would have made with my friends in high school or college.

Should You Watch It?
If you can deal with very low quality and effort, then this is definitely worth a try. At just over an hour long you don't lose much and with the right group of people I think it's a great addition to a holiday movie stable.

Bad Movie Month #21: The Adventures of Pluto Nash

Remember when Eddie Murphy was
a selling point?

The Adventures of Pluto Nash (2002)

Directed by: Ron Underwood
Produced by: Martin Bregman, Michael Scott Bregman, Louis A. Stroller
Written by: Neil Cuthbert
Budget: $100,000,000

Starring: Eddie Murphy, Randy Quaid, Rosario Dawson, Joe Pantoliano, Jay Mohr, Luis Guzman, James Rebhorn, Peter Boyle, Pam Grier, Burt Young, John Cleese

In the future when mankind has populated the moon, retired smuggler Pluto Nash (Murphy) leaves prison and buys a nightclub in an attempt to go straight. Things seem to be going well but soon turn chaotic when a mysterious figure dispatches some thugs to intimidate him into selling. Along with a new server at the club (Dawson) and his robot bodyguard (Quaid), Nash has to figure out who's trying to move in on his turf.

Weirdly enough, this is yet another movie where an actor plays two separate characters, but this time it's a clone.

The Adventures of Pluto Nash feels like a combination of an early Saturday Night Live sketch, the Tim Burton Batman movies, and an attempt to ape the style of The Fifth Element. Considering the movie was in production since the 80s and didn't see release until 2002, I have a feeling that all three at one point may have been true.

The Good
I'm a fan of genre blending, and Pluto Nash at least has a good concept behind it. The idea of telling a 40s-style noir film in a science fiction setting appeals to me and is at least an attempt at being creative. The movie is firmly in that goofy science fiction genre that was popular in the 90s, but some of the sci-fi ideas are at least executed well, including the turret handgun, magnetic pool table, references to space and resource scarcity on a moon base, etc.

The Bad
Throughout it feels like the movie suffered from some extensive rewrites or changes, which it almost certainly did over its nearly twenty year life. Certain scenes feel like they've been inserted specifically to .lighten the movie up, and not in a way that feels consistent with the rest of the movie. The scene where Murphy and Dawson go to the cosmetic surgeon reminded me of a very similar scene in the also-bad-90s-scifi movie Theodore Rex.

Though the movie was released in 2000, it sat in stasis for two years until release, at which point it would have already felt dated. The set design consists of crowded building fronts and neon signs when the characters are in the streets, and the costumes are still stuck in that era where everyone wore differently colored space blankets, except for the main characters of course.

Of course, if the characters are fun you can endure a dumb setting. Unfortunately none of the characters are particularly memorable or worth caring about. For bearing his name in the title, Pluto Nash is a pretty forgettable character, which is even weirder because it's Eddie Murphy. Of course, this is post-Norbit Murphy, so take that as you will. Rosario Dawson is also really bad in this movie, with stilted delivery and zero commitment. Randy Quaid seems like he's having fun playing an obsolete robot, and Luis Guzman shows up for a little bit to...be Guzman. John Cleese also has a little role as a car's AI, but it's obvious both from his delivery and character that he earned his paycheck in an afternoon in a recording studio.

The comic moments have a slightly improvisational feel to them, and not in a good way. Sometimes a movie can pull that off, like Ghostbusters, but the ones in Pluto Nash are both unfunny and too long, which is a deadly combination when it comes to an actor who was once the biggest superstar on the planet. Ultimately I'm not really surprised this nearly killed Murphy's acting career, when you take into account the awkward comedic scenes, badly done action, and certain lines that serve just to pull you out of the movie with how weird or awkward they are. That includes Cleese's rape joke.

Finally, the CGI and overall directing is really bad, and it doesn't help that the movie takes time to showcase certain effects shots. Any time a car has to drive or there's an exterior shot of the moonscape it just looks bad. At one point our heroes are on the surface of the moon and it's obviously a fifteen-foot set with a really bad greenscreen. Later on in the film Murphy has to fight a clone of himself, who is also played by Murphy, and the fight uses an obvious double and cuts to hide the really bad editing. As far as directing and editing goes, at one point I'm pretty sure you can see Murphy standing at his spot before the director yells "action" and he starts running.

The Rest
The funniest part of the movie was seeing that Trump Realty apparently financed the moon colony.

Should You Watch It?
No.

Pluto Nash is one of those movies with a reputation for being awful, and I certainly see why. However, it's awful in the way that many science fiction movies in the 90s were awful, with some clear effort put into certain aspects despite the fact that nothing quite comes together in a good way.

Bad Movie Month #20: Eragon

Stop me if you've heard this one.

Eragon (2006)

Directed by: Stefen Fangmeier
Produced by: John Davis, Adam Goodman, Gil Netter
Written by: Peter Buchman
Budget: $100,000,000

Starring: Edward Speleers, Jeremy Irons, Sienna Guillory, Robert Carlyle, Djimon Hounsou, Garrett Hedlund, Joss Stone, Rachel Weisz (voice), John Malkovich

We start with a princess and her honor guard racing to deliver a stolen prize to the resistance when their party is ambushed by the evil emperor's right hand man, who successfully captures the princess, but not before she can safely hide her cargo. The stolen item is discovered by a young farm boy in a remote location, and soon after his not-parents are murdered by agents of the empire. He teams up with the last remaining member of an ancient order, discovers his ability to harness their forgotten powers, and helps the rebellion fight off the empire and the empire's second-in-command.

No, it's not Star Wars, it's Eragon.

Adapted from the first book of the Inheritance Trilogy Cycle, Eragon tells the hero's journey beat by beat. Specifically, it's like Star Wars with dragons, only worse. Production was announced in February 2004, less than two months after Return of the King raked in the cash, and I can't help but feel like this was a cheap cash grab based off a similar fantasy series.

The Good
One thing this movie and The Last Airbender have in common is that they both have some beautiful environments. Eragon was shot in various locations around Hungary and Slovakia, with some impressive mountains and forests. You know, like a fantasy movie should have because that's what the other ones did.

The CGI for the dragon still holds up in most places, even when compared to modern CGI. Saphira moves pretty naturally, and it's obvious that a huge part of the budget went towards the creation of the character. Considering Industrial Light and Magic did the CGI, that's not much of a surprise.

The Bad
If you've watched a fantasy movie or read a book before you can probably guess exactly how this story will progress. The original author was 17 when he wrote the story, and not much has changed in its adaptation to film. There's an evil emperor who slaughtered the members of his ancient order to rise to power, the young farm boy destined for greatness, the mentor who dies in furthering his protege's course of action, the rebellion fighting their last stand against an encroaching government...let's just say that anything new the books did with the story was erased in the movie.

It doesn't help that most of the cast seems to play it as a comedy. Malkovich plays the evil emperor Galbatorix, and his very first line inspires laughter. Jeremy Irons, in his first fantasy film since the Dungeons & Dragons movie, puts some effort into his character but most of the time it feels like a competition between the two to see who can chew the most scenery. Speleers is a huge weak spot, with his Eragon appearing to be a pouting puppy dog. Carlyle, Hedlund, and Guillory round out the main characters, and though the first two seem to know exactly what type of movie this is Guillory tries so hard to be an action chick, but we hardly see her do anything to support it. The one scene that evokes any sort of response from me is Irons as Brom on his last flight before he dies, which is funny because it's a scene with zero lines.

Even the spectacle is ruined by the cheap effects. You would think that an epic fantasy movie with this type of budget would splurge on the CGI, and while the dragon looks good the rest of the movie looks really, really cheap. The costumes and sets look like Ye Olde Renaissance Faire props, the lighting makes no sense (particularly in outdoor areas), and the special sword looks like plastic with red paint on it. At one point a bad guy gets picked up by a branch and you can immediately see that it's a dummy because its arms remain straight down along its sides while it's getting whipped around. The design sticks it pretty firmly in the "campy" fantasy movie territory, with lots of black leather, "cool" weapon designs, and cruddy fight choreography disguised by quick camera cuts and spins.

Some effects that stood out as particularly cheap:
Dragon vision is a yellow filter overlaid on the footage.
Durza "dying" is accomplished by having a still image of a smiling Carlyle fade into smoke.
Durza's makeup keeps changing as the movie goes on, and not in a way that's internally consistent.
The ra'zac look worse every time you see them.
The battle at the end supposedly takes place in a huge mountain valley, but all we see is the same 40-foot wide soundstage.

Now back to the writing. The script does very little to evoke any emotion from the audience, and despite the score nothing really makes you feel anything other than bewilderment at certain story choices. In order to save time the dragon grows to full size by flying through the clouds. Storylines incredibly relevant to later parts of the novel's plot are removed entirely, which end up creating plot holes within the first film itself. The dialogue shifts between standard fantasy-lite, awkward stage theater, and hilariously cringe-worthy within the same scene.

The Rest
There's pretty much zero chance of a sequel for this, though I have to wonder when we'll get a second attempt at an adaptation. It seems inevitable, but maybe we just need another few years for the bad taste to fade.

Should You Watch it?
No, especially if you're a fan of the book. Unlike The Last Airbender this isn't even entertainingly bad.

Bad Movie Month #19: The Last Airbender

I want to get off M. Night's Wild Ride.

The Last Airbender (2010)

Directed by: M. Night Shyamalan
Produced by: M. Night Shyamalan, Sam Mercer, Frank Marshall
Written by: M. Night Shyamalan
Budget: $150,000,000

Starring: Noah Ringer, Dev Patel, Nicola Peltz, Jackson Rathbone, Shaun Toub, Aasif Mandvi, Cliff Curtis

This movie is a perfect example of how not to adapt a popular series to the big screen.

I'm a fan of the original Avatar series from Nickelodeon about a world where martial arts and elemental control are combined. It turns from a goofy kids show to a very good hero's journey series, with some great fight scenes and excellent animation.

In 2010, M. Night Shyamalan released The Last Airbender which managed to get pretty much everything wrong as an adaptation. The thing about adapting a series to the big screen is that you are trying to appeal to fans of the original while also offering something easily accessible to new viewers. Sometimes the existing mythology is so extensive that things are inevitably cut for time or simplicity's sake, but often it's enough to get the character's names right.

Not so in this movie.

The Good
This movie was shot in some beautiful locations, with sweeping hills and lots of green forests. The establishing shots are generally very pretty. In addition, some of the costume and set design isn't bad, with lots of eastern-style robes and ornate clothing.

The Airbender tattoos are ornate patterns, which I actually really liked over the blocky blue stripes from the cartoon. That was the best decision in this movie.

If you are a fan of the cartoon and want to see the worst possible adaptation that could have been made, this is the movie for you. It is fascinating to watch this movie knowing that Shyamalan has actually seen the series.

The Bad
Where to begin. It's actually really hard to condense everything that is wrong about this movie into a reasonable post.

As an adaptation this may succeed on the most basic level, but fails pretty much every other criteria imaginable. The character's names are pronounced incorrectly, the choices for the cast is baffling, and the imaginative world the television show created has been reduced to a generic fantasy world. Various characters have been congealed into easily recognizable, yet poorly executed archetypes, and certain scenes carry on in such a way that it actively prevents certain important plots from taking place in potential later films.

The acting in this is hilarious. Ringer, hired because he was already skilled in martial arts, puts forth an Aang (pronounced Ong) with some sort of halting speech impediment, hop-jump attention span, and doofy grin that doesn't convey anything except "I'm acting!" Peltz plays Katara displays some sort of talent by portraying her as both wide-eyed and dazed at the same time, and Rathbone delivers the best deadpan "I'm better than this" I've seen in a long time. Patel plays Zuko as a shouting pouter, and Mandvi camps up his General Zhao so much that I was waiting for the Daily Show reference that always seemed thirty seconds away. The best performance is by Toub as Iroh, but instead of being a paternal uncle he feels like a coddling nanny to baby Zuko.

When the actors aren't reading their lines off the script, they're standing limp in the background. Shyamalan tries to direct this with a lot of long shots which feel like they should work, but the problems immediately become apparent when you actually look at the choreography and what everyone is doing in the background. In the scene of the prisoner revolt the action only happens to a group of three or so actors at once...everyone else is standing completely still in the background, or flailing their weapons around like video game characters in an idle animation.

Speaking of choreography, you would think the martial arts would at least be cool to watch right? Well, it is if you like to watch people flail around for far too long to produce cheap-looking special effects. For a series which absolutely requires a large special effects budget, this movie looks downright cheap at certain points in regards to the elemental control. One of the first shots of the movie focuses on a globe of animated water which would look out of place in a movie from 1999. When the movie lets you catch a glimpse of one of the computer animated animals it's blurry and looks superimposed over the actors. The "spirit world" is a number of film filters imposed on a shot.

This would all be acceptable if the script was at least halfway competent, but Shyamalan didn't seem to understand how people in the real world speak. Conversations are disjointed sentences belched between characters at random intervals and certain writing choices are simply bizarre. For example, we don't learn our main character's name until nearly 20 minutes into the movie. A group of people who can control rock are kept prisoner on blankets in the middle of a canyon. The commander of the Water Tribe says they need to extinguish all fires ASAP, but in the middle of the siege you can clearly see all of the lights are still lit.

It's tough to articulate how little anyone involved in this seemed to care. Shyamalan said in an interview his kids loved the series and he'd seen the entire thing. All three seasons were completed by the time this movie entered production, so he had access to every story decision he could possibly need to keep, and yet this movie feels like an Asylum mockbuster of an actual adaptation we never received.

The Rest
In September of 2015 Shyamalan said he will make a sequel after his next thriller release. I for one am looking forward to his interpretation of Toph Beifong and the rest of the second season.

Should You Watch it?
If you haven't seen the TV series, no.

If you have seen the TV series, I would give it a shot as long as you can gather a group of friends who have also watched it, because despite everything I said above this movie is one beautiful disaster of an adaptation.

Bad Movie Month #18: Big Ass Spider!

Books, covers, etc.

Big Ass Spider! (2013)

Directed by: Mike Mendez
Produced by: Shaked Berenson, Patrick Ewald, Travis Stevens, Klaus von Sayn-Wittgenstein
Written by: Gregory Gieras
Budget: I couldn't actually find any information on this movie's exact budget, but it's definitely low.

Starring: Greg Grunberg, Lin Shaye, Patrick Bauchau, Ray Wise, Clare Kramer, Lomardo Boyar

Big Ass Spider is an introspective drama about the lengths families will go to in order to stay together, and the webs we sometimes catch ourselves in when we attempt to fix our own problems.

Ha, just kidding. A genetically altered spider escapes captivity and eats people before attacking a city.

There's honestly not a lot to this one, but some things should be obvious from the title and poster alone. The movie is like a well-done SyFy original monster movie, but with actual care and attention put into the production.

The Good
The acting here is actually not bad. Ray Wise shows up to do his eyebrow thing, and Boyar does a really good job as Jose, a hospital security guard who becomes Mathis's extermination partner. The one performance that doesn't quite live up to the rest is Grunberg as the main character. Though his acting grew on me as the film progressed I felt he rode the line a little bit too much between lovable oaf and charmless oaf. At one point Lloyd Kaufman, the man behind Troma Entertainment, shows up and gets impaled by the spider, so it's cool that they got him.

The spider effects swap between hilariously cheap looking (in a charming way) and actually pretty decent. The monster looks the best when it's smaller, obviously, but when it gets big the movie pretty much throws discretion to the wolves(cops) and just let the animation show. Most of the second half of the movie takes place outside in well-lit areas, which isn't something you often see in monster movies like this, considering darkness and smoke are easy ways to hide bad effects.

Finally, the pacing is actually pretty suited for this movie. It's only 80 minutes long, so it moves pretty quickly from piece to piece, but there's not really any scenes I would cut or shorten. Some of them even have some clever camera tricks with one attack sequence shown in split-screen from two different helmet-cameras. The attention to detail and effort put into that stands out in this genre.

The Bad
There's a shoehorned romantic subplot that feels just a little too serious compared to the rest of the movie. It's the classic "hot blonde action girl gets the chubby hero" plot, but played almost completely straight. I expected some clever subversion at the end, but it never came.

Primarily I thought the movie could have been...more "b." The writing at times felt just a little too good, the shots just a bit too well put together. It's not a bad watch, but it just manages to miss that b-movie sweetspot due to some aspects actually getting close to elevating it outside the genre.

The Rest
There's been talk of a sequel, but the director has said he's played out giant spiders. The movie ends with a tease for a giant cockroach, so maybe we'll expand into other arthropods.

Should You Watch it?
If you like monster b-movies you should give this a shot.
If you're freaked out by spiders, you should probably avoid it. The early stuff has some cat-sized spider antics that would probably get under your skin just a bit.

Bad Movie Month #17: I Know Who Killed Me

This is the weirdest idea for a
Parent Trap reboot ever.

I Know Who Killed Me (2007)

Directed by: Chris Silvertson
Produced by: Frank Mancuso, Jr., David Grace
Written by: Jeff Hammond
Budget: $12,000,000

Starring: Lindsay Lohan, Lindsay Lohan, Julia Ormond, Neal McDonough, Brian Geraghty, Garcelle Beauvais

High school student and aspiring writer Aubrey Fleming (Lohan) lives in the little town of New Salem, which is currently being terrorized by a serial killer who abducts and murders young women. One night Aubrey vanishes as the killer's next victim but mysteriously reappears on the side of the road a few nights later before passing out. When she awakes from her coma, she claims her name is Dakota Moss, and that she's a stripper who has never heard of this Aubrey Fleming chick. As strange events start happening to Dakota, she must unravel what's going on before something bad happens to her.

Yeah, so it turns out Aubrey and Dakota are twins separated at birth who share a psychic connection that actually shares injuries between them. At one point Art Bell from Coast to Coast AM shows up to explain to the audience exactly what "stigmatic" twins are. Like...directly to the audience, while standing in front of a green screen.

This was one of the last movies Lohan starred in before her well publicized meltdown in the late 00's. It was also her first attempt at playing something that was more adult, and I don't know that I would say it was very successful. She wouldn't return to movies to act outside of a 2009 ABC Family original movie until Machete in late 2010.

The Good
The only good thing about this movie is that it could have been worse? There's certain shots and effects which work, including a pretty well-done mirror transition that I thought was pretty clever. Other than that I really had to work to find anything I would qualify as at-par for even a small film like this.

If you're a fan of watching really gruesome injury effects you might get something out of this every twenty minutes or so. I'm talking full-on close-ups of dry ice stripping the skin from a hand, fingers and other limbs getting amputated on screen, and numerous other gratuitous effects.

The Bad
Where to start...how about the fact that the movie feels like a really bad attempt at being like old-school David Lynch thrillers, with strange fades, transitions, cuts, and superimposed images and solid-color frames inserted at spots. The symbolism here is pretty obvious, with Aubrey's scenes overloaded with saturated blues and Dakota's with bright reds. Near the end there's a number of scenes with owls in them for no adequately explained reason. At one point all the colors fade from the scene except for the blues, but they're so poorly overlaid that it looks like someone painted them directly onto the negatives.

As a thriller this movie doesn't offer a whole lot, aside from the pure lie of a title. The "Me" obviously references Lohan's character, but she plays two characters and neither of them actually die. At one point she even drops the title as a line and it's supposed to be a big revelatory moment but...it's still a lie, and a pretty weak attempt at being a clever title. I know what it's supposed to mean, but there's never really any doubt that Aubrey wasn't murdered, so it never has much of a payoff.

The acting is hilarious across the board. Lohan doesn't put any effort into either of her roles beyond good and bad girl. For example, at one point Dakota's finger falls off (due to her sympathetic link with the tortured Aubrey) and her reaction is to grunt a lot and hold a towel to the stump. The rest of the cast invests just as little into their own roles; Ormond phones in her performance as a worried mother, and Geragthy seems to think that his character is actually the murderer, when he's just a school crush.

I remember hearing about this movie back when it was released and how there was a lot of attention called to the fact that Lohan was trying to be adult and sexy; most of them pointed out that Lohan played a pole dancer as if that was notable in any way. Well if you were planning on watching this for the pole dancing, don't bother. It tries to be sexy but comes across as Lohan trying way too hard.

The Rest
There's honestly not much here to talk about beyond the standard bad movie stuff. This movie was actually nominated for nine Golden Razzies and won eight of them, a record for single-year wins which beat the previous record holders Battlefield Earth and Showgirls. It held the record until 2012 until it was beaten by...Jack and Jill. Go figure.

Should You Watch It?
No.

Bad Movie Month #16: Michael Bay's Transformers Franchise

Anyone who watched these movies and expected anything more than a pile of trash was fooling themselves.

This holds true for the first one, which is by far the best of the bunch. Considering most of them were done by the all-star team of Michael Bay, Roberto Orci, and Alex Kurtzman I'm not at all surprised how the franchise has turned out so far, considering Michael Bay described it at one point as a "stupid toy movie." When you as a director have little but contempt for the material you're adapting it makes sense you might as well try and appeal to the lowest common denominator to at least earn a return.

And what a return this franchise has made, with a combined estimated box-office of roughly $3.777 billion. That's absurd, and it helps describe how these movies, which consistently get ranked as the worst of their respective years are also listed as top earners for their respective years.

Partly as celebration of the fact that I've stuck with this project and partially as an experiment in the amount of mental anguish a human mind can suffer through, I watched all four Transformers movies back-to-back-to-back-to-back over the course of one ten-hour stretch which left me exhausted both physically and mentally.

Michael Bay also has a reputation for blatant and excessive product placement, so while watching I tried to take notes on the ones I noticed. These are not exhaustive lists, as I'm 100% sure I didn't catch everything.

Without wanting to spend any more time on these than absolutely necessary, let's start.

Why did I do this? Please send help.

Transformers (2007)

Directed by: Michael Bay
Produced by: Don Murphy, Tom DeSanto, Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Ian Bryce
Written by: Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman (streenplay); John Rogers, Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman (story)
Budget: $150,000,000

Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Tyrese Gibson, Josh Duhamel, Anthony Anderson, Megan Fox, Rachael Taylor, John Turturro, Jon Voight

The first Transformers movie is by far the most legitimate of the series. I admit that might not be saying much, but when you watch all four in sequence the relative quality stands out starkly against the others.

First off, the action scenes and transforming are done with a little restraint. That's going to be a word I use a fair amount in this post: restraint. Mostly because Michael Bay will lose what little he possesses in 2009, but at least it aided this movie a bit. The transformations are shot clearly, and the actual action scenes aren't quite as explosion-y as people like to think. Though there's still a fair amount of shaky-cam I had little trouble following what was actually happening.

The actors at least seem to try and take this seriously. I've never actually disliked Shia LaBeouf and I think he did a fine job in this movie as a bumbling teenager. His recent...performances (the Stream With Me in particular) have warmed me up to him a bit more, but I didn't find him annoying in this. Instead, it's his shrieking yuppie parents who drive me up the damn wall. Kevin Dunn does his Dunnest, and is fine as Sam's dad, but Julie White channels her most insufferable for her role as his mom.

Duhamel plays Military Guy, who doesn't have much development aside from the occasional shot of his wife and infant daughter, but we all know that he's not going to die and will instead shoot his way inexplicably through these three movies. Bernie Mac shows up and is the funniest part of this movie, aside from the humor I got watching Megan Fox "act." Yeah, she's exactly as bad as everyone said, and it only gets worse.

The performances would be fine for a dumb toy movie if the script wasn't also an excuse to crash CGI robots against each other every forty minutes. The plot agents follow Sam around until someone else shows up to pick up the strings; the junkyard dogs literally vanish between cuts as Bumblebee arrives, Mikayla's criminal background is dropped just as quickly as it was brought up, and the Hollywood science is so nonsensical that I almost would have preferred hackers mashing on keyboards instead of...finding a signal by zooming into the graphic that represents the radio signal? What?

We see hints of what Michael Bay would be ridiculed for in the coming years, but not so strongly in this one: everyone has orange skin (even the hackers, generals, politicians...everyone), every interior is blue for no reason, and the windows whenever someone is driving are filled with the laziest greenscreen effects in recent memory. Seriously, if you ever get the chance, look at what Bay's effects guys superimpose into the car windows during driving scenes:

Daytime? Blinding white light, no visible scenery.
Night time? Black background, random lights moving in no discernible pattern


The windows were open during the driving scenes and there still wasn't anything visible from them.

I remember when this movie came out there was a huge amount of marketing around it, including a contest for the internet to vote on a line for Optimus to say. The winner for a while was "Do a barrel roll" but I think it was replaced by some generic line about sentient beings right to live free or something. Very memorable.

Product Placement: Burger King, Chevrolet, eBay, Porsche, XBox, Mountain Dew, DeWalt, CBS, XM Radio, GMC, Blackberry, Nokia, Panasonic, Pontiac, Yahoo.

Spoiler alert: the pyramids
are the bad guys.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)

Directed by: Michael Bay
Produced by: Don Murphy, Tom DeSanto, Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Ian Bryce
Written by: Ehren Kruger, Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman
Budget: $200,000,000

Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox, Josh Duhamel, Tyrese Gibson, John Turturro

This is the movie with the robot Jesuses in it. Jesii? Jesupodes?

Anyway one of the problems we start to see in the "arc" starting here is that the mythology behind the Transformers themselves is never consistent between movies. Each one invents a new addition to the backstory which feels like it should be enough to cover a series, but it's entirely resolved within that movie. Spoilers, there is an ancient Cybertronian artifact in each of these movies, they each do something different, and I don't care about any of them.

From the very first it's notable that the action scenes have already dipped in quality. The amount of cuts in the fight scene with the giant wheel Decepticon is absurd, and it's accompanied by a serious lack of continuity and over-reliance on explosions as character development.

The principal cast returns for this one, but every character seems to have had his or her dial turned up a few notches. LaBeouf has plenty of opportunities to stutter, babble, screech, and otherwise ham it up, the military characters have about six lines each that amount to nothing, and Turturro is goofing around like a madman. Newcomer s Ramon Rodriguez and Rainn Wilson both steal the show and seem to understand that this won't be a good mark on either of their respective resumes. Special mention goes to Wilson's portrayal of the Astronomy 101 professor, who's entire scene was so hilariously over-the-top that I remember wondering whether I had walked into the wrong theater when I had originally seen it. The word I would describe everyone is "manic."

Otherwise the attempts at humor are delivered primarily through the new Autobots, Mudflap and Skids, who are possibly the most racist characters I've seen in any mainstream movie. Yes, more racist than whichever character(s) just popped into your head. One of them has a gold tooth and at one point it's revealed that neither of them can read. Combined with how they act, how they sound, and their general design and writing and it's profoundly uncomfortable watching them minstrel their way through the movie. If you do a Google search for "Michael Bay racist" then Mudflap and Skids show up all over the first page.

Overall this feels like the point in the series where it becomes noticeably Michael Bay-ish, but not full-on Bay. The actors are still putting some effort into their performances (Dunn saying goodbye to LaBeouf at the end is stellar compared to the rest of the movie) but the rest of it starts to feel really lazy. In order to avoid any tough writing decisions the movie falls back on weird, out-of-place robo-mysticism and ancient robot-Jesus prophecy/destiny stuff. The orange-and-blue aesthetic has only deepened, the Fallen's "revenge" is never quite explained, and the actor's manic performances made me sigh in confusion more often than not.


Product Placement: OnStar, State Farm, Mountain Dew, Cisco, Cherolet, Bad Boys II, GMC, Skymall.

At this point I'm just tired.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011)

Directed by: Michael Bay
Produced by: Don Murphy, Tom DeSanto, Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Ian Bryce
Written by: Ehren Kruger
Budget: $195,000,000

Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Josh Duhamel, John Turturro, Tyrese Gibson, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Patrick Dempsey, Frances McDormand

By the time this movie entered production the series had already developed a reputation and you can tell from watching it. On the Bay Scale this movie ranks pretty high. The actors at this point have given up on trying to elevate the script at all, and the performances throughout made me wonder why I wasn't just watching a cartoon.

The new faces this time include Patrick Dempsey who is having a wonderful time playing a massive asshold traitor, Ken Jeong who plays his character for laughs and nothing else, and John Malkovich playing what I suspect he thinks Michael Bay would be like if he ran a company. Frances McDormand shows up to deliver her lines and get mad about Turturro's character acting all Turturro, and at times it feels like she's trying to put something into her character but every time she shows up with more than two others her delivery is so flat.

Not returning this time is Megan Fox, who was in a well-publicized spat with Michael Bay about how they couldn't stand each other, so she's replaced by Rosie Huntington-Whiteley who...is in the movie at parts, and says her lines. Really, it was her casting that confirmed for me that this was Bay caving to the dark voice in the back of his mind which demanded hotter women and faster cars, because that's what this movie amounted to. If he wanted to maintain some speck of credibility for this franchise beyond summer explosions, he could have just left out a romance, because her character does pretty much nothing that anyone else could have done better.

The one bright point in the cast is Alan Tudyk as Turturro's assistant, but I think that's just my residual good-will from Firefly.

The bad guy is also voiced by Leonard Nimoy, and his betrayal is clumsily foreshadowed by no less than three references to The Wrath of Khan or other Star Trek incidents where Spock did something mean.

As a story this is also where the series starts to splinter. While the first two weren't masterpieces of story structure or plot, this felt almost like an attempt to retool the franchise into a different arc. The first film and Revenge dealt with the Transformers arriving on Earth, but you can't reasonably carry that out for another 2.5 hours, so we have to move onto something different.

For most of the movie that amounts to showing the Autobots and Decepticons goofing around on Earth. The Autobots fight America's wars for them, and the Decepticons...blackmail CEOs? Any talk of leaving the planet is treated as nonsense and dismissed without any real attention given to it. Then Optimus refers to Earth as their new home and after a single attempt to get them to leave they just stay here. Alright then.

One acceptable thing I can say about this movie is that the Decepticon invasion of Chicago feels appropriately hopeless. The city gets curb-stomped without much resistance, and I honestly feel like this series would have been far better if it had been focused on humanity reacting to a sudden, violent invasion by the Decepticons, and then the Autobots showed up. Either way, there's a lot of collateral damage in this movie, with people getting violently exploded, vaporized, torn apart, and killed in other graphic manners on screen. At one point a group of people is vaporized and leaves behind a little rolling pile of bones.

Otherwise there's a lot more slow-motion, a lot more bad CGI (including a really, really bad animated LeBeouf at one point) and further deepening of the orange-and-blue, except that this time the people can be blue and the interiors can be orange. Score one for innovation, boys!

Ultimately, though this is technically classified as a sci-fi action film I think it's more appropriate at this point to start calling them sci-fi action-comedies, because no one on this production was taking any part of this seriously.

Product Placement: Pepto Bismol, Nike, CNN, Facebook, Twitter, Fox News, The O'Reilly Factor, Cisco, Bud Light (with label turned towards camera).

I regret everything.

Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014)

Directed by: Michael Bay
Produced by: Don Murphy, Tom DeSanto, Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Ian Bryce
Written by: Ehren Kruger
Budget: $210,000,000

Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Stanley Tucci, Kelsey Grammer, Nicola Peltz, Jack Reynor, Sophia Myles, Li Bingbing, Titus Welliver, T.J. Miller

First off, immediate points taken off for not marketing it as Trans4mers. Instead you let Fant4stic have it.

This was a reboot disguised as a sequel using the same canon with a new cast, mostly new robots, and new reasons to dislike it.

The new cast includes Wahlberg, who does just fine as an inventor-father and is obviously putting more effort into his performance than the rest of the cast. T.J. Miller dies early on, but he's essentially playing the same character that he does in Silicon Valley. Nikola Peltz hasn't improved a bit since her hilarious show in The Last Airbender, but instead of being dull and flat she's reaching for a dramatic weight she just can't quite grasp. Titus Welliver brings some measure of sinister to his performance, but he can't pull himself above what the script gives him. Stanley Tucci's entire entourage is so comically over the top that its parody of techie companies and personalities like Apple and Elon Musk makes the entire movie feel like a parody of the earlier franchise.

Combine this with the fact that Bay has suddenly decided that dutch angles are so him and you have the first Transformers movie that I would describe as off-kilter. Maybe zany is a better word for this, from the acting to the script to the action. Slow motion is used for the most mundane of actions...I'm fairly sure that at one point it was used when the group was sitting around. About halfway through the movie it occurred to me that at this point Bay has essentially proven that his movies earn a huge return, so Paramount/Hasbro is just letting him do whatever he wants and he's running with it.

The "racism" checkbox once occupied by Skids and Mudflap has been replaced by Drift, a samurai Autobot voiced by Ken Watanabe with the most cliche Asian-Master "Find your inner compass" crud I've seen in a long time. The rest of the new 'bots are distinguishable pretty much only by the color of their armor, while I don't remember the Dinobots (oh yeah, they show up for about 15 minutes at the end) ever actually getting names in the movie itself.

At least Lockdown is kind of a cool villain, even if he's essentially only there to set up the next myth arc for the movies. This time it isn't resolved by the end, though, so maybe Transformers 5 (expected in 2016-2017 and maybe written by "genius" Akiva Goldsman) will have some actual weight to its story.

Judging by this one, however, I wouldn't think so. The stunts in this are Looney Tunes caliber, the script is hilariously blunt ("I designed Galvatron after Optimus Prime, why does he keep looking like Megatron?"), and the direction was obviously intended for 3D with things zooming and distorting at the camera.

The final act moves the movie to China, specifically Hong Kong, in an attempt to increase revenue from Chinese audiences. Considering the movie opened at $91.2 million in China and earned over 75% of its total box office overseas, it seems to have worked despite the fact that the setting makes no sense within the story and actively contradicts what the villain said to do.

Oh, and one final thing to hammer home how lazily this movie was assembled: there were a total of nine different aspect ratios used in this movie, and it switches between them randomly, sometimes within the same conversation. I didn't catch it for a while, but once I noticed it was hard not to be distracted every time it happened, which came to several times per minute. This is not a joke, and I cannot fathom how it wasn't fixed in editing.

I don't really have a conclusion for this one, because it's really bad. Even though it has some alright ideas and I appreciate the attempt to move the franchise forward, this movie is a piece of trash and I wish it was the seal on a truly depressing franchise.

Product Placement: CNN, CBS, Budweiser, Red Bull, Beats Pill, Cherolet, Oreo, Bud Light, Good Year, My Little Pony...there are so many that there is a 12 minute long video online compiling just the product placement shots in the movie.

The Franchise
Combined Estimated Budget: $755,000,000
Combined Total Box-Office: $3,777,000,000
Total Runtime: 613 minutes (10 hours, 13 minutes)
Number of Times Shia LeBeouf should have died: At least 6
Number of Beers I Drank During the Duration: Not enough

If I had to use one word to describe this franchise, it would be bloated. Every movie feels about an hour too long, with unbelievable amounts of filler and soulless motion scenes. As an event it was strange watching four essentially identical movies descend into madness and what I can only assume was cocaine-induced mania, but it wasn't entertaining.

Should You Watch it?
No.