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.