Batman And Robin - The worst of the Batman franchise

 

 

The Batsuit is wrapped around Clooney; O'Donnell returns as Robin; Arnie is Mr. Freeze and Thurman is Poison Ivy. The only other thing you need to know is that Wayne's Uncle Alfred (Michael Gough) is unwell and Alicia Silverstone arrives not to nurse him but to free him from his life of servitude.
So much for social conscience, but is it fun? Well, yes it is. For the first half-hour it is, anyway: close-ups of the bat and the bird getting suited and booted; chilling with Mr. Freeze in a wham-bam set piece; introducing bad-guy Bane; and fertilising fantasies as Poison Ivy turns from nerdy botanist to vengeful sadist. It all leaves you ready for more.

But then more is exactly what you get. Rather too much more, as both plot and audience attention span stretch to breaking point.

Schumacher has learnt a little from Batman Forever and has reined in the vertigo-inducing crash-cuts making Batman And Robin a lot easier on the eye. But with the change of pace comes a change in emphasis, the target audience now perhaps a little younger and more receptive to cornball wisecracks.

The overall impact is more like the 60s TV series than anything envisaged by D.C. Comics' Bob Kane (whose consultancy credit must be largely contractual) or Tim Burton (whose gloomy architecture of the first two films is the sole remnant of his Dark Knight vision).

In place of Gothic pathos, Schumacher has a simple three-point plan. One: never let anyone say anything profound when there's an excruciating pun to be made. Two: never let anyone use a doorway when there's a wall to smash through. And, three: never ever get the good guys into a situation that can't be solved by a Bathook-and-wire firing thingy. Actually, there's is another, unwritten rule; never let the good guys upstage the talent. And so they don't.

O'Donnell's independent-streak strop soon wears thin and although Clooney is cool in the suit, his Wayne is too laconic, too angst-free, and given to unseemly smirking. Batman And Robin therefore is once more about the nemeses: about Arnie looking like a cross between Gary Glitter and the Lloyd's building, Uma as a set of French curves squeezed deliciously into a green Lycra body-stocking, and er, Bane (her grunting muscleman sidekick who grunts and, yup, has muscles).
But even Arnie (his name at the top of the credits, his dumb-ass one-liner shtick squeezed until the pips shriek for mercy) cannot compete with Thurman. In perhaps the sexiest turn ever seen in a PG rating, she melts celluloid every time she touches it, camping it up but never denting her cool cred. Silverstone and Elle Macpherson (as Bruce Wayne's squeeze) don't even come close. In fact, Silverstone is a major disappointment; though apparently fresh from "Oxbridge", she's not even asked to attempt an English accent, and sulks the whole movie through until, almost too late, the bat and the bird finally get a bat-bird and audiences turn on Batman Begins.

Grade - E -

Camp end to dreadful era for Schumacher at the helm of the Batman franchise. Let's hope he doesn't get his hands on it again.

 

Blues Brothers 2000 - Worst Movie I've Ever Seen In My Whole Entire Life

I'm sure that every one of us has, as of early 2015, experienced a horrible remake of their favorite movie or franchise. There's Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the Star Wars prequels, even Dragonball Evolution...but the biggest stab-in-the-face I've gotten is from Blues Brothers 2000.

Oh, and the Disney sequels. You're not supposed to do a "Return to Neverland" unless you have voice actors that are dead-on to the original voices.

Originally, the Blues Brothers were just characters used during the warm-up skits on Saturday Night Live, which was enough to have an album released. When that was successful, the movie debuted a few years later. In super-brief, here's how it goes...there are two brothers. When the shorter/older one named Jake (played by John Belushi) gets out of jail, his brother Elwood (played by Dan Aykroyd) takes him to visit the orphanage they used to go to. The Penguin (do not call nuns this) tells them that the orphanage is going to close unless they get $20,000. Jake and Elwood go out to find concert gigs and acquire the money, all the while randomly cameoing famous African-American singers, and driving through stuff.

If you don't at least smile from seeing this poster, then you are obviously an impertinent devil of the sea.

This is in my opinion one of the greatest movies of the 80's and my favourite movie of all time. Even today's children have at least a faint grasp of who Jake and Elwood are. They're the Blues Brothers. They sing. They drive through malls. They're awesome.

So, let's go back to 1982. John Belushi has long been struggling with an addiction to cocaine, as was sadly common in the 70's-thru-80's. He's found in a hotel room, dead from a lethal combined injection of cocaine and heroin. I don't even know what to say...John was extremely talented. And then he was gone. It's not like we can go back in time to warn him, or send Cathy Smith back to jail (even Robin Williams said she was creepy) for furthering John into the drug chaos of the day. His career ended with several of the most well-known movies of all-time, including Animal House. Why did this man have to die?

Unfortunately, Dan Aykroyd got a little "creative" fifteen years later. It wasn't bad enough that he attempted a short-lived animated series, but he got at the helm of a second movie...this is Blues Brothers 2000. And it sucks.

There's an old Canadian anti-drug PSA from 1991 that shows a boy going into his room. He pulls out a packet of cocaine and looks at it nervously. As he's about to dump it out, a Black man in skateboarding clothes jumps out of the ceiling, throws the crack out the window and shouts, "MAN, WHAT'CHA DOIN'? STOP YOURSELF WHILE YOU CAN!" That's what everyone wanted to yell at Dan and John Landis. Come to think of it, I'd show that same PSA to John, too.

My father once said that the only decent plot for a Blues Brothers sequel would involve Elwood preparing Jake's funeral, because he died of a SUPER AWESOME CAR CRASH that may have involved a shark. Dad didn't come up with much then, but he added that maybe Elwood would find out that his mother is still alive and being a recluse somewhere, then he'd try to track her down for the funeral, all the while visiting old characters. But it's not the same if there's only one brother and a "Blues Mom". This would make a satisfactory (but not great) movie. If you get anything below this, then maybe you should stop working on it altogether. This is like the part in the SNL skit "Don't Look Back In Anger" when John (dressed as an old man) dances on Dan's grave...only, transpose either person and there you are.

Since John was...dead and all, you couldn't really bring Jake Blues back in without looking horrible. They could have had JIM Belushi, John's brother, play Jake, except Jim was doing voices on crappy cartoons and probably couldn't be found. And apparently they were going to bring Jim in as "Brother Zee Blues", but for some unknown reason, he wanted nothing to do with it. So, Jake was announced as being deceased in the movie, as well as Curtis (the guy who took care of Jake and Elwood when they were kids in the orphanage, remember?). Now, when so many actors from the original movie are dead, you're supposed to stop planning the film, rather than kill off the character. It only gives everyone a stinging reminder that John and Cab Calloway are dead in real life.

Instead of really dwelling on Jake and Curtis's deaths, Elwood goes off to find Curtis's illegimate son (whom has become a sherriff) and try to invite him into the band. Wait, what? To try and simplify this, let's say my father and brother died somehow. Then, I would have to decide whether to prepare their funerals, or to go find my Dad's astrayed cousin and invite her to work on this website with me. Which is more logical? However, the first option isn't movie material. If the movie went like this, it would be two minutes long. Elwood wake up in a little bedroom in the back of a bar. He would make some toast, get a phone call that Jake and Curtis were dead, make a surprised face, then it would cut to black and the credits would roll.

Elwood is denied by Curtis's son Cab, so he leaves to go work at a stripclub as the announcer. He finds out the bartender Mack, played by another John by the name of Goodman, is good at singing and makes him a Blues Brother. Mack has been bothering the Russian mafia, who then burns down the club. Elwood decides to restart the band, then adopts a boy named Buster and brings HIM into the band. They drive around to places from the old movie to show how much theyve changed, bug the mafia, bug some white supremecists, and be chased down by Cab and the police. Then they go to Louisiana and have a Battle of the Bands, while being electrocuted by a voodoo queen. End movie.

The problem with this is how Elwood is now the star, when previously, Jake and Elwood were equally stars. Jake did 75% the talking, because Elwood was supposed to be a quiet character, but now Elwood has Jake's personality. Plus, the plot is mediocre and on the level of every cheap children's cartoon, and new "brothers" weren't needed. DAMMIT, AYKROYD! WHAT DID YOU THINK YOU WOULD ACCOMPLISH? This is worse an idea than "Speed Racer: The Next Generation"! I'm sixteen years-old with the mind of a nine year-old, and even I think this is terrible!

Worse yet, this sequel beat the original movie's world record for "Biggest Movie Vehicle Pile-Up". This movie made less than 1/10th of the original movie's income, was done with an outlandish plot and numerous people dead or unavailable, and it destroyed what made the Blues Brothers famous. Remember this?

It was ALL THEY EVER HAD and you SHAT ON IT.

I really don't want to be angry at Dan, given that he was also in Ghostbusters, which inhabits a huge, warm spot of my childhood. But really, what I've said before is...what good could have possibly been achieved through a sequel more than 16 years after your co-star and buddy died? To be honest, Blues Brothers 2000 plays out like a fan fiction. A BLOODY FAN FICTION. Speaking of which, look what you inspired. To be blunt, everything by "3LW00D" is horrifying, which shows you kids should never look up fanfiction for live-action productions, unless you enjoy the taste of your bile.

My verdict...this movie was completely unnecessary, and it's hard to think of what kind of motive there could have been behind its creation. I’m not saying that Blues Brothers 2000 is the worst movie in existence, I’m saying that it’s the worst movie I’ve ever seen, but it still takes my favourite movie, puts it in a neckhold and punches it in the face repeatedly.

 Grade - F - SHAME

Birdemic: Shock And Terror

There are a lot of bad movies, but few are so bad they're good -- typically in an unintentionally campy, "we're laughing at you, not with you" sort of way. Intentional or not, Birdemic: Shock and Terror has gained a reputation as such a film. It's an exercise in train wreck moviemaking that has sold out screenings across the US and has earned press in national publications due to its sheer ineptitude as an homage to Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.

While on the opposite end of the production spectrum as Avatar, Birdemic is no less of a cinematic experience that must be seen to be believed.

Rod (Alan Bagh) is an environmentally conscious and inexplicably successful software salesman living in the sleepy coastal town of Half Moon Bay, California.

One day, he runs into Nathalie (Whitney Moore), an ex-classmate who is equally inexplicably successful as a model; although her photos are the equivalent of Glamour Shots, she somehow manages to get signed by Victoria's Secret. They start to date, and things go swimmingly, ending up in a romantic getaway at a sleazy motel room. But, just when all seems right in the world, IT happens.

Birds start to attack the town, pecking and clawing people to death and acting as suicide bombers, flying headlong into gas pumps and other locations susceptible to exploding upon bird contact. Rod and Nathalie team with another couple, Ramsey (Adam Sessa) and Becky (Catherine Batcha), to fight through the carnage, aided by Ramsey's conveniently accessible stash of guns in his van.

The birds, it seems, have been driven crazy by global warming, pollution, gas-guzzling vehicles and other stuff the director saw in An Inconvenient Truth. (Seriously. Rod and Nathalie even go to see the movie in the movie.) Our heroes drive out of town, but the epidemic is too widespread to avoid. They rescue newly orphaned kids Susan (Janae Caster) and Tony (Colton Osborne), remarkably unscarred from seeing their parents pecked to death, and the group does their best to survive, but what can be done to fight a birdemic?

As a salesman and entrepreneur, writer/director/producer James Nguyen should be praised. A software salesman by trade (thus explaining the fact that, hilariously, the hero in each of his three movies thus far has been a salesman), he scraped together the resources for Birdemic and acquired distribution by pasting fake birds and carnage to his car and driving through Park City, Utah during the Sundance Film Festival.

As a filmmaker, though, he has no business being behind a camera. His so-called "romantic thriller" Birdemic is dimwitted and utterly amateurish in all aspects, from the script to the cast to the direction to the dirt-cheap special effects -- and yet, that's what makes it so mesmerizing. If Nguyen had been a better filmmaker or had had any training whatsoever, Birdemic likely would never have been picked up by a distributor, and if it had, it would've been just another sub-SyFy creature feature cluttering Blockbuster shelves. As it stands, Birdemic is an epic showcase of hamfisted moviemaking that would make Ed Wood wince.

Within the first post-credits minute, the ineptitude begins: abrupt cuts, awkward silence, stilted dialogue, the production value of an HR sexual harassment video, actors who seem like the only English they know is what they memorized from the script. One scene features a different angle for almost every line of dialogue. Another sequence just shows Rod driving, getting gas, waiting in traffic, arriving at work and walking into his office. Inside, a follow-up scene features 75 seconds of applause (with looped audio). Later, one of the group's "adventures" is walking around yelling "Tony!" after the boy wanders off. They find him. He's fine. End scene.

But while such scenes make Birdemic awful, what pushes it into craptastic territory is, of course, the birds -- or should I say, the CGI blobs that vaguely resemble birds. The bird attacks consist of what look like free animated GIF stock images copied and pasted across the screen, the barely mobile birds just hovering as their victims scream or, in one ridiculous moment, hit them with coat hangers.

It's enough to make you wonder if it's all one big gag or a viral attempt by a studio -- especially when a Los Angeles screening was presented by the stars of the Adult Swim show Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, whose humor intentionally mines the same sort of low-tech awkwardness that characterizes Birdemic. However, seeing interviews with Nguyen and reading articles like this unflattering account of the behind-the-scenes chaos convinced me that the movie is indeed legit.

Still, that doesn't eliminate the possibility that Nguyen is secretly a cinematic genius who realized his own shortcomings as a filmmaker and decided to slap everything together as haphazardly as possible, hoping that people would recognize its camp potential. Could it be that he hired inexperienced actors not just to save money, but also to feed into the awful spectacle of it all?

If so, he certainly hit the mother lode with Alan Bagh, an actor so bad, he's hypnotic. He's like an automaton, seemingly incapable of human emotion as he plods through his dead-eyed, mumble-mouthed performance, delivering lines like "Hey, those people on that bus are being killed by birds" like he's saying "Hey, look at that cow." He's the William Hung of actors, and if it turns out that he's actually pretending to be a bad actor, he deserves an Oscar, stat.

Maybe thinking that there's something more behind Birdemic is giving too much credit to Nguyen. Besides, I prefer the romantic notion of an untrained Vietnamese refugee scrounging together resources for a passion project and delivering an earnest, straight-faced effort to create a "romantic thriller" with a socially conscious message about global warming and exploding birds.

Grade - C+ (So bad it's...well, not necessarily "good," but at least entertaining.

Fantastic Four (Fantastic Bore)

I watched Fantastic Four to review because I was almost certain I would hate it, and I needed something to help me unwind in the stressful summer period. It's a fairly safe assumption that anyone who ever had any actual talent in 20^th Century Fox has long since abandoned the company to an invading force of leprous retards who create design documents by flicking fountain pens at a pile of shredded paper. I was looking forward to a delightfully horrible movie to get good and angry at, but it turns out I was disappointed. Fantastic Four is so bad, so utterly putrid, that I can't even get worked up about it! It falls right off the edge of my critical spectrum into the black cloying void of dispassionate loathing. It doesn't even have the hilariously awful quality of previous Fantastic Four movies, like in the last one which made the Silver Surfer look like some damp, cardboard cut-out.

The only slightly tolerable parts of Fantastic Four is the atmosphere of the film, mainly because you could give Mr. Fantastic a shield, unfocus your eyes, and convince yourself that you're watching Captain America: The Winter Soldier - a much better movie. The action within the film is almost entertaining but given the humourless tone, the lack of dynamic between the titular characters, and completely squandering the promise it displayed it falls incredibly short of being anything spectacular, unlike The Winter Soldier. It also doesn’t help that the film’s aesthetically drab and dramatically inert, and doesn’t offer anything memorable.

The leprous retards of 20^th Century Fox have basically been lost in their own little world for the past few years, but occasionally something penetrates their malformed three-inch-thick skulls. Recently for example, the notion finally broke through that most people want Fantastic Four movies to be about The Fantastic Four and that their ever expanding entourage of side characters can all go dive under a tractor. So the cast of supporting characters is cut down on this venture. Mole Man makes an appearance but he was with the series while it was still good so I'll let that one slide. We're also introduced to a new "better" cast for the Four with less humour and more boredom. It doesn't help that the dialogue's so blimming embarrassingly written I had to pretend I was listening to it in German just to give it enough of a sense of cultural distance that my hands didn't keep slipping off the top of my head and fastening around my throat.

Another thing that finally penetrated their minds is that putting the Fantastic Four in a darker environment is repeatedly proven to be like releasing freshwater fish into the Dead Sea; they just don't get along. So the main plot consists of the fantastic four slowly becoming what they should’ve been at the start of the movie. Then 20^th Century Fox’s nanny was called away and they fell back on their leprous retard instincts. Ironically this movies pacing is just all over the damn place, starting with Reed’s childhood, jumping to the "One Year Later" title card and things go off the rails. Twelve months from the characters’ lives are gone, and the audience is thrown back into the proceedings after a lot of things have already happened to the main characters. Throw in a rushed fight with Doom, and the heroes suddenly find themselves with their own headquarters at the end. Another issue was the lack of character development. While Reeds was at most, tolerable with his intellect at the expense of his personality, the other members come off as complete jokes. Aside from her pattern recognition and brief flirtation with Reed, Sue wasn’t that interesting. Johnny was established as a "hothead," but he seemed more angry than brash, and his reasons for joining the team were flimsy at best. Ben was essentially a blank slate whose primary function was being Reed’s friend, and even when he did turn into The Thing, he was mopey the whole time. Granted, I’d probably be sad if I turned into a rock monster, but this Ben Grimm had none of the sass and personality he had in the comics and previous film series (not that were any good). I'm ashamed enough that I'm even watching this, movie, and now the movie itself is insulting me for it!

Mind you, even the sound department sounds like something you’d here from a film with of budget of like £15,000. Most of the sounds in this movie sounded like a vuvuzela attached to an elephant dying of flatulence, and the green screen effects were so goddamn noticeable sometimes that it made me want to pick my own teeth out with a pizza slicer, and in terms of costumes, Doctor Doom looks like a kid you’d have knocking on your door at Halloween, (actually even THEY would look better than him)

This isn't the movie for you if you like jumping right into the action. Come to think of it, this isn't the movie for you even if you don't. I'm not sure what kind of person could consider this the movie for them but they probably live in a cave and subsist on raw fish. Nostalgia is the only reason The Fantastic Four still get a free ride despite repeatedly rubbing their little faces in our own with terrible movie after terrible movie. The Fantastic Four are done. They've passed it. They don't need more movies, they need help! Specifically the kind of help that involves taking them behind the shed and tearfully putting both barrels through their confused, oblivious little faces. Stuff them, mount them, bring them back as The Incredibles.

Grade - F (For Fantastic Flop) - Avoid at all costs