The interesting thing about a year long writing plan is that you become more aware about the amount of material you have available. Three hundred and sixty five more entries is a lot of material, and it wouldn't do to spend what I've got saved up too early.
I could, for instance, do another Old Republic log since I spent much of yesterday getting ready for tonight's guild run. But since I'll have even more to talk about after the run, I figure I'll just wait until tomorrow. I could also discuss my thoughts and feelings about the end of the 2011 Chicago Bears season. But that'll keep. After all, the Bears aren't going anywhere, and neither are my thoughts on them.
So instead, I'll discuss the annual New Year's Eve Bad Movie Night Party. Every year we gather to watch and heckle bad movies. Normally we decide on a "winner" by which we mean the worst film of the night.
This year, there were five contenders, which we viewed in chronological order. They were: Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966), Hercules (1983), The Bride (1985), The Avengers (1998), and The Order (2002). Time and energy expired before we could make it to a sixth movie, Conan the Barbarian (2011).
Manos: The Hands of Fate was featured in an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. We didn't watch that version, though. There were no funny robots or a lonely Minnesotan providing quips for this turkey. No, we had to do that ourselves. And there's a lot to quip about. The movie tells he story of a family that gets lost in Texas and encounters and runs into a weird cult that worships Manos. Even by the standards of 1966, the acting in Manos is wretched and the script is worse. Every character is a one-note moron and there's virtually no plot. Characters appear who have no purpose, including a couple whose only point in the plot was to make out in a car. Of course, what else can you expect from a film that only exists because a guy bet how easy it was to make a movie?
Hercules is more professionally done, but still pretty bad. It turns out there's a very good reason that Lou Ferrigno only grunted and roared on The Incredible Hulk. He's simply not a very good actor. Still, it was a definite step up from Manos. That doesn't mean it was good, however. The special effects were laughable, the acting mediocre at best, the action wasn't very interesting, the film quality was poor, and the main villain's definition of "science" was, at best, insulting. Not a good film by any standpoint, but it wasn't epically bad the way Manos was.
If I didn't know the truth, I'd be hard pressed to believe that The Bride was made only two years after Hercules. Honestly, if there was a single movie here that didn't qualify as bad, The Bride would be it. The film quality's better, the actors are better, the script is better. Alas, that still isn't the same as good. The Bride is The Bride of Frankenstein crossed with My Fair Lady. Doctor Frankenstein creates a reanimated bride for his monster, then pulls an Eliza Doolittle on her to make her a perfect lady. Meanwhile, the original monster runs away from home and joins the circus. The standout performance, and the reason it's a cut above the other films of the night, is the work of David Rappaport who plays the dwarf Rinaldo who befriends the monster and humanizes him on the road to join the circus. Other than that, though, the film's a mess. It's basically the Bride does something, the Monster does something, wash, rinse, repeat. There's no cohesion in the film until the very end, and even then it doesn't feel like an evolution, just another thing that happens. Though much better than the other films we watched, it still wasn't very good.
My own contribution to the pot was The Avengers, the 1998 adaptation of the '60s British TV show of the same name. The movie's pretty unsatisfying. The defeat of some of the villains is unsatisfying, the jokes often fall flat, and it has a degree of silliness to it that fails for most audiences, but was perfect for our purposes. Worst of all, it makes a mockery of a classic TV show and fails to recreate its charm. And for that, it deserves its place in Bad Movie night.
Finally, we watched Jean-Claude van Damm's The Order. It...was everything you'd expect a crappy direct-to-video JCVD film to be. Acting was bad, story was ridiculous, the fights not as cool as they ought to be. Sadly, it was kind of a flop for me as far as Bad Movine Night went. It was too bad to enjoy as a film straight up, but not bad enough to be really mockable. It was just there. Of course, since the last film is usually watched after midnight around the time that exhaustion is setting in, that could have something to do with it.
And that was Bad Movie Night '11-'12. May the rest be as bad...and as fun.
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