2 thoughts on “The Movie next is Terrible”

1. In my experience, bad movies fall into three general categories. Levels of badness, if you will. Think of them as a sort of lightweight analogue to Dante’s circles of hell. They are (organized by increasing awfulness):

   Bad Movies: these are movies which just aren’t good. A movie on this list might be a movie that you saw at a theater after picking it out from among a choice of several possible films to see that night, and it left you wishing you’d seen another of your choices. You aren’t happy, but you don’t want to go postal. Lots of films fall in this category.
   Truly Awful, Inadvertently Funny Movies: this category is where those with a taste for the kitschy, the campy, and the inadvertently lame are actually able to find some comfort – as well as some humor. These are films which – whatever their genre, be it comedy or science-fiction – were originally intended as serious works, but which, due to the shallowness of the writing or acting or the lackluster directing (or a cinematic boulliabaise of all of those) winds up being an exercise in arch hilarity for the initiated. Films like “Reefer Madness (alternate title: “Tell Your Children”) fit neatly in this category, as do (for different reasons) films like “Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things, and Plan 9 From Outer Space. You get the idea.
   No one in his or her right mind would be likely to pay good money at retail prices to see a film such as these in the theater – if, in fact, they were even aware of such films before they quickly sank forever off the nation’s screens and faded into the permanent twilight immortality (never truly gone but rarely remembered) of video. But many people, including yours truly, would chip in a buck each (with three friends) to rent such cinematic atrocities. Why? They’re funny, and they don’t mean to be! In fact, this is the entire driving concept behind the TV show “Mystery Science Theater 3000″ – watching hilariously bad movies with a group of friends, and providing a running commentary on the crimes against film which are being committed before your very eyes.
   Unredeemable Films: thought I was done, didn’t you? Sadly, NO. There is a level even deeper into the well-full-of-dung that is bad cinema than even the laughably bad films I described above. The Ninth Circle of Cinematic Hell, as it were. These are a select, exclusive group of movies which are SO bad they defy description, reason, all attempts at understanding why someone would try to make such a thing, and even occasionally bend light in the manner of a black hole, as they mindlessly suck all sense and reason from the world. The Crême de la Crap, if you will, of visual entertainment. People with a normal sense of self-preservation and a regard for their own emotional and mental well-being will only watch this sort of movie if they are tricked into it (i.e. – don’t know what abomination someone else is going to show), or occasionally, laugh-seeking hipsters of the sort I mentioned above, will mistake one of these cinematic train-wrecks for a film that’s in the “bad-enough-to-laugh-at” category. They will be sorely disappointed – and possibly scarred for life, because these movies engender in the viewer a sense of time passing slowly on leathery wings, leaving him or her with the ability to think nothing beyond “this is two hours of my life I’ll never get back again. I could be getting a root canal…or maybe a tax audit: something more worthwhile and pleasant.”
   To demonstrate what sort of horrors inhabit this lowest plane of cinematic hell, a quick perusal of the inimitable Mr. Cranky’s list of all-time worst movies reveals titles like the following:

   Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2
   The Adventures of Pluto Nash
   Christmas With The Kranks

   You get the idea. These are movies that, if you were on an transcontinental flight, and this was the only option – which you’d be forced to watch, because the screen is right in front of you, you might give serious consideration to inquiring with a flight attendant about the availability of parachutes. But the review of Mr. Cranky’s which brings my point home more vividly than perhaps any other is his take on I Am Sam. I won’t cut-and-paste the whole thing here, due to length concerns (and also because of some colorful language), but do yourself a favor and go read the whole thing. The sanity you save may be your own.

   So….where does “Next” fall on the above scale?

2. Its sort of a tough call. It definitely attempted at earnestness, but didn’t reach the level of being funny. I almost felt bad for the movie itself. I definitely felt bad for Julianne Moore, though she does have to shoulder some of the blame. The writing was terrible and the directing of her effort was really bad. Simply was a bad bad role for her.

   I got up and walked away and didn’t finish it, but the ending that Cris described to me was terrible. I have a pretty low threshold for tolerating crap movies, but Cris was able to sit through the whole thing, so maybe I’ll put it into the first category.