BAD MOVIES THAT SHOULD BE SEEN (14 OF 100)

"Tammy And The T-Rex" (1994), Dir: Stewart Raffill
 

$$ Something in Budget vs. Nothing in Gross $$

Most filmmakers walk into a project with an intention. They usually have an idea what kind of movie they are trying to make or at least what audience they are aiming towards. But with the sci-comedy-disaster Tammy And The T-Rex, I don't think Director Stewart Raffill could even answer those questions. Coming off his screaming success Mac And Me (that was sarcasm by the way), Raffill brings us a movie that embodies three very distinctively genres, but fails at achieving anyone of them.

Firstly, Tammy And The T-Rex is supposed to be a teen comedy. The majority of the cast are 90s teen actors with the lovely (but talentless) Denise Richards playing Tammy and Fast & Furious' own Paul Walker playing her goofy boyfriend Michael. Immediately we learn that Tammy fears for Michael's life when her psychotic ex-boyfriend Billy won't leave her alone. Michael tells Tammy that he is not afraid of Billy and confronts him. The two proceed to grab each other's balls in probably one of the funniest teen movie confrontations I've ever seen ("What we got here is one of them testicular stand-offs!").

But from there, Billy and his cronies kidnap Michael and drop him off at a zoo to be lion-lunch. And surely enough, Michael is mauled and killed by a lion... This is where the film takes a sudden turn, casually becoming a teen-comedy that also happens to be revenge-film...? Hmm. So Paul Walker dies (in a very funny hospital sequence), but his brain is left in tact, even if his body is not. Meanwhile, a mad scientist named Dr. Wachenstein (played by Weekend at Bernie's own Terry Kiser) has built a giant robotic Tyrannosaurus Rex... for whatever reason. All it needs to be functional is an unsullied brain, making Paul Walker's now useless brain the perfect suitor. And yes, this is all the same movie...

So the mad scientist steals Paul Walkers's brain (in a lab sequence that looks a lot like Simpsons Treehouse of Horror II) and transplants it into the robot dinosaur. And within a few seconds of becoming a robot dinosaur, Paul Walker sets out to exact revenge by viciously slaughtering Billy and his gang in some rather gory PG-13 moments. So essentially, at this point, this so-called teen-comedy that just recently became a revenge-film now also features sci-fi special effects of about the caliber your see in the picture below.

Ridiculous plot aside, the most off-putting thing about Tammy And The T-Rex is the blatant disregard for human life that the film tries to treat humorously. There's a sequence where Denise Richards and her super-gay friend Byron (Theo Forsett) go to the morgue and start picking through corpses to find Michael's potential replacement body. Leaning the bodies against the window so the giant robot dinosaur can see them, Tammy rejects one because apparently his c$%k is too big for her... Yup. She's not that kinda girl, but is the type that will desecrate a corpse.

Now I know this is an attempt at humor, but the popular brand of 90s dark humor (typically found in era classics such as Pulp Fiction) doesn't work here. Especially not when paralleled with some imitation 80s bubble gum schlock. They do try comedy with the dinosaur like having it trying to make a phone call, but this weird playfulness seems out of place when just moments ago the T-Rex ripped a guy's guts out and crushed him in front of an old lady.

As a director, I think Raffill deserves study. His career includes two films that attempt to tap the youth market of a particular time without having any idea what that market wants or why they even exist... Or maybe it's as simple as Raffill wanted to make a movie about a T-Rex (in light of Jurassic Park's success the previous year) and the name Tammy just happened to start with a "T." Wow! Marketing genius at its finest!

The only thing that makes Tammy And The T-Rex worth seeing is Denise Richards. Simply put, she's young and gorgeous. And I assume the striptease she performs for the camera at the end was the filmmakers half-assed way of apologizing for making the audience put up with whatever the hell this was, while also exploiting Denise Richards for being very attractive at the same time. Poor Denise... She may never have had much in the way of acting talent (even slightly), but the Charlie Sheen years really look as if they took a toll on her pretty face and that's a real shame.

Enjoy this movie for the few laughs it has (mostly among the human characters surprisingly) and to see Denise in a better place, even if that better place is a world where Paul Walker's brain can be kept in salad bowl so that he can enjoy a daily striptease from Tammy. 

And for your viewing displeasure, the off-putting violence I was speaking of, accompanied by some really, really bad special effects.

BAD MOVIES THAT SHOULD BE SEEN (12 OF 100)

"League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" (2003),
Dir: Stephen Norrington
 

$78,000,000 in Budget vs. $179,265,204 in Gross

 

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is one of the best/worst blockbuster films ever made. Based on the comics by famed Watchmen-writer (and part-time magician) Alan Moore, the film attempts to be Jules Verne's answer to DC Comics' Justice League. And for all intensive purposes, this idea probably looked great on paper, combining all these fictional characters in a similar way to the movie Tall Tale, but already proved not to work back in good old 1995. But what makes this movie so great are all the ways it doesn't work and still remains entertaining.

Based on a comic and thus subject to fantasy, the movie claims to be set in the year 1899, so we presume that's our 1899... yet there's submarines, machine guns, automobiles, rockets, etc., so any divide between Fantasy 1899 and Reality 1899 is never made clear. Not like the opening credits to Watchmen, where the movie's different world setting is much more evident. Now, a lot of people blame the movie's poor reception on the C.G.I. and it's overuse, but they might be surprised to discover the movie has a lot less of that than some would think. For example, I always thought Mr. Hyde was a C.G. character. Turns out it's just a bad-looking latex suit as seen below. And the car chase scene through Venice (with the first automobile ever created apparently) is actually all miniatures... Hmm. Interesting. Still looks like sh&^%, though.

Special effects aside, the main problem with LXG is the poor decisions on the creative teams' part. Coming out of The Matrix craze of all early-2000s superhero movies (X-Men and Norrington's Blade included), they chose to follow this visual trend of dark costuming and bullet-time action sequences to sway audiences into believing these story-lines. But for a movie set in the Victorian era, lifting the style of a movie about cyberpunks seems like an odd choice.

Now, maybe I am just ignorant, but I had no idea who Allan Quatermain was before seeing this movie. My inability to read anything beyond the back of a shampoo bottle didn't help. But the bigger question is, what audience going to see a superhero action movie would be brushing up on their Victorian era writings first? I knew Tom Sawyer (hardly Victorian and not as some f*&%ing secret service agent), Dr. Jekyll (the original Hulk), The Invisible Man (who spends most of the movie naked apparently), Captain Nemo (but only Disney's version), and Professor James Moriarty (with no Sherlock Holmes in sight).

Allan Quatermain? No idea. Mina Harker (Dracula's wife and former protagonist of the comic books) I only knew from Wyona Ryder's soulless portrayal in Bram Stoker's Dracula, where she wasn't a vampire and had me confused. And Dorian Gray (from The Picture of Dorian Gray, an Oscar Wilde story) was definitely the most obscure. Also, the movie provides no background to these characters, so if you don't know the story of Dorian Gray, Stuart Townsend's action movie one-liner seen in this clip really makes no sense...

LXG's legacy was less so informing audiences about these classical characters and more so about killing a lot of careers. After its release, Sean Connery quit acting all together. Director Stephen Norrington has not directed a feature since this. And this mess was the last film to carry Alan Moore's name. For all its infamy, though, this movie is immensely entertaining, from its over-the-top action sequences and general lunacy. You will be laughing out loud and have a great time with it.

BAD MOVIES THAT SHOULD BE SEEN (2 OF 100)

 

"Star Trek: Generations" (1994), Dir: David Carson

$35 Million in Budget vs. $120 Million in Gross

If one were to trace back to where Star Trek really departed from being stories about the ethics of the future, it would probably be with Star Trek: Generations. For the first outting of The Next Generation crew, it feels less like a celebration and more like the franchise's garage sale. Up for grabs was William Shatner's integrity in the Captain Kirt role. Some would argue the Shat never had any to begin with, but Patrick Stewart certainly did in the enlightened, forward-thinking role of Jean-Luc Picard. Instead, this deflated cinematic adventure just marks Picard's gradual transformation into a geriatric Bruce Willis. And finally, there was a clear fire-sale of whatever uniforms were leftover from the previous films and Deep Space Nine. The outcome was the most disappointing writing for Star Trek since the original series (and that tar monster episode in TNG). The rest of the Next Gen movies would be rocky or forgettable, and now that the studio's have rebooted the original crew in action movie form, I have a feeling the characters of Next Gen will be forgotten in the world of cinema... for the better, probably... They were TV people, unlike the radiant Nichelle Nichols. Pff! Zoe Saldana, my ass.



For your viewing displeasure, my favourite critic since Roger Ebert, Mr. Plinkett, does an indepth analysis of this... thing.

BAD MOVIES THAT SHOULD BE SEEN (1 OF 100)

 

"Nothing But Trouble" (1991), Dir: Dan Aykroyd

$40 Million in Budget vs. $8 Million in Gross

In 1988, Tim Burton made Beetle Juice. In 1989, Ted Kotcheff made Weekend at Bernie's. And by 1991, these types of comedies were proving to fair pretty well at the box office. So Dan Aykroyd (the man behind the semingly successful genre ala Ghostbusters in 1983) decided to direct for the first time in his career. This film would be Nothing But Trouble and would also mark the end of Aykroyd's directing career, not to mention when it became clear to the public he had a screw loose. It stars Chevy Chase (when people still liked him), Demi Moore (pre-Aston Kutcher), John Candy (we forgive you), Tupac Shakur (in his first movie role), and Aykroyd as a psychotic judge holding a group of socialites hostage in his demented fun house of justice. When people look back on Aykroyd's career, I have a feeling they will mark this as when he first lost his mind.



For your viewing displeasure, the infamous "baby scene" with Dan and his brother, not to mention John Candy in drag and Demi Moore dressed like she's in a Debeers commercial.