What Bad SciFI Film Have You Watched Most Recently?
By John DeNardo |
Thursday, February 19th, 2009 at
12:52 pm
Damn you, NetFlix! You keep making me watch movies I wouldn’t have watched otherwise.
Last night it was the 2004 eco-disaster flick, The Day After Tomorrow. Suspect science, mediocre acting, contrived drama, obvious CG effects, heavy-handed propaganda…these are not the things I look for in a SciFi film. I’m surprised I watched the whole thing.
What bad SciFI film have you watched most recently?
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Filed under: Movies
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I watched the 1986 movie Robot Holocaust the other day. Well, I skipped through parts of it, so maybe that doesn’t count. I’m beginning to think the 80′s are the go-to decade for science fiction stinkers.
I’m having trouble with NetFlix too. I watched Heavy Metal 2000 in it’s entirety! Maybe there’s a support group we can join….
is Van Helsing scifi?
this was the second time I have seen it, it is just so horrible. I don’t think I even finished it.
Terminator 3
I saw Future World recently. It was awesome in its badness, and it was very…so very bad. I think I am a sci-fi sadist, because I love bad sci-fi movies. Battlefield Earth? My brother and I went to see it in the theaters (yes, we were going to pay money to watch it!), they were not even going to show it because nobody…I repeat…NOBODY bought a ticket. My brother knew the manager, so they put it on just for us. (At no cost to us, I might add) Just when we thought it could get now worse…BAM. We were not dissapointed. Bad sci-fi makes my world go ’round.
I watched the Sci-Fi Channel Original Movie “Journey to the Center of the Earth” earlier this month. I was anticipating cheesy badness, because Sci-Fi Originals are good for that, but it was really just…. special. “JttCotE” was still better, however, than “Lost Treasure of the Grand Canyon” that was on before it. That one hurt my brain…….
Red Planet (2000), only last night. The effects were nice and it’s very entertaining if you mute the whole thing and watch. (Not that we could for long stretches because the dialogue was hilariously ponderous.) Hubby was adamant that I watch it, because he caught a bit of it late one night and was waiting for the inevitable cable rerun so we could throw popcorn at it together. Ah, to paraphrase the French, a marriage without bad s-f movies to watch together, is like a kiss without a moustache.
About Roland Emmerich, I watched Independence Day recently and the movie is worse than The Day of Tomorrow. Perhaps the worst of all the Emmerich’s movies.
Day After wasn’t too bad. Yes, suspect science, contrived, yes. But it was entertaining in that brain-candy way.
Makes me want to watch Buckaroo Banzai.
I watched 15 minutes of The Day of the Triffids right here on SF Signal. It was worse than I remembered. That’s the kind of bad that would make Mystery Science 3000 snooze in their Dr. Peppers.
Well, any made for SciFi Channel original film would qualify as bad scifi. (Although, Wyvern was a hoot.)
I dug out my copy of ’84′s Ice Pirates with Robert Urich, Mary Crosby, Angelica Huston, and Ron Perlman the other night — just because I hadn’t made fun of it lately. Another hoot, and well worth NOT watching, but in case you do watch it by mistake, your brain will NOT turn into mush…
Oh, wait, let me get back to you on that. I hear something sloshing…
I have recently watched Event Horizon, Sunshine, and Babylon A.D.
Event Horizon has the framework for what could be a really interesting hard SF film. And then it just gets all silly when the supposedly smart captain does the same stupid thing…twice. From there it goes to heck really quick. I ended up thinking that someone had done too many drugs watching Walt Disney’s Black Hole.
Sunshine also had the potential for beign a very good hard SF movie. And then they introduced the maniacal slasher killer, and it just became another version of Friday the 13th. Very disappointing.
Babylon A.D. gets bonus points for not disguising what it is–take the initials from its title. It’s kinda pretty and interesting in an empty-headed blow ‘em up kind of way. But since the movie doesn’t explain the background–which is crucial to the entire plot–until the last 15 minutes in about the worst deus ex machina way, it just kills any respect I might have had for it. There are some funny moments, maybe unintentionally funny, but not enough to ever make the effort again…unless I end up writing about bad SF movies.
I haven’t seen Event Horizon since Jr. High, so it could be the youth talking, but I loved it. Guess I hadn’t been expecting any real sf at the time. Since then, I’ve noticed that there is a lot of difference of opinion when it comes to that movie.
Sunshine is on my list to watch. I have high hoped for it, being a Danny Boyle flick.
My recently-watched personal pick for a flaming raspberry is The Core. You know: the movie where the Earth’s core suddenly stops spinning, and humanity is still around afterward, not spun off into space a microsecond later. But I guess, given the fine quality of much Hollywood writing these days, it’s ok to ignore a pescy little detail like inertia. Well, at least it’s got the easy-on-the-eyes Christina Cox (or was that the other journey-to-the-bowls-of-the-earth movie, and I’m not talking about the Jules Verne classic).
I have to concur with Fred Perry above. “Sunshine” was great until it became “Event Horizon” minus the supernatural stuff about half way through the film.
My slash-science film of the month was “Deep Impact.” After getting over the desire to slit my wrists after the movie due to how depressing it was (and uber-depressing Morrissey of “The Smiths” was not even in it!) I decided that Téa Leoni wore entirely too much clothing throughout the movie and that even when you have as many heavy weight actors like (Robert Duvall, Téa Leoni, Elijah Wood, Vanessa Redgrave, Morgan Freeman, Maximilian Schell, James Cromwell, Jon Favreau(kidding!), Leelee Sobieski ) you should wind up with a much better film than it was.
To drive the point home I offer Ebert who seems to agree with me on “Deep Impact”:
You tell em’ Rog!
Why does Deep Impact keep showing up on this list of bad scifi’s? Even worse, why does Armageddon NOT appear? Personally, I loved Deep Impact even if some of the characters were fairly weak. They tried really hard to get the science right, and mostly succeeded. And it’s refreshing to see a scifi movie consider the possiblity that our science, and the knowledge gained by it, will change us and how we see the world. Too much scifi (I’m talking to you, Star Trek: Next Generation) is way into the future but we act and think like we do know.
For actual suggestions of bad scifi movies, I second Red Planet. It was why I googled for the phrase “bad scifi” and found this in the first place. While RP’s flaws are too numerous to list, here’s the one I just can’t stand at all. The guy with multiple PH.D’s sees the alien bugs and says “some kind of nematodes”. As anyone who paid attention in highschool biology should know, A NEMATODE IS A ROUNDWORM, YOU DUMBASS!!!
Mission to Mars gets a close second to Red Planet as they have the same setting, same level of nonsensical plot, same awful science, and I can never remember which one has the big white pyramid and which one has Carrie Anne Moss in a skimpy t-shirt.
Anyway, Armageddon should be here too, as it’s just Die Hard ridiculous physics in space.
Event Horizon has to be one of the worst, and not in a good way. I made the mistake of seeing that in the theater ages ago, and the question of “where has this ship been for the last ten years” could have led to a good movie if the answer was something better than “ripping off the plot and trappings of the Hellraiser series.”
Oh yes, as others have said, The Core and Independence Day get at least honorable mentions. They’re at least watchable (ID is borderline entertaining) even though the science is abysmal.