the most craptacular movies of all time

one guy. one girl. bad movies.

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February 24

Ben & Arthur (2002)

HIM: Currently sitting at #19 on IMDB’s “Bottom 100” movies list (with a 1.5 average rating!), the less said about this thing the better. It’s essentially the work of a very determined California self-auteur(the opening credits were 95% his name - - “CATERING BY SAM MRAOVICH!”) who works at Togo’s and happens to be an ugly, fat GAY guy. So GAY in fact that the movie is ALL ABOUT HIS GAYNESS!!! So, he wrote a crappy pseudo-gay-bashing-dramatic “script” (about a newly “married” gay guy with a long lost brother who REALLY doesn’t want his brother to be gay) and tried (with lower-level basement director skills) to make a movie in which he casts himself as the romantic lead, pairs himself with the vacant model fiancee and has all of his best gay friends fill ALL the remaining roles (gay or otherwise). Also, there’s barely 30 minutes worth of dialogue but the movie keeps going ON AND ON AND ON for nearly 90 minutes. You stop trying to think too much about the plot 10 minutes in and end up instead laughing at the horrendous production value. The audio mixing is god-awful. There’s no visible evidence that SAM MRAOVICH knows anything about lighting (even thought I’m pretty sure he took the “choreography by” credit. When the main gay guy couple “marries” and goes off to vacation for their honeymoon, it’s symbolized by showing a camcorder-esque b-roll clip of a plane leaving LAX Airport. Buuuut, it’s a FED EX plane, which is either a huge unknowing mistake or hilarious joke. The crazy brother character also spends the second half of the movie moaning about how he was excommunicated from the church because his brother was gay and blah blah blah. Meanwhile this “church” is actually a paper mache church with colored-aluminum foil wallpapering and a cardboard cross. It looked more like a 12-year-old raver’s bedroom than a church. Also, there’s one of the most awkwardly shot and staged apartment garage murders EVER. AND there’s also some weirdly-handled and just plain STRANGE homo-erotic incest at the end. It’s very weird and then the movie just ends. A 1.5 rating out of 10 is being a little generous. I’d give it a solid 1.0.

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HER: Ben and Arthur... Holy crap. This is writer-director-producer-casting-director-music-editor-sound-editor-lead-star Sam Mravoich’s gift that keeps on giving. Ostensibly this movie was made in 2002, but based on the early 90s Sony mini-cassette camcorder cinematography, I’d place this hunk of burning love suck smack dab in 1992. Honestly, to even go into the technical aspects of the film is to dive head first into the Pit of Despair. Of all the shitrocious aspects of the production (the papier-mâché church replete with cardboard-masking-tape crucifix and crayola-watercolor jesus comes to mind…seriously, watch the clip above at the 2:02 mark), the worst part has to be the sound editing, which goes back and forth from being overly loud and scratchy (never heard of lavaliere mics, Sam Mraovich?) to completely and totally *muted* IN A SINGLE CONVERSATION. I’m thinking Mraovich did his editing in Windows 3.1 Movie Maker. Nothing but the best for a Sam Mraovich Joynt.

As hard as the lack of production value made this movie to watch, the nonsensical storyline of two gay lovers who want to get married but can’t because state law and a crazy Jesus Freak brother stand in true love’s way make Ben and Arthur kind of awesome. In what other film can you drug a priest with nail polish remover, be waited on during a dinner service at TOGOS, beat your domestic partner for letting your bicycle get stolen by someone else, fly back from Vermont on a FED EX plane and have it all make perfect non-sense?

Really, I can’t even get through this review without laughing. So it’s with glee that I direct you to this review of Ben & Arthur on Queerty.com which pretty much says it ALL.

Thank you, and may you accept Jesus Christ as your personal lord and savior, just like Arthur’s brother implores him to do in the clip above, at the 8:45 mark. Watch it. Dooooo it.

January 30

Dark Harvest 2: The Maize (2004) - The Trailer

HER: My feelings on this trainwreck can basically be summed up by watching the above clip, starting at the 1:40 mark. Without a doubt, Dark Harvest 2: The Maize is so bad, so unwatchable, so HORRIBLE, it makes Troll 2 look like effing Masterpiece Theatre.

Writer, producer, executive producer, cinematographer, lead actor, assistant to the editor, and husband to the makeup artist, Bill Cowell may have his hand (and name) in everything, but he fails to do much of, well ANYTHING. It was like he got distracted in all of the fogging and defogging and filming corn, sky, and mud, that he forgot to actually WRITE THE SCRIPT. He set out trying to to pull off a James Cameron or a Babs, but succumbed to bad case of mental retardation with a dash of ADHD during the journey. And dysentery. (He was on the Oregon Trail.)

Seriously, I’m not even sure how to put this sh*tbag flick into words. And it really is a “flick”; I can’t really call it a “film,” because that denotes some kind of cinematic esteem. Imagine you woke up one crisp Sunday morning and said “today, I will make… a FILM.” And then you rubbed your crusty, sleepy eyes and meandered over to the bedroom window and looked out at the world, deciding that today *TODAY* will be the day you enter the ranks of Cameron, Scorcese, and Tarantino. Then you see it: THE CORN MAIZE! Quickly, you grab your Panasonic mini-DV cam and rouse your wife, daughter and daughter’s friend from their beds, and drag them out to the cornfield. “ACTION!!!” you cry, and after being sure to press your trusty Picture-in-Picture special effect button, proceed to film them running, screaming into cameras, and be generally confused by the maze of corn (no pun intended). Voila! C’est magnifique!

This film is all that and less.

I would be remiss if I didn’t take a moment to recognize the one person who worked on the movie who may actually have a future after the cornfield: The Maize’s editor, sound re-recording mixer, and Master De-Fogger Robert Imbs. Not because his editing was so fabulous (though being only 23 at the time and apparently excited by his new shiny Final Cut program, he got a little crazy with the PIP and twirling camera special FX), or for his Master De-Fogging skillz, but for going in an *entirely* different direction with his own forthcoming project, Couch. I may actually be able to sit through this one without wanting to lobotomize myself with a corn holder. Upgrade!

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HIM: OH THE MAIZE. This movie is a giant ridiculous sandwich covered with so much boring sauce that it’s running off the plate. Imagine The Brown Bunny but instead of lots of driving, it’s lots of running around in a corn maize. And instead of a blowjob at the end, it’s your soul that’s sucked out of you. The fact that this movie is actually on IMDB, on Netflix and available in reputable stores to buy…is MINDBOGGLING. The plot? Some boderline psychopath (played by Bill “I Did Everything On This Movie” Cowell) runs around for almost 2 hours in a corn maize. That’s it. Swear to God. There are other people involved…like a supposedly violent and crazed firefighter killer (who is undoubtedly the most confusing/anticlimatic villain of all time), policemen straight out of the third Police Academy movie and two ghostly little girls who spend the entire movie looking for a necklace and scaring everyone else by appearing out of thin air (but they can’t disappear out of thin air, you see, so they just slowly walk back into the corn - it’s unintentionally hilarious and was one of my “favorite” parts). There are also the two Halloween-costumed daughters of the main guy (who are very very annoying and loud - see the clip above) and a bunch of random people who show up every now and then - usually running away from the maize like I wanted to run away from the TV five minutes in. The weirdest thing about this illustrious corn maize is how empty it always was. And the fact that the main guy can not find his kids in the empty maize to save his life (even though he could hear them, could have legitimately found them from the lookout tower or could have just walked off path through the stalks to get to them quickly). So, essentially, not finding them ASAP was a plot point. A deadly boring plot point meant to expand what should have never been a feature film in the first place to nearly TWO FREAKIN’ HOURS OF BUTTNUMBING NONACTION.

To put this crap into numbers, MST3KThe Maize is essentially 15 minutes of “plot” (in its looooosest terms) surrounded by 90 minutes of dazzling corn maize b-roll. Literally, you could film 90% of this film…BY YOURSELF…starting TOMORROW. The crackerjack cameraman(or men)really got the corn from every angle with slow push-in’s, slow push out’s AND first-person point-of-view from inside the maize (so it feels like you’re there too and totally bored out of your mind - YAY!!) Also, throughout the movie, even though the events/plot are logically supposed to happen over a day’s time (we think), the time of day noticeably changes from day to night to day to morning to night to foggy to slightly foggy back to day. We started paying attention a third of the way in (trust me, it was really really difficult) and figured that the main character was stuck in this corn maize for something like 14 days. But if felt like 14 years because there was virtually no dialogue for long portions of the movie. And any actual words that were spoken proved the notion that the “script” sucked major donkey balls. One note about the ending, though: the last line of the movie is stellar. STELLAR. And you know that the entire last scene was written to make the lead guy look like a badass. But it mainly made me laugh out loud. Which, considering what I’d just been through, was improvement. So, yeah, this movie is definitely in the top 3 of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen some pretty crappy “let’s put on a show” productions. So that’s saying a lot. Congrats, Bill Cowell. I’m holding you responsible.

January 21
Troll 2 (1990) - The Trailer HIM:  It’s a relief to finally join the throng of lucky viewers who have had their minds blown by Troll 2. No. Really. Excuse my salty language, but what the shitballs was that? Any of it. I’d bet my milk money that every single person involved with this production thought that they were making the next…uh…Citizen Kane of weird-ass goblin movies. I’d even go as far to say that every actor of this crapfest should be nominated for Lifetime Oscars for acting like this script made any sort of sense. But it didn’t. It actually made non-sense. The plot, I think, is that a family of four swaps houses with another family in the mysterious small town of Nilbog for a nice, leisurely vacation. The main family is made up of Dad, who has a mullet, Mom, who talks like a robot, the teenaged daughter, who bench-presses at night in spandex and the son, who talks to his dead grandfather about goblins and dudes turning into jello. Why they decided to vacation in Nilbog is never explained. There’s nothing there. Just a bunch of people walking around town staring at you. But, the family…they just go, even though Ghost Grandpa keeps warning the little kid to stay away via ghostly interference. We eventually find out why. A) The family they’re trading houses with have terrible attitudes and a home that looks like your Grandma’s. B) The whole town is full of goblin people who turn unsuspecting tourists into green jello so that they can then eat them. Either that, or some evil witchy woman will turn you into a potted plant for her strange church/castle. Yes, that’s really the plot. It’s difficult to explain such absurdity in words. It really is. So yeah. There’s lots to be critical of, but it’s difficult to cast stones when every second of the flick is so so ridiculous. First of all, as a vegetarian, I think the writers were trying to make a joke about how veggies are a bunch of jello-crazy goblins. But then they saw something shiny and forgot the punchline. Or the humor. Or coherence. Secondly, even though it’s my favorite scene!,  corn-on-the-cob porn isn’t anything like that. It’s sexier. With more butter. Third…Grandpa Ghosty Mirrors is an asshole. He doesn’t play by any ghost rules (he should have given more clarification about wtf was going on earlier, like Patrick Swayze in Ghost) and isn’t entirely helpful. If I was that little kid, I’d be like, “Thanks for saving my mom from being turned to jello, dick. Go back to your fat hell mirror!” As a whole, I really really wanted to understand it. I ended up just laughing a lot at the randomness of it and feeling sorry for the little people and/or kids made to run around in Halloween masks all day. That’s straight up little-people/child abuse. Recommended for people who are either high and/or goblins. ————————————————- HER: Let’s start with first impressions: a Mickey Mouse t-shirt wearing freckly kid with prominently featured nostrils who proudly waves a Darryl Strawberry pennant flag listens to his dead grandpa tell scary cautionary tales about portly goblins who have a penchant for serving up green gelatinous goo to unsuspecting passerby. Oh, and for killing people. And did I mention the grandpa was supposed to be dead? Yeah. Sooo, Scary Story Time with Ghost Gramps. Umm… awesome? But wait, dear friends, cause the buck doesn’t stop there. Enter Vacuous Robot Mom, Platitiudes Pops (featuring fabulous non-sequiters like “See that?? THAT’S HOSPITALITY!”) and Choo-Choo-CHOOSE-ME Sistah Jam, who insists that her Boob of a Boyfriend choose her and NOT his friends. NEVER HIS FRIENDS. As much as the characters make me raise my eyebrows and want to toss a withering glance in the writers’ direction, a part of me wonders if the actors chosen for the parts didn’t play it to the hilt on purpose. Sistah Jam basically just came out of a high school Drama 1 production of Our Town, or, y’know, Erin Brockovich as played in Hamlet 2 (fast forward 2:04 seconds in). Mom is borderline catotonic and at times hysterical, seemingly simultaneously. And Dad is a Thespian with a capital T. And the kid… well… I guess it’s kind of telling that I can’t even remember the main character’s name. Sure I could look it up on IMDB, but this movie isn’t worth the extra 5 seconds it will take my fingers to guide the mouse over and open a new tab. Freckly Nostril Kid will have to do. But yes, back to the movie. And Plot Devices.Cricket. Cricket. Yup, that was a lot to say about the plot devices. I feel like I gave it its due.In summation, if you’re a fan of green icing, jello, witches, corn, popcorn, RVs, anagrams, ghosts, mirrors, spandex, bench pressing, neon shorts, curdled milk, peeing on tables, turning people into plants (and then eating them), towns with 27 people and/or goblins, then by all means, rent this movie. But be sure to check your suspension of disbelief at the door. And your brain.

Troll 2 (1990) - The Trailer

HIM:  It’s a relief to finally join the throng of lucky viewers who have had their minds blown by Troll 2. No. Really. Excuse my salty language, but what the shitballs was that? Any of it. I’d bet my milk money that every single person involved with this production thought that they were making the next…uh…Citizen Kane of weird-ass goblin movies. I’d even go as far to say that every actor of this crapfest should be nominated for Lifetime Oscars for acting like this script made any sort of sense. But it didn’t. It actually made non-sense. The plot, I think, is that a family of four swaps houses with another family in the mysterious small town of Nilbog for a nice, leisurely vacation. The main family is made up of Dad, who has a mullet, Mom, who talks like a robot, the teenaged daughter, who bench-presses at night in spandex and the son, who talks to his dead grandfather about goblins and dudes turning into jello. Why they decided to vacation in Nilbog is never explained. There’s nothing there. Just a bunch of people walking around town staring at you. But, the family…they just go, even though Ghost Grandpa keeps warning the little kid to stay away via ghostly interference. We eventually find out why. A) The family they’re trading houses with have terrible attitudes and a home that looks like your Grandma’s. B) The whole town is full of goblin people who turn unsuspecting tourists into green jello so that they can then eat them. Either that, or some evil witchy woman will turn you into a potted plant for her strange church/castle. Yes, that’s really the plot. It’s difficult to explain such absurdity in words. It really is.

So yeah. There’s lots to be critical of, but it’s difficult to cast stones when every second of the flick is so so ridiculous. First of all, as a vegetarian, I think the writers were trying to make a joke about how veggies are a bunch of jello-crazy goblins. But then they saw something shiny and forgot the punchline. Or the humor. Or coherence. Secondly, even though it’s my favorite scene!,  corn-on-the-cob porn isn’t anything like that. It’s sexier. With more butter. Third…Grandpa Ghosty Mirrors is an asshole. He doesn’t play by any ghost rules (he should have given more clarification about wtf was going on earlier, like Patrick Swayze in Ghost) and isn’t entirely helpful. If I was that little kid, I’d be like, “Thanks for saving my mom from being turned to jello, dick. Go back to your fat hell mirror!” As a whole, I really really wanted to understand it. I ended up just laughing a lot at the randomness of it and feeling sorry for the little people and/or kids made to run around in Halloween masks all day. That’s straight up little-people/child abuse. Recommended for people who are either high and/or goblins.

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HER: Let’s start with first impressions: a Mickey Mouse t-shirt wearing freckly kid with prominently featured nostrils who proudly waves a Darryl Strawberry pennant flag listens to his dead grandpa tell scary cautionary tales about portly goblins who have a penchant for serving up green gelatinous goo to unsuspecting passerby. Oh, and for killing people. And did I mention the grandpa was supposed to be dead? Yeah. Sooo, Scary Story Time with Ghost Gramps. Umm… awesome?

But wait, dear friends, cause the buck doesn’t stop there.

Enter Vacuous Robot Mom, Platitiudes Pops (featuring fabulous non-sequiters like “See that?? THAT’S HOSPITALITY!”) and Choo-Choo-CHOOSE-ME Sistah Jam, who insists that her Boob of a Boyfriend choose her and NOT his friends. NEVER HIS FRIENDS.

As much as the characters make me raise my eyebrows and want to toss a withering glance in the writers’ direction, a part of me wonders if the actors chosen for the parts didn’t play it to the hilt on purpose. Sistah Jam basically just came out of a high school Drama 1 production of Our Town, or, y’know, Erin Brockovich as played in Hamlet 2 (fast forward 2:04 seconds in). Mom is borderline catotonic and at times hysterical, seemingly simultaneously. And Dad is a Thespian with a capital T. And the kid… well… I guess it’s kind of telling that I can’t even remember the main character’s name. Sure I could look it up on IMDB, but this movie isn’t worth the extra 5 seconds it will take my fingers to guide the mouse over and open a new tab. Freckly Nostril Kid will have to do.

But yes, back to the movie. And Plot Devices.
Cricket. Cricket.

Yup, that was a lot to say about the plot devices. I feel like I gave it its due.

In summation, if you’re a fan of green icing, jello, witches, corn, popcorn, RVs, anagrams, ghosts, mirrors, spandex, bench pressing, neon shorts, curdled milk, peeing on tables, turning people into plants (and then eating them), towns with 27 people and/or goblins, then by all means, rent this movie. But be sure to check your suspension of disbelief at the door. And your brain.