On Deadly Ground vs. Alien Express: FIGHT!

[solarbird]

Despite many promises it would do so, I'm afraid that On Deadly Ground did not exceed Event Horizon in badness overall, or, for that matter, the Sci-Fi Channel Original Movie, Alien Express, which was today's specific point of comparison. annathepiper, under the influence of sweet, sweet Percocet, declared the two a tie; I dissented.

However, I am able to say that it is more contemptable than any of these other examples of movie hell, in that it basically wants you to root for a mass-murdering ecoterrorist conspiracy-freak version of Erik Rudolph. We even get the Hundred Mile Carburetor! It also seized the Biggest Mary Sue (or Gary Stu, in this case) trophy away from William "Ego Smurf" Shatner's Star Trek V: Look at Kirk's Hot, Hot Ass; you could actually hear the distant sound of fapping every time characters started rambling on about the unstoppable machine who is "Forrest Taft." Alien Express just wasn't as contemptible - oh, except for the marvelously horrifying scene where a character rattled off all the bad excuses Nazis offered up as reasons why the lead wasn't actually at fault for Unexplained Bad Things that went down in Kuwait, up to and including "you were only following orders!" Perhaps there was intended irony, but if so, it did not, in fact, make it on screen.

Tho' really, the surprising part was how many commonalities existed between On Deadly Ground and Alien Express. Ecoterrorist freak? Check! Inexplicably exploding enemies and other gratuitous fire? Check! Pointless quips falling flat? Check, tho' point to Alien Express for having so many that were so bad it felt like passing kidney stones. Trains (either present or in musical soundtrack invocation)? Check! Desperate need to leap over a chasm? Check! Endlessly pointless scenes with helicopters? Check! Utter inability to pace a scene? Check! Hero who turns out to have had SEKRIT MILITARY TRAINING and a dark past with it? Check! Bad toupees? Check! Cavalcades of accidental sexual double-entendre? Check-PLUS! The token black guy gets it? Oh yeah. And more! spazzkat and kathrynt simultaneously suggested that between these two movies, we may in fact be approaching a Unified Field Theory of Suck.

Regardless, while it is definitively a contender, I can't put On Deadly Ground as the worst movie ever made, or even that I've ever seen. That's still Event Horizon. (Modulo, of course, the one-off freakfest known as Manos: The Hands of Fate, which, honestly, is barely a movie - and which, disturbingly, Alien Express riffed on, hopefully accidentally.)

I did, at least, get the first of these three display racks mostly made while this was on. It's slow work, and boring, too, bending all these old wire coat hangers into newsletter issue holders - but it's getting there, at least, and as such things go, it's cheap.

Now if I can just get the latest article work I've had sprung on me done - I don't really mind, it's more money, but it's the third time I've written this same article - I can let myself start to think that I'm making some headway here!

And here, have a flower; this picture was taken in a yard about a mile's walk away, north, during a walk trying to find a park but taking a wrong turn:


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Comments

[kathrynt.livejournal.com]

Those are dianthus, or clove pinks. They're related to carnations.

[waysofseeing.livejournal.com]

So OK, if you're using Event Horizon as your standard of awful, have you actually sat through Battlefield: Earth?

I mean, seriously. It's hard to come up with movies that were more aggressively bad. From the Psychlos with their permanent nose-booger implants, to the random unnecessary off-center camera angles, to the craparrific Atari-inspired effects, this is a movie that just purely hurts to watch. And I haven't even gotten to the script yet.

[solarbird]

I have not yet seem Battlefield: Earth, tho' from reputation alone I have to consider it almost certainly a contender. Perhaps one day we'll have another Fight! afternoon featuring it and another Sci-Fi Channel Original Movie, perhaps, say, Boa vs. Python: How Do You Kill A Hundred Foot Long Snake? With Another Hundred Foot Long Snake?

[banner.livejournal.com]

Wow, Event Horizon, a movie so bad that they had to masquerade it as a Sci-Fi flick because as a horror flick it just sucked. A movie so bad that it will give you nightmares, but not from anything they intended to! More like all the bad acting, bad plot, bad science, bad writing, bad special effects, bad... well bad everything! I mean that's like 90 minutes of my life I'll never get back and I went in a big group and we all uniformly hated it.

I honestly cannot think of a another movie really as bad.

[kathrynt.livejournal.com]

Because you haven't seen Alien Express.

[solarbird]

Also less craptastic than Event Horizon, tho' again, a contender.

[grian-ruadh.livejournal.com]

No no, I'm totally there on the whole "Event Horizon is the worst movie ever" bandwagon. I've never felt quite so compelled to get up and walk out of a picture as I was during that one. Bleah! The utter craptasticness of the acting, effects, and script have already been covered, but I'd like to add that it was full of cheap "let's make the audience jump for no reason with a really loud and sudden dose of score" moments and really looked like someone decided to make a horror flick after smoking pot and then falling asleep in front of a rerun of The Black Hole late at night on the Disney Channel. E-fucking-gad.

Not that I have an opinion about this or anything...

[solarbird]

Three minutes in and they hit you with a Cheap Thrill (flash of light/loud noise). That happened and I turned to spazzkat in the theatre and said, "oh my god... this is all they know how to do!"

Horribly, I was absolutely right.

[banner.livejournal.com]

Wow! It made you think of the 'Black Hole' too? Nice to see I wasn't the only one who seemed to think there was some strange connection there.

[kathrynt.livejournal.com]

Also, I saw Hellraiser IV: Pinhead In Space for _free_, when I was unemployed, and left thinking that my time would have been better spent doing _anything_ else.

[poodlgrl.livejournal.com]

Wait. "On Deadly Ground", is that the Steven Seagal one, where he uses a bunch of Chinese American actors and calls them Native Americans?

[solarbird]

Yes. I would have included the Hysterically Awful Racial Impersonations as a reason for contempt, except it's so common. But that's also part of the comedy gold - there are a few times when you can actually see Seagal trying desperately to act, trying to impersonate his ideas about ... fuck, I dunno, whatever amalgam of first peoples culture he had stuck together in his mind. He adopts this weird, patterned delivery rhythm whenever he does it, and of course it doesn't work, so the attempt is just so funny.

I'm kind of amazed we didn't get some stunt involving totem poles, probably on that slope people kept passing in front of, with the snow pattern that had exactly the same shape as a map of China. I wonder if the locations director was trying to make a bit of commentary there.

That'd be funny. I hope they were. ^_^

[annathepiper]

there are a few times when you can actually see Seagal trying desperately to act,

... and you just want to pat him on his head and give him a dog yummie and tell him, "Good Steven!" Because he's trying so HARD!

[poodlgrl.livejournal.com]

ALSO, my vote for the worst is "Firefox" with Clint Eastwood as a cold-war era fighter pilot. soooo bad.

[solarbird]

Bad. Very, very, very bad. But also WRONG! Not even in the same league with these crap piles.

[ravyngyngvar.livejournal.com]

Also sad. Nigel Hawthorne is an excellent actor, but in movies I've only seen him in a few pitiful attempts at action movies, like Firefox, and one good movie: The Madness of King George. Renamed from "George III" because the studio was worried that people would think it was a sequel. :-)