luke.thunk.it

So, for those not in the loop, find out more about BadMovieClub.

Now, my feedback:

Firstly, I messed up. I rented it on my iMac from the iTunes store, then 5 minutes before the start, I went to get it ready on my AppleTV.  Only it wasn’t there. After a bit of panicking and running from room to room I found out how you had to ‘Move’ a rental from iTunes to your AppleTV - it doesn’t just sync.

So, from the start I was 5 minutes behind, so didn’t really want to read the tweets flying by (at a phenomenal rate) incase it spoilt the film (I needn’t have worried - a film this bad cannot be spoilt!).

I then even cheated later on and paused the film. Two screaming infants was too much for me and my wife. We didn’t want to miss anything, in case something good did happen (silly us).

Still, despite all that, it was still fun. My wife and I had a laugh at the rubbishness of the film, and I tweeted every now and again, and even got a few nice replies back.

** POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD! **

Now the film.  What a load of utter rubbish. Also, being an M Night Shamalamadingdong film, everyone knew there would be a twist, but there was a lot of tweeting about “where’s the twist then?”. Personally I think the twist was supposed to be that it turned out it wasn’t terrorists all along, it was the plants.  Did anyone believe it was terrorists though?

My main problems with the film:

• The dialogue and acting was so stunted that everyone in the film seemed a bit “special needs”. A high point was the Marky Mark character trying to prove he was “normal” by singing a little song. WTF??! Also, his great “I’m a teacher” line, when trying to calm down the nutty old woman.  Some characters also seemed completely nuts to begin with (the plant bloke, the scary old lady, the army fellow). On top of all this, they also had lots of close-ups of blank staring faces (mainly Marky Mark’s and Zooley Dewooley’s) and complete under-reaction to horrific events (“<what’s his name> has just fallen off the roof”). All of this made it really confusing as to whether these people were already infected in some way or not.
• The neuro-toxin causing people to kill themselves idea was actually quite good. However, all the ‘everyone freezing’ stuff just made this all really confusing. Would have been a lot better, and less unnecessarily confusing, without the people freezing.
• I’m pretty sure we were supposed to think it was terrorists. I didn’t for a second think it was terrorists. A much better film would have been one with the neuro-toxins where we thought it was terrorists releasing them, and it ACTUALLY WAS TERRORISTS RELEASING THEM, AND NOT THE PLANT CRAP.
• “Plants and trees can’t defend themselves, all they can do is evolve quickly” (not an exact quote). No. No. No no no no no no no. Plants can’t just evolve quickly, and certainly not in the way that was implied - that they evolved through some conscious choice. NOTHING can evolve through conscious choice (well, except arguably humans doing selective breeding on themselves). Plants can’t make ANY conscious choice. NOTHING can evolve quickly - not that quickly, and not to that extent. OK, bacteria can evolve pretty quickly. Trees? tress have a massively long life cycle, so evolution would be pretty slow.  They wouldn’t just suddenly evolve, all across a large region, and suddenly kill lots of people.  The way evolution works, the neuro-toxins would have had to become slowly and slowly more and more effective.
• Evolutionary nit-picking aside, the whole plant thing was just fucking stupid anyway.
• There was quite a lot made of the whole Marky Mark being a teacher thing, but it never made sense to me why this was important. I felt it was supposed to be important. It never seemed so though.
• I didn’t care about any of the characters.
• Ages after they worked out that it was to do with plants and the wind and being outside THEY STILL KEPT GOING OUTSIDE AND STAYING OUTSIDE.
• That communication tube thing was fucking stupid.

Oh, and just about everything else about this film was shite.  My wife made a comment about how it was kind of like a Disney PG film, and the stupidness of the story line really was like that, or maybe like a CBBC drama series (The Sarah Jane thingies, perhaps) - OK, they’d have to cut out the graphic suicides, etc. Also, for a lot of the film we struggled to believe that we were supposed to actually take it seriously.

Good things about the film:

• It was only 86 minutes.
• You could laugh at how bad it was.

I can’t believe this isn’t actually considered M Night Shawoddywoddy’s worst film (which I believe is the soggy lady one).

In summary: a fun night, a shite film!