Catwoman, Cat Prejudice and Parallel Universes

If you subscribe to the theory that every decision every person makes causes timelines to diverge, creating new universes upon new universes parallel to our own, it is possible to believe that, somewhere in all those universes, there is someone who actually liked 2004’s “Catwoman.”

But I still doubt it.

The movie is widely reviled, and deservedly so. It took a well-loved character that had just gotten a fantastic treatment in 1992’s “Batman Returns,” and squandered all the good will Michelle Pfeiffer had built in her rage-fueled, over-the-top performance. It took a well-regarded actress who had just gotten an actual Oscar in 2001’s “Monster’s Ball,” and put her in ridiculous poses, embarrassing scenes and one of the most tragic superhero costumes ever to grace the silver screen, even though this

Real Wonder Woman costume from a real 2011 “Wonder Woman” pilot. Really.

is a thing which exists.

“Catwoman” earned seven Golden Raspberry nominations and actually won four. Berry picked up her Worst Actress award with her Oscar in her other hand.

While she may have contributed to making Catwoman bad – and it’s always hard to tell whether any given poor performance is the fault of the actor or the director – she’s certainly not the only culprit to blame here. The writers owe Berry an apology. They owe Benjamin Bratt, who played Berry’s cop love interest here, an apology too. Heck, they should probably apologize to anybody who saw this movie thinking it would be good or even mediocre.

That doesn’t include me. I knew what I was getting into, although I honestly did not expect it to be as bad as it was.

The movie starts inauspiciously, with a credit sequence of “historical” images of women of various eras wearing cat ears hanging out with cats and doing battle, on tapestries and manuscripts, implying to the audience that cat women have always existed.

The cat knows it deserves better than being in “Catwoman.”

This would make more sense if we knew what cat women were, but this is the very beginning of the movie. As it is, it just seems like we’re being shown that a lot of illustrators throughout the centuries have had a fetish for women wearing cat ears. Considering some of the stuff that turns up in Medieval manuscripts, that wouldn’t be a big surprise, either.

Seriously, those got weird. (Image from http://io9.gizmodo.com/bizarre-and-vulgar-illustrations-from-illuminated-medie-1456202572 )

Right off the bat the movie has a big problem: it expects us to believe that Halle Berry is mousy and unattractive, just because she’s wearing ugly clothes and her hair is slightly frizzy.

I can suspend my disbelief for magical cat people, and superheroes, and even dragons, elves, transporters and holodecks, but there is no world in which this woman

Totally an ugly outfit, though. Be glad you can’t see it properly.

is frumpy, or even plain. She’s not even Hollywood-frumpy!

For some reason, this movie isn’t about the Catwoman everyone knows (cat burglar and Batman love interest Selina Kyle), so just forget all about that and think of this as a totally separate character. It’s not going to help you like this movie, but at least the real Catwoman won’t be sullied by association with this garbage that way.

Instead, Berry plays Patience Phillips, a mousy nice girl who works for a cosmetics company. At some point, a magical cat decides that she is a nice person, so when she finds out her company’s product has dangerous side-effects and company goons kill her, the cat and a whole herd of its buddies turn up to resurrect her.

Whoever made this movie had to literally herd cats. You owe these cats an apology, movie.

After she comes back to life, Patience is literally a cat-woman, who sleeps on shelves, eats tuna straight from the can, has catlike athletic abilities and generally doesn’t give a flying f*** about anything. Given this last trait, a masked Patience robs a jewelry store, interrupting another set of robbers and kicking their butts before she takes the shinies herself.

Catwoman robs a jewelry store, because cats love diamonds more than tormenting small creatures, ear-scritching and deliberately sitting in front of your computer monitor.

For the rest of the movie, she dodges her bosses, who are trying to kill her, and the police, who are trying to arrest her. One policeman in particular, Lone (played by Benjamin Bratt), is trying date Patience and arrest Catwoman, which leads to one of the worst scenes I’ve seen in any movie.

You really need to see it yourself, and thanks to the glories of YouTube, you can. It’s a little less than 2 minutes of pure awkwardness, in all its incredibly wooden glory, but if you don’t want to see it, it involves Catwoman beating Lone in a one-on-one basketball game that some neighborhood kids challenged them to… against each other… because that’s how that works, apparently.

Cringe. Worthy.

She wins by using her powers. I didn’t realize that cats were such amazing basketball players!

There are a lot of other problems with this movie, including prejudice against black cats. No, that’s not a joke. The magical cat the Patience sees at the beginning of the movie is named Midnight. If I told you my cat was named Midnight, what type of cat would you imagine?

Did ANYONE want to be in this movie?

If you said “a gray tabby,” congratulations! You were the cat-casting director of “Catwoman,” because I refuse to believe there are two people who think that way in this universe.

Then there’s the Catwoman costume, which as I mentioned before is egregiously bad. It’s confusing, too, because they actually had a Catwoman costume in the movie that was very good, and they easily could have just stuck with that and had a hit. When Patience robs the jewelry store, she wears this:

A perfectly viable Catwoman outfit: Black leather pants, black leather jacket, black mask.

That’s actually quite close to a number of the iconic outfits Catwoman has worn over time. Here’s Anne Hathaway in “The Dark Knight Rises,” for example:

Anne Hathaway as Catwoman.

Or here’s Michelle Pfeiffer, in “Batman Returns”:

Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman.

And in the comics she’s had outfits that even more closely resemble the one Patience wears to rob the jewelry store, like this one:

Catwoman comic book cover.

But instead of sticking with that outfit, or choosing from the vast array of other costumes Catwoman has worn over the years (seriously, there’s been loads) , they came up with something new. Something different. Something that oh dear god why, why, why.

Yikes.

Clearly they didn’t think putting Halle Berry in black leather was sexy enough, and came up with this sin against fashion and superheroes instead.

The movie does do a couple of things that I liked. One, it has a crazy cat lady in it, and no, I don’t mean Patience. There’s another older lady who serves as an exposition-o-matic, dutifully doling out plot like a mom serving up mashed potatoes at dinner. She does a nice job, but it’s also nice just to see any woman over the age of 40 in a movie at all since it’s so uncommon.

The other good thing about the movie is Sharon Stone, who plays one of the villains owning the cosmetics company selling a dangerous product.

I WILL CHEW ALL YOUR SCENERY.

Women don’t often get scenery-chewing villain parts, and it’s fun to see Sharon Stone lay into the part and give it all she’s got. If you’re given a cheesy part, you might as well play it up to its cheesy potential, and Stone absolutely did that here.

If you’ve seen Charlize Theron in the (also horrible) “Snow White and the Huntsman,” you’re familiar with the role and general style. It was a departure for Stone, and I was sorry it didn’t happen in a better movie, because she put in a very credible performance.

But even Stone, a bevy of adorable cats, and an actual Oscar-winning actress couldn’t stop this movie from being Reel Bad.

Avengers Grimm, or the Horrifying Glory of Mockbusters

Some bad movies, like “In the Name of the King,” are meant to be good. They’ve got proper budgets, great actors and at least a vague attempt at a story.

Then there are movies like “Avengers Grimm,” which no one ever expected to be good. Instead, it’s a mockbuster, meaning that it’s kinda meant to use the publicity of big-budget movies to interest or confuse movie-watchers who aren’t paying much attention. They usually have similar titles and plot themes and get released at the same time as the “real” movies.

Why are there zombies in this fairy tale movie?

If you’ve ever picked up “3 Musketeers” expecting Orlando Bloom and Milla Jovovich and instead got some action movie about a woman named D’Artagnan trying to stop the U.S. president from being assassinated, you’ve been the victim of a mockbuster.

The Asylum makes a lot of mockbusters, some of which are marginally better than the original movies (yes, really) and some of which are much worse.

“Avengers Grimm” happens to be one of the better ones. That’s not to say it’s a good movie. It’s not; it’s just that Asylum has a very low bar for “better.” You’ll probably stub your toe on it if you’re not careful.

As you might have guessed from the title, the movie is a mockbuster of both “The Avengers” and the television show “Grimm,” but its real inspiration, as far as I can tell, is TV’s fairytales-mixed-with-modernity hit series “Once Upon a Time.”

This movie actually did have a cool premise.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

“Avengers Grimm” starts off with a woman in a very obviously modern prom dress heading somewhere; when she gets there, we find out she’s Snow White, and the villainous Rumpelstiltskin has murdered her husband in order to take over the kingdom.

Obvious modern prom dress is obvious.

Some stuff happens that doesn’t make a lot of sense, and Snow White, Rumpelstiltskin, and a bunch of other fairy tale people end up in the modern world, where the Snow vs. Rumple battle continues.

Actress Lauren Parkinson, who plays Snow White, has very clearly been told to mimic Lana Parrilla, who plays the Evil Queen Regina on OUaT. She does a pretty good job of it, but the derivation of the character is pretty obvious if you’ve seen the show.

Snow White in this movie, left, and Regina in Once Upon a Time, right.

Often Asylum mockbusters will have one B-list (or lower) famous actor or actress and then a bunch of low-budget actors of skill varying from “excellent” to “plank.”

In this case, there are two reasonably famous actors: Casper Van Dien, who plays Rumpel, and Lou Ferrigno. Ferrigno does the ragey schtick from his “Hulk” TV show days in an enjoyably cheesy way, but Van Dien is terrible.

Rumpel, somehow? Why is this Rumpel?

He may even be the worst thing about the movie. It’s tough to make that decision, because the writing here isn’t good, and the costumes are worse. (I don’t like it when women are generically sexy in movies; whether you want sexy women or not, when it’s done generically you lose an opportunity to show something about the character with her costume.)

Rumpelstiltskin is classically an ugly little dwarf person. And Van Dien is basically good-looking.

They don’t bother putting any makeup on him or anything to make him look scary, and he isn’t helped by having the wrong hair for the part or the fact that his costume seems too big for him. He’s not really a good enough actor to sell the part on his own.

The fun part of the movie comes from the “Avengers” part of the title: it’s a team-up movie with fairy tale characters, and all of them have superpowers. (Except Batman. Batman never has superpowers. But we’ll get to that.)

Snow White, the leader, who is very intense and angry about Rumpel murdering her husband, has ice-powers, and can spontaneously create icicles.

Snow White is Elsa now, and that is good.

Sleeping Beauty, the spoiled “mean girl” type in the group, can put people to sleep instantly, like a 2-hour county board meeting focusing on ditches. (To all county commissioners: Thank you so much for doing that work so that the rest of us don’t have to.)

Sleeping Beauty says it’s time for a nap, dirt bag!

Rapunzel has incredibly long hair and fights using it as a weapon (this would have been so much cooler in a movie with the budget to support better effects).

Hair Fighter Rapunzel

Cinderella has… some sort of wishing power, maybe? It’s not incredibly clear what she does, but she can make things appear and disappear. (I don’t know why she has blue hair. It bothered me for a good portion of the movie before I got distracted by the zombies and corrupt police officers. Yes, that really is part of the movie.)

I dig Cinderella’s indigo-blue hair.

And then there’s the Batman. In this case, it’s Red Riding Hood, who wields a bow, doesn’t play well with others and wears one of the cheapest, saddest looking corsets I’ve seen this side of Frederick’s of Hollywood. … actually, when I put it that way, and taking the “Avengers” part of the title more literally, maybe Red is meant to be Hawkeye.

Why are you wearing that? WHY?

Anyway, her horrible costume is unfortunate, since she’s probably given the most characterization of any of the women in the movie except for Snow White.

The team-up and transplantation to a modern setting may not be original, but it is a legitimately fun idea.

It’s just a shame it was put in the hands of people who just wanted to show four scantily clad women running around instead of someone who wanted to tell a good story.

At least someone had fun.

This is not a good story. Somewhere along the way zombies and corrupt police officers turn up, and both manage to take up large amounts of screen time without really adding anything but runtime minutes.

Red has an adversary called the Wolf, who is basically a big scary guy and not that interesting, and there’s a fridge-horror-filled subplot with an airheaded secretary who turns out to be a survivor of brainwashing.

The Wolf.

 

There’s an even more laughable subplot where Ferrigno is turned into a whole different kind of Iron Man. And by “Iron Man,” I mean “guy with silver painted skin.” He looks like he has argyria.

I bet you thought I was kidding.

And Rumpel’s evil plan makes no sense. It’s one of the dumber evil plans I’ve seen in a movie and that’s saying something. I mean, I’ve seen “Manos, the Hands of Fate,” in which the master’s evil plan is “get more wives.”

Pointless cop is pointless. That location is pretty rad, though! Dig that stairwell.

It’s a classic Underpants Gnome plan:

1. Turn people into zombies.
2. …
3. Profit!

While I’d give the movie credit for making a couple of interesting choices (including giving Ferrigno’s character an actual character arc), and acknowledge its budget was probably the functional equivalent of 60 cents and a stick of chewing gum, it still earned the title of…

Reel Bad.

Why did these actors do this movie?! In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale

In terms of bad movies, “Uwe Boll” is a name that means quality. More precisely, it means “lack of quality.” His output has been prodigious, and he’s especially well-known as the king of bad video game movies.

The best part is, people somehow keep throwing money at him to make things like “Bloodrayne,” or today’s offering, “In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale.”

While “In the Name of the King” isn’t considered the worst movie Uwe Boll has ever made, it is the least profitable one, as it grossed $10 million and had a $60 million budget. Yes, that’s right. Unlike many of the movies that will be featured here, this one actually was meant to be a big Hollywood blockbuster action flick with a real budget to match.

But the most interesting thing about this movie isn’t how badly it failed. It’s how many excellent actors Boll managed to get for it.

 

I usually call this movie “In the Name of Burt Reynolds,” because Reynolds plays the titular king, but he’s certainly not the only big name in this stinker.

In a tremendous feat of miscasting, Jason Statham plays the lead, a farmer named Farmer whose generic son is killed and whose generic wife is kidnapped at the beginning of the movie.

Statham is better known from “The Transporter” and various other modern action flicks, and he does “British criminal, but not too bad of a guy” really well. This is the only movie I’ve seen in which he plays a different part, and plays it very very badly.

Ordinarily I’d say that means Statham should stick to what he’s good at, but there are other actors here who did, shall we say, a bad job.

Photo by Vera Buhl, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2009-09-27_(13)_Wood,_Holz.JPG

 

Oh, I’m sorry, that’s not right. That was meant to be a picture of Ray Liotta, who plays the bad guy of the film. Let’s try that again.

Photo by Tedder at en.wikipedia

 

Nope, that’s still not right. I keep messing this up, because it was honestly hard for me to tell that this was Ray Liotta acting and not a block of wood.

There we go. Ray Liotta portrays, and I use the term very loosely, an evil wizard named Gallian, which is pronounced exactly like “galleon” but disappointingly has absolutely nothing to do with ships. He also has nothing to do with acting, and delivers some of the most wooden lines in the history of the motion picture business. I’ll grant you the writing of “In the Name of the King” is probably about George Lucas-calibre (remember Episode I? It’s okay, we tried to blot it out too), but even so, there are a few people in this film who roll with it. So I have to blame this one on Liotta.

One of the people who just rolls with the ridiculous part he’s taken is Matthew Lillard, who’s busy playing a vapid evil nobleman who wants to become king. Since he’s the king’s actual heir at the beginning it doesn’t seem a totally ridiculous goal, even though the character is thoroughly ridiculous.

Matthew Lillard

Lillard, who is mostly known for playing Shaggy in “Scooby Doo” shows of various types, obviously decided to cut loose and have fun with his part, because most likely, no one would ever let him be the bad guy again because he’s too well-known as Shaggy.

So Lillard manages to coax some life into the silly stereotype of his character by chewing scenery so much he makes Vincent Price look restrained.

Then there are the actors whose presence in the movie is just baffling.

Why is John Rhys-Davies lending this movie his gravitas? Isn’t there any more worthy project out there, like a commercial for cheese-in-a-can or ED medication? Here he delivers a first-rate performance all the more incongruous in a last-rate movie, as a wizard whose job is mostly to deliver exposition and have a daughter who imperils the kingdom by having sex with the wrong man. (Thank you for that progressive plot point, by the way, movie.)

Equally inexplicable is LeeLee Sobieski’s presence in the movie as said daughter. She’s earned Emmy and Golden Globe nominations and she’s pretty well-known for being in small independent flicks. She was nominated for a Razzie Award for this thing.

Why is Ron Perlman in this movie? He even plays a human, so Boll clearly wasn’t interested in his extraordinary gift of amazing acting despite eighteen layers of prosthetics. And why does he have an American accent when Jason Statham sounds, well, like Jason Statham?

Then there’s the less well-known but also-excellent Kristanna Loken, playing… some sort of a forest tree-elf-nymph, I think.

Kristanna Loken

She’s not as well-known as the rest of these, but I vividly remember her mostly-wordless performance as a Terminator being the only good thing about “Terminator 3.” She was fantastic, and I’m sorry to say that she also stars in Boll’s “Bloodrayne” movie. She deserves better, really.

“It’s like… every third line was put into some web translation service,
translated into Portuguese, then translated back into English
and put into the script again.”
– J., who had the misfortune of watching this movie

There’s so much more wrong with this movie than the writing and (some of) the acting, though. The monsters, which are called Krug but are basically orcs, resemble nothing so much as the villain-of-the-week from Power Rangers. They also look slightly like ninja turtles who’ve been rolled around in brown paint. The movie had a real special effects budget and these were the best they could do?

Even the music is bad, and intrusively so. It swells at inappropriate times and gets quiet at other inappropriate times. We don’t need the “crossing a river under heavy fire from cannons!” style music during a scene in which a man is silently burying his child. That’s not the emotional note you want there.

And of course everyone has good teeth, the good guys generally have clean clothes, and clearly the kingdom has stock in an iron foundry because all the women shave their legs. And why are there ninjas in this movie?

Generic Family

The utterly generic plot, which is “man gets revenge for his son’s death and must rescue his kidnapped wife” makes the movie tedious. I’m sorry, but this plotline was old in the 1990s, long before 2007, when “In the Name of the King” premiered, and there’s basically no excuse for using it anymore unless you can come up with a really unusual twist. Note: “The lead character turns out to be the king’s true heir” is not an unusual twist.

The movie is a long and boring slog for other reasons, too. Clearly someone saw Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” movies before making this thing, because there are so many tedious big battle scenes between rival armies that the audience really doesn’t care about.

When you don’t care a bit about any of the people involved, action scenes aren’t interesting no matter how many things get shot, stabbed, or blown up.

I’m looking at YOU, Michael Bay.

Graphic by http://franken.space/ info from http://kgbacs.blogspot.com/2011/08/someone-counted-every-explosion-in.html

 

As with almost every movie, however, “In the Name of the King” did do some things right.

• There’s no boob plate. A woman wears armor in this movie and it looks more or less
  

  Not boob plate.

  like armor, with no cleavage,
  no cutouts and no metal breast-shapes. (Putting breasts on armor would direct a sword-blow directly into your chest, which is a bad idea for obvious reasons.)

• There are black people in the movie. I’d give partial points here because they’re obviously important army leaders, but they’re not given any characterization so it’s rather difficult to care about them. And they’re certainly not main characters, unfortunately. As usual with these things, every single main character is white. At least black people exist in this universe, I guess.
• No one makes any sexist comments about the pretty women who help Jason Statham save the day at the end.
• At one point, someone flips a table.
• Statham’s wife helps kill Gallian at the end, by stabbing him. Normally these movies are all about the man getting revenge, and it never seems to occur to people that the woman might as well, even when it’s a mom.

Even so, it’s still a bad movie.

“I think that this movie was written by a shark.”
– J.

Welcome to Reel Bad!

Nos morituri te salutamus! (We who are about to die salute you!)

– said by gladiators right before they fought to the death

Some movies are good. The best of them become legends, cult favorites or classics, and they have enough fans that people still talk about them decades later: “The Godfather,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “The Princess Bride,” “Casablanca.”

Some movies are terrible. The worst of these also become legends, cult favorites or classics, and if you don’t think this is true, you should probably look up “The Room,” “Plan 9 From Outer Space,” or “Reefer Madness.”

They’re fun to watch not in spite of their badness, but because of it; their characters are paper thin and so are their sets, the plots jump around like a toddler on espresso and so do a lot of the actors, and the closest the script has ever been to a script doctor was when one of the actors spilled Dr Pepper on it, which is especially bad because this script is definitely afflicted by the movie equivalent of smallpox, the Black Death and Ebola all at once.

A real script doctor would take one look at this and come back to the barn with a shotgun to put the poor thing out of its misery.

These movies can be fun if you make fun of them while you watch, but plenty of people enjoy them unironically, too.

The problem is, once you’ve seen the few legendary bad movies out there, you start wondering if there’s more like them out there. And the problem with that is, you might actually start looking for them. And the problem with that is, you might actually find them.

This blog is dedicated to watching bad movies and pulling them apart, piece by piece, to see where they went wrong. And because most bad movies still have something good, fun, or just different about them, we’ll talk about that, too. You might like this blog if you like sarcasm and making fun of less-than-perfect movies. If you think those things are mean, you won’t like this blog, and that’s okay! There are plenty of online places you might like better, and plenty of nicer people, too.

Spoilers will be included for every movie we feature, at length and undisguised, because you probably shouldn’t watch these movies. Some of these movies should come with a sick bag because of their cinematography choices. Some of them should come with a free coupon to a psychiatrist’s office. We don’t want you to watch these movies. Save yourselves.

You were warned.

It’s probably not that bad!

– said by anyone right before watching a really bad movie

(It is, though.)