Badlanders (1992) AKA Prison Planet

You know, the future gets away with a lot of shit. It's like the town psycho-kid, running around pulling the ears off bunnies and tacking them to your front door with a message scrawled in his poop about how he lost his grandmother's hair in your backyard. Everyone gives that kid, and the future-setting in books and movies, a wide-berth and mostly takes whatever it or he says or does as a product of its nature without question.

The future on other planets is even worse. It's like that psycho-kid's mom is some Whole Foods nut-job that only brings Paleo-Diet dishes to the Chicken Pox Party.

"Exactly what cave people ate...except for the cookware and the oven I cooked it in."

Meaning, it's one thing to be the kid spouting out nonsense and doing things that confuse and gross everyone out. But it's something else entirely to have the kid and his mom attend the first BBQ of the summer.

The same can be said for off-world, futuristic movies like Badlanders. The opener does that thing where a scrolling few paragraphs explains where we are and the situation we can expect as viewers. Short version? It's another world...in the future, bad things happen and there's an overthrown king. Or something. Doubtful you need more information than is provided in the title picture (top).

There's oppression.

We're escaping, or else I drop this thing! (Spoiler: he doesn't drop it)

There's some type of "wasteland." (Maybe it's the...Badlands. eh? eh?)

Scorched-earth places are SUPER popular in future movies...and doubly-so for space future movies. Apparently, so are cars?

There's swords.

Silly how swords are futuristic and historic and alien all at the same time.

And guns.

But not lazer* guns since bullets are just sound effects and don't require a VFX budget. (*90s spelling of laser intentional)

Leather vests and bare chests, but for some reason one guy is wearing a tie and a fedora.

And another guy sports a Spanish Conquistador hat.

Why not?

The movie wants to be Conan the Barbarian spiced up with some Mad Max with a hefty dose of Hell Comes to Frogtown as the main meat. But really, it's just boring. Boring like listening to someone relate the plot of this movie (of which I'll spare you since neither of us care). Although, that's not much of an analogy since it's the plot that makes this movie boring...

If the plot is what makes the movie boring, and relating the plot would be twice as boring. This.

Rather, it's mind-numbing...like reading about how cardboard is made while French-kissing sandpaper, or listening to someone tell you about the dream they had last night.

...and both my hands were sharks!!

It takes so much effort to maintain your attention to what's happening, let alone put it into some line of a plot. I mean, when one event only follows from the previous because they both played on your television screen, it's really tough to torture yourself into connecting the series of occurrences that happen.


And back we come to the analogy of the neighborhood psycho-kid and his mom. He might light fires in your backyard. His mom might send him over with a pitcher of cucumber water to apologize. He might even wear clown make-up while jumping rope on the hood of your car as his mother applauds.

Don't look him in the eyes!

But you don't try to put all of these things together in any rational way! That would be completely fruitless, as is watching this movie for any sort of entertainment.

Badlanders is available on Netflix...if you're into that sort of thing.

Skyline (2010)

First of all, if you start in with the alien-action, don't jump backwards to tell the story behind the characters who will just end up as fodder if you can't at least make the audience give a shit about those characters.

You're fighting an uphill battle with this group

Thankfully, I am not a completionist, so watching the movie at home let me skip through the part where it's a story about a movie effects guy from Kansas, or someplace, and his successful LA-buddy wants him to move to LA.You are supposed to care. His LA-buddy is unfaithful. You are supposed to care.  Kansas-guy's girlfriend is pregnant. You are supposed to care. Kansas-guy isn't quite ready for the responsibility. You are supposed to care.

This part lasts about twenty minutes, and it feels like it runs for three sleepless days. Not just a regular three days and nights without sleep though. Three sleepless nights spent wearing those things from A Clockwork Orange on your eyes.

This is not how I want to feel when I watch a film.  Not even a bad one.

It might be something straight out an early Bret Easton Ellis novel.  Except this story absolutely terrible and only similar because they're both about rich people in LA.

Moments before the Sentinels from The Matrix attack by shining blue lights into people's eyes

The middle thirty minutes of this film is spent on showing the reactions of people to things happening to them. We see their reaction to an earthquake. We watch their grimacing faces as they see pictures of the alien ships. And finally, we see their best attempts to look worried.

"Did you just feel that? The ground shook. In LA. Weird."

"Holy crap! There is something baffling happening off-screen!"

"There's something scary over there. You'd be scared too if you could see it. Just trust me."

Maybe this was all a strategy.  This might have been some elaborate strategy to get the general public to spend an inordinate amount of their movie-going money on a Roger Corman movie. Like some sort of studio proof that if even the crappiest movie has fairly decent special effects and a HUGE amount of money spent on the advertising campaign, it will pull in a number one box-office spot and a hundred million dollars.

If only Corman had been able to put a trailer on one of those Summer Blockbusters.

Unfortunately, it is painfully obvious that the movie takes itself way too seriously for this theory to hold water. Much like Season of the Witch, I could have gotten behind the film if it had decided it was going to be more Mars Attacks and less Independence Day.

Still the only time Sarah Jessica Parker was funny

Deep down, the movie is really about being a spectator (maybe a spectator of spectators?). It is more generally about the ultimate choice we all have to either sit back where we can watch safely and it's boring but we're alive or to go out of the parking deck and possibly get stepped on and eaten in the process.

He chose poorly.

But what is it trying to say about us, the audience, that we end up sitting in a chair, watching a group of people wait until the last twenty-five minutes to finally decide to get out of the hotel room and actually contribute to the movie they're in.


Original title of this movie: "Watching People Who are Looking at Things"

Once they finally get out of that hotel room, the film moves on to the old "false ending" trope. You know the type. It started back in the 80's when the bad guy just had to be shot somewhere to die the first time. But you had to shoot him in the head to kill him for real and end the movie. It's a cheap trick when you do it once. It's just plain sloppy when you put five of them in a single movie like this one did.

Or maybe it was six. I lost count.

Ultimately, it's a glaring irony that the aliens in this movie eat brains because the movie doesn't have any.

The Last Airbender (2010)

There's an old saying in writing: show, don't tell.  

This film takes that idea, kicks it in the nuts, stabs it in the ribs with a rusty shiv, then lights its carcass on fire and wears the charred skin like a suit so that the image and smell linger long after you stop watching.  

If that wasn't bad enough to make for a truly bad film, the acting is about as good as an episode of Saturday Night Live where the actors are reading their lines from a poster board just off-screen.  I get that they're children for the most part, and that they are driving the entire plot through close-ups and conversation, but if you're going to make a fantasy movie, the actors are going to have to pull off some seriously weird lines.  It's just part of the job.  

I'd summarize the plot for you, but since the actors spend 100% of their on-screen time doing that, I don't want to rob them of their only useful job in this pile of loosely coiled, steaming excrement.  Besides, I don't care enough.  Not about the characters.  Not about the story.  Just not at all.  

Make no mistake, this is not a "good" bad movie.  This here is just a plain, old-fashioned, horrible film.  After watching these people talk to one another about things for over an hour (and then narrate to "mix it up" a little), I wanted to punch the population of the world in the face for going to see this movie to the extent that they did.  Shame on you, worldwide film-going audiences.  Shame on you.

But I made it through.  With the help of some severe inebriation, I braved the excruciating exposition and total lack of any character doing anything that might get the viewer to the next plot-point.  Honestly, I don't recommend the level of annihilation that this film requires.  There may not be enough intoxicating substances to last us as a society if too many people try to endure all 100+ minutes of this apathetic talk-a-thon.  

What I do know (because it was said so many times) is that if you kill the Avatar, he'll just be reborn again.  Maybe they should have killed him.  That way he might have been reborn into a decent movie.