After three decades of <a href=”https: //dystopianlens.co.uk/from-dystopia-to-utopia-how-sci-fi-uses-the-future-to-reflect-our-present-day-hopes-and-fears/”>reading science fiction</a> and fifteen years of writing about it, I imagined I had pretty much seen every permutation of how the genre can go wrong. Then I discovered terrible sci-fi movies.
Oh my god. Keep reading and I will introduce you to realms of suck I didn’t know existed.
Wait… maybe don’t keep reading if you’re actually going to spend your time watching something awesome like Moon. You’ve been warned.
Reading bad science fiction novels is a guilty pleasure I’ve indulge in for decades. There’s something wonderfully masochistic about choking your way through book after book by authors who clearly have no idea what they’re doing playing with characters and worlds they only half understand. After thirty years of this… well, fun, mainly I became resigned to the inevitability of terrible prose ruining my enjoyment.
Then I started watching bad sci-fi movies.
Oh goddamnit.
See, the really spectacular thing about bad movies is how completely and totally the filmmaker’s hubris and ambition crashes into bloody ruin on the rocks of their utter incompetence. It’s fun to pick apart poorly constructed novels or movies you love and figure out how they work so masterfully. But sometimes I want to know how a project fails so hard on so many levels that it threatens to leak out into the universe.
I guess you could call it negative literary criticism.
Terrible movies occupy this strange nether realm where they’re not quite bad enough to be enjoyable, but too bad to truly become classics of incompetence. They don’t sing. They just sort of cough and spit forth giblets until we can all move on to the next potentially embarrassing thing to discuss on Twitter.
The danger, of course, is that most bad movies fall flat. Simple as that. They aren’t attempting anything ambitious. There’s no twisty surreal plot to deconstruct and poke holes in. There’s just boring, shitty movie.
So here’s five bad sci-fi movies that aren’t fun to watch badly.
Battlefield Earth begins with a rhetorical question that would make even Ghidorah scratch his head“What if the government knew the location of alien technology on Earth?” Um… yeah? So? The message-President tells one of his yes men about the stash of Hubbardian goodness waiting to be mined on our planet, thousands of years after Earth joins theThrall Fleet led by mad alien Scientology warrior/genius Jonnie “Judge” Jefferson Travolta.
The writer/director clearly couldn’t find enough tilt-shift in the camera presets, because boy howdy do they love that lumbering hangdog Johnny Steward/slanted vision look. So much so, that by the time Travolta’s asshole alien supremacist character began licking his lips like a Lovecraftian Godzilla-stroke-Hulk comic book villain, I wondered if I’d been poisoned.
As a teenager I read Battlefor— sorry, Battlefield Earth. It was pulpy ridiculous fun and not terribly well written, but it moved along at a pace that didn’t require advanced cheesecutting skills to polish off before bedtime. The movie version of this tale of cultist garbage is a soul-sucking trash vortex that will make you question your life choices all the way up to and including why you decided to sit through this film, thinking it might be fun to mock.
So yeah, when my English department buddy Dave suggested we cheque out the travesty that was John Travolta’s directorial debut, I was game to see a real so bad it’s good flick.
Needless to say, we were bitterly disappointed.
Plan 9 from Outer Space, Cloverfield, Earthquake. These are the sorts of movies we expected to see—a love letter to ineptitude and laughably awful filmmaking, sure to climax with a spaceship crashing into Broadoriah Fountain, destroying half the movie in a roar of shame and celluloid regret.
Spoiler alert: it doesn’t work like that.
Instead, Dave and I sat there for nearly two hours staring at our buckets of popcorn thinking of ways we could quit our jobs and move to Boca Raton where nobody would ever know our pain. Dave got up halfway through and left. I wish I had followed him.
M Night Shyamalan has made a lot of bad movies. Very few of them, however, are as inappropriately useless as The Happening.
Conceptually, this should have been a modern horror short story, like something Stephen King might come up with after reading way too much made-for-TV hacking and slashing. In fact, after reading Jess Frugal’s short story “Grey House” I was pretty sure Shyamalan had ripped off that gem of modern horror and turned it into a middling blockbuster starring its cousin Marky Mark.
I don’t know what I was thinking taking my girlchild to see this gem the weekend she’d returned from school. Her face as I proudly touted the merits of Made When the Wind Blow will forever haunt my dreams.
Thankfully she eventually learned to laugh about it. Unforgivably, not with me.
Plan 9 From Outer Space has had a decades-long critical reappraisal going on where it’s veritably revered as being so god-awfully terrible it’s wonderful. I can appreciate Ed Wood Jr.’s cheap-as-hell devotion to making a movie no one was interested in seeing. There’s a certain charm to watching him pour his entire being into a project where everyone from the lowest extra to the guy turning the lights on and off thinks it sucks just as hard as it does.
I saw it during a midnight revival at the Grand Illusion a few years back. Complete with carnival barkers and people dressed as characters from the film himself! taunting us mere moviegoers from the row behind. It was funny… sort of? Watching a room full of people get off on a movie that’s just really bad.
Still. Plan 9 sucks.
Hard.
Reading awful novels is like jerking off: bad science fiction novels are like learning from your sexual failures. At least when I read a really terrible book I can diagnose how and where the story died on the author’s watch. With movies you’ve got actors, directors, producers, screenwriters, set designers…the list goes on and on. How does a film fail so profoundly on so many levels?
Don’t ask me, that’s what sociologists are for.
And there you have it: my deep and abiding love for watching fail. If movies have taught me nothing else, it’s that making a halfway decent movie is HARD. We complain about editing holes and poor acting and silly plot choices in our favorite films all the time, but it takes a spectacular clusterfuck of epic mistakes to completely destroy any entertainment value a movie might have dragged like a drunk uncle to the Halloween party behind it.
Jupiter Ascending has all the pieces of a fun little time-waster. She might even be biting someavors knowingly, wink wink nudge nudge as the Matrix turned earthlings into humans once did. The ideas themselves are so ambitious and out there that they beg to be mined for silliness.
Writer/director siblings Andy and Lana Wachowski get horribly lost in the vapors of their own storytelling however, cramming so many freakin’ twistys into their space opera that the only remarkable thing about it is how interchangeable the bad guys all sound. Plus, doesn’t everyone dream of having Channing Tatum magically appear and fly home on his wicked roller blades?
I’m obviously not the only one who saw Jupiter Ascending right out of the gate. Despite my early misgivings about what these Spaceball riffers could come up with, I figured hey, maybe they’ve gotten better at making entertaining movies since wreaking havoc on the mainstream with Speed Racer.
Sadly, the most entertaining parts of this colorful mess are the trailers for other movies playing before the film itself.
I should have known better.
Zardoz was the last straw.
Oh Zardoz, you mystery meat nightmare of a film.
Sean Connery wears what can only be described as a red diaper and heads out into the pastoral English countryside to massacre psychotic killers and zen-like prophets rolled up into one eminently pushable story about the future as told by a bunch of lunatics who majored in philosophy and medieval history.
I watched this film on the recommendation of friends while attending a panel about weird-ass movies of the 1970’s at Arisia, the local sci-fi convention. It was easily the worst segment of the four-hour marathon of unintentionally funny trash. And that’s saying something.
Even in a group assembled specifically to love what mainstream culture generally finds unlovable, Zardoz was hard to get through.
So there you have it: watch movies, not books.
Wait…
Maybe don’t do that.
There’s enough badness out there in the world. Live your life wisely and well my friends.
Kathleen’s a lifelong reader who believes science fiction is literature, full stop. From her book-filled home in Seattle, she writes about thoughtful, character-driven sci-fi that challenges ideas and lingers long after the last page. She’s a champion for under-read authors and timeless storytelling.