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One of the better bad movies I've seen is something called "The Protector" (1997), starring Ed Marinaro and Lee Major. I picked up the video for $5.
It is pretty bad. It is consistently bad. It is bad in every respect. There is a little bit of presence and semi-good occasional acting from Marinaro and Lee Major, the latter of whom plays the hired thug who "goes after" the Marinaro character. Other than that, the only redeeming features are the "premise" (of a guy valiantly protecting harassed women) and the consistency of the badness. "Protector" doesn't pretend to be good when it's really bad. It's just plain bad.
No, this movie may not know it's bad (although everybody in it and connected with it may know), but it doesn't claim dibs as the "romantic hit of the season" either. It just slogs along telling its frayed moldy thread of a weak story with plenty of down-home non-acting and tepid erratic pacing and conventional bad "movie music" and turns of dialogue that somebody had to have worked very hard on to reduce to such a low level of empty stultifying cliché. Whenever there is a sex scene you have to fast-forward, because this is the movie that makes sex boring. Mannequin A, meet Mannequin B. You are passionate about each other. Take One. Go! Great! Cut! Print! Zoom, we got another shot coming up!
Yet I wanted to see how it would "all turn out." Even though I knew exactly how it would all turn out. Even though it was stupid piled on stupid and would you like an extra helping of stupid with that.
Marinaro plays a man whose wife was killed by a stalker while he was fighting for his country overseas. He just could not get back in time to help her. So he becomes the Protector, and creates a special computer intelligence to check his email for him. When women are in trouble they post a message to him "on the net." The computer intelligence periodically scans the net to find these ads. We can tell when the scanning is underway, because of the endless lines of type creeping slowly down the monitor. Well, the movie was made in 1997 and the Google search engine wasn't out yet.
These women, well, these women are in trouble, and the cops are never any help, because no matter how many bodies a stalker piles up, the hands of the cops "are tied" until the bad guy "does something." ("Did he threaten you?" "No officer. Not in so many words. But I'm sure he's responsible for all those corpses piled up on the porch." "Sorry ma'am. Our hands are tied.")
The main bad guy of the movie (and believe me, he's bad--really bad; I don't mean evil) turns out to be a crime boss, which isn't immediately obvious on the first date. He has one--count 'em, one--one--outing with the victim-soon-to-turn-heroine before proceeding to go ballistic when the lady...has dinner with a co-worker. Yes, he's the jealous type. We can see that. It's right there in the script. Type? Jealous.
You have to see the fight scenes in this movie. No, you don't have to. What I mean is, if you wanted to see some very unconvincing fight scenes, this would be the video to buy from me for $10. Sometimes the participants just stand there for a moment after being hit until they realize they're supposed to move into another part of the screen in some way in honorary obeisance to the fact of a fist hitting your face. The movie also has some episodes of virtual reality, which adds a certain nothing to the non-existent science-fiction appeal.
The Protector is such a super-duper hyper-technological, militarily well-trained secretive guy that when an ex-fellow-soldier is hired to go after him it takes the ex-fellow-soldier a whole 27 minutes to find the Protector's hidden hideout--that's how well-cloaked the Protector is from the world. There is a final fight scene in this home, where the Protector, also code-named Gabriel, it's a Biblical allusion, this is a very ambitious movie, had been keeping the girl until they could have the sex scene you have to fast-forward through. Well, one thing you might like about this sex scene is that the girl has big, protuberant nipples, they could shred aluminum. So anyway in the end the Protector and the girl (who is spunky--don't want to omit that) triumph against the bad guys and the Protector gets to keep the girl. The Protector now has a final virtual-reality session with his dead wife because now he's finally over her. Today would have been the fifth wedding anniversary of the marriage of the Protector and his dead wife. Cut to bad music, credits.
So that wasn't so bad and at least you had to watch it through to the end.
Then there's the kind of bad movie which pretends to be good and is really sickening, like "Two Weeks" starring Sandra Bullock and Hugh Grant, which you can't watch all the way through. I stopped somewhere after the poop scene (through which one must also fast-forward), which is supposed to reveal the stars at their most whimsically engaging. The video of "Two Weeks" also cost me five dollars.
Both Grant and Bullock have been charming tentative fumblers in certain movies that are appealing. The appealing Grant movie would be "Four Weddings and a Funeral." I guess for Bullock you would cite "Speed." So how did this other movie, "Two Weeks," get made in such a way that it is so bad, in a way that keeps kicking you in the head with how bad it is? Maybe as follows (imagine movie-maker guys sitting around a table, mainly a producer and a scriptwriter, plus several spittle-dribbling hangers-on nodding at periodic intervals):
"We need a romantic hit of the season. We should make a movie vehicle for Hugh Grant and Sandra Bullock."
"Brilliant, J.G.! What an 'idea'! Now how do we execute?"
"Both of these well-known super-stars flourish in the role of charming tentative fumbler--that's how they're known to the public."
"Brilliant insight, J.G.!"
"They also are romantic types. Therefore we need a script in which they can fall in love and exhibit their charming tentative fumbling in a way that is both synchronous and complementary. Also continuous. They most be constantly playing off each other. Constantly."
"Constantly, J.G.! Got it."
"We want each moment to pop, pop pop pop with how charming and tentative and fumbling they are. Um, let's say also that they hate each other, but they also love each other. Wait a minute, no, no, no. Let the Bullock character hate but love the Grant character, but let the Grant character be obtusely but genially indifferent to the Bullock character, except that he needs the Bullock character desperately and calls her up at three in the morning all the time. The thing is, they love each other, but they're hiding it from themselves."
"Love your knack for conflict-sparking sparkling characterization, J.G.!"
"Put down that each one must be smart as a whip, even though they constantly act like idiots. Let the Grant character somehow have made incredible heaps of money even though he is lazy and idiotic. But a whiz with the public. Empty inside. Controlled. But charming. And let the Bullock character be an idealistic socialist type who ostensibly disapproves of her new employer but gets charmed by his smarm just the same. Socialist versus capitalist type thing. Opposites attract. The works."
"Exciting element, boss!"
"But keep it shallow, keep it shallow--we don't want any realistic sinewy portrayals of ideological conflict here to weigh the thing down. And anything that looks like a motive I'm going to weed out of the script, so don't even try."
"You got it!"
"Also, there should be a party, a tall building, glitz, glamour, a warhorse bitch mom--the works!"
"A poop scene too, boss?"
"Of course! Make it a turning point."
--David M. Brown, 11/19/03 ©2003
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