February 29th redeemed

Four years ago, I put up a poll in the Flickcharters group on Facebook, asking people which of a dozen terrible movies I should choose as my viewing for February 29th of 2020. It's a tradition that started in 2008 when I happened to watch the Nicolas Cage remake of The Wicker Man on that day, and it birthed the idea that I should be watching something howlingly awful every February 29th. 

The Flickcharters made their choice rather definitively, but in the comments section a write-in candidate started gaining traction. It was seconded and thirded and before long, the evidence was overwhelming that the best candidate wasn't in the poll offerings, but was, rather, Christian Mingle, a Christian-themed dating movie starring Lacey Chabert.

So I watched Christian Mingle. And I sort of liked it.

I wasn't going to let that happen again.

So the winner of the 2020 poll, the 2003 film From Justin to Kelly, was my choice for 2024 ... and I couldn't have been happier with that decision.

I'm not even sure where to start on how bad this movie is, but maybe I should start on how much different a movie like this would be if it had been made today.

A 2024 movie featuring two American Idol stars would be a cross-promotional dream with all the various social media platforms, and it would get high-profile talent behind the camera -- an up-and-comer with possible music video experience, but either way, someone fresh and full of ideas. The resulting movie, even if ultimately unsuccessful, would have been bouncy and buoyant and probably have the look and feel of something like this year's Mean Girls remake. (Which I haven't seen, but I can make assumptions based on the trailers.)

The person they did get to direct the movie, Robert Iscove, is not a name I know off the top of my head, but neither is he some hack who stumbled into the job through nepotism. In fact, Iscove had more than 50 of his 65 directing credits (mostly in TV) prior to From Justin to Kelly, and was already 56 years old at the time of its release. Perhaps the clearest example of why he was chosen was that he had directed She's All That, which was a pretty big hit in 1997, even if it does have the dubious legacy of popularizing the instantly dated notion that a woman would turn from ugly to pretty if only she removed her glasses. 

Given the sheer volume of professional experience Iscove brought with him, it's hard to overstate how shabby this movie looks, how inert are its performances, and how flat the whole experience feels.

Surely, the fact that neither Kelly Clarkson nor Justin Guarini were trained actors had something to do with their lack of charisma (independently) or lack of chemistry (jointly). (During the movie I found my mind wandering and thinking how "chemistry" can be defined as "charisma between two people.") But they are not as bad as they could have been, and might have been propped up a bit by any sort of passable filmmaking technique, or decent choreography or song choices. 

Nope.

One of the first things you notice about From Justin to Kelly is just how bad the lighting is. That's not something you see anymore on any movie with any modicum of a budget. These actors are not lit to bring out their physical attractiveness -- not just these two, but the physical attractiveness of any of the cast, who are all attractive as this movie takes place in a Hollywood version of spring break. Even the daytime scenes are full of shadow and glare.

To delve fully into all the things that don't work, I need to set up the plot.

So Kelly plays Kelly, a waitress in a country (Texas, is it?) bar who also sings to a nightly crowd of two to three drunks sleeping it off. Her two friends, backstabber Alexa (Katherine Bailess) and the sweet Kaya (Anika Noni Rose), convince her to come to Florida for spring break. That's also where Justin (as Justin) has come with his two friends, horndog stud Brandon (Greg Siff) and nerdy Eddie (Brian Dietzen), who is trying to meet up with a girl he met on the internet. Their paths are going to cross way more times than should be possible in an area suffused with probably 15 to 20,000 college-aged kids.

So here we get into one narrative problem with From Justin to Kelly. The two leads are supposed to be separated after their initial meeting by bad luck (she writes her phone number in lipstick on a paper towel, but it lands in a puddle and becomes unreadable) and the conniving of the bitchy Alexa (who gives Justin her own phone number, pretending it is Kelly's phone number, so she can send him misleading texts and send him on wild goose chases that will allow her to swoop in on Justin instead of her friend). 

When characters are kept apart in a movie for these reasons, it's supposed to increase our investment in their eventual pairing and make us yearn for that to happen. However, after every latest roadblock is introduced, it takes less than two minutes of screen time for them to randomly cross paths again, meaning that whatever narrative value is gained from these roadblocks is immediately frittered away. They don't seem to discuss the reasons they didn't call or arrive at the designated meeting spot the previous time, so it's like they are reset to their default interaction standards without any of what happened before meaning anything. Also, they never manage to learn -- until the very end, of course -- that Alexa has been manipulating and misdirecting them. (A simple reference to any one of several dozen texts would have done the trick.)

You'd think the relationship would be off to a less-than-magical start given this film's version of a meet cute. Although they have rubbed elbows in big dance numbers before now, Justin and Kelly first speak after meeting in a women's bathroom. He's been chased there because women want the tickets he's handing out to some party, and she's already in there. Under some staging this might have worked, but this is the most drab and boring bathroom the location scouts could have possibly found, and nothing of the short exchange that occurs between them seems like it lays the foundation for an infatuation that will occupy both of them for the rest of the movie. The actors can't sell it, but it's not there in the script, and it lets us know that this sort of lack of a pulse is going to inform the entire film.

And boy does it ever.

My wife walked in on what was probably the funniest scene in terms of the cluelessness of the staging.

In one of their many attempts to overcome the obstacles that have been thrown their way, Justin and Kelly go out on a boat ride. I can't remember how or why he has access to this boat or how he knows how to pilot it, but you need to understand how this is staged in order to understand why it's so funny. So here is a picture:

They sing a duet on this boat, but they never leave the configuration you see above, and in fact, she never even turns around to look at him. It's supposed to be a point of optimism in their relationship but the song feels dour, which is exacerbated by the fact that they are not looking at each other and in fact are both as stiff as a board. Making matters worse is that Iscove shoots it from about ten different angles, but because they never move it just draws further attention to their twin senses of rigidity and lifelessness.

Given the sort of career Clarkson has gone on to have, you might think that the songs she and Justin sing are some real bangers, maybe not "Since You've Been Gone," but at least something befitting a recently anointed diva. Nope. I wouldn't say the songs are horrible in that they violate basic principles of song structure or anything like that, but they are just so mediocre and forgettable, which is also the best description for the scenes that do have some sort of choreography that does not involve two people sitting on a boat staring straight ahead. A final fart in the wind is the closing number, which is quite involved in its choreography, but is a curiously chosen staging of KC and the Sunshine Band's "That's the Way (I Like It)." A good song, to be sure, but not really the vibe you are going for in a big happy ending number where everyone has been paired off successfully and everything's going to turn out alright. (Oops, spoiler alert.) Plus it seems to last for about two full play-throughs of the song, an interminable ending to a movie that is only 81 minutes long.

Is there anything good in From Justin to Kelly? Maybe "good" is too strong of a word, but I can tell you about something I found in the neighborhood of charming. The only real actor in the cast -- there isn't even some guest star from the older set, a Danny DeVito or someone like that -- is Anika Noni Rose, though she would not become described as such until later on. It's kind of hard to believe Rose went on to appear in films like Dreamgirls, considering that this was her first feature and it might have ended the acting careers of anyone involved (and did for most of the others). But Rose does indeed have ability, and she shows it in a romantic sub plot with a young man named Carlos she meets who works in one of the spring break resorts. (He's played by Jason Yribar, who is also pretty good.) The things that happen in their sub plot are mostly sweet and are the sorts of things you would hope would happen in the A plot, if the script knew what to do with either Justin or Kelly.

Take away points, though, in another romantic sub plot involving Brandon and a female police officer who keeps issuing him tickets for holding events without permits and gambling on things like a grudge being settled in the form of a duel between two hovercrafts. (Don't get me started on that one.) Since we're naming names, the officer is played by Theresa San-Nicholas. Brandon is a real douchebag, and Siff's performance is probably the third most professional in the movie after the two mentioned in the previous paragraph. You'd expect he'd be a douchebag with a heart of gold but he's just sort of a regular douchebag, always boasting about his female conquests and trying to see a little more female flesh (they hold a whipped cream bikini contest). He tries to seduce the female police officer as well every time they meet -- which is about five times -- so it's no surprise at all that when she finally shows up in the final scene, and he's not doing anything illegal, it's in a bikini and she's finally succumbed to his "charms," such as they are. Yes, retrograde morality on the powers of seduction of a creep were still alive and well in 2003.

It's hard to understand how Clarkson and Guarini would allow this sort of travesty to be made, except that they weren't famous at all a year before this, and of course she couldn't yet know she was really going places. (Guarini, not so much.) Today's recently minted American Idol winner and American Idol finalist would be much more conscious of burnishing their brand, as they would already have millions of followers on Instagram and would expect the world to be at their feet. Here, Justin and Kelly look like novices pushed into a disaster on terrible advice, powerless to do anything about it.

One final note on the universally agreed-upon awfulness that is this movie. From Justin to Kelly has a user rating of 1.9 out of 10 on IMDB. Usually when you see that sort of rating, it's because a bunch of trolls have gotten on IMDB to give 0/10 on a movie whose subject matter they find politically objectionable or that challenges their sense of the primacy of the patriarchy. That could not possibly be the case with this movie, so it just means that everyone thinks it's bad. 

I could go on, but February 29th is over, and now it's time to get back to our regularly scheduled viewing.

But I'd be lying if I didn't admit I'm already thinking about potential candidates for 2028, now that I've gotten this tradition back on track. 

When February 29th viewings backfire

For the fourth time, I have chosen the arrival of another February 29th as the occasion to watch “the worst movie I can find.” The tradition started when I happened to watch the remake of The Wicker Man on February 29th of 2008, then decided to make a thing of it with Howard the Duck in 2012 and Manos: The Hands of Fate in 2016.

None of those films were disappointments in terms of the desired outcome. Each were awful in their own special way, offering howls of laughter and/or disbelief. Only Manos may actually be among the 20 worst films I’ve ever seen, but the candidacy of the others for an extremely rarely reoccurring series like this one was clear.

Well, in 2020, I’ve screwed it all up.

I didn’t have an obvious candidate leap (no pun intended) to mind this year, so I polled the good people at my Flickchart Facebook group. I had scanned the dregs of the global rankings on Flickchart for titles I hadn’t seen, and presented them with a list of choices, saying I would watch the one that got the most votes. They included such personal blind spots as Glitter, The Love Guru, Chairman of the Board, Alone in the Dark, Crossroads and Leonard Part 6. From Justin to Kelly was leading when I stopped counting the votes on the poll.

But I'd also given them the option to add a choice in the comments below, knowing of course that they'd have little idea what I had and had not already seen. This is how a groundswell of support for a different movie started. One commenter mentioned Christian Mingle, a 2014 film starring Lacey Chabert and directed by Corbin Bernsen, whose title I had heard come up in similar contexts in this group before.

Then the choice was seconded. Then the choice was thirded. And so on. I don't know if it actually ended up with more votes than From Justin to Kelly, but then again, a lot of people don't read the comments below, preferring to vote in the poll and be done with it. I decided that the crowd had spoken and had produced a choice for me that was historically bad, not just the kinds of generic misfires I had been providing them as options.

So I declared Christian Mingle the winner a month ago, the day after I posted the poll, and waited for February 29th to roll around.

I almost had to call an audible and go for From Justin to Kelly after all, as I couldn't find Christian Mingle to stream or purchase on any of the sites I regularly deal with. But lo and behold, there it was streaming on YouTube, in full, unexpurgated form -- "hidden" from those who might seek to take it down for copyright reasons, I suppose, only by having its title appear in Spanish.

Yesterday, I watched it.

And I liked the movie.

It's a risk you take any time you watch a "terrible" movie. I watched The Hottie and the Nottie for similar reasons eight or nine years ago, and I also liked The Hottie and the Nottie. Look, you can't hate every movie that most people hate, any more than you can love every movie most people love.

If you had asked me to guess why the good people at my Flickchart Facebook group had nominated Christian Mingle for my consideration -- because I did not specifically ask them -- I would have guessed the following two reasons:

1) It has a laughable execution, with terrible craft that includes, but might not be limited to, the acting, the editing, the camerawork, the song choices, and the presence of boom mics in the shots.

2) It is laughably tone deaf about how it communicates its obvious agenda of catering to a Christian audience, or possibly making believers out of those who are not.

Before I address those points individually, let me remind you of a core maxim I follow when it comes to film criticism. And that is, I meet every film on its own terms. If a movie is about ballerinas, I judge it as a movie about ballerinas. If a movie is about people who have sex with corpses, I judge it as a movie about people who have sex with corpses. I don't want to turn one into the other, and whether I am the intended audience for it or not, I need to judge it as though I were.

Christian movies are a prime example of this. If a movie is being made to speak to a Christian audience, I will try to put myself in the shoes of that audience. A movie being a Christian movie does not disqualify it from being a good movie. As one example, I am a big fan of the Kirk Cameron movie Fireproof, about a firefighter who learns to believe in God in a way that helps save his marriage. I just thought it totally worked.

Not to tarnish their good name, but I suspect the Flickcharters who nominated Christian Mingle have not seen any other Christian movies. I suspect the fact that they felt like they had walked into the wrong movie theater -- a phenomenon I am familiar with, believe me -- meant that they had a prejudice against the movie that they could never shake. Instead of giving the movie itself a fair shake, they instead sought to amass evidence that the movie was bad, rather than considering the idea that it might be good. It was guilty until proven innocent.

Of course, the reverse should also obviously be true -- just because you are trying to give a movie the benefit of the doubt does not mean it should blind you to the movie's faults. So let's consider those two categories I mentioned above.

1) Is the movie executed poorly?

No. The acting in it is fine to good. The filmmaking is workmanlike, perhaps, but never once distracts with an example of sub-par technique. The songs are Christian pop songs, but that's in keeping with an agenda that the film doesn't try to hide. It's a Christian movie, as the title quite obviously indicates, so why shouldn't it have songs about loving God? I would not expect otherwise.

I closely watched the structure of the story to see if it broke any basic rules, and there was only one I could find. The story is told from the perspective of Chabert's Gwyneth, and every moment on screen is something she could have witnessed or known about, with one exception. At one point the story feels like it's important for us to be privy to a phone conversation between the man she meets on the Christian Mingle dating website, Paul (Jonathan Patrick Moore), and his judgmental mother, played by Morgan Fairchild. This temporary and solitary break from Gwyneth's perspective should have been avoided, probably, but it's hardly reason to deduct any serious points from the movie. (As a side note, Fairchild was one of the first actresses I had the hots for when I began "noticing girls" back in the early 1980s, from seeing ads for her movie The Seduction on cable. As I was watching the movie, though, I was calling her Loni Anderson in my head, rather than remembering her actual name.)

As I read up a little on the film, I found that some people were offended by its presentation of the residents of a Mexican village -- there's a little bit of a white savior thing going on here, as there's a section featuring white Americans on a Christian mission to help restore a village that was damaged by a hurricane. But I didn't consider there to be anything egregious about this. I thought the film makes a pretty good effort to be racially inclusive, as when Gwyneth does start to find her way to God, it's through a church mostly comprised of black congregants.

So let's move on to ...

2) Is it Christian in a tone deaf way?

Here again the answer is no. A truly tone deaf movie about Christianity would make all the Christian characters unblemished heroes and all the non-Christians one-dimensional heathens. Really, though, there isn't a single unambiguously good Christian or unambiguously bad non-Christian.

So let's start with the Christians themselves. When we meet Paul, it's clear that the movie considers him a bit dorky. He's too buttoned up, he's a little awkward. When Gwyneth takes him to try sushi, he has a really hard time swallowing the bite and says he's more of a "cheese steak type of guy," or something along those lines. And I can tell from this scene that the movie is lightly critical of Paul for his closed-mindedness. This is definitely a movie that thinks sushi is good.

So then let's move to Paul's parents. His father (David Keith, looking quite larger and quite different from the last time I'd seen him) is a bit of a blowhard given to corny rhyming phrases -- his silly refrain regarding the Mexican village is "From door to door, we shall restore." At his urging, a number of parishioners go to lunch at a restaurant called Steak & Cake, where the only thing on the table is a plate of large steaks and several cakes on raised platters -- like, way more cake than the people present would need. There's no vegetables or anything. This movie is making fun of the excessive American myopia of a restaurant that serves only steak and cake, and pins that on these people who are supposed to be our "great Christian heroes."

And then let's look at Paul's mother. She is suspicious of Gwyneth from the start. (If I have not said it already, Gwyneth is a Christian in name only -- she can't remember the last time she went to church and does not know the Bible at all.) As it turns out her suspicions are warranted, but she comes across as a highly judgmental character who does not give Gwyneth really any chance at all before deciding she's hiding something. She's prissy and uptight and does not really strike one as a shining example of the type of Christianity you would expect a movie like this to be prizing.

Then there's Kel Kel (Jill Saunders), the girl Paul has known since childhood who is his obvious intended match. She represents exactly the type of Christianity Paul's mother prizes, and she wants Paul and Kelly to end up together. But it's quite obvious this movie knows Kel Kel is deficient as a character, a bit shallow and possibly even a bit backstabbing, even as she does things that have the appearance of being kind and generous. It's clear the movie doesn't think of her as a shining example of Christianity either.

Probably the closest example of the type of Christian the movie thinks is great is Gwyneth's "black friend," Pam, played by Saidah Arrika Ekulona. She works at the advertising agency with Gwyenth. And no, she doesn't always rise above the limitations of the "black friend" role, but this is hardly the only movie guilty of that. What she does do is present an alternative version of Christianity that is not in line with the religious right overtones of Paul's family. She's actually not a member of the predominantly black congregation Gwyneth joins, but rather, a "secret Christian" who only reveals her Christianity to Gwyneth when Gywneth is farther along on her journey. Gwyneth never suspected because Pam doesn't wear a crucifix necklace, to which Pam responds that that's really not her style.

The thing Christian Mingle gets right about Christianity is that there are "styles" of Christianity. You don't have to be white saviors charging into Mexico to help save a community devastated by a hurricane. You can be a non-crucifix wearing, by all accounts very hip black woman who works at an advertising agency. You can be another hip woman who works at an advertising agency who loves sushi and loves wearing spunky outfits. (Chabert's wardrobe is really great).

So let's look at the non-Christians to see how they fare.

Gwyneth has a greek chorus of secular friends who only pop up in a few scenes. They are basically supportive friends. They don't act snarky when she signs up for a Christian dating site, they just wonder if she will be revealed as not the same type of Christian that those people are looking for.

Then you've got her boss at the ad agency (Stephen Tobolowsky) and the agency's biggest client (John O'Hurley). Which, by the way, were two faces I loved seeing pop up in this movie. These characters have no idea about Gwyneth's dating life so they make no comment on her Christianity or lack thereof. They are just part of the work plot.

Still, a lesser movie would undercut these two characters who presumably have no faith. Tobolowsky, as her boss, would be particularly likely to be a dick. He's definitely eccentric -- he wears around a captain's hat as his agency is called Maritime Advertising -- and he gets (justifiably) annoyed at Gwyneth on a couple occasions when she's falling down in her duties. But ultimately, he is presented, in a way I thought of as quite clever, as a man who has his own kind of "faith." The movie makes the point that you have to have a little faith in the product you are shilling in order to properly shill it, and the product O'Hurley's character makes is a pill that's supposed to re-grow hair in bald people. Tobolowsky is such a person, and so that's the thing he has faith in -- and he expresses that faith in a really touching scene. In a way, this movie is supporting the idea of believing in something -- whether it's Christianity or regrowing your hair. I find it essentially optimistic in a way that's unafraid to be secular.

O'Hurley's character is basically just comic relief, as kind of a variation on J. Peterman, but he's harmless.

I know I've spent a lot of time on how the film conveys its Christianity, so let's just summarize by saying that it doesn't lay it on nearly as thick as you would expect. Really clueless Christian movies start with the Gods and Jesuses right from the start, and this one really doesn't. Even though Bernsen and Chabert are both Christians who speak openly about their faith, they are shrewd enough to know what turns people off. Then again, even Kirk Cameron can do this subtly when he wants to.

Obviously I experienced this movie very differently from most people. On Letterboxd, here's what the spread of its user star ratings looks like:

That's 557 half-star ratings compared to the 39 who gave it three stars, one of whom is me.

Again not to denigrate my fellow Flickcharters or anyone else who hates this movie, but I do wonder if hating Christian Mingle feels like some people's duty in the current culture wars. Like, if you say you like Christian Mingle, you are somehow helping Donald Trump get reelected. I understand that impulse, though I can't endorse it. Christian Mingle is more nuanced than that, I think.

I think it can feel scary to say you like a movie like Christian Mingle -- I feel scared just writing this post. Scared for a number of reasons. For one, that you'll think I have no ability to discern good from bad, and will never trust my critical opinions again. But also, scared that you will think I'm a "crazy Christian," or that I may be starting my own "path to Jesus."

But just how I hope most people are getting over being afraid to make a comment where someone might "think they're gay," I don't think I or anyone else should be afraid to say that a Christian movie is good without someone "thinking I'm Christian." Being able to appreciate something intended for a certain type of person does not mean you are that type of person, but then again, so what if you are?

I watched Christian Mingle on the morning of February 29th when I was away for the night with a friend, and he was still asleep. (I'm not gay! Ha ha.) I did give temporary consideration as to whether I should try to "salvage" my February 29th terrible movie by watching another candidate -- say, From Justin to Kelly -- when I got home later on.

I ultimately decided against it. (In fact, I re-watched my favorite movie of all time, Raising Arizona.) I ultimately decided that I'd made a good faith (ha ha) effort to watch something truly terrible, where all existing evidence stated it was terrible. Just because it had not, in the end, been terrible for me, does not make it a failure for this February 29th "series."

It just serves as a reminder that movies can always surprise us, that our preconceived notions are often wrong, and that maybe we shouldn't even have those preconceived notions.

Being surprised is the reason we watch movies.

Amen to that.

From best picture to worst

Monday was a queer day in the old-fashioned sense of that word, before it had anything to do with a person's sexuality. It was a day we only get on the calendar every four years, a day I have traditionally celebrated (the last two times, anyway) by watching something absolutely god-awful. However, since it was also the same day the Oscars were playing (in Australia, anyway), it was a day where I needed to cram in a three-plus hour awards show as well -- one that we couldn't start until after we put our kids to bed.

Somehow I managed it all. Thank goodness for the earlier recording of the telecast and the ability to fast forward commercials.

It was truly odd to go from the producers of Spotlight accepting the best picture win to watching the opening shitty frames of Manos: The Hands of Fate on YouTube less than five minutes later.

Manos is the third in a grand tradition of February 29th films, joining the Nicolas Cage version of The Wicker Man in 2008 and Howard the Duck in 2012. But Manos created a whole new level of terrible that few if any films have ever matched.

For those not familiar with it, Manos is a 1966 low-budget "horror" directed, written by and starring a man named Harold P. Warren. It gained notoriety when it went under the Mystery Science Theater 3000 lens, its sheer indescribable awfulness having helped it transcend the more pedestrian sort of badness displayed by the other movies that show skewered.

How awful? Let me try to tell you.

But first some "plot."

It involves a "young" couple in a convertible and their daughter (Warren is not particularly "young"), who are trying to find an inn where they're supposed to be staying. They get lost and instead come across a home tended to by an eccentric proprietor who is acting strangely and advises them that he watches over the place "while the master is away." Unable to find their way back, they reluctantly go inside and see a mysterious painting of a man and his ghoulish-looking dog. Ultimately the family's dog escapes outside and is killed, and eventually they discover "the master" and his small clutch of wives, i.e., captives.

The very broad strokes of this story preview something chilling, but all it takes is one second of viewing this movie to realize that it may be the worst movie ever made. Every creative element that goes into the making of a movie is delivered at a Z-minus grade of quality. You could probably argue until the cows came home about whether the photography, the editing, the lighting, the sound or the acting was the worst element of the movie, but the directing is the one element that seems to encompass all of those, so let's just say that this is almost definitely the worst directed movie ever made.

Vance, how many god-awful movies have you seen to make a statement as bold as that?

Not nearly all of them, to be sure. But watching any one minute of Manos -- literally, choose randomly from the entire 68 minutes -- will convince you that it's almost not possible for someone to make a film more incompetently than this one is made. Ten random homeless people could make a better movie than this if they replaced this film's ten most important collaborators.

To call the editing haphazard doesn't even come close to describing the depth of its ineptness. The film is cobbled together from camera angles shot either three degrees to the left or right of the previous shot, played consecutively with each other rather than as a return shot after a cutaway. The camera is rarely if ever set up in a location that makes the most sense for capturing the action, with crucial objects sometimes appearing half out of the frame. Lighting has been applied so indifferently to the proceedings that sometimes it bathes the performers in a blinding whiteness, and other times it is totally absent, so you can't even see anyone's face. And let's talk for a minute about the ADR. Clearly films on this budget would not have synchronous dialogue that you could hear clearly, but the post-dubbed dialogue doesn't even come close to matching the mouths in the pictures. Plus even the silence is noisy, as the soundtrack has a background noise that sounds a bit like air being released from a tube, a constant stream of polluted quiet.

The terrible acting and directing deserve their own paragraph. The best you can say about the acting is that people's reactions are in keeping with the general mood of what's expected of them -- in other words, no one sounds happy when they are supposed to sound sad. Literally any and every other acting sin is committed here, from excessive flatness (that's Warren) to giant, over-the-top scenery chewing (Diane Mahree and Tom Neyman, as his wife and "the master" respectively). What is most odd, though, are the delayed reactions, the two- to three-second pauses after lines of dialogue that would seem to require an immediate response. You can almost see Warren off camera saying something like "Wait ... let it sink in. Pause for effect." Though to be honest, the notion that Warren had any guiding principle whatsoever on how to direct this movie is baffling.

And then there are just the hilarious things that transpire in this movie. I can't mention them all, but there is the repeated sub-plot of another couple who keeps getting harassed by the same police officer while making out in the back of their convertible. For a while I thought this had something to do with the rest of the movie, but I honestly can't figure out what it is. Then there's the supposedly horrific scene where a victim gets slapped to death by the master's crazed wives. I'm not talking about a brutal episode of violent slapping that bludgeons someone to death. I'm talking about five or six mid-strength slaps that somehow result in the victim expiring. There's also the absurdity of the fact that the father carries around a drawn gun for the last 15 or so minutes, even when there are no villains nearby and when he is trying to do things that require the dexterity of his hands, like pick up and carry his daughter. He's pretty damn lucky he didn't accidentally discharge a bullet into her temple. (Spoiler alert.)

What's truly terrible about this giant collection of cluelessness, though, is that it generally does not have the delicious moments of grand spectacle that distinguish other such terrible movies. There's no "You're tearing me apart, Lisa!" (The Room). There's no "OH MY GOD!" (Troll 2). I suspect that if they tried to show Manos: The Hands of Fate as a midnight movie (and I'm sure somebody's considered if they haven't actually done it), I have no idea what would work as the "bring down the house" moments. It's like a slow, trudging march toward an ending that seems like it will never arrive. I find myself wondering how they tackled this challenge in that MST3K appearance that brought the film to prominence. They must have come up with something good, otherwise we probably wouldn't even know about it at all.

The movie is of course fascinating for the simple reason that someone (Warren, I guess) looked at this dailies every day and said "Yup! Nailed it." But let's just say, not fascinating enough for me to ever watch it again.

When I get around to ranking this on Flickchart, I will seriously be considering it for my lowest spot on the chart.

Never too early to start planning for February 29th, 2020, right? Suggestions welcome.

It's a Saturday, so I definitely won't be watching the Oscars the same day.