April 25, 2004

This movie is so bad that I saw it for free and STILL wanted my money back!

I shuddered at the notion that five months into the new century came a worthy candidate for the worst movie of the new millennium. In my life I cannot remember a bigger theatrical train wreck, a movie so bad that you can feel the movie’s badness oozing off the screen and sneaking up your spine. This movie is horribly, horrendously, aggressively awful. In short, it sucks rocks backwards.

The movie begins with a Handover font to inform us that this is “A Saga of the Year 3000” and the only positive that I can say is that if the next millennium resembles this movie I’m glad I won’t be around to see it.

The usually likable John Travolta stars in his biggest cinematic debacle playing an alien named Turd who looks like a Jamacian werewolf and talks like an inebriated party clown. He rules over The Psycholos a race of aliens who take pleasure in making our lives miserable (It worked). They’ve taken over earth, enslaved humanity and forced us to dig for gold and other resources in the vast wasteland called Denver (?). I’m not sure how long we’ve been in slavery but it is at least long enough to grow long hair and grunt a lot.

All the human dress the same and look like the road company production of “Quest for Fire”. We’re apparently a rather squalid people who have outgrown the need for soap but none the less appear to have been supplied toothbrushes and razors. Several opportunities arise for the line “Sir, the people are revolting” but this movie isn’t that clever.

The Psychlos are none too happy about their assignment, particularly Turd who wants to work his way out of middle management. He complains endlessly about the task which he sees as an ongoing, endless torturous Hell and is itching to finish up, blow up the planet behind him and move on to something better (I sat through this movie, believe me I can relate).

The problem with the movie (which listed would rival the length of the Warren Report, and be just as credible) begins with Travolta, whose make-up man should be hat-whomped like Gilligan. His head is so tall it’s resembles a junior conehead, his eyebrows are still dripping glue and his rubber hands falter and quiver when he tries to pick anything up. Then there’s the breathing apparatus which hangs from his nostrils like untended nosehair. His accent is, to say the least, baffling. He sounds like he has developed a speech that lies somewhere between Bette Davis and Kahn. Even if he had managed to pull off such a feat it wouldn’t have helped given lines like: “Crap-lousy ceiling! I thought I told to get some man-animals in here and fix it.”

All of that while we are subjected to Coral Blue lighting and rolls and rolls of film that are stocked with enough Dutch tilts to make fives seasons worth of "Batman" episodes.

Travolta should be outraged but he can’t because this was his baby! It had the full support of the Church of Scientology which claimed, just before the release, that the film might have been blamed for putting subliminal messages to get people to join the sect. But truthfully, aside from invading Poland or burning crosses there could not have been a worse method of recruitment.