Another one of my bad movie nights, this time themed around John Travolta.
Battlefield Earth, 2/10
This is the infamous sci-fi bomb from 2000 based on the works of L Ron Hubbard. In a post-apocalyptic earth aliens from the planet Psychlos are mining earth for its resources and humanity has regressed basically back into the bronze age. Then one hero starts fighting back and your typical oppressed vs oppressor narrative follows. It's complete nonsense. This movie is infamous for its horrific excess of dutch angles, but even then you have to see it to truly grasp the sheer scale of the madness on display. Literally almost every shot is a dutch angle with zero rhyme or reason. The effects are gloriously dated early 00s CG slop, the dialogue is just bizarrely bad, the acting is all over the goddamn map. The visual design of the aliens is unorthodox in all the wrong ways. The amount of dialogue the aliens blabber about bureaucracy, trade customs and basically office drama is truly hilarious. John Travolta is an absolute blast, he is just on shrooms and coke the whole movie. Just total brainrot the whole movie, and a whole bunch of fan with drunk friends.
Killing Season, 2/10
This was the other one we watched, and instead of fun bad it's just boring bad. It's about a Yugoslav war vet coming to conflict with a serbian man whom he once faced during the war. The only reason this glorified straight to DVD stinker even got into theaters in 2013 is because somehow Robert DeNiro agreed to it. Perhaps he wanted a paycheck for spending some time in a woods lodge. It's just quite not bad enough to be completely worthless, but neither is it ever really interesting. The film's structure is basically yapping -> torture -> running in the woods -> yapping -> torture -> running in the woods in the laziest, most padded out way. It's like an overly serious bad episode of Tom & Jerry, but stretched torturously over 90 minutes. Not even Travolta is any fun sans his magnificently fake chin beard, the dialogue's in one ear, out the other, the filmmaking is just passable enough to not really warrant making fun of. It's just nothing.