oh, the badness of the bad movie...

[jethrien]

We had a bad movie night on Saturday - cookies and wine (thanks, Marc!) and movies. We started with Sky High (which was obtained as a palate cleanser, but the group demanded to watch first). It was surprisingly good. I mean, I didn't expect it to suck, but I was still surprised by how clever and funny it was.

Dungeons & Dragons, however, lived up to expectations. I can't decide what was the worst part. The one-dimensional characters? The really bad overacting (including Jeremy Irons gnawing the scenery to sawdust and Thora Birch looking like she had never acted before in her life and had only seen the script for the first time five minutes ago)? The fact the plot felt like it was lifted straight from one of the more boring modules? The incredibly tacky badness of the key prop? The bad CGI? The fact that they apparently cut all scenes with actual character development in favor of paying for the bad CGI? The tendency of accents to shift mid-sentence? The inherent silliness of trying to have a bad guy be menacing when he has tentacles coming out of his ears?

Wait, no - it was the incredibly painful performance of Marlon Waynes as Snails the bumbling, incompetent, cowardly thief. Within the first five minutes, ivy03 turned to chuckro and asked if he was going to die because he was the only black character. And what do you know? He did. But first he turned in a performance worthy of Stepin Fetchit. I swear, he was one step away from rolling his eyes in fear. It was horrific. We were cringing.

We actually watched a little of the beginning again with the director's commentary. We were hoping that maybe the director would break down in tears and beg our forgiveness. Instead, we had the director and the lead actor talking about how so-and-so is really talented, and the director is a hard taskmaster and how without the chemistry between these characters, the scene wouldn't work. They were talking as if the scene did work. Only - it didn't. Not even a little. These people were convinced they'd made a good movie! What, were they blind? Aaaauuugghh!

But the MST-ing was hysterical, which was the point.

Comments

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

Also, while having anyone play Snails as written is bad enough, having someone play a roleplayer playing Snails as written would be too horrific for words.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

And of course the elf chick would have to be played by a large Asian guy, and the romantic lead by a skinny kid with glasses...

With buffering shots, all the bad acting and props and plot in the movie could actually work to its advantage.

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

It would definitely explain the bad acting and plot, especially if you intercut scenes of the "players" starting the dialogue and then having the characters continue it.

I'm just imagining a whole secondary plot in which half of the players keep coming and going for various reasons, and the GM eventually gets pissed off, which leads to him killing Snails and making the "wall of force" that stops everyone but Ridley from going into the dragon's horde cave.

And, of course, right after the ending scene, you cut to the characters throwing popcorn at the GM and screaming, "What the hell?!"

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I think you also need little title cards - "Game 1" "Game 2" "Epilogue mode."

Or we could just watch Gamers, which I have a serious hankering to do at this point.

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

Second.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

Ok, then we'll watch The Gamers some night. It's now officially on the list, right under Rocky Horror.