Got a couple of Smithee-worthy and related things for y’all to read. First off, here’s an excerpt from this brilliant review of the movie BloodRayne:
…If I find out that you went and saw this film after I told you not to, I’ll phone your friends up and tell them to go to your house and pour ants in your bed. And when you wake up screaming, covered in ants, you’ll think “at least I’m not still watching BloodRayne.”
This led the reviewer (one Howard Tayler of Schlock Mercenary fame) to do some poking into the background of the guy who directed this film… Turns out he’s a German by the name of Uwe Boll, and he deliberately makes bad moves to exploit a loophole in German tax laws. There’s a Cinema Blend article describing the whole sordid situation.
Reason I bring it up is that last night, instead of my usual Ars game, we watched a kind of strange Smithee film called Spiders. Let me be absolutely clear about this: this was not a good movie. There are at least two dozen potential clips of Smithee value, including a really good Whoops! and multiple instances of Inane Dialogue and Acting Appropriately Stupid.
If you’re not sure what those terms mean, there’s a list of the categories on Bryan’s Smithee Awards Site.
Anyway, this film is bad, but it’s entertaining. It also undergoes a strange transformation in the last fifteen minutes. Most of the film is set in a top-secret government lab, most of which bears an uncanny resemblance to a dusty old industrial complex. The last bit is full of outdoors sequences, vehicle crashes, explosions, scores of extras and location shots which obviously required that streets be shut down.
It’s like they discovered a previously untapped vein of budget and blew it all on the ending.
They did a pretty good job too. You can tell that they wanted to make a decent “big scary bug” movie, and that they were having a good time doing it. They weren’t just in it for the sake of giving their investors a tax break.