charlweed

The audience is all ready to enjoy a monster invasion movie, and we've suspended disbelief of all the obviously unexplainable stuff. And then, it's spoiled by distracting, inconsistent nonsense, where we just want everyone to die and get it over with.

For example, the monsters are supposed to have super-sensitive hearing. They can hear a shirt tear from a block away. But then, when a person has sprinted down a street, and up flights of stairs, and a monster is literally inches away, the monster can't hear them breathing. And the film keeps repeating this scenario until we all feel that it's perfectly safe to just run up to the monsters and stand next to them.

And the cat. The mute, psychic, cat. Ugh. The film should at least have given a hint why the creature behaves almost, but not quite, completely unlike a real cat. And if a film is going to have a cat with superpowers, it could at least be heroic and save someone.

But no, this is a Michael Bay film. He's the producer, not the director, but his mark is all over and through this movie. He just grabs flashy, explody stuff out of the closet, throws it on screen, and punishes the audience for paying attention to anything else.

That said, the cast and performances are genuinely great. I bought pretty much all the relationships, and that was DIFFICULT to pull off in such a chaotic, violent, nonsensical plot, with less-then-minimal dialog. So 4 out of 10.

Read the other reviews, I concur with all of them. But here is something to consider:

While I am not a true scholar of bad film, I have seen much of the MST3K collection, and countless other examples of truly wretched cinema. And in my opinion, this film may indeed have captured the worst performance in any commercially released film. It's not your ordinary woodenness, it's not merely the sheer inability to convey fear, happiness, or anger. There are countless bad actresses. Sure, the script was already incomprehensible. But that's common too.

No, I believe Adrianna Miles' performance is the result of taking a (terrible) actor, and then handing her a (terrible) script IN A LANGUAGE SHE DOES NOT UNDERSTAND, and only giving her the weakest possible direction on how to parrot the syllables.

Imagine Pauly Shore as the lead in a Chinese horror film, IN Chinese, where the director and voice coach hate him so much, that they refuse to even explain to him what is supposed to be happening in the scene.

To me, its the best explanation of the "This is absolutely fascinatingggg" scene, and every other time she is supposed to be performing "dialog". It's why she giggles while someone is writhing in supposed agony on the floor in front of her, and why she does not seem to recognize that the male lead is not supposed to spit in her hair while wooing her.

See this film. It may be one for the ages.

I have buddies who are MST3k fans, so I've seen some of the worst films of all time. Outlaw of Gor, Laserblast ,Killer Shrews, the utter garbage on the SciFi channel, and of course, Manos, Hands of Fate.

I hate this movie more then all the above. There is simply no excuse for how bad it is. Look at the credits. Some of those people even had TALENT. It looks like when they started, the project had MONEY. But they squandered both.

It's so outrageously painful to experience. The off-key singing. The falling apart sets and props. The ridiculous "special effects". The random editing, the sometimes missing audio. The COSTUMES! oh, the costumes...

But the worst of course is the writing. It's not *bad* writing, it's EVIL writing. The writers hated you, me,themselves and all of humanity. They hated love, truth, and beauty. The lyrics and dialog of this film are crafted to try and keep you from seeing any other movie ever again. Or listening to music. Or letting someone speak to you.

Don't watch this film. Unless you're undead, and face empty, joyless eternity as an animated corpse, then your life is too short to waste any of it on The Apple.