Nukie

Nukie. It's a bad E.T. ripoff filmed in Africa, with production (and some footage) handled in Germany. It's in English, so I'm not sure where the targeted market was. Nukie and his brother Meeko are ugly little aliens with big heads and runny noses who fly through space using some sort of personal energy rather than ships. They are tempted by the beauty of the earth, fly too close, and crash. Nukie lands in Africa and is relatively unharmed; Meeko lands in the United States and is immediately picked up by NASA. At least, I think it's NASA. Its logo appears in several places, but the stock-footage building exterior is definitely not NASA. Nor is it ever called `NASA'. It's called the Space Foundation. And there are beer cans in the break room! But since NASA is the only space agency in the U.S., that's what it has to be.

Scene after scene begins with an exterior shot of `NASA'. The voice-over gives the date and time (sometimes the times don't synch with the amount of daylight shown), and more often than not he follows with `nothing unusual to report' before telling us that Meeko has escaped or some such. If that's not unusual, I don't know what is.

While Meeko suffers in America, Nukie meets the quirky inhabitants of a small village in Africa. He befriends twin boys named Tookie and Tiko, and a chimp named Charlie. Nukie and the boys search for `America', which they think is the name of the evil-doer who is holding Meeko. They must avoid an American chopper pilot working for NASA (watch out - he's a `player'), local poachers, and a pesky nun (Glynis Johns) while they do so. It all ends happily, of course, because this is a kids' movie. Nukie and Meeko fly into space amidst stock footage of fireworks, and they bring along one of their new friends from Earth. Who is the friend? You'll have to watch the movie to find out!

The producers must've expected a big demand for Nukie merchandise, because every time the word appears it has the little `TM' after it. `Nukie' is trademarked, for crying out loud; none may use his name without permission. I doubt the demand for merchandise materialized, otherwise we might be seeing Nukie lunchboxes and action figures for sale in thrift stores.

People don't believe me when I tell them this, but I kind of like Nukie. Did you ever have a friend who was your friend just because you felt sorry for them? I like Nukie because I feel sorry for it. I think it needs a friend.

Firstly, Nukie looks like ET if he were made of poo. Plus, on the back of the VHS box is a picture of a Tiger. Nowhere in the entire movie is a tiger. I felt cheated! Honestly, I was caught off guard by how AWFUL this movie is. I'm also caught off guard as to how many reviews IMDb has for for NUKIE.

In regards to movies, I'll watch ANYTHING. I'm actually fond of little know releases. I found Nukie for $1.75 NEW in a Mexican grocery store. How on earth was this movie made? I'm pretty sure it will never be released on DVD. The budget wasn't big but you can tell some money was spent. I'm sure they expected this to be a hit at the theater ( they even trademarked the name Nukie! ). Also, why didn't this movie make the "worst of" lists? It's WORSE than Soultaker and Troll 2. Why was this movie even made? Who funded this? Why!?!?

I pride myself on being a connoisseur of bad movies. I have purposely watched hundreds upon hundreds of terrible movies with my friends, ranging from classics like Manos: The Hands of Fate to foreign 80's conan ripoffs to the contemporary Sci-Fi Channel and Asylum cheese fests. But not even those can prepare you for the abomination that is Nukie. It is, without doubt, the worst movie I have ever seen. By worst I do not mean least enjoyable; there are horrifically boring movies that are less enjoyable than Nukie. By worst I mean it causes more pain. To be honest, I can't put into words exactly what that is. There are movies that are more ridiculous. There are movies that have worse costumes. There are movies that have more annoying characters (though perhaps not many). There are even movies with stupider plots. But somehow, by some inexplicable alignment of terribleness, all these things have combined like an evil, mutated Captain Planet into Nukie, which has the power to punch your soul and beat it until you lose all faith in humanity and the universe.

Nukie is a movie about two alien light beams which inexplicably speak English and crash land on Earth because they are ungodly stupid. Upon landing on earth they transform into hideously disfigured E.T. knockoffs that are, for reasons unknown to anyone who has the slightest claim to humanity, expected to be seen as cute by the audience. One of them is named Nico and is captured by American scientists, who apparently operate out of a low-rent apartment building in Miami. The other is named Nukie, who lands in Africa and is so stupid he never considers just flying over to America even though he has no trouble flying anywhere else. Nukie and Nico spend the first fifteen minutes of the movie yelling each others names back and forth by bouncing their voices off of the moon. Yes, that makes just as much sense written down as it does in the movie. Nico is experimented on by scientists before being helped by a sentient computer who wants to turn scientists into clowns and have disco dance parties in his laboratory. Meanwhile, Nukie tries to convince the African natives to help him get to America by terrorizing them, breaking their things, crashing a helicopter, and causing two little boys to be cast out into the wild. For some reason, this doesn't make them want to help him, so Nukie is forced to wander through stock footage and before befriending a talking monkey who has a fondness for candy and stupidity. Nukie finds the children and celebrates by flying around in the sky, not going to America, and doing a disco dance scene in the African wilderness.

I have now seen this movie four times, and every time it takes a piece of my soul back to hell with it. There are no words that can adequately describe what viewing this movie does to you. Some have said it is like watching a train wreck, in that you have to keep watching even though it is horrible. It is more like watching the annihilation of humanity. Nukie is nihilism. Nukie saps you of the will to live and leaves you wandering though the void of nothingness, for after seeing it you know in your heart that there cannot possibly be meaning in a universe which contains Nukie. There are some things that happen to you in life that change who you are forever. Nukie is one of those things.

Here's what I can say: this movie is SO BAD. NEVER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES SEE THIS MOVIE. I try to see all the bad movies I can, and this tops them all. It's not even funny to mock, it's just that bad. It's a test of patience. Even if you think you wanna see this movie, you really don't. I'll leave you with a bit of the wit from this movie; while the scientists are taking miko's pulse with the x-ray machine, they still don't know whether he's an animal, mineral, or vegetable. Go back over that last sentence again. Yes. That actually does happen in the movie. Honestly, when I finally finished this movie I felt like dying(it took me a while because I watched about the first half hour and needed to stop on account of the utter idiocy of this movie). It is terrible. I can't stress that enough. And now I speak directly to the people who like watching bad movies: I know you've seen movie that people have told you not to see, but skip this one. It hurts to watch.

Nukie is widely regarded as the worst/most painful movie ever made. No one who has seen it denies this assertion. It tops even the infamous Manos: the Hands of Fate. As a result, it has a bit of a cult following, the way Kali, the Hindu goddess of death has a bit of a cult following.

The astounding thing about Nukie is its ability to cram so much stupidity into so little time. You find yourself watching a scene, realizing that every line and every action is utterly without merit, wishing the scene would just END--then it does, and a new scene begins, equally stupid, and you realize that the last scene's eternity was really only about 30 seconds long, and this movie is about 90 minutes. That's when you look for pointy objects to thrust violently into sensitive body parts as a distraction.

The other thing about Nukie, the one that leaves me in awe, is its ability to top itself in brain-killing idiocy. The movie crushes Barney's foolishness 30 seconds in, stomps Teletubbies in minutes, and after that, it's home free in the race for cerebral vacuum creation. Despite this, every 15 minutes--or less--a scene comes along which makes your jaw drop as it rockets the movie to a new depth of idiocy. Just when you think the movie has reached its nadir, a character begins dancing, or one of the aliens demonstrates a new power, or the computer learns a new lesson about feelings, and your brain tries to escape the pain by squeezing out of your skull through the pores in the bone.

It's a truly unique experience.