What the Hell Were They Thinking?!

      Hello, readers. I decided to create a new segment of which its inspiration came after borrowing a movie from a friend of mine. He's an avid collector of horror movies and that's including as he puts it "the really crappy ones". So I took this certain film home and gave it a watch. That's when I thought, you know, I do a weekly segment on movies I own that I recommend for viewing. If I have a segment on films that are worth watching, why not have a segment on the exact opposite? I'm not talking about movies that are just bad. You don't waste your time with a movie that's just bad. I'm talking about movies that are so bad, it's comparable to driving by a bloody car wreck. You know you can't help but look. So from here on, every Monday, I'll devote a segment to those films that have straight to DVD and into the Wal-Mart checkout lanes down to a perfection in "What the Hell Were They Thinking?!"

      Mothman begins in Point Pleasant, West Virginia (the origin of the "Mothman" urban legend), with a group of teenage friends at a swimming party. The group pulls a prank on one of the friends that accidentally kills him. Naturally, the group makes the most rational choice by smashing his face in with a rock to leave him unidentifiable and then dumping him in the river. After all, when you can't come up with any good ideas of your own, why not rip off another shitty horror film in I Know What You Did Last Summer? Anyway, ten years go by and one out of the group, Katherine Grant (Jewel Staite), has moved on from the incident and Point Pleasant and now resides as a journalist in Washington, D.C. That means one thing, and one thing only. Her editor, in a nice touch of fresh originality from the writers, is coincidentally wanting a piece on the Mothman and who better to do a story on Mothman than someone who came out of Point Pleasant, Katherine? Of course, she doesn't wanna go back at first, but as we all know, emotional scarring from traumatic events in our lives is overrated anyway. So she heads back home and reconnects with some friends, and then the Mothman shows up every now and then. In a surprising twist, the friends start to die one by one. Then we get the token wise, old guy that comes along and warns the youngsters about the urban legend. Of course, he's blind too - as well as an ornery son of a bitch - 'cause those type of characters absolutely have to have some sort of physical handicap and I guess the writers felt it'd be too cliche to have him in a wheelchair and you most definitely don't wanna be cliche. That's for those shoddily written piles of crap inferior filmmakers pass off as films.

      This makes the Richard Gere 2002 film, The Mothman Prophecies - as flawed as it was - appear comparable to The Exorcist. You catch the Industrial Light & Magic worthy special effects in the clip I played? You know, the one with the other token character - the typical smart ass that probably wouldn't shoot his mouth off as much if Mothman yanked that shotgun out of his hand and crammed it up his ass sideways? I don't even think effects like those could appear first rate to an LSD junkie. Hell, I could pull off better work on Windows Movie Maker. I've also seen more moving performance work from kindergarteners in school program plays. While watching this movie, I saw Jewel Staite and thought, boy, does she look familiar. That's when I remembered. There was a show a while back, I believe I was in Jr. High at the time, called Flash Forward on the Disney Channel. It starred both her and an unknown at the time named Ben Foster. Foster's career really took a turn for the worse as he ended up starring in such critically acclaimed drivel as Alpha Dog, Hostage, The Punisher, Rampart, and The Messenger - which in particular really stunk its way to a career performance from Foster as well as two Oscar nominations. His co-star, Jewel Staite, gets Mothman. This truly is a horrendous piece of garbage, but one - mind you - that's so superbly bad you almost have to wonder if that was the filmmakers' intention. Who are we kidding? I don't think they intended shit. The movie just sucks. That being said, with movies like this, they're so bad, you really have to watch it once just to see how bad it is. It's just like the car crash scenario I brought up earlier, except here you won't get angry looks from those actually helping the victims wondering to themselves, "Who's the morbid dickhead just standing there looking?" I'm not sure if Redbox has it available. Judging from a lot of its content, this is almost too perfect for Netflix Instant Queue. If you don't have Netflix, you may get lucky at your nearby Family Video. Flicks like these are destined for the "Two for a Buck!" section. Of course, priced any higher, and the video joint is - well, pardon my French - clearly fucking you over. If you really hit the Mega Millions Jackpot, you run across it on TV for free since it was made by the SyFy Channel... Who knew?