Dear all who love film,
Drop whatever you're doing and watch this film on Netflix right now, because this is the new shorthand for "worst film ever made" and it's so bad that it has to be seen to be believed. Let me give you the "kind" version of my review.
Let's start with the writing. The writing on this movie is so bad that I'm not entirely convinced it was written at all. I think it may have been vomited onto the page. This is essentially what happens if you get really, really stoned, write a thesis on existentialism whilst watching the OC then decide to adapt it into a screenplay and subsequent movie having consumed your body weight in acid on every day of the process. I mean, it's just terrible. In fact, this is an analogy that screenwriters will understand that demonstrates how bad the dialogue is: You know when you're struggling with a scene so you just drop in some placeholder dialogue to come back to and fix later? This is what happens when you don't go back and do that.
Now the acting. I'm using the word "acting" so charitably here that it physically pains me. I have never, in all my life, witnessed anything quite so terrible as the acting in this film. I mean, some of the lead actors would struggle to get a callback for a kindergarten nativity play. I'm surprised that they could get insured to make this movie... you'd think it'd be dangerous putting this much wood under studio lights. Honestly, it just needed a couple of squirrels and we could've replaced the nonsensical voice-over with David Attenborough narrating and improved the movie a thousandfold. And, somehow, Molly Ringwald pops up in it. If she's getting that hard up for cash, can we please start a Kickstarter rather than let her humiliate herself like this again? And, as if the director was painfully aware that the level of acting in this was bad, in an almost way too ironic act of definitely unintentional parody, there are cameos from Keanu Reeves and Pamela Anderson. Seriously. I couldn't make this up.
Oh, and the directing? Awful. Like, the worst student film-level bad. Every single choice is wrong. Every single one. There's footage used, shot on a camcorder by one of the actresses, that is the only footage in the entire movie that is framed in any way correctly. The entire movie looks like the camera operator did his job whilst sitting on a pneumatic drill in an earthquake except for the camcorder footage.
Ladies and gentleman, I submit to you that we no longer need to discuss Plan 9 as the worst piece of cinema ever. SPF18, quite frankly, makes it look like Citizen Kane.
Although, because I want to end on at least one positive, I'll give it this: That soundtrack is absolutely incredible. Like, every great song from the 80s appears at some point. It doesn't make sense for them to be there, but they are...
Drop whatever you're doing and watch this film on Netflix right now, because this is the new shorthand for "worst film ever made" and it's so bad that it has to be seen to be believed. Let me give you the "kind" version of my review.
Let's start with the writing. The writing on this movie is so bad that I'm not entirely convinced it was written at all. I think it may have been vomited onto the page. This is essentially what happens if you get really, really stoned, write a thesis on existentialism whilst watching the OC then decide to adapt it into a screenplay and subsequent movie having consumed your body weight in acid on every day of the process. I mean, it's just terrible. In fact, this is an analogy that screenwriters will understand that demonstrates how bad the dialogue is: You know when you're struggling with a scene so you just drop in some placeholder dialogue to come back to and fix later? This is what happens when you don't go back and do that.
Now the acting. I'm using the word "acting" so charitably here that it physically pains me. I have never, in all my life, witnessed anything quite so terrible as the acting in this film. I mean, some of the lead actors would struggle to get a callback for a kindergarten nativity play. I'm surprised that they could get insured to make this movie... you'd think it'd be dangerous putting this much wood under studio lights. Honestly, it just needed a couple of squirrels and we could've replaced the nonsensical voice-over with David Attenborough narrating and improved the movie a thousandfold. And, somehow, Molly Ringwald pops up in it. If she's getting that hard up for cash, can we please start a Kickstarter rather than let her humiliate herself like this again? And, as if the director was painfully aware that the level of acting in this was bad, in an almost way too ironic act of definitely unintentional parody, there are cameos from Keanu Reeves and Pamela Anderson. Seriously. I couldn't make this up.
Oh, and the directing? Awful. Like, the worst student film-level bad. Every single choice is wrong. Every single one. There's footage used, shot on a camcorder by one of the actresses, that is the only footage in the entire movie that is framed in any way correctly. The entire movie looks like the camera operator did his job whilst sitting on a pneumatic drill in an earthquake except for the camcorder footage.
Ladies and gentleman, I submit to you that we no longer need to discuss Plan 9 as the worst piece of cinema ever. SPF18, quite frankly, makes it look like Citizen Kane.
Although, because I want to end on at least one positive, I'll give it this: That soundtrack is absolutely incredible. Like, every great song from the 80s appears at some point. It doesn't make sense for them to be there, but they are...