The Last Movie You Watched

[Rev. Rye]

I figured this would be the place to explain why I started the Deep Hurting Project:

The initial idea for it started in November, when a show I watch on Channel Awesome had a theme month called "Noooo-vember," covering initial impressions of some of the worst films ever made. The next month, a blog I follow, 366 Weird Movies, finally reached its 366th Weird Movie, and I mused about how my favorite movie and the worst movie I've ever seen made the list. Then, I wound up watching IHE's review of The Amazing Bulk and he posed the question of "when is a movie not a movie?" He concluded he couldn't rightly even call it a movie, especially since most of the movie was basically shot on a digital backlot, except that almost all those digital assets were purchased elsewhere (this was admitted in the commentary and the end credits even cite them) with only about six or seven being custom-made for the film. This started to make me think about what could be the worst movie I ever saw.

My previous candidate was Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny.



By this metric, perhaps Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny doesn't count as a movie. The thing is, it's basically a random frame story for another film that was made years prior: a version of Thumbelina (or Jack and the Beanstalk, depending on the version). They don't even edit out the credits to that version. The Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny plot in the new footage? Only about 33 minutes long. Roughly a third of the actual piece.

I also put another asterisk on another film called Fun in Balloonland



This does pretty much the same thing as SATICB, except even worse. This barely deigns to have a plot and gives it up entirely after 15 minutes to show more stock footage, this time, not of another pre-made film, but of a parade. Specifically, the 1964 Philadelphia Thanksgiving Parade. And it's narrated by a woman who sounds like she's had just enough hits of acid to not think she could fly and jump off the roof of whatever building they recorded the narration in.

But there was one more recent discovery that could have been worse if not for one thing:



Santa's Christmas Elf Named Calvin was made by one of the people behind SATICB, and does it even worse, but in a much more elemental way. If you look at it, you might notice the problem: there is no motion. It's all a still-show of poorly framed and darkly-lit photos of shitty knock-offs of Rankin-Bass puppets telling a boring story told by someone who was clearly just there for a paycheck. And it's not animated because that takes far too much time and effort. You know what, here's a counterpoint: Chris Marker's La Jetee. It was a short about time travel that's good enough to have made the Criterion Collection, and became the basis for 12 Monkeys 30 years later. It was made the way it was because Chris Marker only had access to a proper movie camera for one day, and he used that day to show a woman smiling. And once again, it's still a pretty strong work that haunts me even to this day. There is nothing in Santa's Christmas Elf Named Calvin to recommend it. It fails at being a movie because it fails to move. And not just move my soul, but portray motion at all.

Thinking about this, I found myself wondering: what was the worst movie I've seen that could really be called a movie? And I couldn't for the life of me find an answer. I briefly latched onto Red Zone Cuba, but Cherokee Jack and even that fucking theme song were more than enough to say "No, that's not the worst." So, I decided to go to TVTropes' "So Bad It's Horrible" and check out all the films that were on the list and available at my local library to see if I can find that answer.

(Note: as I wrote this, I've considered that perhaps The Brute Man might actually be the worst proper film I've ever seen, if only for its shameless exploitation of Rondo Hatton's acromegaly and the fact that literally everybody's a fucking asshole who keeps passing the buck on the Creeper investigation because Truman. Perhaps I'll find a worse film before the year's out.)