Bad Movies

I’m so tired of bad films. I used to watch everything that came out, good or bad, I’d go to the cinema at least once a week, sometimes alone sometimes with a gang of friends. Nowadays a trip to the cinema is a bi-annual event so if I waste one of my goes on drivel then I’m mightily peeved. This year I’ve already been a few times but I’m not counting last week’s trip because it was so awful, so gut-twistingly nasty and wrong, that Matt and I stood up and walked out before it was even half-way through.

I’ve not walked out of many movies in my lifetime. Something about wanting to give the film a chance and not feeling like I could properly judge it if I’d not seen it to the bitter end. In fact, the only other film I can remember walking out of is “Threesome” and that was just because the friend I was with wanted to leave.

These days I have so few to watch that I don’t want to waste my time on the bad ones. So, from now on I will be choosing my movies with care. If a trailer contains a sentence beginning with “This summer…” (As in “This summer, the coast is toast!” or “This summer, justice is blonde.”) then that film moves right to the bottom of the list. If it is a remake of an older film that was dreadful the first time around then I won’t be buying tickets. If it’s a remake of an older film that was perfectly fine the first time around then, again, I won’t be calling the credit card line and forking over my 8 Euros. If the story boils down to: girl and guy meet and hate eachother plus guy is hiding something from girl but then they have a montage scene where they come to realise girl isn’t uptight because she can play poker and the guy is not truly a chauvanist pig because he cares for his blind mother so they fall in love but then the girl finds out the guy’s secret and storms out and is going to leave town but at the last moment the guy’s nerdy friend tells him he’s being a fool so he steals a bike from a passing kid and a fun chase to the airport ensues where guy stands in front of a crowd and proclaims his love for the girl then everyone stands and does the slow clap thing and they kiss…the end **Deep breath** …well, I’ve seen that one a few times too many already.

So what was the film we walked out of last week? First, let me say that I’m no wuss when it comes to horror films…at least I didn’t used to be. I’ve never enjoyed gore for gore’s sake, I’ve always preferred intelligent scary films that don’t show you very much but suggest things to you and build the tension that way. That doesn’t mean I didn’t watch those standard slash films; to me, all that blood was just ketchup on the screen and nothing worth getting upset about. That said, since having a child of my own, it’s added a whole new dimension to how I watch any movies or television. If there’s a child in trouble or distress I can’t bear to watch, it’s just too close and I can’t remain detached from it.

Ok, ok, the film…it was “The Hills Have Eyes,” a remake of a 1977 Wes Craven film of the same name. It was pointless and disgusting and I’d summarise the plot but there was none. I knew it was going to be rubbish but I figured I’d just ride it out and perhaps laugh at the stupidity of it. That was until a couple of scenes into it when we are introduced to the hapless victims and one of the characters is a young mother with a baby on her hip. From that moment I could no longer laugh at the ketchup and consider this film from a distance. My eyes kept looking for that baby and a sick feeling crept into my stomach that this director wasn’t going to hold back and was going to have something happen to the child. As the violence started and the members of the family were being picked off in ever more gruesome ways, Matt and I stood up and walked out. It wasn’t funny, it wasn’t entertaining, it wasn’t even scary…it was just disturbing and I’ve made that deal with myself. No more money or time wasted on bad movies.